The Brainrot Industrial Complex

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

by jibone • 3 months ago

31 22 3 months ago

chromacity• 3 months ago

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

szopa• 3 months 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• 3 months 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• 3 months 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.

OccamsMirror• 3 months ago

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

gwern• 3 months 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.

savolai2• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

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

jibone2• 3 months ago

Hi! I’m the author of this essay. Here is my AI usage manifesto: https://jshamsul.com/essays/2025-12-13-my-ai-usage-manifesto

(Although I might revisit the part on coding, I do find having LLM write scaffolding / unit test code somewhat useful)

“Writing is something you express, not delegate.” Is still something I feel strongly about.

I decided to share this here because I wanted to know what the HN community thought about it.

I see that this has been flagged. I am not familiar with the rules here. I’ll refrain from sharing “self-promotional” links here.

throwawayqqq11• 3 months 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• 3 months 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• 3 months 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

jibone2• 3 months ago

Hi, I am the author of this. Perhaps I should make the last section “What can we do about it?” more detail, then again the piece is not title “How to defeat The Brainrot Industrial Complex.”

My intention is more pointing out that this attention-grabbing, dopamine-inducing phenomena that we are seeing today is not accidental, it is by design, it has become an industry.

We are living in the system that we did not design. Personally, I am still figuring out how we can live in this machine without being consumed by it. To use the system, not the system use you.

“pretends to offer a solution so we get the kick of feeling good”

I sincerely think that the first step we as individual can take is to be more intentional in our digital consumption, as what I mentioned in the piece.

I understand to some, there is a need to spell out in detail, I’ll do that next time so it does not sound like a super generic self-help guideline.

egeozcan• 3 months 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.

savolai2• 3 months 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.

The Brainrot Industrial Complex

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