How Brain Rot and Rage Bait Fuel the Rise of Global Autocracy
The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 was “brain rot” and for 2025 it was “rage bait”. The obvious implications of these two interconnected phenomena, birthed by our digital existence, are well known, but what fascinates me more is how they fit so snugly into the schema of an authoritarian government. Before I elaborate, consider this: the size of the human brain increased rapidly from early hominin to modern man as it struggled to cope with dramatic climate events and intricate social interactions. The most rapid increase occurred some 800,000–200,000 years ago, when man’s environment became much more unpredictable. Subsequently, brain sizes decreased, but size was replaced by complexity, and by the 20th century, IQ scores were rising steadily, in a trend called the Flynn Effect, due largely to improved nutrition, healthcare, and education. Then, something happened.
Beginning in the 1990s and 2000s, various tests began to show a global decline in IQ scores, a phenomenon that scientists dubbed the “Reverse Flynn Effect”. While there is ongoing debate about the extent of this “dumbing down”, most researchers do agree that the explosion in information technology—television, Internet, social media—has created a social environment that does not stimulate cognitive growth. Fast forward to the 2020s, and we end up with “brain rot”, defining both cause and effect: the relentless rise in garbage content as well as the shrivelling of grey cells that consume only that. Language too caught up, with “slop” denoting the trash mass-produced by AI.
Now, one kind of feed that ranks particularly high in the slop list is “rage bait”. During Christmas, I saw a video, set somewhere in rural India. One youth riding a motorcycle, a pillion rider facing backwards, holding up a young boy posing like a crucified Jesus. Followed by a ragtag gang jeering and mocking. “Rage bait” videos like these overrun our feeds, deliberately created to offend and enrage in order to drive engagement and traffic. The world’s highest-earning “AI slop” YouTube channel is based, unsurprisingly, in India and has earned over $4.25 million to date. Content, thus, is no longer about getting clicks; the algorithm gods demand that emotions and reactions be manipulated to create endless loops of engagement. Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, explains the connection between brain rot and rage bait well: “Together, they form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.”
As I look back at 2025, I find that the rapid rise of this twitchy and cognitively maimed digital population benefits autocratic governments the most. Because the Trumps and Modis speak directly with voters on social media using the same tools of engagement: junk and rage. If digital channels are optimising the attention deficit for monetisation, autocratic leaders are doing it for power. The boys in that video I described are no longer thinking of their frayed clothes or bare feet; they are dreaming of instant fame and quick money. They get their cues from politicians and virality from the platforms, a state-corporate nexus that has ensured the political and economic profitability of hate speech.
For the strategy to work seamlessly, you first need to establish brain rot. As far back as 1854, Thoreau wrote in Walden of society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas for simple ones and called the decline in mental and intellectual effort “brain-rot”. We are seeing this play out today in a far more insidious fashion: autocratic leaders have actively distorted everything intellectual as suspicious and everything critical as seditious. Having thus discredited thinking itself, electorates are now kept busy with cat videos and hate speech, the one designed to sedate and the other to deflect anger to the “other”.
This state of torpor is essential; it allows the government to first grandly announce Green India Mission to protect and enhance India’s forest cover, then make plans to destroy the Aravalli range or the Great Nicobar Island without voters noticing the discrepancy between claim and deed. It allows the Prime Minister to declare on Christmas Day that he hopes the teachings of Jesus Christ will strengthen social harmony even as the Sangh Parivar’s foot soldiers harass vendors selling Santa Claus hats and set fire to Christmas decorations. When there is mass cognitive decline, such obvious dissonance goes unnoticed.
The incongruities have only grown steadily: 2025 saw India’s GDP data get a C grading from the IMF while glowing reports about economic growth flooded WhatsApp chats. It saw TV channels claiming world leadership when India is now isolated even in its own neighbourhood. It saw the launch of dubious electoral roll revisions in election-bound States even though the BJP is supposed to rule Indian hearts. “When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set,” said the Chinese writer Lin Yutang, and the year gone by saw the sun moving westwards. Whether Indians looked up from their devices long enough to notice is a different matter.
