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Arto Koistinen

So Macquarie chose @pluralistic as their word of the year last week and now Oxford chose "brain rot."

I can't help but feel there are two very different perspectives at play here: while "enshittification" correctly points the finger at the source (i.e. the services that are shittified), "brain rot" places the blame solely on the consumer, who "overconsumes material considered to be trivial or unchallenging" that just seems to somehow magically appear on their feeds.

@arzi @pluralistic brainrot sounds hella ableist as well if you ask me

@arzi @andypiper @pluralistic I think that both are at fault. They shouldn't be feeding us crap but when they do, we don't have to eat it.

@mlanger @andypiper @pluralistic

I don't think it's that easy to avoid when we have already uploaded our social lives almost wholly to the cloud.

@arzi @andypiper @pluralistic Are you saying that people’s social lives are crap? I would agree in a lot of cases.

But it’s very easy to avoid social media: just walk away. I walked away from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I was on Twitter for more than 15 years and had 150,000 tweets that I deleted. (Thank you Tweet Deleter!)

So I’m really not sure what other people put in the cloud has anything to do with what we do to consume it.

@mlanger @andypiper @pluralistic

I'm not sure it's as easy to a 15-year-old whose every friend is on social media.

@arzi @andypiper @pluralistic I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about adults instead of children who should be supervised by adults.

@mlanger @andypiper @pluralistic

Try telling a 15-year-old they’re not allowed to be in social media because it rots their brain. I feel like I’ve heard that before in some other context...

@arzi @pluralistic nice work eviscerating the lazy or inauthentic thinking on 'brain rot'.

@arzi @pluralistic I disagree, I just listened to the Oxford words fellow as he was interviewed for tonight’s CBC’s As It Happens episode about the choice. He attributed the popularity of the word, and their choosing of it, very much to the fact that younger generations (Z and Alpha) have rediscovered a word (brainrot was originally used in the 1800s!) to describe their own feelings when they scroll through the endless slop of what has become social media. They are, in fact, describing and commenting on enshitification, in their own, experiential, way.

@chris @pluralistic

Enshittification and brain rot are two sides of the same coin, in my mind, but I think the latter has a more moralising aspect to it. I'm not saying OED picked it to consciously shift the blame on the users, but the fact that they cited its popularity among Gen Z and Alpha does ring like another instance of the age old "youth these days" adage.