In this era of humanity, the world is heavily saturated with digital media. We’re living in a transitional moment, caught between the understandings of digitally literate younger era, and the digitally illiterate pensioners, separated only by a generational gap.
But in 2025, it’s common knowledge that memes, brainrot, and social media shitposting have become Gen Z’s primary way of making sense of the world.
While older generations’ understanding of current events leaned on traditional news outlets run by actual humans, and even by word of mouth, Gen Z, on the other hand, often first encounters major global events through absurd, irony-drenched and watermarked internet content—typically a consisting of a Subway Surfers clips with a ChatGPT-generated script being narrated by an AI-voiceover of Mr. Fish, the fictional Bikini Bottom announcer and news anchorman from Spongebob.
We have found ourselves at a new crossroads where short-form, artificially generated content now teeters uncomfortably close to how people form their perceptions of the world and situational understanding.
The line between irony and information has blurred.
Fake news sites like The Onion were once obviously satire to those raised with them (they were jokes pretending to be headlines, and everyone was in on it). But all generations aren’t just dealing with satire, they’re navigating AI-written monologues and articles in a sea of algorithmic sludge, deepfakes, emotionally manipulative clickbait, and hyper-accelerated content cycles where legitimacy, parody, and propaganda are all blended together without a sense of the truth.
What’s weird is that although younger generations might not always know if a headline is real, they can clock an AI-generated image or sentence instantly, like second nature. Literacy has changed. It’s not about spotting a lie, it’s about developing an understanding of knowing whether something feels human.
One such phenomenon, known online as “Italian brainrot,” epitomizes this shift. Made up of surreal characters (like Tralalero Tralala or Tung Tung Tung Sahur) and jarring, disjointed visuals, Italian brainrot thrives on chaotic remixes of global cultural symbols, mixed with unhinged appropriations and meme logic… But, it is paradoxically how many young people today understand reality.
Italina brainrot videos often feature an AI-video or photo of a character with their names spoken in exaggerated, whiny Italian voiceovers, usually accompanied by a combination of an animal mixed with either a machine, an object, or a random food item:
A cow paired with the planet Saturn becomes:
A crocodile mashed up with a bomber plane turns into:
And then there’s the aforementioned infamous stick figure holding a bat yelling Tung Tung Tung Sahur——don’t even get me started, because it only gets weirder from there…
These creations are intentionally overwhelming, aggressively nonsensical, and deeply unserious. But they aren’t empty.
As journalist Leslie Katz explains in Forbes, Italian brainrot is “a wild mashup of artificial intelligence and absurdist humor flooding social media” (Katz). She goes on to talk about more AI-generated creatures like Ballerina Cappuccina (a tutu-wearing coffee-headed dancer) and Lirili Larila (an elephant-cactus hybrid in Birkenstocks). The generative AI-produced hybrids are
It’s not just weird or made up—it’s a real meme genre that has been fully integrated into mass media, at this point. What’s worse is that Italian brainrot videos don’t pretend to inform; they are literally designed to overwhelm.
As Katz notes, this genre has exploded into a full-blown universe with character rankings, fanfiction, and even spinoff trends in other languages like French and German.
In a world where coherent narratives are collapsing, Italian brainrot becomes a way of expressing how that collapse feels. It’s funny, but it’s also unsettling. These videos reflect a generation not passively consuming culture, but actively warping it into forms that are faster, messier, and harder to pin down than the systems that try to regulate them. They’ve created a language that doesn’t translate cleanly into traditional logic—and that’s the point.
To understand why this kind of content matters—and what it reveals about meaning, power, and identity—it’s worth turning to the theories that explain how structure breaks down in the first place.
Gen Z meme culture, as exemplified by Italian brainrot, operates as both a postcolonial and deconstructive force. Through its layered irony, cultural hybridity, and refusal of linear logic, this form of wacky digital media destabilizes dominant narratives and challenges the colonial hierarchies embedded in global media. When figures like Donald Trump call for a 100% tariff on foreign films or defunding of public programming like PBS and NPR in the name of cultural protectionism, they attempt to reassert borders that Gen Z has already blurred.
Brainrot isn’t just commentary—it’s resistance.
Memes as Deconstructive Texts
Jacques Derrida’s theory of différance breaks down the idea that words (or signs) have stable meanings. Instead, every sign points to something else, in a chain of endless reference and contradictions and delays. This means that meaning is never settled and that it rather slips or fractures or defers. That’s what memes do too. Especially Gen Z memes, which don’t “say” anything directly. Especially brainrot. They point, joke, mock, and layer, but instead, they use overload to collapse meaning before it even lands. That collapse is the point.
Italian Brainrot is a Semantic Mess
Italian brainrot, in particular, operates as a kind of semantic mess of rhetoric. One second you’re looking at a cow with Saturn for a head—La Vaca Santurno Saturnita—and the next, a pixelated fish-robot chimera named Trippi Troppi while a whiny Italian AI voice chants nonsense.
These aren’t “jokes” in the traditional sense. They don’t build to a punchline. They defer meaning. You get the vibe, but the meaning’s always seemingly just out of reach.
It’s a logic of différance—and it’s all over TikTok.
No Morals, I guess.
Sometimes, the absurdity cuts deeper. When @talkingfishnews “reports” on something serious—like the death of Pope Francis—it makes a real event feel like a meme.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js@talkingfishnews 🚨The pope has passed away! Now what??? #talkingfishnews #news #pope ♬ original sound – DAILY NEWS 🗞️
It’s a disorienting mix of humor, horror, irony, and detachment.
There’s no takeaway. No moral. Just dissonance. You can’t decode it. You just sit in it.
The Meme Condition
But this isn’t apathy—it’s recognition. The world doesn’t offer coherent narratives anymore. And so Gen Z stopped trying to make things coherent.
In the A24 film, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn, after being hurled through an awakening built across universes and superpositions and absurd contradictions and timelines, she decides: “Nothing matters.”
But the film doesn’t land in nihilism—it lands in radical absurdism.
If nothing matters, then everything does.
That’s meme logic too. A brainrot video isn’t trying to teach or explain—it just feels. It resonates, even when it’s made of glitchy nonsense, auto-tuned gibberish, or a crocodile fused with a warplane. Meaning isn’t resolved—it’s suspended. But inside the mess, something still hits.
Or, as Evelyn Wang puts it:
“There is always something to love. Even in a stupid, stupid universe where we have hot dogs for fingers, we’d get very good with our feet.”
Beautiful, right?
That’s what brainrot is doing. It’s not explaining the world. It’s showing how we survive inside it anyway—how we cope with the noise by making noise of our own.
It doesn’t chase truth or clarity. It collapses these things.
That’s what Derrida meant by deconstruction: the unraveling of stable meaning, the refusal to accept that signs point to fixed ideas.
In meme culture, that unraveling never stops. Nothing stays serious, nothing stays sacred, nothing stays still. Meaning flickers, glitches, duplicates itself, and disappears—just like that broken Imgur link on a Reddit post from 2017.
These days, meaning isn’t found in the book.
It’s in the scroll.
You have to close-read the brainrot now.
It’s in TikTok comment sections and blue-linked phrases that drag you down the doomscroll rabbit hole.
It’s in the bat-swinging stick figure named Tung Tung Tung Sahur (maybe not him).
But somehow, in today’s context, it almost makes sense.
Postcolonial Perspectives on Meme Culture
If deconstruction shows us how meaning breaks apart the meaning of brainrot, postcolonial theory shows us who was trying to hold it together—and who benefits when it stays intact. The chaos of Gen Z meme culture doesn’t just reject coherence; it also pushes back against the lingering structures of empire embedded in language and media representation starting with the writings on the wall. Memes may look messy, but that mess is political and rebellious.
Meme Fluency and the Domination of English
Let’s start with the most obvious sentiment of empirical influence on brainrot: memes are overwhelmingly formatted in English.
Even Italian brainrot, with all its faux-European phrasing and global absurdity, circulates within an English meme economy—captioned in English, memed in English, shared in English.
English is still the assumed default, even in contexts where the aesthetic is purposefully foreign or mixed. Postcolonial theorists like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have long argued that language is a tool of imperial power. If people around the world have to speak English to be understood—or to be funny—then the empirical tyranny is still alive in the joke.
This meme fluency creates friction. Brainrot often uses fake Italian or even distorted Indonesian names, but its punchlines rely on viewers already knowing the Western meme formats it parodies.
A stick figure with a bat yelling “Tung Tung Tung Sahur” doesn’t work unless you already understand how irony, repetition, and absurdity function in English meme culture. The form is Western, even when the content isn’t, making it an inaccessible form of meme for all, but quite accessibly formatted and tailored to American societal standards for Gen-Z ‘humor’.
Meme Borders vs. Political Borders
And yet, there’s something revolutionary in how memes move. There is almost no jurisdiction or copyright to online content like this, just copy, paste, translate, distort and nobody on X or Reddit will bat an eye. While political leaders like Donald Trump push for a 100% tariff on foreign films and call for the defunding of PBS and NPR, Gen Z is already two steps ahead—consuming Young Sheldon edits, Italian Brainrot, and AI rap battles between Obama and Trump, all on the same scroll.
Meme culture is borderless, and not because it tries to unite the world in some utopian way—but because it doesn’t care about borders in the first place.
Memes are chaotic, remixable, and aggressively non-national. It’s postcolonial in spirit, even if not always in ethics.
Conclusion
Gen Z’s meme culture is far more than a stream of disposable jokes. It is a dense, fast-moving language of resistance and survival.
Through the lens of deconstruction and postcolonial theory, recent memes like Italian brainrot reveal themselves as cultural texts that dismantle dominant narratives and refuse imposed meaning.
Their absurdity and hybridity across cultures directly challenge the ideals of rationality and cultural purity that underpin both colonial history and modern media systems. As Donald Trump calls for ‘protectionist’ policies, such as a 100% tariff on foreign films to preserve a narrow vision of American culture, meme culture laughs, mocking those efforts with chaos.
Memes operate as postcolonial acts of reclamation. They resist commodification, reject linear logic, and speak across cultures without translation. They are the monkey vs. the robot in the spontaneous, yet affective, global remix against the cold, mechanical reproduction of meaning. To dismiss them as trivial is to ignore their power.
In the digital age, memes are not just how Gen Z expresses itself; they are how it fights back. Understanding them as tools of critique and cultural negotiation is essential to recognizing how meaning, identity, and power are now being remade—one shitpost at a time.
Works Cited
Daniel, Kwan, and Daniel Scheinert, directors. Everything Everywhere All at Once. A24, 2022.
Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2020 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#Diff.
Katz, Leslie. “What Is ‘Italian Brain Rot’? The Surreal TikTok Obsession, Explained.” Forbes, 3 May 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/05/03/what-is-italian-brain-rot-the-surreal-tiktok-obsession-explained/.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Heinemann, 1986. PDF available at https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/decolonising-the-mind.pdf.
The Onion. https://www.theonion.com.
“Trump Movie Tariffs Spark Confusion in Hollywood and Abroad.” NPR, 5 May 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/05/nx-s1-5387421/trump-movie-tariffs-confusion.
“Trump’s Executive Order Targets Public Media Funding.” PBS NewsHour, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-trumps-executive-order-targeting-public-media-funding.
@talkingfishnews. “BREAKING NEWS: The Pope Has Died.” TikTok, uploaded by Talking Fish News, https://www.tiktok.com/@talkingfishnews/video/7496150332599389486.
Sprockets and Springes 