Rot all over

Michelle Santiago Cortés on bed and brain rotting.

The image of a beautiful woman languishing in bed was once the stuff of oil paintings. Since at least 2021, TikTok’s @bedwitch has been posting videos of herself doing just that—laying in bed—to a growing following of almost 400,000. Some comments say they’ve seen this room in their dreams while others recognize it from Pinterest.

The bed is crowded with pillows and her vintage side tables are piled high with books. A luminous, chiffon curtain fans her as she sleeps. To scroll through the last three years of @bedwitch videos is to witness a timelapse of changes too small to detect on their own: Another side table, a new tray of perfume bottles, two more shelves stacked even higher with books, and more art on the walls. Vintage lanterns and trendy mood lighting. The camera set further back to reveal more of the bedroom and the Bed Witch still in bed—naked, tattooed, sometimes smoking or scrolling, but almost always sleeping. This is “bed rotting.” 

Bed rotting can trap you in its warm sheets, riveting feed, or that TV show with few enough seasons to fool you into thinking you can binge it in a single sitting. It wears away at whatever version of yourself was closest to achieving your #goals. It’s a true decomposition of the will and ability to be That Girl, or any other archetype of the productive, upstanding citizen. And so, as 2024 rang in, the kids of TikTok resolved to leave bed rotting in 2023. Any extracurricular time spent in bed now needs to be justified: “I’ve seen so many people saying that in 2024 they’re done with rotting on the couch but I refuse to give up my rot time,” wrote one lifestyle creator. 

Bed rotting has been beneath the surface for a while, the Gen Z version of slacker culture, predictably prompting American media to call in the mental health experts. It’s been lauded as a radical rejection of Hustle Culture while also being a hazard to your health. There are exceptions for special occasions: (“Me after spending my whole Christmas break rotting in bed.”) As far as pleasures go, bed rotting is perhaps the guiltiest: If you are in bed, if you are not moving or producing in any measurable way, you are bed rotting, sick and as good as dead. But from Tracey Emin’s My Bed to Audrey Wollen’s (regularly supine) Sad Girls and even the Nap Ministry’s pleasure activism, rotting only looks passive. 

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Rotting isn’t just for your horizontal body, it’s also for your brain. Too much scrolling and time spent in comment sections, and you’ll find yourself wading through the lethargy of your very own brain rot. (I picture mine as a thin veil of spiky, white spores, like an Iris van Herpen dress.) To quote one TikTok of too many, your Brain Rot Friend has a grating vocal fry and lips slathered in gloss. They say things like “that’s so joy-and-happiness-coded,” and “not you being happy with good things happening to you,” and “I saw you gag-uated from Gag-iversity of Gag-ington.” Online, brain rot is diagnosed by comments that react to things said or posted that are too abstract or convoluted to make any sense offline. Offline, brain rot can be spotted through conversations that are too entrenched in the muck of the internet to stick to anything else. You know you have brain rot when your life online does nothing to serve your life off-line, and vice-versa.

If you do all of this in bed, then you could be accused of rotting in two ways. In our enshittified times, what many of us have online can hardly be counted as “a life.” The worlds we thought we were building through social media are now the necrotic remains of the hope they once inspired. The companies that built the social internet are now subjecting us to their AI-powered technologies (and hype!) to extract what little revenue they still can. We gave Amazon and Facebook and Google too much power. Now, all that is reliably left to do is scroll and watch and “consume media'' and shop. 

This blow also dents our sense of agency offline, which is similarly atrophied by crumbling economies and abuses of power. To rot is to be subject to a narrowing of choices, a darkening of possibilities, and a corrosion of desires, until all that’s left is to lie down and wait for it to be over. There is nothing for life on and offline to give each other, except for the gunk. And while gunk can seem like a homogeneity of dead-ends, we owe it to whatever is left of ourselves to recognize the end as a process. Rot is an opportunity to witness something new—new internets, new technologies, new behaviors—take form.

It’s easy to languish in decay when it’s so abundant. In her slow pivot towards mysticism and abjection, the girlblogger nurtures her affinity to rot. Girlbloggers are a class of social media power-users that deal in hyper-feminine trends. She cycles through fashion, literature, and lifestyle trends with the feral hunger of someone who is constantly reinventing herself, always sure to luxuriate in all the sinful excess. A recent popular meme asks her to choose between six essential interests—girl on girl cannibalism, ROTTING, religious torment, ontological evil, symphorophilia, and the grotesque—but “one has to go.” Another breaks it down to the basics by stating that girlhood is a spectrum that goes from “performance” to “bed rotting.”

The world of fragrance offers a fuller expression of the desire for decadence in every sense of the word: decline, excess, and decay. The past two years have seen a steady rise of consumer interest in fragrance, paying specific attention to niche and oddball scents. Thanks to online forums like Fragrantica and Basenotes, a ripe subculture of savvy fragrance shoppers want rot distilled down to its palliative and sensual properties. Cult favorites like État Libre d’Orange’s Sécrétions Magnifiques are sometimes compared to rotting flesh (derogatory). And indie perfumers can find loyal audiences if they are able to produce anything that recalls decaying wood or wilting flowers. Anything that reeks of jasmine or other kinds of indoles, thick and unctuous. The freaks want their earthy sweetness, heavy and sour. Sticky smells of vetiver and civet, magnetic in their overwhelm and warm with disgust. There is an appealing (or appalling) story of decay and decadence under all that stench. Rot is where debasement meets exaltation, a place for the brain and bed rot to mean something.

The internet is a lot of things, but it’s not forever. A website is a file that is hosted on a computer and can be accessed remotely from another computer. Websites with multiple pages are themselves a series of files linked to each other, but perhaps more frequently, they are linked to other files on other websites. This is essentially the whole of the internet. Link rot occurs when the promising glow of hyperlink-blue splats against a 404 Error page. And about a quarter of the deep links (links to specific pages instead of general websites) in the New York Times website are already rotten. 

I take a small risk any time I use links in any essay I write for the internet. It imports so little into my descriptions and retellings and, instead, redirects readers to other places for the details. But hyperlinked writing is intertextuality in action. I can’t think of a technique better suited to treat the internet as its subject. Plus, I already told you, I have brain rot. I’m counting on other media companies and online publishers, social media platforms and even e-commerce sites, to dedicate money and resources to ensuring there is always something on the other side of my link. 

So the instinct to build personal archives kicks in. External hard drives and local storage swoop in to wrest back as much of our digital lives as we can host and maintain in our homes and communities. But as museums and archives working to preserve digital works of art have found, saving it closer to the metal does little to protect information from rot. 

Digital files are made up of binary digits, 0s and 1s, also known as bits. Enough electrostatic discharge on servers or hard drives can turn a 0 into a 1, or the other way around, and corrupt a file. Caroline Gil, the director of media collections and preservation at the New York nonprofit Electronic Arts Intermix, told the New York Times that while this can be fixed, it takes a highly-specialized professional. Technology moves in fits and starts, sometimes leaping but often tripping. “Bit rot” can also be used in place of “format rot,” which describes digital data that can’t be accessed because there is no available hardware or software that can read its format. The movements of both time and technology determine not just how, but if, our information spoils—something to keep in mind amid the current hardware renaissance.

To rot is a verb and as a noun it names a process. Rot, the dictionary confirms, does not just happen, it is done. In the case of flesh, those doing the rotting are the bacteria and the fungi. In the (metaphorical) case of the bit or the link, rot is carried out by industries and businesses according to their shifting interests. Rot is the inertia of a scent in bloom. While it’s a slow rolling death, it can turn over a new life. Rot might be the end, the pause, the road to nothingness and death, but it never stops moving. In this sense, the Bed Rotters make a compelling point: While they might be in bed all day, online all day, not doing anything of calculable value, in the end, they are the agents of rot. 🗑️