The Story of Italian Brainrot – Collective Musings on a Meme Wave

By Francesco Barchiesi & Geert Lovink
with contributions by Daniele Zinni, Silvia Dal Dosso, Noura Tafeche, Albert Figurt, Valentina Tanni

“The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.”
Giacomo Leopardi

During the first months of 2025 the meme sphere got taken over by Italian Brainrot. The hype coincided with the beginning of the Trump II presidency, when Elon Musk and his DOGE troops were still part of the administration. As Marc Tuters texts us, “Meme rot is the symptom of a politics that feeds on nonsense and starves on meaning.” This collection of AI slop consisted of a set of computer-generated characters that soon after started to be animated, taking different shapes, from video and fluffy toys to theatre shows. The figures were generated by prompts and then transformed into videos, always supplemented with a mechanical voice-over ‘Italian’ memes can be produced anywhere, but what do Italian theorists, activists and critics themselves make of it?

CONTINUA A LEGGERE QUI | FULL ARTICLE HERE