EP. 49: WELCOME TO 2025, BASKETBRAIN!
We sage for the new year by dumping together. Because friends who regulate together have healthy colons, and healthy minds.
Hellloooooo IT’S 2025 AND IT’S A NEW YEAR!! And as the world never fails to throw yet another curveball our way (in no particular order: imperialism, wildfires, the incoming US government), we mere plebians at Forty Trillion DPI are opting for some ritualistic knowledge unloading as an attempt to unearth an alternative to…all of this.
ICYMI: Forget you ever even knew the term ‘microtrend.’
Helen laments about microtrends—the need to hyperlabel everything that graces our bleeding eyeballs with yet another Frankenstein-ed term. This article from Document Journal, written around Halloween, echoes that sentiment, providing tantalizing petty words while remaining painfully aware that really all it takes sometimes to not be in the loop is exactly that—to not be in the loop. This article reminds Justin of a viral TikTok that seedily made its way to his periphery, in which an influencer’s outfit somehow defies gravity and sanitary standards. And the crowd goes wild!!!
Have we all lost our minds? Absolutely, no question. Here’s a proposal: let’s leave didacticism in the dust of 2024. Let’s permit cognitive dissonance to be a slow and satisfying neural burn, before jumping to the interwebs to coin the next trend, which will be most definitely over before you take your morning bowel movement.
Brain rot vs. slop: WHAT IT FEELS LIKE INSIDE GEN ALPHA’S BEDROOM
Justin has been ruminating on the distinction between brain rot, the Oxford Dictionary word of the year, versus slop. They feel related, but one feels more distinctly responsive to a dread-filled reality than the other. While slop refers moreso to a byproduct of mashed potato lowest common denominator tech-fuelled idiocy, brain rot feels like a catchall for the Gen Alpha sentiment. Or maybe both of us are about to get fanum tax-ed the fuck out of town.
This reminds Justin of this one article in The Baffler that highlighted a New York Times article attempting to understand what the lexicon of grunge was all about. We draw parallels between the motivation of grunge slang versus the brain rot Gen Alpha appears to submerge themselves in. At the end of the day, I think we’re totally okay being in the dark on matters such as quandale dingle. We elder millennials aren’t that much smarter or better off, having embraced movements such as electroclash, capris, and allowing Dov Charney to convince us these pants were worth 100 bucks give or take:
Speaking of brain rot … how bout those AI films?? wOO!!
Both of us stumble into breaking down what it means for AI films to be in existence. This 404 Media article highlights TCL, a global television manufacturer hoping to diversify its business model into the world of subscription television content. Part of this strategy also involves investing in an experimental film studio, TCL Film Studio, which has (upon publication of the article) produced 5 short AI-generated films.
Notable AI film, The Slug, is just about everyone’s gnarliest Animorphs nightmare. And the biggest question mark we find with these films is what we end up terming AI Inertia: our brains are struggling to keep up with the built-in atonality of these films. We’re presented with markers of narrative (characters, worldbuilding, dialogue, sense of drama) but our brains have to perform pole vault to try to connect any of these aspects together to create a throughline. Instead of any character development or story progression, we are presented with stories that go nowhere, aka The Hero’s Journey as a Flat Earther. These films aren’t narrative; rather, they are mere vibes. Scratch that—not even vibes! Some kind of post-primordial soup of images and sounds draped around the form of vibes. Truly cursed material!
Okay, that’s all for this week. Thanks for listening! Ciao!