By Francesco Barchiesi & Geert Lovink

“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?

Brainrot studies are striding ahead. It was the Bolognese theorist Franco Berardi who, as always, has been leading the way. Besides the boomer despair about a global moratorium on thinking, there’s a liberating, joyful side to flatlining any thought. The cute, sometimes cruel aesthetic leave behind our dreadful reality. Let’s go on strike against this world. In 2024 brainrot was named Oxford Word of the Year. During the previous season we’ve become accustomed to bedrotting — likely borrowed from the blackpill forums of the manosphere, then adopted by the Sad Girl. Digital youthfulness is dealing with a sense of decay, just explored on a bodily level at first, now cognitively speaking. Onlife is increasingly associated with degeneracy. The Dead Internet Theory was stage one, with non-human agents gaining the upper hand. As state by James O’Sullivan, AI-slop is heralding “the last days of social media.” The next task is to think through Dead Brain Theory.

A while ago we bumped into a species infesting on the retirement home network Facebook: Shrimp Jesus. A few months later 🎵 meow meow meow meow 🎵 went viral on Insta.  Another dimension in the same metaverse, we see screaming heads jump scaring from the porcelain throne everywhere: Skibiditoilet. The redline is a purposeless, outrageous schoolboy energy, extorting us few snoffs broadly, and now even our most dedicated, prideless considerations. “The most satisfying answers to any substantive questions about Italian brainrot lie in the conscience of a twelve-year-old,” Milan-based visual artist and independent scholar Noura Tafeche writes to us. In the meantime, meme chronicler Aidan Walker is working on a video series called On Skibidi.

The Rome-based Valentina Tanni, author of Memesthetics and Exit Reality, observes that “in a time when the memetic universe is becoming increasingly fragmented, partly as a result of algorithmic content selection and filter bubbles, Italian Brainrot stands out as a rare case of a truly mainstream meme. It’s deeply rooted in internet culture with its taste for nonsense, absurdity and political incorrectness and can best be compared with Rage Comics, a type of badly drawn web comics that were hugely popular in the early 2010s and were part of a shared narrative universe. Today, there is no need to open MS Paint or any other editing app to develop a character; everyone can easily create it using generative AI tools. These tools allow people to merge objects and ideas in the most random ways with great ease, while also imparting to the images a very distinctive “generic” look, an aesthetics of midness or mediocrity that commercial TTI (text to image) applications are so good at producing.”

The first figure Tanni encountered was Lirilì Larilà, the cactus-elephant roaming in the desert and she shares two references came to her mind: “Gianni Rodari’s nursery rhymes and Salvador Dalí’s paintings. The video, however, conveys neither the imaginative irony of the Italian writer nor the unsettling atmospheres of the surrealist painter. Generative AI empties form of its content, meaning and vibe, leaving nonsense to float, pure and simple, before our eyes. And it is precisely this emptiness that captures people’s attention, especially among the young: there is nothing to decode.” Speaking in memes is what 2025 will be remembered for, a lingering, annihilating or rather cynical flare. Italian Brainrot symbolizes a playful, creative collaboration between human and non-human agents on a global scale. Or was it merely a redundant blasphemy based on Italian nursery rhymes? Now that the dust has settled, we allow ourselves to cast a glance, to break the spell and face this simple question: why, the hell, Italian Brainrot?

It’s late 2023 and the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson meme pops up, swearing curses in Italian, expressing the abracadabra: “Trallallero Trallalà”, an Italian common phrase related to folk lullabies. Then the shark with blue Nikes appears on TikTok, early January 2025. The techno-animal pastiches are products of a machinic delirium. Wilderness hybridised with fetishes from the consumer cultures, not too far in terms of Venn’s diagrams from the Shrimp Jesus. The images are pasted over with the very same audio from the previous meme, produced with ElevenLabs’ default male voice (Adam). Following the rhymed curses against the Abrahamic God and Allah, the tale goes on with the case of the young “Merdardo” (portmanteau between the Italian common name “Riccardo” and the word “merda”, shit), icon of the boyish habit to get stuck playing Fortnite. Add the trendy CapCut filter to the mix, and the absurdity is brewed. The collage named “Trallallero Trallalà” is the first of its kind, the apex of brainrot bestiary’s family tree.

The video, apparently uploaded for the first time by user @eZburger401, being “Burger” frequently mentioned in the voiceover, goes viral, together with its mechanical reproduction. The commodified surrealism is entirely AI-made consistency — text-to-image and text-to-speech — combined with the ready availability of translators, video filters, and editing tools. It invited users to experimentation. In the following months further monstrosities arose. Bombardiro Crocodilo is “a fucking flying alligator who flies and bombs children in Gaza and Palestine”, says Adam’s voice over. “Doesn’t believe in Allah and loves bombs. He feeds on the spirit of your mother. If you translated all that, then you’re a bitch. Don’t break the joke, whore.”

What we see here is an old-school, alt-right way of meming. Out of line dark humour and ‘political incorrectness’ are essentials of a masculinist post-irony which is often encoded in web subcultures. Add more old habits echoing from this internet fringe such as creepypastas and visual anxiety and you’re there. It is the viral spread that is the remarkable aspect of the story. The following iterations of “brainrot characters” are easing up the edginess in favour of full-fledged absurdism, expressed in memetic, Italian neo-futurist language (like Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tuumb”).

Take Brr Brr Patapim, half-treefolk, half-nasica primate with disproportionately big feet, in a beef with a blue frog called Slim; or the previously mentioned Lirlì Larilà, a cactus-elephant in Birkenstocks questioning the passage of time, as if hallucinated in a techno-absurdist version of 1970s psychedelia. More Funko-dada-pop is the couple Ballerina Cappuccina and Cappuccino Assassino: two humanoid coffee mug-headed, female and male, the dancer and the sicario. Also, banana-gorillas, banana-dolphins, many more. Some are merely resulting from a combination of natural elements, surreal hybridisations; others, in line with the first tokens, are animal figures, randomly fused with artefacts of modern everyday life. There is no rigorous coherence as there are no overall design principles applied from above: Italian Brainrot is an impersonal, collective, random enterprise, abruptly escalating.

Turin-based Italian memer and theorists Daniele Zinni explains that “a second wave came when non-Italian speakers stumbled onto it. Creators were churning out spinoff content of every kind — reaction videos, tier lists, character battles. Even news outlets began to cover the phenomenon.” By then, a whole lore had already developed, growing through different unhinged plots in thousands of different videos, often revolving around fights, love stories, and the paranoid imagery of getting jailed: “nooo la poliziaaaaaa”. We bet you heard kids gibbering this: that’s how it always goes. Always… in Italian. It’s The Italian Brainrot.

Italian Food, Italian Wine 

Silvia Dal Dosso, member of the meme collective Clusterduck, admits that Italians indeed have memetic potential. The terrain had already been prepared by marketing and cultural colonialism. “Italian children were raised on streams of little characters, from the collections of crocodiles, hippos and turtles in Kinder Surprise toys to Pokémon and all the other pantheons absorbed from cheap, dubbed Japanese manga and anime series broadcasted on Italian (commercial) television.”

Dal Dosso sees Italian Brainrot as a consequence of the stereotyping of Italian-Americans, from The Godfather, The Sopranos, Eminem’s Mum Spaghetti core all the way to Super Mario Bros core. “It is no coincidence that U.S. and Japanese internet spaces were the fastest to respond to the call of Italian Brainrot,” she emails. “Many Italian stereotypes such as Tommy Cash with Espresso Macchiato, Italian Brainrot originates from trash-made in Italy. @burgermerda, the user who, according to the American website Vulture, created the audio of Trallallero trallallà in September 2024, is part of the Italian TikTok trash. And so are many of the voice-overs that accompany other Brainrot characters.”

There a suggestion of Italian origin using names ending with the “-ini” suffix. Apart from that, what’s specifically Italian about Italian Brainrot? Aidan Walker suggests using the “Panzani Ad” analysis from Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image, a notable case along with other early experiments in visual semiotics applied to advertising. According to Walker  “Italianness” is an abstract concept, related to the Italian national identity; “Italiancity” is a drift on that semantic field, a surrogate signified for Italianness in the common sense. The colors from the national flag reflected on food: bright red fresh tomatoes, leaf green basilico, creamy white mozzarella — presto, here you got the recipe. Italian food, caught in the death grip of fake export products and local touristic scams, has widely become the global signifier of Italiancity: commodified Italianness. The same fate is often sorted to Italian wine. Now though, for convenience we distinguish, let’s associate the wine to a local production, grounded expression of the national cultural heritage: organic Italianness.

Italian Brainrot is not by default Made in Italy. No one can estimate how many Italians contributed to the worldly offshored manufacturing of the Brainrot universe, but there’s nothing inherently ‘local’ about it. Tung Tung Tung Sahur, of the wooden head, one of the foremost brainrot figures, is clearly coming from an Islamic context. It’s onomatopoeic for the drumbeats calling people to sahur during Ramadan, made in Indonesia. It’s not cultural assimilation, but a metonym revealing the misunderstanding beneath Italian Brainrot itself.

Gamification of the Absurd

“The very first thing that came to my mind when I was exposed to this overnight memetic tornado”, Helsinki-based Italian video-artisan Albert Figurt tells us, “was the glorious (and undeservedly forgotten) SGORBIONS fad, deliberately unpleasant and bizarre sticker trading cards that suddenly invaded Italian elementary schools in the late 1980s. They were eagerly traded under the table due to their flaunted and pompous obscenity by mostly little boys with a kink for weird stuff (like yours truly). Unlike their concomitant Simpsons or Panini Football Players equivalents, those were indeed unexpected deranged tarots from an obscure post-apocalyptic wasteland. They have no backstory or interconnection whatsoever among the several characters (if not their repulsive strangeness), are designed to be collected and swapped in secrecy (possibly with a twisted excitement), and whose names – and here we have the unfiltered Madeleine element – had an 100% ante litteram Italian BrainRot taste (that somehow remains 110% still vivid in my brain, probably thanks to the original clandestine imprinting). So here you have Annona Pustolona, Beata Grattuggiata, Dodo Colabrodo, Gino Lumino, Loretta Marionetta, Marcello Porcello, Pepè Bignè, Salvatore Fetore and the like.”

Albert Figurt continues: “Years later would I discover that the SGORBIONS were actually the rustic but genuinely crazy Italian reproposition (with plenty of small-but-significant differences, especially on the onomastic side) of an American collection of funny trading cards (the Garbage Pail Kids). In turn they are an irreverent parody, conceived by none other than Art Spiegelman, of a very successful line of uniquely-crafted and reassuring cloth dolls (the Cabbage Patch Kids)”.

Italians have memetic potential. Always had. Besides these antecedents (what could easily slip into a cliché), placed within this specific visual strain, the liaison between Italian language and the brainrot genre seems feeble. It could have been any other language. Actually, the brainrot multiverse already boasts a wide range of regional dialects, while this meme wave is likely to be Italian only at the phonetic surface, after its very first source. The uniformity of the trend draws its coherence primarily from its linguistic identity. Italian is a marked tongue; highly recognizable, fairly musical, and, to much of the non-Italian-speaking world, faintly comical. It serves the purpose of adding the flavor of incomprehension to the mix. The name is Italian, but it’s not even frozen pizza. It’s not even Italianicity, just machine-generated global pop absurdism. Until it serves the purpose of being an Italian brand.

The footballers’ sticker album from Panini is pretty much Italian stuff. It still preserves its analogic allure, a space-time jump back to Sixties’ Italy. Well. Skifidol, an Italian company (Officina Comunicazione Srl), acquired the rights and turned Brainrot into an official IP. It holds itself out as the “creator and IP owner of Skifidol Italian Brainrot”. Allegedly by “January 2025”, Skifidol had launched a full trading-card game and a sticker album, published by Panini, complete with magazines and 3D figures, releasing into commerce in late June. In July, the brand Dynit announced a licensing deal distributing Skifidol’s Brainrot card game and collectables, now also exporting in the whole EU market in English language. Italian food.

Italian brainrot are fragments of a European anime culture in the making. While the archetypical power of the Belgian Tintin comic figure grew out of the paper album narrative (later on transformed into films), Italian Brainrot follows the opposite trajectory: they are characters in search of a story. Anno 2025 memes have become expanded objects, surpassing the boundaries of the online image forum. Soon after the brainrot release, merchandise appeared.

This is what the sales pitch says: “Dive into the absurd with Bombardiro Crocodillo, the crocodile-plane hybrid that’s both fearsome and hilarious. This figure captures the essence of brainrot humor, blending military might with reptilian flair.” ($39.95, 12 sold in the last 10 hours, not suitable for persons under 8). You can buy the figures online or visit the store in downtown LA. Ballerina Cappuccina is claimed to “combine the grace of a ballerina with the inviting warmth of a cappuccino. With her graceful pose and stunning latte art head, she brings a touch of class and warmth to every space.” And Tralalero Tralala is promoted as “the ultimate fusion of street style and marine life swagger.” There are also an Etsy store for t-shirts plus posters and adorable plush toys, caps and customes, all available on Walmart and Amazon.

The expanded Italian Brainrot universe features many different kinds of merchandise: keyrings, plushies, videogames, and now even a show. A Latin American production (@artisticaproducciones) staged the Italian Brainrot musical, with a tour that even reached Broadway with the New York date on August 29, 2025. On their Insta feeds we see crowds of children, accompanied by their parents, screaming with iPhones in hand for the cosplays of their new idols. The theatre is packed; grotesque names chanted on repeat. Mascotification complete: characters are now animated. They dance, fight, sleep together, get caught. The rhizomatic lore just represented, brought on stage for the same purpose it was video made in the first instance: none. Children’s entertainment.

We’re not done. “While it is important to distinguish between the Italian Brainrot taxonomies (images, sounds, character names, and narrative elements) and their independent existence beyond the internet phenomenon that produced them”, advises Noura Tafeche, “also the music inspired by the Italian Brainrot quickly became a global sensation. As Pitchfork notes, Italian brainrot anthems ‘infested Spotify Viral 50 charts across the world, from Denmark to Sweden to Peru to the Czech Republic’ encountering relatively little backlash compared to the criticism aimed at the original videos, likely because listeners focused more on rhythm than on words”. And short music videos, of any kind — “Brainrot Gigachad Rap” counts 26M visuals as now on Youtube.

What can be inferred from such a blast of figures is that, whether in its musical dimension or in its new puffy disguise, Tralalero Tralalà is no longer tied to its effing and blinding — so unsuitable for the parents (and the pious grandparents especially) of Italy. And Bombardiro Crocodilo as well, is no longer remembered for its tasteless humor about children in Gaza, nor its deceiving intentions. “…Basically, this is the internet version of the type of person who finds it hilarious to teach non-native speakers curse words, insults, or offensive language but claims that they’re innocent phrases”, one commentator said. Memory fades, and Italian Brainrot becomes collectable as a harmless surreal bestiary. Vaguely endearing, nothing more; dredged from some unfathomable recess of the Internet, virtually simultaneous and co-present, yet so far from the romantic, untimely unworldliness of 2025 Italian newsstands. For consumers, on paper, this should suffice. For You Pages are moving forward already.

Against the Backdrop

Next, Daniele Zinni asks: “What has Italian AI slop become in the meantime, now that Tralalero Tralala & Co. have left the stage? Since the release of Google Veo 3, the spotlight has shifted to hyperrealistic clips, at times nearly indistinguishable from TV footage, that stage fake street interviews or friendly chats, often set in recognizably Italian streets or piazzas. Many of these recycle old jokes about Neapolitans, Arabs, old people, or babies who swear and curse like sailors. They often end with some character flipping out of frame in impossible acrobatics, shouting “skibidiboppy” or something equally nonsensical. If there is such a thing as a distinctively Italian contribution to the global slop economy, this might be it — not just because of the settings, but because the humor leans on national puns and popular stereotypes. Beyond that, in the Theatre of the Brainrot there’s no shortage of tearjerkers, ragebait, and wholesome fluff. In short, the same lessons we’ve learned from the international flood of AI-generated images and clips: as the technology evolves, the content becomes more finely tuned to the algorithms and user appetites that drive it. We call it slop as if it were the crudest of materials, but in reality it’s the opposite: the most refined form of its kind, the logical end point of nearly two decades of cat videos, tearful selfies, fake quotes, and manufactured provocation.”

Neither sloppy, nor Italian. What we can now call ‘first wave’ Italian Brainrot, looking back, “was kind of an outlier,” Daniele argues. “It offered surreal, entirely original characters and jingles — strange enough to surprise rather than trigger a predictable reaction.” The feeling of surprise is not so suitable for brainrotting, indeed. “You needed a spark of imagination even to prompt those figures into existence, and the texts didn’t read like machine output. If they were AI-generated, they were anything but statistically probable. Here too, we labelled it ‘Brainrot’, as if it embodied the cognitive mush of social media overexposure, but you would actually wish our feeds were clogged with absurdist experiments instead of the usual manipulative emotional bait”. If anything, now we know, Italian Brainrot lies — it was meant to stand for nothing, nor even for what it has become.”

The toyification of Italian Brainrot amounts to capitalist appropriation of absurdism, which in itself emerges as a free play of the faculties: a ludic-aesthetic experience, fundamentally alien to any extrinsic purpose. Even to virality. “In the end,” says Daniele, “it wasn’t a conscious pushback against platforms or their algorithms. It was more like a revival of the internet’s anarchic prankster spirit, which periodically reemerges: the fun wasn’t in the content itself but in collectively giving attention, for as long as possible, to something so trivial”. That’s probably also what kids like about it. “It’s the same energy that turned Harambe into a global meme, or that helped a guy who wanted to raise $10 on Kickstarter for his potato salad end up with $55,000. If this ephemeral nonsense occupied our For You Pages for a few weeks — displacing international politics analysis, war reporting, and feminist debates — then perhaps the real question is why we ever entrusted these things to platforms optimized above all for entertainment.”

The parable of Italian Brainrot is emblematic insofar as it is superimposable to the logics of culture that the semiotician Jurij Lotman outlined. Like any subversive knowledge, it emerges at the fringes of the semiosphere, then drifts toward its core, pulled by the gleam of its own semiotic force. Yet, in this shift from the periphery to the centre, it sheds its subversive charge. Figurt noticed it as well: “The more the unseizable and immaterial chimaeras are upgraded to branded three-dimensional gadgets, the more they get paradoxically flattened & inevitably deprived of their unclassifiable and sticky multimedia patchwork. That intoxicating mixture of jerky movements, hallucinated backgrounds, chanting voices and distressing soundtracks that marked their fleeting (yet powerful) wreck-doomscrolling, digital-instant-karma potential.”

We would not dare call Italian Brainrot subversive, but it has nonetheless been sanitized, purged of its more abrasive elements before it was retooled for the mainstream. Fine-tuned to markets’ appeal, without its irreverence. Toyfied, ready to be sold as figurines or trading cards to primary school children. The prissiest parental control could almost make an elsagate case out of it. Fetishised Italian Brainrot loses the inharmonious sound effects of TikTok filters, the eerie inhuman voice from Adam. Its nihilistic, playful mirth blunted, discarded, neutralised. Expat from the uncanny valley, turned into a bauble. What will stick?

Silvia Dal Dosso guesses: “What is happening now is that the need of influencers, brands, and companies to quickly capitalize on these powerful, complex symbols has become so fast that it sometimes outpaces the construction of collective narratives. These actors are now themselves becoming part of the narrative. This is what happened with the love story between Tung Tung Tung Sahur and the Cappuccina Ballerina, created by the German retail chain MediaMarkt. Despite or because of capitalism, internet communities still manage to create a shared symbolic language. Think of dreamcore and weirdcore, which are based on the fact that everyone, at some point in life, has found themselves confined to a liminal place like an underground parking lot, an empty swimming pool, a hallway. This will happen in the future too with today’s kids through their shared childhood memories of Italian Brainrot characters.”

As Substance, As Attribute

“Isn’t Italian Brainrot perhaps comparable to a Potëmkin village?” Noura Tafeche asks. “It presents itself with a rich, baroque façade but hides behind it nothingness, a nothingness that convinces us there is some enormous content waiting to be unveiled. What mystery lies behind a sneaker-wearing shark cursing the Abrahamic God, and what pleasure is there in understanding why a warlike crocodile boasts about dropping bombs on Palestinian children? What is new in the sudden swing from comedy to shock and back to comedy again that challenges so much our mental concentration? As the Log Lady in Twin Peaks said in the intro monologues: “So now the sadness comes. The revelation. There is depression after an answer is given, it was almost fun not knowing.” Keeping the mystery alive means postponing, and thus delaying a certain kind of suffering in disillusionment, a return to apathy, to sloptainment, and eventually the confrontation with the return trip of boredom and horror that await the moment after the mystery is revealed…”

If the Italian Brainrot formula were more denotative of the trend’s commodification than the trend itself, what are we actually dealing with? Its genealogy confronted us with the petty spirit of internet creativity and its swirling collective escalations. Sheer nonsense brought forward just for the sake of it: for the freedom, profitlessness of futility. Memetic communities are havens for naysayers to challenge aesthetic common sense with new digital languages. Now, we are dealing with the essential weirdness of doodling in the specific AI visual texture, resulting from the Peter Pan complex-trapped, post-Pokémon generation’s imagery.

We might explain how these contingencies have come to be significant, yet why are we time and again surprised? Do these puppets bear the contemporary physiognomy of the collective unconscious? Is all the chitchat about brainrot a twisted cry for help? A slip of the tongue for something we dare not take seriously (but should)? As internet becomes less and less human — hand in hand with what we used to call ‘The Real World’ outside — the trend (to this end, almost tritely) could be taken as a litmus test of civilisation and its discontents. ‘Absurd’ is not as much on the level of sign (as form and content) as in our helpless disposition to feed from it.

As an empathic symbol of entropy Italian Brainrot exposes the collective loss of cognitive capacity. Machine dreams comfort us in a response to the unfolding ‘polycrisis’. As infantile hybrids of tech and the animal world, the expanded memes assist in the transition to an unknown world that is strangely both intimate-cute and violent. There’s no shock here. Decay of memory is a subtle, sub-conscious process. Are we at all ready to admit that we remember less? We no longer train the brain. How many telephone do you remember by heart? How about your own? Significant others from the recent past fade away quickly in favor of the perpetual now? While strolling, information sticks for mere seconds. Brain atrophy is our techno-social condition. Has AI slop already taken over your dreams? Instead of quantifying regression, aesthetics is being brought in.

Valentina Tanni reminds us that, for her students, the strength of Italian Brainrot lies in its sheer stupidity, devoid of any meaning. “This does not imply that such videos are literally empty: they are full of signs and symbols, and we have to analyze and decode them. Yet most of our theoretical tools and conceptual frameworks are inadequate for the job. That’s because true brainrot cannot be interpreted; it can only be over-interpreted.”

Besides its Italianness or Italiancity, the brainrot formula became so popular because of its inherent semantic complementarity. The term is more telling than ‘slopification’, or however one would refer to our degenerated, nihilistic, bourgeois ennui, manifesting in the shadow theatre of our mediascape. Brainrot names both poles of the semiosis: the substance ingested and the organ corroded. You don’t know if it stands more for the subject or the object; what brainrot is and what it does. Content and cognition rot together, caught in a vicious loop where it is no longer clear whether the feed sickens the brain or whether the brain, already degenerated, secretes its own sludge. The mirror of brainrot is reflecting us, yet we fail to recognize what we are becoming.