Gen-Z’s Post-Détournement

A layering of cultural references, images, sounds, and songs into incoherent, avant-garde flashing messes has become one of the most popular genres of short-form content today. Often labeled brainrot, lobotomy-core, or sludge content, this bizarre media seems to have encapsulated Gen-Z's generation-specific disorientation, born out of their pioneering existence within our era of digital capitalism.

It might be a clip from a movie, content creator, or viral video, appearing to play out normally before things break down. Suddenly, the audio glitches or pauses; a celebrity is briefly flashed on screen, or a culturally significant, often memed phrase or word triggers a cascading hell of glitching screams, synths and industrial sounds played over warped sequences of brain scans, ‘cursed’ images, and digital decay. A character from an unrelated video game may become roughly overlaid onto the screen, while the theme song from an early-2000s reality show is played and an ad for multiple sclerosis treatment appears sideways. 

The style is something I call post-détournement—a chaotic, unconscious reincarnation of the radical media sabotage most famously practiced and theorized by the 1950s revolutionary movement: The Situationist International.

The rebirth of détournement signifies Gen-Z’s unique position in a stage of digital late capitalism and hyper-consumption, one saturated with new kinds of commodities, marketing and separation. The videos exist as revolts to these developments, instinctive responses to the suffocating weight of cyber consumption that has subtly terraformed our social relations, expectations, and daily life.

Recognizing this new media's place in a leftist tradition, sharpening its attempts to redirect the noise it has sporadically parodied, and ensuring those redirections aren’t simply reabsorbed by the spectacle of mass media as more content is an incredibly important task of the Western Left today.

What Makes Good Détournement? 

To the Situationists, détournement referred roughly to the rerouting, hijacking, or more directly, the "subversion" of existing artistic elements within a capitalist context, repurposed into a new composition that disrupts and uncovers the hidden nature of its original: A Marlboro billboard graffitied and rearranged to say “It’s a bore” or a film critiquing mainstream media, created entirely through repurposed Hollywood films, newsreels, commercials, and propaganda.

As British cultural theorist Sadie Plant described it, 

“[Détournement] is plagiaristic, because its materials are those which already appear within the spectacle, and subversive, since its tactics are those of the ‘reversal of perspective’, a challenge to meaning aimed at the context in which it arises.”

-The Most Radical Gesture

It was important to Situationist theorists that this new ensemble of ‘détourned elements’ was direct, explicit and not overly focused on humor or entertainment. Rather than just becoming more content, Situationists saw the art as clear counter-propaganda. They believed it should retain the original source while creating an entirely new, clearly oppositional meaning, one whose priority was not to mindlessly occupy, but redirect and reveal. 

“...the [re-ensemble] of détourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original…”

-A User's Guide to Détournement

The artistic reaction of détournement can be seen sprouting repeatedly throughout history, reborn under new technological and social contexts while remaining under an enduring economic one. Situationists called the style “a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant‑garde…both before and since the formation of the [Situationists International].”

In their critique of earlier, “proto” forms of détournement from the 20th-century avant-garde, Situationists delineated a clear rubric for successful détournement. They drew lines between art that merely disrupted versus art that could successfully overthrow. A main obstacle to successful détournement, they argued, was its frequent fragmentation of revolt—art that shocked but never unified its aims into a coherent revolutionary project.

The art of the Dadaists, for example, was seen as too focused on original deconstruction, on incomprehensible collages communicating nothing but nonsensical ‘détourned elements’ without producing a coherent rerouted message. It aimed to ‘abolish’ art, but didn’t proceed in replacing it with anything substantive or coherent. Surrealism, at the other pole, produced strange and original pieces that challenged norms, but did so without the use of détourned originals and so were ultimately sold back comfortably to the public. 

“Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it; Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists has shown that the abolition and realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.”

-Society of The Spectacle (emphasis added)

This split—negation without creation, creation without negation—is a recurring tension of many natural developments of the détournement form. The unification of these ends: of the destruction of an original, reformed into a new ensemble of détourned elements that communicates a clear and explicitly radical purpose, was for the Situationists: effective détournement.

A new Post-Détournement

The continuation of naturally formed, intrinsically radical avant-garde isn’t found today in the pretentious and vapid performance art of big-city museums; it has instead reappeared within Gen-Z’s bizarre media forms. Brainrot and its variants share the absurdity and odd novelty of the proto-détournement, each arising from reactions to the unique material conditions of their respective times and each delivering a disorganized but clearly subversive economic critique.

A major difference in brainrot’s reincarnated contemporary revolt is the particular form of base conditions it responds to and arises from. These conditions appear far clearer than they were during Dadaist or Surrealist movements, making the target of the détourned redirections easier to make out. From the hijacked originals of Post-Détournement—viral videos, T.V. and movie clips, celebrity news, content creator slop, etc.—the obvious subject of revolt appears as the incessant and blaring noise of a digital-hyper-capitalism.

It goes without saying that this noise—the endless scrolling of short-form content, the constant background playing of YouTube or a thousand indistinguishable braindead podcasters—has consumed Gen-Z’s existence, increasingly relegating life to the cyber sphere. An unsurprising 2023 study found the core Gen-Z demographic spends on average 7 hours and 22 minutes a day on screens, not including school and work. The accompanying overload, isolation, alienation and amnesia—with hours of media consumption you’re unable to recall a single thing from—is deeply understood and captured by this content's natural attempts to both parody and escape it.

The epileptic consumerism of the videos, the flashing commodities and speaking metal all converging into some incomprehensible stream of culture so densely populated by its multitude of recognizability that it ceases to be recognizable at all—is obviously manifest in the layering of references and absurd mass of content germane to the brainrot genre. The style's popularity further hints at a universally understood critique of these short-form media platforms and the type of inelastic consumption they procure.

An encounter with this media promotes the clear acknowledgement of something being off. It exposes the system’s inanimate logic of expansion and forces the viewer to fall out of the plugged in amnestic fog of a doom-scroll. Videos will often explicitly tell the viewer to ‘wake up,’ that ‘we’re in hell’ or ‘this is hell’. Congealed in their parodic complaint is a clear message: capital’s new frontier is and has been online, a sentiment backed by the world's largest marketing conglomerate, WPP, which recently projected digital advertising to be 73.2% of global ad revenue this year. 

Post-détournement reflects a widely shared malaise with being sucked into the digital-hyper-consumption. The media forms then aren’t just random, odd evolutions in humor or art or some new quirk of the younger generation as many see it, but rather a deeply human, reflexive revolt to our rapidly shifting existence. Its redirections are one of the few resources of counter-propaganda we can utilize in re-cementing humanity in this late-capitalist-digital age.

Claiming and Directing Post-Détournment

Sharing a lineage with proto-détournement, this new media of Gen-Z falls into many of the similar traps identified and critiqued by the Situationists. Its radical core, although clearly present, seems to have been gradually obscured in the duration of its existence. There exists a political imperative to recognize, refine, and redirect this energy before it is reabsorbed into the spectacle as mere content—something actively occurring.

Content of this sort seems to have progressively lost its directed revolt and instead become consumed by the same noise and absurdity it originally parodied. Some creators simply see opportunity in its popularity, feeding into a further digital-hyper-production by somehow installing this post-détournement as just another genre of online slop: “proof I’ll watch anything,” as some comments say.

This development can be seen most clearly within the even younger Gen-Alpha—those under 15—who encountered this media with no period to measure it relative to. For them, the material is often simply understood as more content, another type of entertainment, devoid of any implicit critique of digital capital’s inhuman capture of humanity. The demographic as evidenced by their own media productions and consumption trends (see “Italian Brainrot”) believes this kind of consumerism is just how things are, how they’ve always been. It's a predictable added point that this genre (adjacent to the post-détournement) is often all produced using AI.

Post-détournement, if it’s to retain its edge, must move beyond absurdity for absurdity’s sake and cement the intention it arose from: not just to reflect the chaos of digital capitalism, but to weaponize it and shock the viewer into seeing that “...concrete inversion of life” pervading our current existence.

The immense speed at which these digital-economic developments have consumed and repackaged reality manifests in the fact that these videos are no longer considered acts of protest. In a single generation, this trend of digital consumption has enclosed and re-naturalized a new cycle of its subjects within an inhuman world; one still attempting to be grappled with by those born just a couple decades earlier. 

It is our historical imperative, having been placed in a similar, arguably more stark period to that of the past Situationists, to utilize this media. But taking up the same old Situationist efforts of reviving the avant-garde, inflaming its embered radical core, and more sharply redirecting it against the noise it parodies, hasn’t been on the dockets of contemporary revolt. While our window of opportunity is closing, the task is already half done. The greatest revolts are those that have come naturally; our task remains simply to reveal them.