If We Rot, You Rot with Us

In an essay for Public Books, Morgan Barry argues that the absurd online content known as "brain rot" belongs to the long tradition of literary nonsense. Oxford University Press named the term its 2024 Word of the Year and traced its earliest use to Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" (1854). Barry points to a 1965 Bob Dylan song and to the cartoons of Glen Baxter, whose captions were disconnected from their images, and calls Baxter's work the closest analogue to today's memes. Drawing on Noel Malcolm's book about 17th-century English nonsense poetry, Barry writes that the genre has always been a parodic reaction to "high" literature and to the institutions behind it. The political examples include memes of JD Vance's face after his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and "daddy" videos of Rahul Gandhi around the Indian general election. Barry also describes mass protests in India in the summer of 2026, when young people organized as the "Cockroach Janta Party" after Chief Justice Surya Kant called unemployed youth "cockroaches". Many came in cockroach costumes, and according to the essay their demands were met. Barry concludes that brain rot may reflect rotten structures in the world rather than a flaw in its users.

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