How Russian brainrot became a hit for children
The Economist
The British playground usually echoes to screechy impersonations of well-known artists such as Katy Perry. But if you approach one today you may well hear a seven-year-old adopt a vaguely Slavic accent and drone: “Sigma boy, sigma boy.”
The lyrics come from an electropop track sung by two Russian tweens. The music video has racked up more than 271 million streams since being uploaded to YouTube in April. Academics across Europe are puzzling over its popularity.
Some have called it “a cultural invasion”, says George Charonitis of the University of Thessaly in Greece. For older listeners, the appeal is not clear.
The melody is repetitive, and the Russian lyrics – “I’m the icon of your icons / They dream about me as if I were bitcoin, got it?” – are unintelligible even in translation.
Some parents were appalled when their children began singing it; “sigma” is a term from the manosphere used to describe a lone (male) wolf who does not conform to norms or expectations.
“It absolutely terrified me,” posted one parent: it “really made me think about the influences around my DS [darling son]”.
Sigma Boy spread through the perplexing ecosystem of youngsters’ social media. A clip of an influencer blasting the song in Munich’s underground has millions of views – as does a video of an AI-generated shark enjoying the song.
But some think that a different sort of shark is behind Sigma Boy. Ukraine’s government says it has been promoted by bot farms, indicating that it could be Russian propaganda.
A spokesperson claims the song helps Russia by “reinforcing among young people the idea of dominance, masculinity and contempt for the ‘weak’.”
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds, says Carl Miller of Demos, a think tank. He has noticed a shift in Russian disinformation tactics in recent years, with less emphasis on promoting counterfactual versions of events and more on masculinity and patriotism.
If nothing else, the Sigma Boy scare highlights how little adults understand about children and social media. It is not their playground.
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