Internet Aesthetics and Anaesthetics

Drawing on the work of Susan Buck-Morss (1992) and Cressida Heyes (2020), this article develops the concept of “anaesthetic media”: media forms and practices that highlight social media’s role in numbing cognitive and sensory experience. While terms like ‘brain rot’, ‘zombie scrolling’ and ‘TikTok brain’ pathologise social media engagement, my focus here is how these ideas are taken up by young media users themselves as a means of expressing what it feels like to live in an age of ‘continuous compulsory connectivity’ (Lupinacci, 2020). Through an analysis of brain rot and lobotomycore content on TikTok and Pinterest, I consider how cognitive fatigue, emotional detachment, and sensory withdrawal are performed and embraced by Gen Z and Generation Alpha users. While these media work to aestheticise the cognitive strain and attentional fatigue of digital life, I suggest it is important to take seriously the desires for anaesthetic relief that are expressed through these youth cultures. As I argue, although these practices are often discursively constructed as strategies of affective or anaesthetic withdrawal, they participate in, and help to sustain, the demands of being a subject in an always-on culture.