To the ninth Skibidi Boppy appeared on my Instagram feed I started thinking about Mildred of Fahrenheit 451. In particular, when the lady, as well as wife of Guy Montag protagonist of the novel, remains hours in her living room fix with lobotomized gaze the parlor wall. They are huge screens that content meaningless content uninterrupted. At what moment I was afraid.
For those who have not seen them (I doubt) the Boppy skibid videos are nonsense clips created with artificial intelligence – most of Google’s veo 3 – often simulate news of news and always end with The same magic formula: Boppy skibidi. They represent the last frontier of dopamine capitalism. There are no more products, nor stories, but chemical discharges.
They are content designed to continuously activate the Circuit of pleasure in the brain, And to push us to flow again, and again, and again. And while we enjoy crawling our fingers on our dopamine bombed screens we become more and more similar to Mildred, more and more hyperstimulated, increasingly deficient.
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Boppy skibids and other wonders for our cerebral rot
The word of the year 2024, chosen by theOxford University Pressexplains well what we are talking about: Brain Rot. The expression, translatable as “cerebral rot”, indicates the logoing effect caused by the continuous use of repetitive digital content, demented or not very stimulating. At the same time, however, it is also used to describe the contents that cause this effect. The term contains both the cause and the symptom of a collective cognitive decline. And so the cerebral rot becomes the product and fuel of this economy of attention.
The sociologist Neil Postmanalready in the 1980s, he explained how entertainment transformed into a cultural standard reduced our ability to think in a complex way. Today that process is accelerated to the maximum. Social media have become particularly effective in distracting us. Several scientific studies have come out on the damage caused by the compulsive use of the devices: they worsen attention, weaken cognitive connectionsalter the mental and physical balance.
The Abbradabra in the era of dopamine capitalism
The exposure continues to quick and repetitive content is re -educating our brain to work on dopaminic automatisms. We get used to reacting immediate and superficially to stimuli, sacrificing prolonged attention and reflective thought. This mechanism, repeated for hours every day, leads to one intellectual stagnation: our ability to concentrate, think critically and follow complex ideas thinks, replaced by a constant Research of easy distraction. And if the contents in question empty even more of meaning, as in the case of the Boppy skibid videos, the problem is not only the loss of attention: It is collective training to superficiality.
We are not faced with a passenger fashion. The artificial intelligence factory is only testing its first products. The Boppy skibids will take other names but will remain demented video created with a handful of prompt. They are not narration, they are not art, they are not satire. I’m pure stimulus, The fast food of attention: You look at them, forget them, seek them again. The videos thus become the entertainment that does not entertain, which fills the void with the void and skibids boppy the abribrabra of dopamine capitalism. And like any magical formula, on the dint of repeating it it really works.
