This year was a tough one, indeed. With harrowing events happening across different meridian coordinates, 2024 has shaped, for many, a new understanding of humanity. And while the digitalization of life was meant to bring benefits and open access to knowledge, we seem to have almost forgotten that power belongs to those who control the knowledge.

Surely, the information we consume online, shaped by cutting-edge algorithms and our own preferences—often with the help of AI—reassuringly fuels the picture we have portrayed in our minds about certain things.

For me, this year was marked by the erosion of the knowledge we access online. I don’t have TikTok (and likely never will), and I preserve my Facebook and Instagram accounts merely to maintain the contacts I’ve made in the past. Scrolling through social media platforms has become painful—if you know what I mean. For example, it was disheartening to watch how well-placed individuals used AI-generated images to promote upcoming events, as if to say, “Come to our paid wine tasting. We actually don’t care that the image we used for advertising was cheaply and artificially created by AI.” For me, access to quality, verified knowledge is a right for consumers and a duty for creators. Maybe I’m naïve.

So, like many, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot.’ For twenty years, Oxford University Press has highlighted the language shaping our conversations and reflecting the patterns of particular years. This year’s word is largely defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

If what Oxford describes reflects the impact of consuming low-quality, low-value content on social media and the internet, others argue that it’s not just meaningless data but also negative news that lead to mental fatigue and a drop in motivation and focus, particularly among young people.

Overall, we should take into account that ‘brain rot’ is, in fact, a mental condition that may require specialized treatment. A research paper published in 2019 in World Psychiatry, for example, showed that “the internet can produce acute and sustained alterations in cognition related to attention and memory, which may be reflected in changes in the brain’s gray matter.”

Furthermore, endless scrolling through mind-numbing content has a significant negative association with executive functioning skills such as planning, organization, problem-solving, decision-making, and working memory.

Lastly, while tech companies flourish and grow their profits, taking advantage of a lax regulatory landscape, the simple people are losing their ability to control their lives. Some of you might criticize me for comparing the current state of things to the Pixar animated movie WALL-E. Remember the humans populating the Axiom spaceship? I’ll leave it at that…

Photo credits: Lisa Fotios