Italian Brainrot, Digital Chimeras :
Memini Cyborgi e la Cultura del Brainrot
In this early 2025, a new trend has emerged on TikTok that I seem to have missed; you sleep one day, and you’re already five steps behind, yet I’ve nary heard anybody speak on it and how it works upon the ever-running tapestry of meme folklore.
Italian Brainrot, or AI Italian Animals. These memes typically feature AI-generated hybrid animal-object chimeras—such as Bombardirllo Crocadillo (a crocodile bomber plane), Tralalero Tralala (a shark in Nike shoes), or Lirili Larila (a cactus-elephant with flip flops)—narrated by an swaggered, rhyming Italian text-to-speech voice. While initially appearing nonsensical, this phenomenon exemplifies deeper cultural and aesthetic tendencies that permeate meme culture, particularly in relation to themes of hybridity, cyborgism, and the networked co-creation of digital folklore.
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/italian-brain-rot
Italian Brainrot can be understood as part of a broader memetic trend towards syncretic imagery, where fragments from disparate cultural sources are forcibly sutured together to create new, fractured, and absurdist forms. These memes invoke the aesthetic of the chimera, a term historically used in mythology to describe composite creatures. Scholars like Donna Haraway have long argued that we live in a "cyborg" era, one defined by the collapse of boundaries between animal, machine, and human.
"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.
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Italian Brainrot literalises this hybridity through its surreal fusions: military machinery with crocodile heads; elephants grow cactus limbs; baseball bats sprout human eyes.
This digital chimera aesthetic is not new but reflects a longer genealogy of hybridity in internet meme culture, visible in trends such as Skibidi Toilet or John Pork. These phenomena reveal how online content thrives on collision, incongruity, and fragmentation—a form of digital bricolage where new forms are rapidly generated by recombining the debris of meme culture.
What distinguishes Italian Brainrot is its reliance on AI-generated imagery and text-to-speech technology, rendering it a distinctly cyborg aesthetic. The human and non-human are fused at the level of production itself: machine-learning algorithms generate the visuals, while robotic TTS voices narrate nonsensical poetry. This echoes N. Katherine Hayles' argument that digital culture is increasingly mediated by "posthuman" entanglements, where human authorship is diffused and aesthetic production is algorithmically determined.
Furthermore, the viral nature of Italian Brainrot is propelled by the algorithmic logics of platforms like TikTok, which privilege content that is fast, visually overstimulating, and easily remixable, usually AI generated. As memes like Bombardirllo Crocodile spread, users layer new narratives over the base imagery, participating in a game of telephone, where a story mutates as it passes from user to user.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Italian Brainrot is its role in generating collective mythologies. Like the John Pork assassination meme from a few months ago, users quickly weave stories around these absurd characters, creating imagined lore, rivalries, and even conspiracies (Tim Cheese’s involvement and later conviction being a notable example). This participatory storytelling transforms otherwise meaningless AI-generated images into an emergent digital folklore, where communities collaboratively generate meaning out of nonsense.
This phenomenon can be understood through the lens of Henry Jenkins' concept of participatory culture, where audiences are no longer passive consumers but active co-creators of media narratives. The chaotic, absurd elusive nature of Italian Brainrot memes becomes a canvas for community-driven world building, a counterforce to the disjointed, individualised consumption patterns typically produced by TikTok’s algorithmic feed.
Interestingly, the soundscape of Italian Brainrot memes is often accompanied by that spooky conspiracy TikTok audio or royalty-free western music—aural detritus of the algorithmic age. These musical motifs act as a form of digital musak, the background noise of our online existence, stripped of meaning through overconsumption yet still part of the rhythmic fabric.
At its core, Italian Brainrot participates in a digital version of Dadaist anti-aesthetic practice. It revels in nonsense, irrationality, and overstimulation. But paradoxically, users try to rationalise these images—giving them names, backstories, and relationships—because the human impulse is to seek pattern and meaning, even in algorithmic noise. In doing so, meme culture attempts again to stitch together a tapestry of absurd narratives in an online space increasingly defined by fragmentation and social disconnection.
TikTok’s architecture, designed to propel users toward atomised and algorithmically selected content, often resists the formation of stable communities or subcultural webs. Italian Brainrot and similar memes, however, momentarily reverse this. It creates a shared language, a common ground where people can participate in a game of nonsense myth-making.