Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

According to the University of Oxford website, a survey conducted in a public vote with 37 thousand people, the word of the year chosen was “brain rot”, translated as “brain rot” a mental state produced by the excessive consumption of low-quality content.

According to the Oxford press website, the first recorded use of the word is from 1854, made by Henry David Thoreau, in the book Walden, which recounts his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world, the author already criticized in the 19th century the tendency of society to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways.

It is important to understand that this way of seeing the simplistic nature of everyday life is often an indication of a decline in mental and intellectual effort, as the Oxford text quotes: “While England is striving to cure the potato rot, there is no effort to cure the brain rot – which prevails in a much wider and fatal form”.

This serves to understand that current media technologies accelerate this process, but it comes from long data, and also the biggest criticism of artificial intelligence is due to the fact that we no longer elaborate calculations and analyses of complex issues, so the well-articulated intelligence of a machine becomes superior to the media of low-quality intellectual elaborations, resulting from the consumption of media with content without connection and without truth.

It is important to understand that this is a longer process that has gradually meant the emptying of quality content, reading capacity, and especially of methodologies and epistemologies that seek to simplify methods that are not simple. Take, for example, physical and cosmological theories, which have made a leap from Newtonian to quantum theory.

At the existential level, there is an emptying of the being, this is seen in all literature. Dostoevsky, who we talked about in the previous post, was also an existentialist, Edgar Morin spoke of the complex method, and medicine increasingly talks about holistic treatments that treat the entire body. So the idea that this is due to the emergence of digital devices is very shallow.

They undoubtedly have an influence, but the tendency towards an empty culture has been around for a long time. Nietzsche already talked about it. Theodore Dalrymple, the pseudonym of the psychiatrist Anthony Daniel, who wrote about the emptying of culture, already wrote about it in the 1980s: Coups and Cocaine: Two Journals in South America (1986), Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987) and Philosopher’s Republic (1989) (under the pen name Thrusday Migwa).

In short, we are experiencing a decline in civilization. There is even talk of communication difficulties (studies on changes in writing carried out by the University of Stavanger, in Norway).