From ‘Brain Rot’ To ‘Rage Bait’: Stuck In The Online Loop

When the rock band Beatles released their song Tomorrow Never Knows, they were probably unaware that the lyrics ‘turn off your mind, relax and float downstream; lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void’ would become symptomatic of a larger societal malaise half a century later.

‘Rage bait’ is Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025. Oxford University Press (OUP) defines rage bait as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted to increase traffic or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”. It’s a calculated manoeuvre that exploits human tendencies to react to meaningless controversies, falling in a trap much like “surrendering to the void”, as the Beatles would say.

The term is used to describe online content wilfully designed to provoke anger to create engagement (likes, comments, shares) to generate traffic, often for financial gains through ads, benefiting creators through inflated visibility. Online creators continue to churn out ‘rage bait’ content, where the goal is simple: post content that makes users viscerally angry and then bask in the thousands of shares and views, cashing in on outrage.

As Internet algorithms are designed to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait.

It signals a deeper shift in how we talk about online engagement. Rage bait aims to trigger emotional responses using anger as the ‘bait’. Angry reactions boost the content’s visibility. Such content, which is mainly fabricated, thrives on provocation by manipulating emotions – spreading misinformation, making blatantly incorrect statements, manufacturing unfounded conspiracy theories, posting freakish recipes, attacking pop culture figures or taking controversial political stand.

By tapping into strong emotional triggers, rage bait content compels people to respond creating a cycle of negativity. It can distract from real issues and polarize audience. The fact that a term like rage bait exists and has seen dramatic surge in usage is an irony in itself. This indicates we’re aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into, and yet we succumb.

Last year Oxford selected ‘brain rot’ as the Word of the Year, amid serious concerns over the perceived dangers of mind-numbing content one is exposed to on social media. Brain rot is defined as ‘the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state as the result of overconsumption of online content, particularly trivial or inconsequential ones”.

The first recorded use of 'brain rot' was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, who criticised society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas in favour of simpler ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.

The term initially gained traction among Gen Z and Gen Alpha who used it in a humorous, self-deprecating manner. It is both interesting and ironical that the term has been popularised by youngsters who themselves are the targets of the ‘brain rot’ phenomenon. As OUP highlights, it demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media.

Rage bait and brain rot are both metaphors of the times we’re living in. They have reference to how we are getting impacted by online content which is moving from being informal to becoming egregiously irreverent to often bordering on the bizarre. Together, they form a vicious cycle where the preposterous sparks engagement.

Millions today are spending hours mindlessly scrolling Instagram reels or binge-watching videos or just switching between tabs consuming huge quantities of nonsensical data, negative news, and meaningless updates. At the same time, one might be simultaneously texting and checking messages resulting in digitally inundating oneself with information leading to overstimulating the brain. The brain associates Internet scrolling with a feeling of gratification, even when one is aware of its negative consequences. In a way, mindless Internet scrolling becomes a hedonistic behavioral addiction. These activities affect the brain’s reward system.

So when one is zombie scrolling, one may be vacantly staring at the smart phone while compulsively flitting from one feed to another. Doomscrolling involves an overwhelming desire to be up to date on latest information, even when it’s disturbing and distressing. Indulging in such experiences is seriously damaging collective intellectual growth in the society today.

This brings back sociologist George Ritzer’s ideas, who in his 1993 book The McDonaldisation of Society, described how fast-food restaurant principles were becoming symbolic of a society being driven a very mechanical, fast-paced lifestyle, devoid of emotions and humanness. This was just when the Internet era was beginning to happen.

In the free market of language, Ritzer’s analogy was a precursor to an increasingly hollowing societal fabric today.  Shallow online interactions build cynicism that hampers public discourse and genuine understanding. It harms users’ mental health, increases polarization, creates divisiveness, desensitizes people, erodes trust and normalizes aggression.

Both brain rot and rage bait are outcomes of engagement-based economic ecosystem for online platforms. The business model is simple -  generate outlandish content to be gobbled down by gullible users, amplified through algorithms, resulting in quick monetisation. Generative AI tools make such content easier and faster to produce.

As is said, online content is being engineered to fiddle with emotions. It raises questions of what it means to be human in a tech-driven world - and the extreme perils of online culture.

In our journey from ‘brain rot’ last year to ‘rage bait’ this year, we seem to have collectively reached nowhere.

(Dr. Feza Tabassum Azmi is Professor of Management Studies & Research at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh)