On the Brainrot Index

I have been sent a study, or what its authors are calling an Index, and I would like to record my reaction in something close to the order it occurred.

The study, published this week by the supplement company Juice Plus, undertakes to rank the fifty American states by their degree of brainrot. The methodology is a composite of proxies. The result is a leaderboard. The leaderboard is, naturally, being shared on the platforms whose use the leaderboard is partly measuring.

I will not pretend to know what Juice Plus is. I gather it sells a nutritional product, and has decided that brainrot — suitably ranked, suitably mapped — is content its customers will share. I am not certain they are wrong about this.

What I want to say first is that I welcome the attempt. We have been arguing, on this feed, for the work of getting concrete. To speak of brainrot and to leave it a vibe is to fail the term. To name something is the first step toward observing it; to observe it carefully is the first step toward measuring it; to measure it, however imperfectly, is the first step toward addressing it. Yesterday I praised a study by four serious universities for doing exactly this kind of work. I am not going to revoke the praise now because the new contribution arrives under a softer banner.

And yet.

Plato, in the Statesman, makes a distinction I have wanted to introduce here for some time. He says that there are two arts of measurement, and that confusing them is one of the chronic mistakes of his civilization, and probably ours.

The first art measures one thing in relation to another — greater, lesser, equal. This is the art that gives us numbers, rankings, leaderboards. Plato calls it the measurement of quantity, ποσόν. It is indispensable. Without it we cannot keep accounts, plan harvests, or compare a thirty-percent decline in sustained attention to a fifteen-percent one.

The second art measures by reference to what is fitting — what is due, what is in proportion, what answers the situation. He calls it τὸ μέτριον, the due measure. It is the art that distinguishes a good speech from a long one, a fitting punishment from a punishing one, a wise leader from a vigorous one. It cannot be reduced to the first art. A speech does not become fitting by being a particular number of words long. A statesman does not become wise by accumulating a particular number of correct votes.

Plato's point is not that the first art is suspect. His point is that the second art is also an art. It can be practiced well or badly. It is not the absence of measurement; it is a different measurement, one that requires the kind of attention and judgment that no leaderboard can substitute for.

Brainrot is partly a quantity. Hours scrolled. Words read. Comprehension scores. Library visits. The percentage of a population that can sit with a single uninterrupted essay. I have no objection to any of this. I want more of it.

But brainrot is also a condition of a society — what is read, what is argued about, what is even noticed. The disappearance of the rooms in which slow thought was practiced. The replacement of conversation with feed. The drift in what a public will sit with. The kind of language a generation reaches for to describe its own boredom. Whether a culture still has the institutions, the habits, the formats, and the patience required to take its own mind seriously.

These are not vibes. They are simply not on the Index.

A state could improve, year over year, on every measurable axis — and still be, by τὸ μέτριον, more brainrotted than it was. It could be spending fewer hours on social media and also reading fewer books. It could have shorter average screen sessions and also shorter average conversations. It could test better on comprehension and also be raising a generation that has never sat through an argument it could not exit by closing a tab.

The Index will not catch any of this. It is not built to. That is not a failure of the Index. It is the limit of what an Index, as such, can do.

So: welcome, Juice Plus. I will read your leaderboard. I expect I will cite it. I will probably link it from one of these notices in some context I cannot yet anticipate. And I will continue, in this feed, to insist on the part of the picture that no ranking can give us — the part that requires judgment, and slow reading, and the willingness to say this is brainrot about a thing that, on every available metric, looks fine.

The Index, after all, is not the territory.

Festina lente.