My Brainrot Demands Slop: Infinite Jest and GenAI

I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago, and he used "brainrotting" as a verb, in much the same way people use "doomscrolling" to describe mindlessly browsing social feeds like a dopamine junkie. Maybe I am finally self-actualizing as an old man yelling at clouds, but that terminology strikes me as eerie. A conscious acceptance of the mind altering nature of habit whose dealer is one swipe away in your pocket. The way we talk about things betrays how we think of them.

I'm not the first to draw the parallel between the slop content endemic to social media platforms and the Entertainment from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and judging by where this is going I won't be the last. For those whose attention span is too brainrotted to read a 1000-page tome, the gist is this... Quebecois separatists seek a Weapon of Mass Destruction fitting for our age of simulation: entertainment so enthralling you literally cannot look away. People exposed sit transfixed until they die. The eponymous "Infinite Jest" is an infinitely generating TV-movie-media thing. Published in 1996, Wallace's observations regarding the trajectory of Western media production and consumption have unfortunately proven all too prescient.

The proliferation of slop as such is not new to the terminally online. Google's years-long enshittification due to its lackadaisical handling of SEO garbage websites gaming SERPs is a pre-GenAI example of this phenomena. However, the recent advancements in GenAI, particularly video (Sora, Runway, Veo, etc) I believe has quite literally opened Pandora's Box.

This next bit is going to make me sound like an elitist so forgive me. People have been consuming human-generated (GenHomo?) slop for years already. How many Marvel movies are there these days? Why does everything have to be a redux or a sequel of some intellectual property that ought to be left for dead? Even if GenAI never escapes its uncanny valley aura, Hollywood sure as heck doesn't care so long as it's good enough. Consumers won't, either.

I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about this short of a solar flare. Maybe this is what the kids call "cope" but I see it - as I do practically everything - through the lens of an ecological process. Western media production and consumption are undergoing succession but their trajectory, to my eye, is altogether unchanged. Without putting words in a dead man's mouth, I'd hazard a guess DFW would agree.

OK back to doomscrolling brainrotting while I play Hearthstone and listen to a podcast and watch YouTube and spam emotes in Twitch chat and why can't I look away?