“You don’t even have to look for it,” nine-year-old Anaqi said of the short videos he watches online. “It just shows up automatically, and it’s super interesting.”That instinctive pull is familiar to his father, Firdaus Omar. The 39-year-old Malaysian civil servant said his two children – Anaqi and his six-year-old brother – could spend hours watching the kind of short, noisy, endlessly recommended clips now commonly dismissed online as “brain rot”.He is worried about the effect of such...