The Information Diet
confessions of a binge-watcher
Thumbnail is a segment from This Outfit Does Not Exist. As a complement to my subscriber-only deep dives, thumbnails are a shorter, more personalised, set of musings covering topics like the connection between MSCHF and Memecoins, Neopets as my Roman Empire, digital doppelgängers and more. If this sounds exciting please:
This thumbnail was started in New York and finished in Hydra, inspired by the guilt I feel when someone witnesses my self-immolation-by-stream, and a perpetual inability to relax.
The thumbnail
I recently got the hang of ennui, something I’ve strived to master since turning 15 and discovering Effie Stoneham. Every day, in the hours after waking up, my invocations of apathy proceed as follows: first I queue up a mid-tier TV show such as The Real Housewives, then I start a chore to move my motor neurones in step with my mental monotone. Before I know it I’ve burnt through hours suspended in an intellectual deprivation tank. When my laptop finally gives out, no proof of work remains. Just a sprig of salad welded to a half-washed plate I can’t remember cleaning.
Unfortunately, unlike the method acting greats, no matter how much I’ve indulged this simulation, I still can’t elicit a Melania Trump-esque ‘I really don’t care do you?’ on queue. The reality is that my Shawn-of-the-Dead trance states aren’t feigned but triggered by consuming content that yields no sustenance. Not even its promise.
In spite of the hype around what The Oxford English Dictionary defines as Brain Rot, aka:
‘The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging’ – Oxford English Dictionary
After much thought I’ve decided that my DIY trance-states fall beyond this bracket. Rather than a choice to seal my fate with a flick my ritual of decay hinges on stasis. Aside from when the content is first plucked from the fodder of my For You page there is none of brain rot’s elective action. The Next Episode In that fuels my demise is the intellectual equivalent of ingesting lard through a gastrostomy tube. It’s gluttony in its purest, most pernicious form.
The double click
Over the past month I’ve been reflecting on my ruinous behaviours in a Lisa Rinna-esque quest for irrevocable reform. Sifting through the archives of my altered states one parallel protrudes: a link between the way I guzzle Cloud-cached crap and the way I binge before a diet. Since turning fourteen and learning that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’1, those few days before a ritual purge see my unrelenting dedication to conjuring up a guilt so strong that it propels the period of healthy living forward with Pentecostal self-loathing. When each binge begins, the bucketloads of sweets shot down my oesophagus are delicious in their impropriety. But by the second day puffed-up pastries, and chomped-down chips are tasteless. Their only role is to scar my psyche with the howls to make it stop.
When it comes to eating crap most medical professionals concur that abstinence is the route to retribution. Increasingly hackneyed across web forums, the food types most detrimental to the body – sugars, cheese, caffeine etc. – stimulate serotonin receptors in much the same ways as heroin or cocaine. Such accusations elicit images of Augustus Gloop lubed-up in molten chocolate, squirming as he’s sucked through a tube too narrow to impel his bulk. The sing-song taunts from the swarm of Oompah Loompah’s that accompanies his passage mimic my own battle cries to make better choices
Turn to TikTok, or the classier You Tube, and attention grabbing headlines, borne from the same graphic design schools as their candy bar cousins scream “pick me!” from the shelves of the infinite scroll. As one Brown study reports likes wring out dopamine from the nucleus accumbens through the semblance of social rewards. With such parallel incentives to consume crap through one's orifices, my first visions of rehab involved plugging my eyes and ears with wildflowers and fleeing to the nearest patch of grass to seek out oblivion, swaddled in grass like a cannibal’s Temaki, in the serene grasp of Gaia.
however, has other ideas. Refuting the through-line that emerges in all conversations with relatives over 40, and much of my Twitter feed2, Rao claims that to tap out of the content-industrial-complex is to remove oneself from the potentials for productivity entirely. Rather than lobbing my Mac into a natural body of water and retreating to the fields to read Ovid, Rao’s 45-part argument ‘Against Waldenponding’ claims that my mind doesn’t need to be shielded from slop, but strengthened to it. He claims:40/ A real adept oughta be able to meditate on the angriest, most toxic twitter stream, consume the bile, and turn it into nectar: actionable insight you can bet on in the real world.
41/ A real adept ought to have strength-trained attention so they can spend an hour either reading a tweetstream or a once-in-a-generation history-disrupting philosophy book. No hack designer or advertiser should be able to lock them down in the 0.1-10 second range
Before advising:
42/ Stop blaming the media platforms for your own wallowing in small-minded twitter gossip about people. Strength train to the point where you decide whether to be there or elsewhere.
As a classically trained dancer, Rao’s approach rhymes with the way I was raised. The idea of employing new pedagogies to fend off slopturation, mirrors the monotonous tendues and port de bras that were drilled throughout my childhood. Rao’s advice however is more challenging than even the most arduous sets of gran battments as what I’m fighting to overcome is not The Real Housewives themselves but the triggers that lead me to seek out their sanctuary.
The Zoom Out
Growing up, my household had a rule that when it comes to gifts books don’t count. Still evident in the relentless pillaging of my Mum’s Amazon, the acquisition of knowledge has always been my source of propulsion. However, over the past year, I’ve found information paralysing rather than inspiring. The feeling of vertigo elicited when entering a bookshop, where the excitement derived from potential knowledge mingles with the overwhelming possibility of choice, is replicated 1000-fold each time I see a screen. There is too much information available and too many softly whispered ways to use it. Podcasts beseech me for notes of key phrases, hyperlinks pullulate into infinite tabs, scrolls on social end in folders filled with content to replicate in ‘the style of Daniella Loftus’ until I retreat back to forms that I know will give me nothing at all. Queue The Real Housewives.
If the information overload itself wasn’t enough, the content that exists across real-life news reports and GPT-generated chimera is similarly jarring. Jia Tolentino’s assertion that it is as if ‘reality were becoming illegible’ mirrors the book title I see summing up my 2025: Benjamín Labatut’s ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’.
In a climate where geopolitics are ever-more-jarring, I’ve come to view my screen in much the same way Susan Sontang viewed her camera. Framed in her book ‘On Photography’, the camera is wielded as a ‘defense against anxiety’, deployed as a tool to process the world,. While I am potently aware that the home pages of my youth are now houses of horror, something about the screen provides me with the guise of protection. Perhaps it’s because I can convince myself that events seen through silicon are always sensationalised. Perhaps it’s because I am relegated to respond to images of deportation and torture only via the tools that these platforms provide. It might even be because the screen serves as laminated safety glass encasing the protagonists of our zoomorphic present. Just as the enclosure’s glass protects me from the wrath of the raging beasts encased, it simultaneously allows me to believe that the happenings across the pane are staged solely for my entertainment. Seeing images of mass-evacuations, and blazing homes and questioning if they’re AI-generated, is equivalent to seeing a caged lion gnawing on flesh, and permitting yourself to assume that it’s an impossible burger rather than a gazelle’s haemorrhaging rump.
With Rao in one ear, and an understanding of my reasons for retreat in the other, I’ve recently devised my own information diet. Part part meal plan, part exercise regime, it involves daily processing of multi-format content ranging from staunchly curated sets of epic novels to sequenced reps of epilepsy inducing TikToks.
At time of writing this new POA has only been in effect for a few weeks. Although I’m yet to muscle up to the deep fried memes of a true adept, I’ve been inspired by fantasies of a future where P.E stands for Processing Education, and intellectually focused ‘face-gyms’ spring up around the world. As my urges to retreat into a world where post-truth disputes are relegated to who actually owns their Birkin subside, I’m hoping that unlike my bi-yearly health kicks this information diet will stick.
To be continued…
— Dani
In the words of Kate Moss
Former crypto-nites now committed to flexing how much they touch grass