We live in an age where information is infinite, but understanding is optional.
Endless content flows through us—swiped, skimmed, saved for later (and never opened again). A video explains what a book once did. A tweet replaces a lecture. A generated fragment mimics wisdom. Everything is faster, shorter, louder. But while access has exploded, processing hasn’t kept pace.
We’ve never consumed so much and digested so little.
This isn’t just information overload it’s a cognitive economy where quantity eclipses depth, where presence is measured in impressions, and comprehension is sacrificed for speed.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking: how much are we really understanding?
Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking: how much are we really understanding?
AI interpreation of Rodin's "Le penseur"
"Brain rot" is Oxford University Press's Word of the Year for 2024. It refers to the perceived decline in mental or intellectual state, particularly due to excessive consumption of trivial online content.
The term gained prominence due to increased concerns about the impact of online content, especially on social media, and its usage has significantly increased.
An UCE represents a symbolic unit of content that a person can cognitively process and retain during a short, meaningful experience.
It allows us to compare different platforms and knowledge systems from oral storytelling to AI-generated text on a common cognitive scale.
The Unit of Cognitive Experience (UCE) is a symbolic construct created for this project, not a scientific metric, but a tool to qualitatively compare and visualize the historical and ongoing expansion of accumulated content in cultural mediation systems.
Knowledge used to trickle.
Now it floods. From the slow, deliberate cadence of the printing press to the manic bursts of Instagram stories and AI-generated content, each new platform has compressed time and inflated volume.
What once took decades to shape books, broadcasts, early websites now emerges in seconds, scaled to billions.
What once took decades to shape books, broadcasts, early websites now emerges in seconds, scaled to billions.
The curve isn’t just exponential; it’s unstable.
And in this race to produce more, faster, the question of what we’re actually learning gets buried under how quickly we can consume.
And in this race to produce more, faster, the question of what we’re actually learning gets buried under how quickly we can consume.
I highly recommend HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MEME 's post Italian Brainrot and AI semiotics
Paul Virilio in Open Sky warned us. When everything accelerates, nothing has room to unfold.
The bombardino crocodilo-core, the cognitive glitches we scroll through daily, they’re not anomalies, they’re symptoms. In a world where speed trumps depth, absurdity becomes the only way to register impact. The faster we go, the flatter it all feels. Virilio called it the loss of the world’s vastness.
