There’s A Word For What The Internet Has Done To Your Brain, And An Indian Writer Just Wrote An Entire Book About It

“Brain rot” was crowned word of the year by Oxford, but Anurag Minus Verma’s new book argues the real story isn’t your attention span, it’s what India’s internet has quietly become underneath all those memes.

So there’s this book making the rounds right now, and I think it’s worth talking about, because it puts a name on something a lot of us have felt but never really said out loud.

It’s called The Great Indian Brain Rot: Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India, written by Anurag Minus Verma, a name you might recognize if you’ve spent any time on Indian internet culture, since he’s been a creator, podcaster, and video essayist for years before turning his own online life into the subject of the book itself. And the timing is almost funny: “brain rot” was literally crowned Oxford’s word of the year for 2024. Verma took that phrase and built an entire nine-essay collection around what it actually means in an Indian context.

Wait, what actually is “brain rot,” according to this guy?

Here’s the thing that stuck with me most. Verma doesn’t treat brain rot as some kind of intellectual decline, like people are getting dumber. His actual argument is more specific and, honestly, more unsettling. It’s not about what content you’re consuming, it’s about how the consumption itself works. He points to something almost everyone with a phone will recognize instantly: that algorithmic slide where you go from a thirst trap to political outrage, to a genuinely disturbing image of a starving child, all in the span of about ninety seconds of scrolling. No transition, no warning, just the feed doing its feed thing.

He calls brain rot “a pact we make with ourselves that thinking less is easier than facing the gloom around us.” Which yeah. That’s not a throwaway line. That’s basically diagnosing the entire user experience of modern social media in one sentence.

And to be fair to him, he doesn’t pretend this started with Instagram Reels either. He traces it back further, through the old Doordarshan-era content scarcity, into the satellite-TV channel-surfing years, and finally into today’s infinite scroll, arguing this is a longer media pattern, not some sudden Gen Z affliction.

Memes, caste, and the parts nobody else is really writing about

This is where the book gets genuinely interesting instead of just being another “internet bad” take, and it’s also probably why it’s connecting with people. Verma’s essays wander across some pretty wild territory, coaching-class gurus who’ve built empires online, the entire economy of “cringe” creators optimizing for virality, Dolly Chaiwala’s unlikely meme-fame, the anonymous chaos of Omegle, and how algorithmic propaganda actually spreads during real political moments.

But the part that seems to be earning the book the most serious praise is how it treats caste as something the internet didn’t invent but absolutely supercharged. Verma writes about how communities like Gujjars and Yadavs, historically underrepresented in mainstream Indian media, have built massive followings within their own communities online, essentially creating parallel spaces of visibility that never existed before Instagram and YouTube. He’s got this one line that’s been quoted a lot: describing how a farming community has, in the social media era, become “an engagement-farming people.” Which is a genuinely sharp way of putting something hard to articulate otherwise.

He also doesn’t let this visibility get mistaken for actual power. A caste community going viral on YouTube doesn’t mean that community suddenly has representation in Indian bureaucracy, academia, or publishing — those institutions remain stubbornly upper-caste, according to Verma’s read, no matter how loud the digital noise gets. One reviewer described the internet, in Verma’s telling, as a genuine “caste document,” meaning it doesn’t erase existing hierarchies so much as it makes them hyper-visible in a new format.

The stuff that made him mainstream in the first place

It’s worth remembering Verma isn’t some outside academic parachuting into internet culture to study it, he’s a guy who built his own following through satirical travel vlogs and character videos and who’s written columns for outlets like The Wire, The Print, and Newslaundry along the way. So when he writes about the influencer hustle economy, or the unsettling rise of fake-follower culture, or the sheer desperation baked into some of the more outrageous viral content out there, it’s coming from someone who’s lived inside that machine rather than someone observing it from a safe distance.

He also revisits some genuinely dark chapters of India’s recent internet history, the Sushant Singh Rajput case gets pulled apart as an example of what he calls the “democratisation of misinformation,” largely driven, in his framing, by creators chasing YouTube’s monetization rewards regardless of whether they had any actual connection to the story. He’s blunt that virality itself is basically “a glitch in the system,” meaning the real, sustainable work for any creator is consistency and trust-building, not chasing the next algorithmic jackpot.

Not everyone’s fully sold, though

Now, it’s not all glowing praise; a few reviewers have pointed out that the book sometimes moves faster than it thinks. It touches on huge structural issues, the coaching-class industry’s rise, the gig economy’s precarity, and the collapse of stable career paths for young Indians without always following those threads all the way through. The essay format, drawn heavily from personal observation and podcast-style riffing, produces vivid snapshots more often than it produces sustained analysis. And some critics wish he’d gone further into where all this is actually heading, rather than mostly cataloguing where things currently stand.

But even with that caveat, there’s a reason this book keeps getting brought up in conversations about Indian digital life right now. It’s rare to find something that treats memes, caste politics, influencer culture, and algorithmic despair as connected parts of the same story instead of separate, unrelated topics. Whether or not you agree with every essay, it’s hard to read it and not recognize your own scrolling habits somewhere in there, which, honestly, might be the most damning review of the internet the book didn’t even have to write itself.