The Brainrot Industrial Complex

https://jshamsul.com/essays/2026-04-12-brainrot-industrial-complex

29•jibone•2h ago

Comments

chromacity•1h ago

And of course it's an AI-generated article.

szopa•1h ago

I’m starting to feel that comments about an article being AI-generated are super low value AND super low effort. Who cares? Soon most of the text you’ll be dealing with is gonna be AI generated. But there’s still good and bad AI generated content — start judging it by its merits.

Cider9986•1h ago

If AI-generated wasn't a reliable synonym for classifying bad content, I'd consider that.

edit: actually I wouldn't. I do not want to interact with an internet that is dead. AI-edited or consulted, that's fair. Generated—no thanks.

allthetime•1h ago

“Soon most of the text you’ll be dealing with is gonna be AI generated.”

No thanks. Myself and many others will continue to seek out real thoughts written by human writers.

Your mindset and willingness to flippantly dispose of human communication is deeply concerning to me.

Your days should not be spent deciding if the machine generated data you’re constantly consuming is of a specific calibre.

lacy_tinpot•1h ago

It's fun to see the false idea that intelligence and thinking are what make humans human begin to collapse in real time. It's one of those structural pillars of human identity invented by some philosophers too lost in their own grandiosity from quite some time ago that we've all mistaken it for gospel. That notion was false to begin with, but I think a lot of us forgot that. So it'll be interesting to watch how that invented part of "being human" is eroded away, or rather is going through a revolution.

The reality is that being human stands independent of that idea.

Thoughts and ideas of course will continue to be the domain of humans, but as curators/extending our intellectual creativity beyond just the mere craft of writing. So even that story, that humans are thinking beings, will continue on for the foreseeable future.

operatingthetan•1h ago

>It's fun to see the false idea that intelligence and thinking are what makes humans human begin to collapse in real time.

As soon as LLMs start thinking please let us know!

OccamsMirror•1h ago

Of course this comment response is AI generated. The snake eating its own tail.

gwern•1h ago

It's a lot easier to look at the whitespace and paragraphs, realize it's a LLM, plug it into Pangram to see that it gets 100% (unsurprisingly), and click to close; than it is to read it with a sucker's good faith and realize that it never says anything concrete or meaningful or unpredictable and contains only junk like canned etymologies or cliche quotes.

savolai•57m ago

In the case of this article, the calling out also seems to be without merit.

From the about page: ” When I’m not writing code, I write prose, short and long, ranging from personal anecdotes in tech to philosophical musings on how technology shapes culture, society, and the individual self.”

dimator•1h ago

Is it?? I need to update my calibration then. What tipped you off?

throwawayqqq11•1h ago

I recently saw these collectible cards for sale, targeting kids. I wish them a quick and painful insolvency.

https://www.blue-ocean.de/neuroblast-brainrot-party/

Lammy•1h ago

Corollary: we should collectively stop referring to WWW clients as “browsers” because the metaphor no longer fits. They are Web Grazers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browsing_%28herbivory%29

kruffalon•1h ago

This article is brainrot.

It is ragebait with no clear idea on actual steps to take against the brainrot industrial complex.

It states that we can't or shouldn't even bother thinking about what to do about it instead it offers super generic unhelpful self-help guideline that is almost impossible to do since we must fight the brainrot industrial complex every ms to make it while they just have to win once an hour (or less) to keep us occupied.

I'm all for describing problems without even trying to find solutions.

But this is worse: this pretends to offer a solution so we get the kick of feeling good without actually accomplishing anything.

True brainrot crap article.

[Edit:] Spelling and formatting

egeozcan•1h ago

So it's agrued that the modern internet functions as a "brainrot industrial complex" (title of the article), deliberately designed to hijack our attention and degrade our ability to think clearly for profit... My counter-point is, isn't everything so these days? Internet just happens to be the main communication channel. Even the local, in-person meetings I've had in the last 10 years or so, are full of distractions, attention-seeking and misrepresentation.

Yes people should make an explicit effort to reclaim their focus, but maybe not directly with digital tools? "Start in the physical world" would be my humble advice.

I strongly believe the digital world is just a multiplier for everything, including our defects. So we should just start at the source.

savolai•1h ago

This names something valuable and frames it in an original way. It expressed caring for younger generations and encourages effort to meet the young with presence. It gives practical advice on how to practice attention. In present time this is enormously valuable.

I see it being flagged in realtime, please wake up HN.

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