Brainrot, AI slop, and the enshittification of the Internet

This introduction to the Cultural Commons special issue on brainrot, AI slop, and enshittification maps the conceptual terrain opened up by these terms as they crystallise widespread anxieties about the deterioration of digital culture and everyday experience under generative AI. Reading brainrot, slop, and enshittification alongside earlier vocabularies of digital waste (spam, junk, and viral content), the introduction argues that these terms point to a new phase of platform capitalism in which ‘content’ is increasingly decoupled from communicative value and functions instead as a means of modulating attention at scale and optimising the emotions, moods, and atmospheres that flow through platforms. It then situates the dossier’s contributions across three overlapping registers: affective and phenomenological experience, political-economic and infrastructural conditions, and aesthetic and operational logics.