The 1800s Had ‘Brainrot’ Too!

The following is republished from the excellent Pessimist’s Archive, with permission.

The Oxford Dictionary just added “brainrot” as its newest official word—a cynical, but tongue-in-cheek term for consuming too much short-form social media content.

However, the word isn’t actually new – in the archives we found examples going back as far as a century and a half of ‘brainrot’ being used in the context of unhealthy consumption of (new) media.

125 years ago – In 1899 – journalist Julian Ralph warned of a “BRAIN-ROT CONTAGION” that would be accelerated by an increase of magazines in the US – after witnessing their popularity in England. He posited that:

“The number of people who think like birds, in little broken thoughts, will be greatly enlarged.”

The writer feared “millions upon millions of American boys and girls and men and women” would suffer the same fate as the English who were supposedly “unable to learn anything, to know anything well and to concentrate their minds upon anything.”

Concerns about the psychological influence of ‘new media’ by those in the ‘old media’ are nothing new, and reactions to the rise of magazines and the ‘yellow press’ were no different.

The term ‘brainrot’ can be found used even earlier with regards to cheap periodicals – in 1866, a Vermont paper called a number of New York publications “soul destroying and brain rotting” and in 1883 ‘The Press’ of Stafford Springs, Connecticut lamented the rise of “vile ‘Illustrated’ weekly story-papers” that it said was “polluting the country”, continuing…

“The best of them are brain-rotting trash and twaddle, and the worst of them are deadly poison. And the infection is spreading day by day, week by week, and thousands of brave, honest lads all over the country are in moral peril from it.”

The real brainrot happening seems to be in media elites convincing themselves new mediums can have such powerful psychological impacts – postive or negative. We explored this dynamic in our previous two posts about the fictitious ‘War of the Worlds’ panic, cooked up by newspapers hostile to radio, and the literary elites of 17th century Europe who insisted a popular new novel triggered a suicide epidemic among the young:

The ‘War of the Worlds’ Panic was Anti-Radio Propaganda

Remembered as history’s most infamous radio broadcast, a 1938 dramatization of H.G. Wells “The War of the Worlds” reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought a fictional news broadcast of an alien invasion was real…

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