The internet’s sheer volume and constant shape-shifting make it a difficult subject to write about. Anurag Minus Verma – artist, author, and podcaster – takes on this challenge in The Great Indian Brain Rot: Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India, an exploration of India’s digital dystopia. He focuses on the “post-Jio world”: an era that began in late 2016, marked by cheap data plans and widespread smartphone usage.The book is highly readable and rich in observation. Verma’s preface strikes a wistful note: “The smartphone age leaves behind a quiet, lingering sense that something has been lost forever; for better or worse, we still don’t know what we really have lost.” He recalls discovering the internet in 2004 at a cybercafé in Rajasthan.‘The Great Indian Brain Rot: Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India’, Anurag Minus Verma, Bloomsbury Publishing India, 2025.The first chapter, “Loveless Loners,” examines the awkward and desperate attempts of lonely men searching for love and sex through early platforms such as Orkut, Gtalk, Omegle, and Yahoo Messenger. About a decade ago, Indian romance entered the brave new world of dating apps – Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, and Hinge – offering the illusion of abundance while leaving users more alienated and consumerist in their approach to intimacy. When online love “wins,” it can do so in bizarre ways. Consider the case of Seema from Pakistan and Sachin from India, whose relationship began through the online game PUBG in 2023. Seema’s dramatic arrival in India via Nepal, with four children in tow, became a media circus. News channels fixated on the story for days, conveniently ignoring alarming youth unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, and the dismal state of education and healthcare.In the Seema–Sachin saga, one unlikely star emerged: a grumpy Indian auntie furious about the match. In a television interview, she unleashed a barrage of colourful Hindi insults, calling Sachin a lappu (scrawny), barely articulate, and ugly as a jhingur insect (cricket). The clip went viral and was then amplified by TV channels.Anurag observes a relentless influencer economy in which many chase fame – and potential monetisation – through odd or outrageous content. A viral clip featured Odisha-based creator Kamalini Mahanta provocatively asking viewers, “Kis colour ki chaddi pehni hai? (What colour underpants are you wearing?)”. The comedy collective All India Bakchod (AIB) rose to prominence through sketches that relied heavily on insult-driven humour. The book argues that today’s internet rewards junk entertainment – like Dhinchak Pooja’s song “papa ki pari” with one million views – divorced from social and political substance. The AIB content used to address feminism, free speech, and LGBTQ+ rights. In later years, founding member Tanmay Bhatt pivoted to content optimised purely for views: gaming videos, meme reactions, and commentary. It became “a factory of second-hand amusement where creation was no longer necessary.”Still, influencers with huge followings are coveted by corporate sponsors, event organisers and politicians, from local MPs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. The consequences of this fame culture and economy are dangerous. Rising teenage depression, anxiety, cyberbullying, and exposure to hateful and pornographic content have become so serious that Australia severely restricted social media access for minors. Content creators themselves often live on the edge. The author notes that in 2023, an influencer Misha Aggrawal died by suicide in her Mumbai apartment, with reports saying that she had been terrified of losing followers. India’s digital landscape also produces distinctly Indian phenomena. Anurag describes the emergence of “new caste mythologies,” in which Gujjars and Yadavs—long invisible or underrepresented in mainstream media—have carried their self-assertion into a “digital Kurukshetra,” amassing large followings within their own caste communities. As he puts it, “Once a farming community, in the age of social media the Gujjars have become an engagement-farming people.”This digital visibility, however, does not translate into real power. Those belonging to the backward caste, Dalit, and Adivasi communities remain largely excluded from India’s top bureaucratic, academic, media, and publishing institutions. Indian society resembles an iceberg: only its upper-caste tip is visible and celebrated. This dynamic is evident in Gujjar claims over the ninth-century king Mihir Bhoj being aggressively ridiculed by ‘upper’-caste Rajputs on social media.Later chapters on toxicity, hate speech, and fake news deepen the unease. Online shock and cringe content demand constant escalation. Consider Puneet Superstar, a young man from an acutely impoverished background whom Anurag featured on his podcast in the early days. He began with clips of himself screaming in crowded places and splashing in rainwater puddles, and has since regressed to stunts such as drinking water straight from a dirty drain with a squeeze of lemon juice.Fake news has become a hit genre on the internet. The suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, as Anurag notes, sparked a hurricane of conspiracy theories, many imported wholesale from American far-right culture: global elites, child abuse rings, deep-state operatives. Subscribers to these alternative realities don’t seem to care that these “truths” travel via the world’s largest profit-making corporations.Anurag suggests that insult humour and dehumanising language are not confined to the right-wing social media accounts. He links this universal appetite for toxicity to the failure of more civil alternatives to Twitter (now X) like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Soon after the book’s publication, a viral video of a Hindutva supporter physically threatening a church service illustrates this pattern. Anti-Hindutva users responded with body-shaming abuse, calls for him to be thrashed, demanding his deportation as a supposed “Bangladeshi terrorist.” This book offers a clear-eyed overview of India’s recent digital chaos and algorithmic hustle. It would have benefited from a chapter on social-media-generated religious cults, from Hindu formations to dominant-caste Christian celebrity pastors. I also wish Anurag had sketched where he believes this “Jio-political” trajectory is leading, and what remedies, if any, might be possible.The West has its own informational and political garbage. But it also possesses institutions that, for the most part, nurture serious thought and provide a voice for the poor and marginalised. Public broadcasters such as the BBC, Australia’s ABC, and Radio New Zealand play a crucial role in countering online noise, educating citizens, and sustaining social democracy. Likewise, even small towns maintain free public libraries as a basic civic good.India lacks comparable informational, creative, and intellectual sustenance for ordinary people. Progressive Indian media often remains an English-speaking, upper-caste echo chamber. Meanwhile, large sections of the population are trapped in attention bait and populism.One way to resist this decline is through slow, careful thought. Going offline to read Anurag Minus Verma’s book is a good place to begin.Rajiv Thind is a literary critic, fiction writer and visiting academic at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.