On September 11, Australian Progressive Senator Fatima Peyman approached the parliamentary podium in Canberra. “To the Australian Sigmars,” she began, addressing “an often forgotten segment of our society”: the youngest Australians, Gen Z and Alpha. Capping. ”
Inspired by the online meme and slang often known as “brain rot,” Peyman launches a scathing and often chilling attack on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling his government “Yappaholics.” party, and at times made derogatory remarks about himself. It’s like being the CEO of Ohio. In between sickening brainwashing, Peyman encouraged young people to consider the country’s housing crisis and Albanese’s plan to ban social media for teenagers of an undetermined age. “Some of you may not be able to vote yet, but I hope that if you do, you will see a stronger Australia and a more dignified government,” she concluded.
I first encountered Peyman’s speech at the end of a middle school journalism class I teach every Thursday in New York City. Five 11-year-olds gathered around my desk with Microsoft laptops assigned to them by their school, all excited and excited to show me something interesting. As we watched, each student jokingly and exclaimed in bewilderment as Peyman spoke of “Gat and Service” and “Dub with the Brothers of the Fort.”
They explained to me that Brainrot is not so much a language as a series of sarcastic jokes that rely on nonsense. My students made it clear that Peyman, while she may have had good intentions, was putting the absurdity of the absurd on the absurd, and was not responding to the needs of Generation Alpha as she thought. did.
On the first day of class, I asked each student to draw a newspaper front page and write a short hypothetical news article. At the end of the day, while going through a pile of assignments, I found Turtle Periodicals, a newspaper about the fictional “Turtle Town.” The Skibidi Toilet Chronicles is an ode to the popular YouTube series where a man’s head emerges from a dilapidated toilet. and a magazine titled “Brainrot News Channel.”
This final cover had a student-written headline about Charli XCX’s Brat and the 100 Kung Fu Pandas vs. 1,000 Skibidi Toilet Battles, along with matching illustrations. But in his mind, the student was writing a short story about a man working hard at an accounting job, “another (soulless) screw in the ever-growing capitalist machine.” Here was an 11-year-old boy with a far greater vocabulary than my teenage self and a curious, if not anxious, sense of destiny. Perhaps, for younger generations, Brainrot is more than just a sarcastic joke, it’s a way to cope with the intensity of our world.
