The host at my karaoke bar in Southeast Portland, who calls everyone baby, announced last Thursday that we were going to do a fast round. Ninety seconds each. Chorus only. Twelve people got up and sang twelve hooks and nobody sang a verse, and by the end of it I could not tell you a single thing about any of the songs except that they had all been extremely loud.
I got home, opened my laptop, and read that Oxford had named brain rot its word of the year.
The definition they published is about the deterioration of a person's mental state from consuming too much trivial, low-quality online content. Which is a polite way of describing a business model. Somebody is producing that content. In a great many cases that somebody has a brand brief and a quarterly target and a calendar that says fourteen posts a week.
The culture has now given a name to the exact output your content strategy is optimized to produce, and it did not pick a flattering one.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Nobody sets out to make garbage. What happens is that volume becomes the only metric anyone can defend in a meeting. Reach is measurable. Frequency is measurable. Whether the thing was worth a stranger's forty seconds is not measurable, so it quietly stops being a requirement, and within two quarters you have a team of talented people making fourteen posts a week that nobody would miss.
Here is what separated the winners this year from the noise. It was not posting more. Duolingo's owl works because there is a real editorial point of view running it, one weird voice making decisions. Nutter Butter's account is genuinely deranged and completely committed, and commitment is the thing you cannot fake at volume. Liquid Death has been doing one joke with total discipline for years. None of these are content machines. They are points of view that happen to publish.
The uncomfortable part is that brain rot is not an accusation aimed at audiences. Audiences did not build the feed. They just live in it. When the word of the year describes the sensation of consuming what our industry produces, the industry does not get to treat that as somebody else's problem in somebody else's attention span.
Try this instead of the calendar. Make less. Make it worth a verse.
They are points of view that happen to publish.
I sang a full song at the end of the night, all the verses, and it was not good but it was mine. Truffles and Barnaby have never once asked me to post more frequently. They ask for exactly one thing, at 5 a.m., with total editorial consistency.