BTP March Meetup

[Boston Tech Poetics]

March meetup on the 24th from 6PM to 8PM!

We’ll be joined by @piperfishkindd, a student at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she researches media theory and digital aesthetics.

Vulgarity: the cannibal core of brainrot,

Building on the book _Our Aesthetic Categories_ by Sianne Ngai, this project tracks the afterlives of the cute, the zany, and the interesting in the age of the feed. I pose that these categories don’t just evolve- they consume themselves. As the Tumblr Dashboard of 2013 is devoured by the TikTok For You Page of 2026, content finds itself stuck within a hypercommodified, circulated, and overproduced world, its decayed pieces still bound to processes of capital. Cuteness finds itself with fangs; zaniness spikes into frantic randomness; the interesting dissolves into an attention-grabbing act. The result is not innovation but vulgarization: each mutation more overexposed, simplified, and overstimulating, turning cultural content into shocking spectacle and spectacle into monotony.