TINA KENDALL
Anglia Ruskin University, UK

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Susan Buck-Morss (1992) and Cressida Heyes (2020), this article develops the concept of “anaesthetic media”: media forms and practices that highlight social media’s role in numbing cognitive and sensory experience. While terms like ‘brain rot’, ‘zombie scrolling’ and ‘TikTok brain’ pathologise social media engagement, my focus here is how these ideas are taken up by young media users themselves as a means of expressing what it feels like to live in an age of ‘continuous compulsory connectivity’ (Lupinacci, 2020). Through an analysis of brain rot and lobotomycore content on TikTok and Pinterest, I consider how cognitive fatigue, emotional detachment, and sensory withdrawal are performed and embraced by Gen Z and Generation Alpha users. While these media work to aestheticise the cognitive strain and attentional fatigue of digital life, I suggest it is important to take seriously the desires for anaesthetic relief that are expressed through these youth cultures. As I argue, although these practices are often discursively constructed as strategies of affective or anaesthetic withdrawal, they participate in, and help to sustain, the demands of being a subject in an always-on culture.

Keywords

anaesthetic media, internet aesthetics, TikTok, Pinterest, brain rot, lobotomycore

For the official version of record, see here:
Kendall, T. (2026). Internet Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Anaesthetic Media, from Brain Rot to Lobotomycore. Media Theory, 10(1), 45–74. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v10i1.1367

As Jernej Markelj and Jakko Kemper note in this special issue of Media Theory, practices of ‘media shielding’ reflect unease with the affective demands of pervasive media stimulation. In this article, I examine youth-specific trends that register a similar ambivalence toward the embodied realities of always-on media consumption. Once promoted as unlimited sources of aesthetic stimulation and as personalised toolkits for self-expression, metaphors of numbness, fatigue, and cognitive impairment have begun to conspicuously creep into both public discourse and internet vernaculars. Terms such as ‘brain rot’, ‘TikTok brain’, ‘zombie scrolling syndrome’, and ‘dumbscrolling’ signal concern about how media use affects our ability to think, feel, and act in a world where these functions are increasingly entangled with algorithmic processes. While concepts like screen addiction have regularly pathologised social media use, I am interested in how these ideas have been taken up by young media users themselves—how ‘brain rot’ and ‘lobotomycore’ aesthetics circulate on platforms like TikTok as expressions of ‘continuous compulsory connectivity’ (Lupinacci, 2020). Here, experience is increasingly shaped by the temporal demands of ‘algorithmized selfhood’, through practices of endless scrolling and the curation of, and self-curation through, one’s feed (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022). Drawing on Susan Buck-Morss and Cressida Heyes, I develop the concept of “anaesthetic media”: forms and practices that foreground social media’s role in dulling cognitive and sensory experience. While popular discourse treats these metaphors as cautionary warnings against the dangers of excessive screen consumption, this article asks: what is at stake in framing cognitive impairment, emotional numbness and lobotomisation as desirable states?

Following Heyes, I argue that these trends express a ‘desire for the anaesthetic, the withdrawal from sensory experience, as a mode of managing pleasure and pain’ (Heyes, 2020: 6). Although brain rot has been cast in public discourse as a pathological condition requiring specialist intervention, brain rot content also functions, I suggest, as affective vernacular across interconnected youth cultures: an idiom through which younger users make sense of, and perform, the contradictions of digital life. As I will argue, this sense-making encompasses both a re-tooling of the human synaesthetic system, and an active process of meaning-making amongst Gen Z and Generation Alpha users on platforms such as TikTok and Pinterest. I suggest that youth culture’s embrace of media’s stupefying properties should be understood as an anaesthetic relation to the wider regime of internet aesthetics, which generates its own internal tensions and contradictions.

Aesthetics and anaesthetics

In ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, Susan Buck-Morss (1992) revisits Benjamin’s claim that modernity’s sweeping technoaesthetic transformations performed a retooling of the human synaesthetic system. As she reminds us, aesthetics has its etymological roots in ‘the ancient Greek word for that which is “perceptive by feeling.”’ Its original field is ‘not art but reality’ and ‘corporeal, material nature…a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell—the whole corporeal sensorium’ (Buck-Morss, 1992: 6). In modernity, overstimulation, overwork, and fragmentation became the new realities of metropolitan life. In this context, the openness of the synaesthetic system exposed human subjects to the ‘trauma of perceptual shock’ (18). As a result, the synaesthetic system reverses its role, no longer putting people ‘“in touch” with reality’ but instead working to ‘numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of anaesthetics’ (Ibid.). Although he appears only as a footnote in her essay, Buck-Morss’s central claim also builds on Marshall McLuhan’s argument in Understanding Media that electronic ‘superstimulation’ leads the central nervous system to ‘protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function,’ producing a ‘generalized numbness’ that both protects and diminishes perception (McLuhan, 2013: n.p.).

Buck-Morss also traces the development of biochemical anaesthetics in the nineteenth century, ‘from opium, ether and cocaine to hypnosis, hydrotherapy and electric shock’. These were supplemented by aesthetic ‘phantasmagoria’, which made a narcotic ‘out of reality itself’ (22). The phantasmagoria of bourgeois interiors, shopping arcades, and World Fairs flooded the senses, intoxicating ‘through sensory distraction rather than chemical alteration’ (22-23). These technologically-manipulated dreamworlds performed an anaesthetic function by fusing disparate sensory fragments into a reassuring illusion of aesthetic harmony and social cohesion. For Buck-Morss, phantasmagoria is both a narcotic and a ‘form of social control,’ which works by disguising the ‘alienation and fragmentation, the loneliness and the sensual impoverishment of modern existence’ (26). At the heart of her re-reading of Benjamin is the claim that it is this ‘crisis in cognitive experience caused by the alienation of the senses that makes it possible for humanity to view its own destruction with enjoyment’ (37).

Written in 1992, Buck-Morss’s essay notes how nineteenth-century phantasmagoria anticipated late capitalist phenomena, from ‘shopping malls, theme parks, and video arcades’ to the ‘totally controlled environments of airplanes’ and ‘the individualised audiosensory environment of a “walkman”’ (22). Since then, computational media have vastly extended this technical manipulation of the senses. In a context of constant notifications, multitasking, endless scrolling, and hyper-fragmented attention, parallels with Benjamin’s analysis of sensory overload and cognitive shock are easy to discern. Many thinkers have traced a similar trajectory, showing how computational capitalism’s demands for limitless enjoyment, hyper-productivity, and perpetual self-enhancement give rise to conditions such as burnout (Han, 2015), cognitive breakdown (Crary, 2013), depression (Berardi, 2009; 2024), and lethargy (Hu, 2022). These accounts draw on Benjamin’s insight that technological mediation—now intensified through computational media—transforms aesthetic experience and conditions perception to serve the rhythms and pace of digital capitalism.

I want to develop this Benjaminian line of analysis by focusing on the meaning of the term ‘aesthetics’ as it has developed in the context of the internet. Since around 2020, ‘internet aesthetics’ has become shorthand for the kaleidoscope of trends that drive engagement on Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify, TikTok, and other platforms. As the ‘Fandom’ wiki explains, ‘internet aesthetics’ is an ‘online phenomenon and a form of expression’ built on practices of curating and sharing images and videos. Users create collections of images and sounds–moodboards, playlists, edits, memes, and videos–meant to ‘evoke a particular feeling, usually content that they personally find aesthetically pleasing’ (Fandom, 2025). Given their diversity, scale, and the speed with which they come and go, making sense of internet aesthetics can be a challenging, if not dizzying task. As Guilherme Giolo and Michaël Berghman (2023) suggest, the concept is associative, malleable and open to interpretation, providing both the sensory and identificatory infrastructures of experience in a context of pervasive media.

The phenomenon of internet aesthetics functions much like phantasmagoria in Benjamin and Buck-Morss’s sense: simulated environments of fragmented sensory data that flood the user’s senses without time for active reflection. Like phantasmagoria, internet aesthetics prioritise sensory, embodied response, but operate through micro-temporal processes that exceed the human sensorium’s capacity to fully process them (Dieter and Gauthier, 2019). In a neoliberal context, they also serve as tools for self-making and self-curation, with users forming an ongoing sense of self from this sensory process. As Anna and Ellen Ioanes argue, internet aesthetics are ‘weak aesthetics’, a regime that ‘subordinates questions of aesthetic judgement to focus more on categorizing kinds of styles’ (Ioanes & Ioanes, 2022). These ‘weak’ aesthetics increasingly ‘blur the distinction between aesthetic subject and aesthetic object: to participate in an aesthetic is to make yourself over as an aesthetic object aligned with a style’, the goal of which is ‘to imagine yourself being experienced aesthetically, to live in—or live like—an Instagram post or perfectly-curated Tumblr feed’ (Ibid.). Internet aesthetics have thus become a dominant sensory medium through which people experience their feeds, and a ‘toolkit’ for self-identification, however provisional this sense of selfhood may be (Giolo and Berghman, 2023).

By placing aesthetics at the heart of user practices of sense- and self-making, internet aesthetics supports neoliberal digital capitalism’s address to individuals as entrepreneurial ‘performance subjects’ who manage and optimize their emotions, wellbeing, and general health through digital technologies (Han, 2018: 81). Social media platforms are marketed as tools for expressing, developing, or “finding” their aesthetic attachments, and connecting with like-minded communities, in a context meant to feel vibey, fun and stimulating. And yet, as I will now consider, the same media infrastructures that encourage aesthetic engagement also cater to the opposite: creating spaces for anaesthetic desire: for numbness, blankness, and withdrawal from the sensory overload of always-on self-curation.

Discursive formations of brain rot

In recent years, terms such as ‘brain rot’ (Oxford University Press, 2024), ‘TikTok brain’ (Coleman, 2024), ‘zombie scrolling syndrome’ (Sinha et al., 2023), and ‘dumbscrolling’ (Holmes, 2023) have voiced growing anxieties about the harms of social media use, particularly amongst younger users. These terms articulate a growing awareness that technologies once heralded as tools of empowerment and efficiency, increasingly appear as time-sapping, attention-eroding, energy-draining machines whose stream of trivial content may, quite literally, be making us stupid. Oxford’s 2024 word of the year, ‘brain rot’ captures both the risks of excessive screen time and the dangers of exposure to the “wrong” kinds of media. Although it is not new, the phrase has renewed resonance today as a means of dramatising the deleterious impact of social media on bodies and minds. Oxford University Press defines it as the ‘supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging’ as well as ‘something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration’ (Oxford University Press, 2024). It is thus defined as both a ‘genre of content’ and a ‘state of being’ (Galip, 2025). In contrast to terms like ‘screen addiction,’ brain rot opts for a decidedly fleshy metaphor, suggesting that it isn’t just time, but the brain’s pulpy grey matter itself, that is being eaten away.

Similarly euphemistic terms like ‘TikTok brain’ now crop up in headlines and captions across news outlets and blogs, warning that TikTok is ‘coming for your kid’s attention span’ (Coleman, 2024) and ‘killing your brain, one short-form video at a time’ (Aleksandra, 2022). These clickable headlines couch phenomena such as ‘zombie scrolling’ in quasi-scientific language, providing “expert” advice in the form of listicles and quizzes to diagnose these new syndromes. One striking example comes from the Newport Institute, an American young adult mental health and substance abuse treatment centre, in their resource ‘8 Danger Signs of Zombie Scrolling and How to Protect Yourself.’ In a bravura display of hyperbole, the piece catalogues the outward signs of ‘Zombie Scrolling Syndrome’ by describing ‘scroll zombies’: ‘creatures’ with sunken eyes and ashen skin, who communicate ‘with grunts rather than words’, their thumbs moving ‘endlessly, flicking up and down on the glowing rectangles clutched in their hands.’ The article asserts that only ‘a small part of their brain still works, and that part is entirely devoted to the images that flash before them, one after the other.’ It adds that after dark, ‘zombie scrollers morph into another supernatural creature’ – the vampire—explaining that ‘vamping’ refers to compulsive late-night scrolling (Newport Institute, 2022). In case this description is not sensational enough, the website provides a visual illustration of these scroll-zombie-vampires, their blank wide eyes glowing yellow, smartphones clutched in hands, set against a lurid shade of orange more typically associated with prison inmates and hazardous chemical materials (Fig. 1).

Although less widespread, the term ‘dumbscrolling’ has been used to describe ‘mindless scrolling with no purpose other than tuning out’ (Jae L., 2022). In his article for Esquire, Dave Holmes identifies 2023 as a cultural tipping point, the year that ‘we let the stupid wash over us in an unrelenting surge that wore down the folds in our brains and left us numb.’ He notes that whereas in ‘years past, in our own lifetimes even,’ the pacing of social media ‘allowed us to sit with the daily stupidity’ by examining, processing or making a meme out of it, by 2023, he writes, ‘the dumbest shit dominated and whizzed right past us in an unbroken stream that shows no sign of slowing down or drying up or settling into…our temporal lobe.’ For Holmes, the danger of ‘dumbscrolling’ is explicitly political: how can a culture ‘face the potential horror’ of war and other global crises ‘if we cannot process the stupid of today’? (Holmes, 2023). While dumbscrolling points, for Jae L., to a problem of individual agency, for Holmes it signals a more pressing issue of political incapacitation through collective stupor.

This stupor is engineered to feel much like the phantasmagoria that Buck-Morss describes: a ‘privatized fantasy world’ that provides ‘a protective shield for the senses’ but also ‘alters consciousness’ through constant ‘sensory distraction’ (22). As Buck-Morss reminds us, Benjamin located in phantasmagoria a paradoxical pleasure: a narcotic enjoyment of one’s own diminution. Platforms like TikTok optimise precisely for this kind of pleasantly zoned-out experience, providing the tools and ingraining the habits through which users can check out from attentive, task-based consciousness. As Vasco d’Agnese puts it, TikTok provokes ‘not so much the inability to act and think as the feeling one does not need to act and think.’ Through the temporal immersion that TikTok provides, the subject ‘experiences a kind of suspension from world, others and things’ (d’Agnese, 2024: 94). Digital vernaculars have established their own language for describing this state of anaesthetised quasi-engagement, as for example in emoji combinations that evoke experiences of ‘digital numbness’ that accrue through exposure to our feeds (Fig. 2).

Taken together, terms like brain rot, zombie scrolling, dumbscrolling and Tik Tok brain index widespread concern that our increasing entanglement with digital media is retooling the human sensorium in deleterious ways. Alongside this pathologisation of excessive or trivial media consumption, cottage industries in the digital wellness and EdTech sectors have been quick to suggest solutions. The mindfulness app Calm, for instance, has produced a piece entitled, ‘Do You Have Brain Rot? Here’s How to Know’ (Calm, 2023). This info-piece warns against watching ‘short, fast-paced content that can overwhelm the brain.’ Calm points out that while brain rot ‘can be reversible with conscious effort, some people see excessive content consumption as a way to self-soothe and don’t want to change their habits’ (Ibid.). Their solution is a curated list of wellness tips to ‘prevent excessive scrolling from becoming a real problem.’ These suggestions are conveniently accompanied by links to in-app resources, from sleep routines, mindfulness guides, gratitude masterclasses, habit-breaking courses, and Calm-curated playlists (Ibid.).

Whereas the Newport Institute relies on conventional therapeutic ‘tailored treatment plans,’ including cognitive behavioural therapy, adventure therapy, mixed martial arts, yoga, and creative arts therapies, Calm and similar apps offer more affordable, scalable models of self-regulation. These perform a trickier tightrope act when dispensing advice, since their business model depends on driving customers back to the app rather than endorsing full-scale digital detox. These platforms frame users as rational agents who are digitally empowered to make “the right” choices in their screen consumption. But this idea of what is “right” or healthy is filtered through proprietary, commercial logics that are invested in their customers’ continued engagement. The goal is not a smartphone free childhood (Smartphone Free Childhood, n.d.) but the cultivation of “smarter” media habits that contain users safely within the wellness bubble of the Calm digital ecosystem. As Anna Munster suggests in An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology, this relentless transformation of life into data points and branded digital enclosures turns people into ‘meta-managers’ of their own lives, culminating in the ‘rise of the bubble person as administrator of data-life’ (2013: 190). While framed as alternatives to the problem of sensory overload, wellness platforms like Calm operate as part of a pervasive computing environment that, as Munster notes, ‘inevitably recedes into an interconnected background of transactionalism’ (191). This context of pervasive ambient mediation results in what she calls ‘network anaesthesia’ (3)—a condition of flattened experience and dulled perception that makes us less likely to see the new relational possibilities that networks also might open up.

The burgeoning EdTech industry has also capitalised on the technopanics around social media in order to promote apps aimed at Gen Z and Gen Alpha users. In a crowded market of AI-driven educational media, 2024 saw the launch of a series of ‘PDF to Brainrot’ platforms such as Coconote, Memenome, Revid, and StudyRot. These apps convert study materials into short-form ‘brain rot’ videos, repackaging educational content in internet vernacular and featuring ‘brainrot translators’ that replace words with brain-rot slang. Memenome AI, for example, markets itself as the ‘AI for Gen Z researchers’, a tool that transforms ‘difficult’ material into ‘engaging videos’ with AI characters who ‘explain it in ways that click’ (Memenome, 2025). StudyRot likewise claims that by ‘adapting academic content to popular social media formats, StudyRot addresses the evolving needs of Gen Z and Gen Alpha learners who prefer digestible, multimedia learning experiences’ (Mahas, 2024). Although they are framed as study aids, these platforms do very little to explain or break down study materials. Instead, material is condensed and converted into an AI-voiced script augmented with audiovisual elements of ‘brain rot’ culture, such as animated avatars and gameplay videos. While many AI platforms offer to take the hard work out of thinking, the selling point of PDF to brain rot video generators is their promise to package the feel of learning into the familiar atmospherics, moods, and temporalities of meme culture. The original learning material is whizzed up, blender-like, alongside nuggets of popular digital culture, into an arbitrary new assemblage that looks and feels like social media content but smuggles in learning through the back door. Unlike Chabot ‘AI tutors’ which simplify learning material into easily understandable text, the value of these brain rot apps lies in their transformation of the sensory experience of learning—in their modulation of the challenging sensory environments in which thinking occurs. They are framed, in other words, as anaesthetic media: media that offer to manage ‘the pleasure and pain’ of conscious, attentive experience.

Such desires to manage the sensory conditions of consciousness are not easily reducible to narratives emphasising screen addiction or the lazy recalcitrance of youth to face up to the hard graft of education. Rather, they reflect structurally produced affective responses to the conditions of digital capitalism, which increasingly exploits attention as labour. While always-on computational media continue to retool the human synaesthetic system in ways anticipated by Benjamin and Buck-Morss, this transformation is more nuanced than popular discourse and mainstream apps suggest. As I will now turn to consider, user-generated brain rot content and lobotomy aesthetics are suffused with a knowing ambivalence surrounding screen engagement. In their own responses to these trends online, young people demonstrate a keen awareness that social media affects them in ways that are not always beneficial. Their engagement with social media should not be misread as naïve complicity but understood as an anaesthetic relation to a media system that generates its own internal tensions and contradictions. As Neal Curtis writes in Idiotism: Capitalism and the Privatisation of Life, ‘identification with a crisis-ridden system […] is not an epistemological problem. It is not the case that we do not know. It is rather that thinking about the necessary change instigates an ontological disturbance that makes us want to forget that we do know’ (Curtis, 2012: 8). Indeed, as I will now consider, the brain rot and lobotomy themed content emerging from within the popular cultures of the internet is shot through with precisely such tensions—between awareness and willed disbelief, pleasure and pain, a thirst for sensation and a yearning for anaesthetisation.

User-generated aesthetics of cognitive decay

While commercial products frame brain rot as a kind of cognitive failure that requires intervention by experts, I now want to turn to the responses to brain rot that have been generated by users themselves. Taking a variety of perspectives on the aesthetics of cognitive decay and emotional numbness that are specific to social media use, this content offers insight into lived experiences of continuous compulsory connectivity. As deployed by media users, brain rot is not only an umbrella term for the mental damage caused by excessive social media exposure but also refers to a specific subset of trivial and often nonsensical media texts such as the Skibidi Toilet song or Italian Brainrot lore. These ‘pieces of “brain rot content”’ are framed in internet meme culture as having a deleteriously viral quality, lodging themselves into social media users’ brains, crowding out other thoughts and leading to feelings of cognitive degradation (Know Your Meme, ‘Brain Rot’). Many popular brain rot memes acknowledge the mentally stultifying aspects of social media culture with a playful, if resigned, tone. Some frame brain rot as an unwelcome condition that a user “contracts” through media use, as in the meme above, which remixes Francis Bacon’s painting ‘Study After Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ (1953) with a low-res image of a desktop computer and a banner that reads ‘You have contracted Brain Rot’ (Fig. 3).

More recently, brain rot has been closely associated with the internet-specific slang that has emerged from this scene. A key aspect of user engagement with this wave of brain rot is the pleasure of recognising and identifying brain rot through its characters and distinctive slang terms. On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, brain rot listicle videos enumerate the top brain rot memes, while Italian Brainrot quizzes test users’ knowledge of slang, characters, and lore.

One TikTok trend involves ‘brain rotting’ strangers: a prank in which TikTokers quiz the public on their knowledge of brain rot content by showing them images printed from the internet. These POV TikToks feature off-camera content creators gesturing to the images and prompting responses from the subjects in the videos. One popular account, @publicbrainrot, features clips with captions like ‘I found skibidi sigma couple and brainroted [sic] them’ and ‘I forced strangers to say brainrot words’. The targets of this account’s videos are young people, who greet nonsensical expressions such as ‘U I I A O I O U I I’ and ‘LINGAN GULI GULI GULI’ with knowing laughter, reading them back in a rhythmic pattern that confirms their awareness of the memes. While these TikToks acknowledge the nonsensical nature of the content, they also affirm brain rot’s currency as a generationally-specific form of humour shared amongst those who are “in the know.”

Another variation on this trend features users ‘showing brainrot to the elderly,’ sometimes involving family, but more often featuring strangers in public. In one, an ‘elderly’ female shopper in Walmart is approached by a creator holding a white plastic binder. As the TikToker flips through the sequence of images—John Pork, Low Taper Fade, Eye of Rah, Chill Guy, Skibidi Toilet, and Freakbob, and others—the woman responds with genial bemusement, with expressions such as ‘Oh my goodness’ and ‘very good’ mixed with laughter that seems at turns genuine, forbearing, perplexed, and beleaguered. This video’s modest success (787.2K likes) hinges on the woman’s mystified laughter. Comments such as ‘why was she just spamming the oh my goodness and laugh emotes😭😭’ and ‘Oh my goodness ha ha ha, oh my goodness, ha ha ha, oh my goodness, ha ha ha’, poke fun at the flummoxed woman’s phatic responses, her inability to know quite what to say.

In these TikToks, brain rot is framed less as content that impairs memory and numbs emotional response than as a means of defining the distinctiveness of Generations Z and Alpha through the centrality of their internet-specific knowledge—a distinctive kind of media literacy that differentiates them from earlier generations. Brain rot thus acts as a kind of affective social glue, binding together a youth culture who self-identify as “chronically online.” As one semi-discrete trend within the wider swirling vortex of internet aesthetics, brain rot affords users a temporary foothold in the fast-paced medium of socially mediated experience, a means of temporarily identifying as a collective with specific tastes, humour, and language that have been shaped through engagement with digital platforms. Brain rot creates its own hierarchies of knowledge and forms of expertise that users embrace as a means of creating themselves as an affective public, even if the basis of this collective is also acknowledged by these users as nonsensical drivel.

The scene has also produced niche subgenres of brain rot, and performance-subjects who have gained visibility within them. For example, digital creator Anatoxich has amassed 2.9M followers and 125.5M likes on his TikTok account devoted entirely to reacting to ‘Italian Brainrot’ videos. Italian Brainrot is a popular subgenre that emerged in January 2025, featuring AI-generated characters who are amalgams of animals or humans and inanimate objects, with vaguely Italian-sounding names like ‘Tralalero Tralala’, ‘Bombardiro Crocodillo’, and ‘Ballerina Cappuccina’ (Katz, 2025). A key feature of Italian Brainrot is its distinctive narration: it embraces alliteration and assonance, producing sing-song rhyming stories that often make little or no sense. This language is ‘easy to mimic’ and has spawned many user iterations, becoming a kind of ‘secret language that parents don’t understand’ (Braun-Silva, 2025).

Anatoxich’s videos directly address both the unique linguistic properties of Italian Brainrot and the scale and pace of its spread. Several involve ‘Brainrot speedruns’, challenges where he must identify characters as quickly as possible as they appear onscreen. Using a split-screen technique, an image montage appears in the top half of the frame while Anatoxich appears below, framed as both gamer and athlete. These performances humorously display his encyclopedic knowledge of Italian brain rot but are also framed as athletic feats of cognitive endurance and temporal mastery. Wearing a sweatband and gaming headphones, his face fixed in determined concentration, Anatoxich reels off the Italian names without hesitation or delay, in a barely-intelligible flow of verbal dexterity, before falling dramatically backwards out of frame at the end (Fig. 4). Each of his speed run videos conclude in this way, with a full body collapse that signals exhaustion but also mastery over the image sequence’s challenging pace.

But these videos do more than showcase the content creator’s knowledge of niche subcultures; they also stage an embodied performance that dramatises what inhabiting this context feels like. Despite its absurd humour, watching this TikTok is a tense experience. The intensity arises not from narrative suspense—we don’t really feel there is that much at stake in Anatoxich’s mission—but from the possibilities for identification with an embodied experience of time that is specific to a regime of constant connectivity. Through the rapid-fire image sequence and the digital countdown, we are drawn into what Cressida Heyes calls the ‘increased sense of linear, protensive time urgency’ that defines ‘postdisciplinary time’ (Heyes, 2020: 97). In Anaesthetics of Existence, she describes this temporality as one that ‘pulls us away from the present moment: it is forward-looking, connecting the now to a future reward, achievement-oriented, and prone to disappointment.’ It ‘imagines time as a commodity’ that is ‘infinitely divisible’ and thus ‘infinitely exploitable’ (123). Within this framework, multiple, impossible demands for constant productivity and self-optimisation create an ‘an economy of temporality that is relentlessly depleting’ (99). In his TikTok speedruns, Anatoxich performs a subjectivity that appears nearly equal to the demands of this infinitely divisible and relentlessly depleting postdigital time. Indeed, there is pleasure in watching him parry the shocks and jolts of the phantasmagoric procession of brain rot, seeing him master its ‘linear, protensive time energy’ as it flows past at a punishing pace (97). If public ‘brain rotting’ demonstrates the power of internet aesthetics to create affective publics, this example affirms their usefulness as toolkits for self-branding and for shoring up the image of an autonomous self who can withstand the pressures of postdigital temporality. Through his speedruns, Anatoxich creates an image of himself as a virtuosic performance subject of postdigital neoliberal capitalism, a body impervious to the fragmentation and pain of always-on media stimulation.

As Heyes suggests, this performative mastery is something that postdisciplinary temporality demands, but it is also difficult to achieve in a context that ‘often feels compressed, demanding, teetering on the edge of possibility, utterly draining, yet also out-of-control’ (7). Sometimes, she notes, the only possible response under such pressures is not to ‘sit up, pay attention, [and] work harder’ but to ‘detach from experience, to evade pain and fatigue, to slow down, and […] to alter or even to lose consciousness’ (Ibid.). Indeed, as I will now explore, while internet users take pleasure in collective fun and self-expression through aesthetic trends, others show more ambivalent attachments to postdisciplinary temporality—expressing the discontents of TikTok time.

Lobotomy aesthetics: Networked numbness and strategic self-erasure

While internet aesthetics have been framed as toolkits for self-expression and interaction, they are sometimes experienced differently: as a means of expressing networked numbness and embracing strategic self-erasure. In this final section, I further develop the term ‘anaesthetic media’ to describe elements of platform design, aesthetics, and user practices that converge around this desire for sensory withdrawal. I focus on ‘lobotomy’ as a cross-platform phenomenon associated with states of stupefaction, numbness, or dissociation specific to internet culture. As ‘Know Your Meme’ explains, lobotomy is used to describe ‘nonsensical and scrambled visuals, jokes, and associations’ that mimic the chaotic and slow functioning of the human brain after a lobotomy procedure (Know Your Meme, 2024). Closely associated with brain rot, lobotomy content is often—but not always—dark, reflecting a user’s ‘broken sense of humor’ or personal “fails” ‘caused by being chronically online’ (Ibid.).

The origin of the term in this usage dates back to 9 November, 2021, with a YouTube video entitled ‘me everytime after the lobotomy 🤦🏾‍♂️😂:’ posted by Redditor Jacooo2019. This thirty-nine second clip features gameplay footage from The Simpsons Game featuring a stupefied Bart Simpson running chaotically around, and slamming repeatedly face-forward into, the walls of his house. The footage is heavily distorted, with fades, superimpositions, rapid-fire editing, and subliminal inserts of a chalk-drawn skeleton and The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. The audio track layers The Simpsons theme with jarring audio samples resembling air raid sirens and electromagnetic scanners. Since late 2021, re-edits of this and similar videos have spread across platforms. In this iteration of the trend, the content feels loud and aggressive, disorienting viewers by flooding the senses and refusing coherent audiovisual connections. Here, lobotomy is shorthand for the psychological or emotional damage the videos simulate through hypermediated POV framings. Densely layered, fragmented content aims to deliver a numbing shock, establishing an implicit connection between exposure to digital content and the stupefaction indexed in the term lobotomy.

TikToks in this vein often use a before-and-after structure, focusing on what post-lobotomy experience feels like. In one popular example (93.1k likes), captioned ‘me after the #lobotomy,’ (29 November 2023) @ilove.deathgrips delivers a cheery POV address: ‘ha ha, caught your negative thoughts…let me see what they say’. This is followed by a montage of black-and-white e-fit drawings, the words ‘YOU ARE ILL’ and ‘WE JUST WANT TO FIX YOU’, a screen reading ‘A SPECIAL PRESENTATION 333-333-333’, and finally a black screen from which an eerie white mask slowly looms (Fig. 5). The audio track shifts after the intro, alternating forceful machinic drone effects with morse code, producing an unpleasant visceral response meant to simulate the scrambled cognitive patterns of someone post-lobotomy. 

The video’s reference to ‘fixing’ negative thoughts through lobotomisation may suggest a critique of an outmoded psychiatric procedure; but lobotomy is also framed as the object of the video’s dark, obscure humour. While some lobotomy-themed TikToks are framed as #MedEd, aiming to raise awareness about this abandoned medical practice,^[i] most lobotomycore content seizes on the term as a convenient metaphor for describing the affective texture of experience that emerges in a regime of always-on connectivity. As a metaphor, the lobotomy gathers a disparate, ambiguous range of affective layers that are not easily reconciled. The comments on @ilove.deathgrips TikTok register a collective ambivalence about whether viewers should laugh, join in, or treat the video as a cry for help. One user retorts, ‘Me after lobotomy be like🤣🟦 no’, while others reference ‘the fog is coming’ meme, linking lobotomy content to ‘schizoposting’, a ‘term used to refer to the act of posting memes as though one were having a mental breakdown’ (Know Your Meme, 2021). This type of lobotomy video sits within a wider continuum of mental health-related content, including ‘depression memes’, which feed into the broader ‘memeification of emotion’ on platforms such as TikTok (Scherz, 2022: 142). Through depression memes, users can find solace in the space opened up for humorous self-deprecation about mental health issues. As Laurence Scherz notes, while they take many forms, depression memes can offer a critique of the ‘tiresome narrative of “happy” social media in which we see smiling individuals sharing their best selves, best engagement pictures, best smiling selfies’ (146). Lobotomycore TikToks function similarly, as a potential rejection of ‘the tyranny of happiness’ that pervades mainstream internet aesthetics (Ibid.).

In other social media posts, lobotomy metaphors evoke a direct desire for numbness or strategic self-erasure. A number of Pinterest boards and TikToks pair lobotomy hashtags and imagery with the caption ‘My next piercing’—a joke referring to the insertion of orbitoclast needles into the patient’s eye socket during transorbital lobotomy surgery. Pinterest boards devoted to this trend curate images ranging from black and white anatomical illustrations, vintage-inspired collages featuring brain imagery, ‘live, laugh, lobotomy’ and ‘ask me about my lobotomy!’ stickers, ‘legalize lobotomy’ t-shirts, as well as images that are more obliquely related (Fig. 6). These fragments don’t just aestheticise mental illness; they reframe numbness and detachment as curatorial moods, compressed into shareable content.

Some lobotomycore TikToks adopt a similar ‘mood board’ aesthetic, superimposing and splicing together content set to audio tracks with a dark, trance-like intensity. In one TikTok titled ‘My next piercing’ (261.3k likes), tagged #nextpiercing, #lobotomycore and #lobotomy, we see a montage of surgical illustrations and anatomical models of the brain layered with x-rays showing human heads pierced by metal objects. Set to an industrial dance track, the montage fuses these images together into a ‘surface unity’ that, echoing Buck-Morss’s reading of Wagnerian opera, ‘overwhelms by not pausing for breath’ (25). Such TikToks prompt mixed reactions: some users seeming to embrace the trend through comments like ‘I want a lobotomy’ and ‘LOVE lobotomy’, while others respond with disapproval or outrage, asking ‘now why would u want this?’ or imploring the lobotomycore community to ‘stop normalizing this NOW’ (@yuatis, 2025).

Although they lack the loud aggressivity and jump scare tactics of the POV TikToks discussed earlier, these Pinterest and TikTok lobotomy mood boards are troubling because they frame lobotomised selfhood as an active desire and style choice rather than as the target of ironic humour about the discontents of media overexposure. Casting numbness as a lifestyle choice that defines a user’s aesthetic attachments, lobotomycore content exemplifies the ‘weak’ logics of internet aesthetics, appearing as one option amongst endless others catering to ‘the desire to transcend our everyday dull lives’ (Clugage et al., 2022). Whereas many aesthetics serve as toolkits for intensifying everyday existence, lobotomycore content leans instead into the more ambivalent anaesthetic desires that also emerge from always-on media life—yearnings not for heightened sensation, but for the numbing, strangely comforting dissociation of algorithmically flattened experience.

With their visual emphasis on broken, damaged, and bandaged bodies, these TikToks sit within a wider context of internet-based ‘aesthetics of self-harm,’ which features depictions of self-injury and disordered eating, either in the ‘pursuit of an idealised beauty’ or as a means of expressing ‘feelings of sadness and vulnerability online’ (Alderton, 2018). Platforms like Instagram have regularly come under scrutiny for ‘actively helping [the] spread of self-harm among teenagers’ who use the platform to access, post, and share such content, even though its community standards explicitly prohibit this (Bryant, 2024).

In spite of these extremely troubling platform affordances, Pinterest is discursively framed as a space of inspiration, creativity and positivity, with a self-professed mission to ‘build a better internet’ that prioritises ‘positive mental health outcomes.’ In a recent press release, Pinterest cites a research study exploring ‘how 10 minutes a day on Pinterest impacted on Gen Z’s mental health,’ concluding that looking at ‘inspiring content’ is key for helping young people to ‘guard against stress and toxicity,’ and adding that ‘Pinterest is more likely than its competitors to always leave its users feeling positive after spending time on the platform’ (Pinterest, 2023). These types of statements are a regular refrain of social media corporations, which pay lip service to corporate social responsibility whilst outsourcing much of the work of safeguarding to users, who are framed as rational agents empowered by media to optimise experience by curating their feeds as “feel good” encounters (DeCoux Hampton, 2023). Against this discursive framing, it is worth asking what affective work lobotomycore content performs for its communities. Such content functions as a dark retort to neoliberal discourses of wellness that frame mental health as the object of self-governance through the careful curation of one’s feeds. Lobotomy metaphors create affective publics that are shaped by more ambivalent feelings about imperatives to monitor and manage mental health, offering a visual language to express the damage that is felt, or the self-erasure that is craved, in a regime that demands constant self-expression and self-optimisation.

It is also vital to recognise the gender politics that are given shape through this anaesthetic desire. Whereas earlier examples of brain rot and lobotomycore content are somewhat masculinised through their emphasis on embodied endurance, hypermediated shock and aggressivity, this strand speaks to concerns that are often expressly feminised. For example, Pinterest lobotomy mood boards often feature images of perfect-looking 1950s housewives whose heads have been opened up, their brains exposed or missing (see Fig. 6). This is also the case for the cross-platform ‘lobotomy chic’ trend, described by Fandom as ‘an aesthetic that focuses on exploring femininity through meta-irony, detachment and nihilism,’ noting that it is ‘mostly used by teenage girls who feel empowered by detaching from reality and acting as though apathetic and mysterious’ (Fandom, n.d.). As Rayne Fisher-Quann describes it, the scene is exemplified by the ‘performance of detachment’ in the ‘dissociative pout selfie’ that seemed to dominate visual social media in 2022 (Fisher-Quann, 2022). Whereas all selfies are inherently self-conscious, requiring ‘an awareness of the self, and a sense of purpose in controlling how it’s perceived,’ lobotomy chic’s dissociative pout is born ‘from a sense of widespread fatigue’ that has long pervaded affective economies of visual social media, which require such calculative self-awareness (Ibid.).

In her article ‘The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating,’ Emmeline Clein argues that dissociation has become a dominant affective stance amongst feminist communities who recognise that women’s structural ‘conditions haven’t changed, but it’s not in vogue to complain about them’ (Clein, 2019). What Clein calls ‘dissociative feminism’ is both an ethos and an active technique that many women have chosen as a means of managing the pleasure and pain of digital neoliberal experience. Performances of dissociation in lobotomy chic are rife with dissensus that hinge on the scene’s embrace of ‘meta-irony,’ which adds a layer of anaesthetic numbness to performances of selfhood. One example is Instagram and TikTok influencer @lex.delarosa, whose dissociative performances of traditional domestic femininity are embraced by some followers as the epitome of lobotomy chic. Although she does not frame her content using lobotomy tags, fans often read her distinctive blissfully vacant self-presentational style in this way, through comments such as ‘can’t wait to be this empty behind the eyes after my lobotomy’ to ‘can u tell me where u got ur lobotomy queen?’ In her article ‘WTF is Lobotomy-Core?!’ Stella Hughes observes that Delarosa’s wholesome homemaker content feels ‘distinctly off,’ tapping into a ‘new era of performed numbness’ (Hughes, 2023). As Hughes writes: ‘Her expression is permanently fixed in a state of Disney-like happiness, with her eyes nearly shut from how wide her smile is’ and ‘she seems to float around whatever her task is’ (Ibid.). Delarosa’s persona channels an image of 1950s-era domestic feminine perfection that is a recurrent trope of the cross-platform ‘tradwife’ scene, which promotes lifestyles grounded in traditional gender roles and aesthetics (Scott & Day, 2025). While her performances dialogue with the wider tradwife subcultures that are currently flourishing across the internet, many of Delarosa’s TikToks push this to extremes that strongly suggest a satiric stance.

For example, her video ‘pov your kids requested a glass of water’ (697.3k likes) takes the viewer through a hyper-complicated process of producing the beverage, starting with melting down freshly-harvested snow into jars, placing them under a full moon to ‘absorb the moon’s energy’ before adding to a pan with ice that has been ‘directly harvested from a glacier.’ The process continues through several other steps, requiring a full gamut of kitchen gadgets and appliances to produce the glass of water. Although Delarosa rejects the term ‘tradwife’, her ‘repeated aesthetic displays of the feminine self, home and family’ can be read either way: as a critique, or an embrace, of traditional, privileged, white Western femininity (Hoekstra, 2024). This ambivalence is central to what Sarah Banet-Weiser and Jilly Boyce Kay call the kaleidoscopic, topsy-turvy ‘digital mirror worlds’ of contemporary influencer culture (Banet-Weiser & Kay, 2025). Here, gender categories are subject to ‘endless refraction’ and ‘disconnection from collective…politics,’ to the extent that they become empty containers for ideas and feelings that are endlessly ‘mixed and matched, scrambled and recomposed’ (Ibid.). In keeping with the weak logics of internet aesthetics, gender identities are recast as sensory fields to inhabit temporarily, relational styles to try out, rather than stable categories grounded in shared structural conditions.

Embodying these weak aesthetic logics, Delarosa’s stylised performances of the happily lobotomised homemaker unsettle coherent identity politics, occupying the position of the ‘ideological entrepreneur’ who registers the ‘cruel optimism of living in a capitalist world that pays lip service to gender equality’, while at the same time embodying the sensory pleasures of heteronormativity, wholesome motherhood and retro domestic bliss (Ibid.). This either/or, both/and logic springs from lobotomy chic’s investment in meta-irony, distancing, and detachment. Lauren Berlant described this relational style as ‘underperformativity’: a ‘mode of flat or flattened affect’ that ‘sneaks around the codes of sincerity and intelligibility that make possible normative social trust and trust in the social’ and ‘opens up questions about what the terms, register, and idioms of exchange’ should be in a given encounter (Berlant, 2015: 193, 195, 198). We might read these blank affective styles as the residue of Munster’s ‘network anaesthesia’: responses to a transactional relational system that is relentlessly depleting. Or we might read them as a more purposeful rejection of the terms, register and idioms of exchange on social media platforms: a refusal to perform according to legible categories of femininity. 

As an internet Aesthetic, lobotomy chic expresses such ambiguities by foregrounding the female body as a blank, impenetrable surface that reflects back whatever the viewer projects onto it, while feeling no pain. Whether intended as critique, admiration, or active desire, lobotomy chic prettifies this state of underperformativity so that the ‘crisis in cognitive experience’ that it indexes can be viewed ‘with enjoyment’ (Buck-Morss, 1992: 37). Whether one aspires to live this life of numbed perfection or simply laughs at or along with them, Delarosa’s TikToks are engaging because they prettify this condition, rendering the hard work of stay-at-home motherhood as a scene of effortless tranquillity. Her content invites viewers into a world that is strangely weightless, where bodies float serenely above everyday life, perma-smiles functioning as ‘mimetic shock absorber[s]’ (Benjamin in Buck-Morss, 1992: 17). Encountered in the flow of a TikTok feed, Delarosa’s videos produce small islands of respite within a stream that might otherwise feel chaotic, intense, time-pressured. In contrast to lobotomycore content that projects a state of temporal confusion and jacked-up, manic energy, the state of lobotomisation pictured here feels more like what Heyes describes as ‘anaesthetic time’. ‘During anaesthetic time,’ Heyes writes, ‘my intentionality slackens and shifts: I no longer have a clear object of experience […] Any larger sense of myself as an agent diminishes’ (Heyes, 2020: 123). Through their slow, gentle formal qualities, Delarosa’s TikToks create a spaced-out, warped temporality, inviting viewers to let her gliding movements and gently narrated voiceovers trickle over their frayed senses like so much moon-energy-infused glacier water. Their appeal lies not in the specific content, but in the ambient modulation of the sensory experience that is encountered within one’s feed.

This work of ambient mediation also appears in a final category of lobotomycore, where ASMRtists perform mock lobotomy procedures to remove the viewer’s brain rot. In ‘ASMR lobotomy (removing your brain rot),’ the creator ASMR Berlin whispers, ‘Stop scrolling. You are long overdue for your lobotomisation. You’ve been doomscrolling for way too long.’ These videos layer lobotomy metaphors with calming ASMR tropes, framing TikToks as therapeutic interventions and services that are accessible through careful feed curation. They sit within a broader ecosystem of ‘self-medicating media’: low-intensity formats framed as cognitive aids, from brain massage and brain cleanse TikToks, to ambience videos, sleep podcasts, meditation apps, ambient sound Spotify playlists, and white-, pink-, and brown-noise videos (Klausen in Brooke, 2021). Lobotomycore functions here as a specialised genre of anaesthetic media—a sensory balm intended to soothe the jagged intensities of mediated experience.

Paradoxically, this content activates a form of agency premised on self-erasure. This active embrace of self-loss crystallises the structuring tensions of internet aesthetics: between a drive to express, perform and “have” a self, and the countervailing desire to check out from experience—to simply vibe with a chosen aesthetic. Platforms like TikTok and Pinterest frame users as empowered managers of their digital experiences but also supply the tools to temporarily drift into zones of algorithmically-induced stupor. As Buck-Morss notes, the pleasure of anaesthetics lies not only in the temporary reprieve from the frenzy of digital communication that it promises, but in the deeper comfort of self-erasure that accompanies this. This is what ‘being-in-TikTok’ produces: a state of suspension that freezes time and arrests the burden of both choice and self-consciousness (d’Agnese, 2024: 97).

As I have argued, the states of anaesthetisation exemplified in brain rot and lobotomycore are not just trivial digital flimflam. Rather, they are symptomatic expressions of digital neoliberal capitalism’s ongoing retooling of the human synaesthetic system—what Buck-Morss, following Benjamin, understood as the very ground of aesthetic and political life. In this context, numbness, cognitive blankness, and affective withdrawal are the ambient conditions that make digital life endurable. Brain rot and lobotomy-themed media register anaesthetic desires that are shaped by the exhausting imperatives of performative subjecthood in a regime of algorithmic self-optimisation. Yet, as Heyes reminds us, such anaesthetic desires do not take us beyond the logics of neoliberalism but participate in and help maintain them: ‘the labor of being an agential subject (of which political resistance is part) is not outside the neoliberal regimes that incite it’ (Heyes, 2020: 5). If anaesthetic media offer a kind of relief, it is one that often folds users back into platform engagement and its self-administered forms of numbness and passivity.

But while ‘political resistance has been undermined’ by neoliberal structures, it remains crucial to interrogate the desires for self-erasure and self-induced numbness that grow out of this context as the grounds of a potential awakening (Heyes, 2020: 124). As Clugage et al. argue, while internet aesthetics are never ‘purely subversive, and are at best conflicted about capitalism and its attendant neoliberal policies,’ the desires that are congealed within them may contain ‘the seeds of a genuinely resistant political culture.’ Internet aesthetics seem trifling; they are unlikely to ‘mount a revolution’, but they nonetheless perform stealthy political work by putting us ‘in a different mood’ (Clugage et al., 2022). Like many internet aesthetics, brain rot and lobotomycore content do not easily map onto a stable political agenda. Yet in their ambivalence, they articulate a shared rejection of self-regulated, self-medicated life in an age of continuous compulsory connectivity. Seen through these optics, brain rot and lobotomycore are a meaningful index of how life is experienced, negotiated and endured in a context of compulsory connectivity. And for that reason, it is worth taking their nonsense seriously.

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Notes

[1] See, for example, @blonde.girlyy’s ‘Understanding Lobotomies: A Dark Chapter in Medicine’ (205.9k likes), which belongs to a wider category of ‘disease videos’ where the content creator uses her body as a canvas to visualise the effects of particular illnesses and, in this case, their treatment.

Tina Kendall is Associate Professor of Film & Media and Director of Research Students for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research explores everyday affects and ambivalent temporal experiences of always-on digital cultures. She is the author of Entertained or Else: Boredom and Networked Media (Bloomsbury, 2025) and co-editor of The New Extremism in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Email: Tina.Kendall@aru.ac.uk

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 13/06/25
Date of original decision: 19/09/25
Revised article submitted: 23/09/25
Article accepted: 23/09/25