In 1854, the American writer Henry David Thoreau described his life and thinking in his famous collection of essays "Walden Lake" in his life and thinking that he spent two years, two months and two days in a regenerated forest by the lake. At that time, the industrial revolution in the United States was in the ascendant. Although Thoreau lived a recluse life away from the hustle and bustle of Lake Walden, he was keenly aware that the development of technology had caused widespread degradation in people's thoughts and intelligence. In the book's wonderfully debated conclusion, Thoreau repeatedly points out this dangerous disease-the tendency to belittle complex ideas or have multiple interpretations possibilities in favor of simple concepts. He wrote: "It is as if nature can only support an order of understanding... as if there is security only in the midst of stupidity";"I wish to speak somewhere without boundaries, as a man who wakes up speaks to other people who wake up";"They claim that Gabir's poems have four different meanings... But here, if a person's work has more than one interpretation, that will be used as a basis for criticism." In the laying and progression of layers, Thoreau offered a very Thoreau question:

As England struggles to cure potato death, isn't there anyone working to cure the broader and more deadly form of brain rot?（While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?）

Here, Thoreau connected the words "brain" and "rot" with a short horizontal line to create a new word-brain-rot, to correspond to the death disease that roils potatoes. What is significant is that this term did not fade with the wind like most newborn but short-lived things, but became new over the next 170 years. It can be said that behind the history of brain-rot lies a history of media development and technological iteration, as well as people's reflection on it. If we look at it from the perspective of reading, it can also be said to be a history of continuous decline in reading culture. Especially in the era of social media with algorithms as the core, low-quality content represented by Short Video emerge endlessly, and the closed loop between mobile phones, algorithms and dopamine is almost invincible. The term brain-rot has once again ushered in a world-renowned highlight moment.

Walden Lake

All this starts from the era when Thoreau was born, which was 1817. At that time, the world was still ruled by printing, and the mainstream media in the United States was type-that is, printed text mainly composed of newspapers and books. Most of the British who immigrated to the North American colonies came from areas or classes with higher British cultural and educational levels, and they had the habit of reading. After arriving in the United States, they will build libraries and schools there. Trade relations between Britain and the North American colonies brought a large number of books to the United States-art, science, and literature books that greatly met the needs of the people of the time. An important result of this situation is that the widespread spread of printed matter has created a vibrant reading culture without class distinctions, rather than the emergence of cultural aristocrats occupied by only a few people, as in Britain.

In the first half of the 19th century, the number of libraries of various types in the United States surged."Uncle Tom's Cabin"(1851) published more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication, when the population of the United States was only more than 70 million. Not only that, Americans also like to listen to speeches, which makes lecture halls popular. Influenced by printed words, most speakers use written language and complex sentence patterns. Most of the content of speeches or discussions is serious, and each speech often lasts for several hours. However, the audience listened with great interest. They had rich background knowledge, including knowledge of historical events and complex political issues, and had the ability to understand complex long sentences. If they hear something exciting, they can't help but applaud. As an emerging civilization, the United States is more obsessed with type and the art of speech based on type than any other society.

However, all this faltered with the invention of telegraph technology (1837). It can be said that the emergence of telegraph technology has divided the entire human civilization into two stages. Before that, the speed at which information was transmitted was the speed of a carriage, the speed of a ship, and the speed of a train, which was about 60 kilometers per hour. It is this "slowness" that gives us time to read, time to think, time to screen information, and time to take action based on it. The emergence of the telegraph erased all boundaries, eliminated the concept of region, and brought everyone into the same information network. From this, we can know about major events that have occurred thousands of kilometers away, and we can convey peace and longing to family and friends far away. However, telegraph technology has also made the wealth of newspapers no longer determined by the quality or use of the news, but by the remoteness of the news's sources and the speed with which it is obtained. It was Thoreau who was the first to perceive the "information overload" caused by this technology:

We hastily built a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas may not have anything important to communicate... We enthusiastically opened a tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean, bringing the old and new worlds closer together for a few weeks, but the first news that reaches Americans may be that Princess Adelaide has whooping cough.

In this way, the invention of the telegraph turned the United States into a "community" and completely changed the face of newspapers. From then on, the center of newspapers was no longer local news and timeless content, but war, crime, traffic accidents, fires and floods. These news stories are characterized by sensational titles, scattered structures, inconsistent language, and no special audience. Moreover, the form of these news is similar to slogans, which are easy to remember and forget. Often there may be no connection between one piece of news and another. As a result, more and more people are beginning to pay attention to the risk of "brain corruption" posed by newspapers: people seem to read a lot, but also seem to read nothing. The root cause is that telegrams turned information into fragmented and irrelevant symbols, and people's time and attention began to be torn apart.

If telegraph technology has brought about astonishing changes in newspaper content and laid a deep hidden danger for the overall shallowness of reading culture, then the birth and popularization of television in the first half of the 20th century was to uproot reading culture. Because the revolution of electronic images represented by television is no longer a derivative of the word medium, but subversively replaces "seeing" and becomes the basis for our judgment. Some people may ask, can't you think well while watching TV? The answer is almost no. Because the average time for each shot on TV is only 3.5 seconds, our eyes have no time to rest at all, and there is always something new on the screen that injects your eyes and brain. More importantly, the most important image of "good television" must be attractive. It is essentially the art of performing, not the art of thinking.

This nature of television determines that it must meet people's needs for visual pleasure, which is the reason for the rise and continuous prosperity of the entertainment industry. From ancient times to the present, human life does require entertainment, and there is nothing wrong with this. However, what was unexpected is that people's "brain-corruption" love for television media has had a serious consequence, which is that it allows politics, religion, business, education, law and other important social affairs in our lives to operate in an entertaining way, leaving us less and less time to think. Finally, when people looked around, they were surprised to find that there was gradually only one sound left on the TV screen or in people's lives-the sound of entertainment.

Comparing the two behaviors of reading books and watching TV, people are in a passive state of acceptance of the information conveyed by TV. This torrent of graphic information never stops. What catches people's attention is often not knowledge, thoughts and emotions, but entertainment full of sensory stimulation; Real reading is free and autonomous. You can stop and think at any time while reading, or even take notes. However, TV obviously cannot do this, and dialogue cannot be discussed. This is determined by its dynamic nature, which cannot allow you to imagine. What's worse is that a piece of news that moves you to tears may be followed by an entertaining revelation, which will leave your thoughts blank and emotions confused.

In the final analysis, although they are both human creations, books and television are two very different media. In fact, all media and tools will in turn shape, influence and even enslave humans, or more accurately, the human brain. The German Nietzsche was perhaps one of the first to realize this problem. In 1867, 23-year-old Nietzsche received a letter from his best friend Kozelits, which said: "(Your) eloquence has become short maxims, and careful deliberation has become a simple 'telegraph style'." In response, Nietzsche wrote in his reply: "My thoughts on music and language often depend on the quality of paper and pen... The writing tools we use participate in the formation of our thoughts." Here, Nietzsche had touched on the great secret of the high plasticity of the human brain, which was not yet known at the time.

In 1884, American psychologist William James put forward a shocking conjecture: "Nerve tissue seems to be endowed with great plasticity... Over time, both external forces and internal forces can make that structure change. It's different from the past." This view is no less explosive than British biologist Darwin's announcement to the outside world that humans evolved from apes. It was not until 1968 that this genius conjecture was fully confirmed by the pioneering work of neuroscientist Melzenich. In this far-reaching experiment, Mayer first cut off some nerves in the monkey's hand and found that the monkey's brain was in chaos at first; but a few days later, he was surprised to find that the monkey's brain had completed self-reorganization, and its neural paths could weave themselves into a new map, and the results were consistent with the new nerve arrangement in the monkey's hand. As a result, the secret that Nietzsche vaguely felt a hundred years ago was finally revealed, that is, technology, media and tools can reshape our brains and thinking-from books to newspapers to television, every revolution in technology and media will arouse people's attention and discussion about "intellectual decline"(actually another expression for "brain corruption").

In fact, when Plato wrote his famous philosophical chapters with pen (his teacher Socrates only believed in memory and dialogue and refused to write with pen), when Nietzsche typed and wrote with a ball typewriter, when people in the era of Short Video complained that they could no longer read any long words, what they touched was this central theme in the history of human civilization. How we discover, store and interpret information, how we direct attention, how we mobilize feelings, how we recall, and how we forget are all influenced by technology, media and tools. The use of technology, media, and tools strengthens some neural circuits and gradually weakens others, making certain mental characteristics increasingly apparent and others tend to disappear. On the surface, we use and play with tools; in fact, tools shape each of us.

In the second half of the 20th century, more and more people of insight became aware of the negative impact of television culture, especially the book "Entertainment to Death" published in 1985 by Professor Neil Bozeman, a researcher in media culture.(The mainland launched its first Chinese translation in 2004. The cover depicts a family of four with only a body and no head, sitting in front of the TV, which perfectly echoes the word "brain corruption" in a metaphorical sense.), The mental disaster caused by TV culture has been deeply analyzed and has had widespread global impact. However, Bozeman gives a pessimistic conclusion at the end of the book: it is impossible to get people to give up television just like this. In this regard, he gave an example: In 1984, a library in Connecticut advocated a "turn off the TV" campaign-the theme of this event was to get people to stop watching TV for a month. However, the event was widely covered by television media, and it is hard to imagine that the organizers of the event did not see the irony expressed in their stance. Bozeman himself felt the same way, writing: "There were many times when I was asked to go on television to promote a book I wrote about anti-television, which was the same irony. This is the contradiction of TV culture."

Entertainment to Death

In 2003, Professor Neil Bozeman passed away. In the following twenty years, the entire world underwent earth-shaking changes again. If Professor Bozeman lived in today's era, he would be amazed that Social networks have almost redefined what he calls media culture. Today, the younger generation is not as addicted to TV culture as people in the past. They have something more attractive-social media. In 2023, the average daily touch time of mobile Internet users in my country will be 435 minutes, which is close to the ideal sleep time. People are accustomed to switching back and forth between major platforms every day, browsing news, swiping Short Video, ordering food and shopping, and interacting likes. Each platform's functions and content have its own focus. While swiping their fingertips, users are also switching between different roles. However, there is too much low-quality and even junk content on the Internet, various fabricated Short Video scripts frequently harvest emotions, and algorithms intensify the "information cocoon room" of partial listening and partial believing. The more people swipe their mobile phones, the more empty their spirits seem to become. It is precisely because of the emptiness of their spirit that their dependence on mobile phones is further intensified. Maybe it really is a disease.

On December 2, 2024,"brain rot" was selected as the Oxford Dictionary's 2024 Word of the Year, bringing this word created by Thoreau 170 years ago to once again attract global attention and heated discussion. According to the official explanation of Oxford University Press, the so-called "brain corruption" means that a person's mental or intellectual state is believed to have declined, describing the negative mental effects caused by excessive browsing of low-quality online content, especially on social media. Caspar Grassworth, chairman of Oxford Dictionary, said that the term "brain corruption" reveals the potential risks that virtual life can bring and how we use our leisure time, which seems to mark a new chapter of collision between humanistic care and technological development. Interestingly, another strong opponent defeated by "brain corruption" is "junk content"(slop), and the two seem to form a causal relationship. Our eyes are nailed to the small mobile phone screen and we read too much "spam" before we induce "brain rot".

Nowadays, all kinds of slops are constantly being updated on the Internet every moment of the day, so that many people will feel abandoned by society if they don't learn Internet messages. You had just figured out "Ke Xue", and everyone suddenly stopped playing; then you specialized in "Mai Xue": Why did Mai Lin buy smoked chicken? Li Xingliang is so poor! Li Xingliang and her got back together? Must be resisted! Mai Lin couldn't earn a penny!... Then, when you look back every half a year, no one cares about who the "Cat Cup" is... I read a lot of information but didn't learn anything; I quarreled for a long time, but I was always set by others and became a consumable for traffic. I only feel that the brain was once submerged and surged by Cyberspace's sea foam. When the tide recedes, nothing remains, except for the increasingly severe symptoms of "brain rot".

The famous Israeli historian Yuval Harali pointed out in his new book "Above Homo sapiens" published in September this year that algorithms have discovered that hateful conspiracy theories can better enhance human participation on social platforms. So the algorithm made a fatal decision: spread anger, spread conspiracy theories. These discussions based on anger and conspiracy theories are actually the most meaningless, the least likely to reach consensus, and the least conducive to promoting social progress. From this perspective, those contemporary "brain-corruption" artifacts are obviously meaningless things, but because of the teasing of low-level emotions, careful recommendation of algorithms, and emotional projection of the self, they occupy the eye of cyberspace. After more than 20 years of rapid progress on the Internet, we seem to have gradually reached a consensus on the ugly cyberworld. The torrent of information surges forward, and our brains become a tribute to "flow fetishism".

However, the iteration of technology never has an end. The current wave of AI is gradually permeating all areas of life, and "moistening things silently" is changing the pattern of the future world. In fact, the shortlisted candidate word of the year slop has demonstrated to a certain extent the huge impact of AI on the entire society. According to the official interpretation, Slop refers to art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence that is freely or in large quantities online, and is usually of low quality and lacks authenticity or accuracy. In the era of intelligent explosion, the gap between the information people come into contact with, the information they absorb, and the information they really need is widening. How can ordinary people absorb nutrients from the "information ocean" of the Internet and reject "brain corruption"? It is unrealistic to return to the "primitive era". We must learn to coexist with miscellaneous information and try our best to maintain the ability to think independently, especially in depth. Of course, appropriate "digital abstinence" and deliberate blank space in life may not be an antidote to self-healing, as Carl Newport said in "Digital Minimalism":

(Digital minimalism) is the concept of using technology to devote online time to a small number of carefully selected online activities that provide strong support for what you value, and then happily forgo everything else.