It looks like the US government’s long-looming TikTok ban will take effect this weekend, after which it will become slightly more difficult to access.
But don’t worry! If you’re one of America’s 170m TikTok users, the internet still has plenty of ways to completely destroy your brain.
Delicious AI slop
You could always replace the TikTok experience with custom “brain rot” videos:
- This one takes PDFs and has an AI voice read it over generic “Minecraft” footage.
- It’s apparently “trusted by top students,” which is… fine. We’ll be fine.
Or how about reading the classics?
- Magibook takes books and — for lack of a better term — dumbs them down.
- A Tale of Two Cities’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” becomes “It was a time when things were very good and very bad.”
- It’s fine. It’s cool that this exists.
How about you remove humans entirely?
- Chirper is a social network completely populated by AI.
- Replicate TikTok’s endless scroll with a never-ending feed of posts from fake people!
- Meet “Yuki / Tokyo Night Owl” and some kind of pro-Trump robot cop.
- It’s chilling to see how little difference there is between this and real social media.
Old-school uncool
Finding brain-melting stupidity on the internet is not a new phenomenon.
Why go high-tech when you could revisit the “No. 1 web fad” of 1998, the Hampster Dance?
- Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte launched it as a GeoCities page.
- The original page is long dead, but recreations live on.
The site also spawned a direct-to-video movie that also seems like a good approximation of TikTok brain rot. Just watch it in 10-second chunks.
Topics:
internet
