Capitalist realism suggests that capitalism has become so dominant it has become impossible to even imagine alternate societal structures.
I don't think we're at slop realism by that same metric (yet).
For everyone I see chasing "authenticity" or "whimsy" or whatever else the sloporithm rewards, I know at least as many doing their own thing (in effect being very "authentic" or "whimsical" without even considering those terms).
I'm not sure if this is going further downhill or just making us more polarised into extremely online vs extremely offline.
I think it’s that those who generate “content” are louder than those who don’t, making it appear that the entire world has gone into delusional madness.
Similar to the “one bad apple” parable.
Bad actors do more damage than all the normal people.
I was at your San Francisco panel and this post is reminiscent of some of your points from that night. Cannot express how healing it is to hear you speak both academically and earnestly for human intention. The tension in the room was such a surprise! But I felt surprisingly comforted and reassured by your words.
I think optimism often feels inaccessible. The whole “just choose to be positive!” stuff is beyond me, just like the average person’s motivation for working out is not to become a strongman but rather to be healthier. But your way of looking at it - nothing is real, everything matters, everything is holy, I think it rewired something in my brain.
Thank you for the reading recommendations and especially for sharing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Thank you for traveling so that people have a reason to convene in person in addition to online! And of course for the brainrot stickers :)
I think a lot of your issues with slop are downstream of your choice to spend a lot of time on social media and specifically TikTok. I am (very) loosely aware of the things you are discussing, but since I no longer participate in “the discourse” I am not exposed to these sorts of information hazards. I recently deleted LinkedIn because I realized that it had turned into just another shitty form of social media filled with worthless slop. The last straw was when an LLM powered account started following and interacting with me. At that point it had become a net negative with few redeeming qualities.
You can minimize your exposure to slop without becoming a digital hermit, it just requires some caution and care with how you interact with others on the internet.
I confess, I take a certain morbid pleasure reading your analysis of slop taxonomy and don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. It’s fascinating, but on some level, that level of Info hazard exposure might not be good for you?
Spectacular society reifies every social spectacle into a specter of the real. Beneath the paving stones, the sloptacular. But there is always noise in the signal. How many copies of a copy can you make until information entropy demands its dues?
> This outlook seems bleak, and it is easy to surrender to the metrics, but I see it as an imperative to shine.
This is optimism slop. I'm sort of joking, but sort of serious: articles, books, and documentaries all have what seems to be a mandated "but not all is lost" addendum tacked on at the very end.
The truth is that poetry and passion can't save us, and the idea that they can is content just like all the rest.
I read it slightly differently from you, in that I don’t expect any of it to save me but Adam is suggesting intentional attention as the antithesis to mindless consumption. I fully accept that it’s all meaningless! There is no solution and it sucks! I simply want to enjoy the time I have and find meaning in the things that make me feel good.
What works for me may be slop to others and vice versa, but I get to choose what I find holy. Sometimes it is art and poetry, sometimes it can be a meme that’s been shared to oblivion yet still gets at something I couldn’t previously express. Sometimes it’s a crumpled trash bag that’s shaped like my dog. Sometimes it’s a poem that makes me cry. All is lost but those things can make the loss feel a little more intriguing.
I respect that, and I appreciate you taking my comment in the spirit intended. I'm not trying to score points or put anyone down.
That being said, the ending of the post very clearly follows a formula. It frustrates me to see someone post something so observant and well-written only to "see it wrapped up in a nice neat little package" or in some other way which allows the reader to walk away without "getting any on themselves".
In this case, within the context of the larger post, including a "suggestion" of focusing on the holy at the end subtly supports a narrative that things that feel good (even if they are ostensibly hard to do) are an antidote to the media environment that we're subjected to (and which we helped create and are helping to perpetuate).
> but I get to choose what I find holy.
This is wonderful and I support and encourage you to do so. And had this been a post exclusively about finding the holy in ordinary life, I wouldn't have had the same reaction (I would, of course, have had a *different kind* of negative reaction 😆).
> There is no solution and it sucks! I simply want to enjoy the time I have and find meaning in the things that make me feel good.
For the record, I actually think there might be a solution. But *if* there is (and that's a big "if" there"), it requires a kind of pathological vigilance when it comes posting or sharing the kind of content that feeds into The Spectacle, a force which (as noted in this very post) is capable of assimilating even the most anti-spectacle content if said content follows any framework of engagement (rage, contempt, in-group affirmation, virtue/sophistication signaling, redemption, etc, etc).
On the topic of no solution, though, here's a wonderful quote from Anton Hand, an indie game developer whose doomerism I have immense respect for:
"I'm going to try to hurt the fewest number of people that I can manage to in my day-to-day existence in this super-compromised, fucked-up life we lead in this broken country until the wall of fire comes"
I refuse to end on a pessimistic note, because slop is created out of a pessimistic mentality. I get that the "optimistic message at the end of a leftist critique" is a meme, but perhaps there's a reason we do this. I don't want to put a little bow on my essay, I want to identify a problem and the clearest way we can combat it (which is an optimistic outlook).
> because slop is created out of a pessimistic mentality
I feel like you *know* this isn't true.
Your earlier work in this article and others show that you understand that any "flavor" of media can be optimized, slopified, and/or assimilated into consumerism. "Pessimistic", "optimistic", "anti-slop", "anti-irony", and any form of rebellion, including inside-joke-based rebellion and satirical rebellion.
Pessimism isn't what we're fighting, it's the Spectacle itself. That's why any form of engagement is potentially feeding back into the system. That doesn't mean we have to stop engaging - I'm not making a "yet you participate in society - curious!" argument - but if we're not super honest about it then we're definitely not going to make any real progress in combating it.
> but perhaps there's a reason we do this.
Why would you not just go with the most obvious reason: that we like the way it makes us feel?
And, more generally, shouldn't we err on the side of being more skeptical of motivations, both our own and others?
> I want to identify a problem and the clearest way we can combat it (which is an optimistic outlook).
Me too! Actually, I never claimed to be a pessimist, that's a word you introduced into the conversation.
It generally fits me, of course, but it's also a meme, so not particularly productive. I'm not the big bad doomer. What I wish we could cultivate is an honest, productive, and widespread conversation - and I don't believe we'll ever have anything like that unless we start to integrate maniacal meta-awareness and self-questioning into all our online interactions. And one element of that is realizing how we participate and perpetuate in the very thing that we despise, even as we express our frustration with it.
Save us from what exactly? What is this need for salvation? Is peace and dignity in oneself also a form of optimizing? Is doing anything healthy just optimizing? I really don’t think so. There is a need to practice just being normal which is not extremist.
> Save us from what exactly? What is this need for salvation?
Eh, I have some thoughts on this, but really I was replying to the explicit statements in the article/post, statements that clearly frame a situation where "things are bad and will probably get worse". If you don't believe that last part, then you are (somehow) not part of the situation.
> Is peace and dignity in oneself also a form of optimizing? Is doing anything healthy just optimizing?
I emphatically agree with the implications of these rhetorical questions.
I actually think that peace, dignity, and healthy human existence are things which, by definition, cannot be "scaled and mass-produced".
But there's the lives we live, and then there's the cultural and media narratives which we consume and participate in, and which we help to spread. The pervasiveness of these narratives are indeed "extreme" and the only chance of dismantling them (if there even is a chance) is to have an extremist attitude about "the situation".
I think you're describing an important tendency of internet culture, but not necessarily the founder of slop. Plenty of things survive optimization without becoming meaningless. Shakespeare was mass entertainment. Jazz records were industrial products. Great art has always existed alongside derivative art. The internet accelerates imitation, but imitation itself isn't new, and commercialization doesn't automatically imply corruption.
I also think "Moloch" gives the process more inevitability than it deserves. Moloch describes coordination failures that individuals struggle to escape, whereas culture feels more sophisticated than that. Maybe the more important question isn't whether optimization inevitably creates slop, but what values our systems are optimizing for in the first place. Otherwise, we're evangelizing a narrative that mistakes popularity for selling out and scale for the end of meaning.
I'm concerned about the levels of anxiety that kids growing up as natives within this culture are going to have. Adolescent me was obsessed with getting more than 30 likes on my impact-font memes and goofy selfies. Teens today might be worried about deep parts of their identity being aesthetifed, churned through the algorithm, and eventually being dismissed as slop once every facet of it has been identified and parameterized. I already feel this way when I engage with memes around the niche electronic music / IDM community, and it's very icky. But at least I know how to disengage and be comfortable in liking what I like. Lexapro isn't ready for this
First off, thank you for writing this. For me personally, as of late, I have been embracing the idea of “be the change you want to see in the world,” and coincidentally I have also found my voice as a writer (I have two lit degrees and have written a lot of research papers, but I never seriously considered writing creatively before) and thus, my Substack was born about a month ago. (I love verbosity and flowery language, so my prose can be quite abstract if you’re into that lol.)
Tbh I think the best way to combat the slop problem is for people to truly look inward and live in a way that feels authentic to them as individuals, but in order to do that, they can’t share as much of what they’re doing, or anything at all, because it should be for them. But everyone is living for everyone else’s eyes, and it feels like the plot’s been lost.
People crave something that is antithetical to the consumerist, individualized and personalized exceptionalism (which includes your unique and special trauma and neurodivergence).
Land based governance. This is an economic system which means it is a value system.
The wholeness is a restitution of not only indigenous peoples back into land stewards and governments, but also the restoration of bodies and land back into one relationship.
The biological and material is the imaginal and spiritual. The emotional and the cognitive as a united place without special hierarchies.
Definitely, even not being chronically online translates into this reward-punishment system, where we are constantly grading our realities. It only feels gratifying if the other contributes in the acceptance of how we incentivise our “authenticity”.
This dovetails with something I've been thinking about: if optimisation turns everything into slop, it may eventually turn the word "slop" into slop, too. The term increasingly feels less like a description and more like a thought-terminating critique, especially once it becomes a suffix that can be attached to almost anything. Wrote a short piece on that idea here: https://twohundredths.substack.com/p/like-mid-before-it-slop-has-become?r=4azpw5&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
Insane vocab word thank you for dropping this
Also a great concept to point out. So important to stay wary of the slop regime enslaving the very tools we use to criticize it
Capitalist realism suggests that capitalism has become so dominant it has become impossible to even imagine alternate societal structures.
I don't think we're at slop realism by that same metric (yet).
For everyone I see chasing "authenticity" or "whimsy" or whatever else the sloporithm rewards, I know at least as many doing their own thing (in effect being very "authentic" or "whimsical" without even considering those terms).
I'm not sure if this is going further downhill or just making us more polarised into extremely online vs extremely offline.
I think it’s that those who generate “content” are louder than those who don’t, making it appear that the entire world has gone into delusional madness.
Similar to the “one bad apple” parable.
Bad actors do more damage than all the normal people.
I was at your San Francisco panel and this post is reminiscent of some of your points from that night. Cannot express how healing it is to hear you speak both academically and earnestly for human intention. The tension in the room was such a surprise! But I felt surprisingly comforted and reassured by your words.
I think optimism often feels inaccessible. The whole “just choose to be positive!” stuff is beyond me, just like the average person’s motivation for working out is not to become a strongman but rather to be healthier. But your way of looking at it - nothing is real, everything matters, everything is holy, I think it rewired something in my brain.
Thank you for the reading recommendations and especially for sharing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Thank you for traveling so that people have a reason to convene in person in addition to online! And of course for the brainrot stickers :)
Thank you Cynthia, you are holy :)
This is substack-slop
I think a lot of your issues with slop are downstream of your choice to spend a lot of time on social media and specifically TikTok. I am (very) loosely aware of the things you are discussing, but since I no longer participate in “the discourse” I am not exposed to these sorts of information hazards. I recently deleted LinkedIn because I realized that it had turned into just another shitty form of social media filled with worthless slop. The last straw was when an LLM powered account started following and interacting with me. At that point it had become a net negative with few redeeming qualities.
You can minimize your exposure to slop without becoming a digital hermit, it just requires some caution and care with how you interact with others on the internet.
I confess, I take a certain morbid pleasure reading your analysis of slop taxonomy and don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. It’s fascinating, but on some level, that level of Info hazard exposure might not be good for you?
Spectacular society reifies every social spectacle into a specter of the real. Beneath the paving stones, the sloptacular. But there is always noise in the signal. How many copies of a copy can you make until information entropy demands its dues?
Beautiful!
Reminds me of the meme (on twitter?) "that's just X-slop, you only like it because [quintessential thing about X]".
- "that's just wifeslop, you only like it because you love her"
- "that's just qualityslop, you only like it because it's good"
These sorts of jokes reject the notion of everything becoming slop and overanalyzed and begin treating the subjects as "holy" again.
Thanks for this. It was exactly what I needed to read today to remind me of how powerful actual reality, in its non-reducible glory, will always be.
Do u have beef w goodhart or avoid using the term for other reasons
> This outlook seems bleak, and it is easy to surrender to the metrics, but I see it as an imperative to shine.
This is optimism slop. I'm sort of joking, but sort of serious: articles, books, and documentaries all have what seems to be a mandated "but not all is lost" addendum tacked on at the very end.
The truth is that poetry and passion can't save us, and the idea that they can is content just like all the rest.
pessimism slop
retort slop
I read it slightly differently from you, in that I don’t expect any of it to save me but Adam is suggesting intentional attention as the antithesis to mindless consumption. I fully accept that it’s all meaningless! There is no solution and it sucks! I simply want to enjoy the time I have and find meaning in the things that make me feel good.
What works for me may be slop to others and vice versa, but I get to choose what I find holy. Sometimes it is art and poetry, sometimes it can be a meme that’s been shared to oblivion yet still gets at something I couldn’t previously express. Sometimes it’s a crumpled trash bag that’s shaped like my dog. Sometimes it’s a poem that makes me cry. All is lost but those things can make the loss feel a little more intriguing.
I respect that, and I appreciate you taking my comment in the spirit intended. I'm not trying to score points or put anyone down.
That being said, the ending of the post very clearly follows a formula. It frustrates me to see someone post something so observant and well-written only to "see it wrapped up in a nice neat little package" or in some other way which allows the reader to walk away without "getting any on themselves".
In this case, within the context of the larger post, including a "suggestion" of focusing on the holy at the end subtly supports a narrative that things that feel good (even if they are ostensibly hard to do) are an antidote to the media environment that we're subjected to (and which we helped create and are helping to perpetuate).
> but I get to choose what I find holy.
This is wonderful and I support and encourage you to do so. And had this been a post exclusively about finding the holy in ordinary life, I wouldn't have had the same reaction (I would, of course, have had a *different kind* of negative reaction 😆).
> There is no solution and it sucks! I simply want to enjoy the time I have and find meaning in the things that make me feel good.
For the record, I actually think there might be a solution. But *if* there is (and that's a big "if" there"), it requires a kind of pathological vigilance when it comes posting or sharing the kind of content that feeds into The Spectacle, a force which (as noted in this very post) is capable of assimilating even the most anti-spectacle content if said content follows any framework of engagement (rage, contempt, in-group affirmation, virtue/sophistication signaling, redemption, etc, etc).
On the topic of no solution, though, here's a wonderful quote from Anton Hand, an indie game developer whose doomerism I have immense respect for:
"I'm going to try to hurt the fewest number of people that I can manage to in my day-to-day existence in this super-compromised, fucked-up life we lead in this broken country until the wall of fire comes"
I refuse to end on a pessimistic note, because slop is created out of a pessimistic mentality. I get that the "optimistic message at the end of a leftist critique" is a meme, but perhaps there's a reason we do this. I don't want to put a little bow on my essay, I want to identify a problem and the clearest way we can combat it (which is an optimistic outlook).
> because slop is created out of a pessimistic mentality
I feel like you *know* this isn't true.
Your earlier work in this article and others show that you understand that any "flavor" of media can be optimized, slopified, and/or assimilated into consumerism. "Pessimistic", "optimistic", "anti-slop", "anti-irony", and any form of rebellion, including inside-joke-based rebellion and satirical rebellion.
Pessimism isn't what we're fighting, it's the Spectacle itself. That's why any form of engagement is potentially feeding back into the system. That doesn't mean we have to stop engaging - I'm not making a "yet you participate in society - curious!" argument - but if we're not super honest about it then we're definitely not going to make any real progress in combating it.
> but perhaps there's a reason we do this.
Why would you not just go with the most obvious reason: that we like the way it makes us feel?
And, more generally, shouldn't we err on the side of being more skeptical of motivations, both our own and others?
> I want to identify a problem and the clearest way we can combat it (which is an optimistic outlook).
Me too! Actually, I never claimed to be a pessimist, that's a word you introduced into the conversation.
It generally fits me, of course, but it's also a meme, so not particularly productive. I'm not the big bad doomer. What I wish we could cultivate is an honest, productive, and widespread conversation - and I don't believe we'll ever have anything like that unless we start to integrate maniacal meta-awareness and self-questioning into all our online interactions. And one element of that is realizing how we participate and perpetuate in the very thing that we despise, even as we express our frustration with it.
Save us from what exactly? What is this need for salvation? Is peace and dignity in oneself also a form of optimizing? Is doing anything healthy just optimizing? I really don’t think so. There is a need to practice just being normal which is not extremist.
> Save us from what exactly? What is this need for salvation?
Eh, I have some thoughts on this, but really I was replying to the explicit statements in the article/post, statements that clearly frame a situation where "things are bad and will probably get worse". If you don't believe that last part, then you are (somehow) not part of the situation.
> Is peace and dignity in oneself also a form of optimizing? Is doing anything healthy just optimizing?
I emphatically agree with the implications of these rhetorical questions.
I actually think that peace, dignity, and healthy human existence are things which, by definition, cannot be "scaled and mass-produced".
But there's the lives we live, and then there's the cultural and media narratives which we consume and participate in, and which we help to spread. The pervasiveness of these narratives are indeed "extreme" and the only chance of dismantling them (if there even is a chance) is to have an extremist attitude about "the situation".
I think you're describing an important tendency of internet culture, but not necessarily the founder of slop. Plenty of things survive optimization without becoming meaningless. Shakespeare was mass entertainment. Jazz records were industrial products. Great art has always existed alongside derivative art. The internet accelerates imitation, but imitation itself isn't new, and commercialization doesn't automatically imply corruption.
I also think "Moloch" gives the process more inevitability than it deserves. Moloch describes coordination failures that individuals struggle to escape, whereas culture feels more sophisticated than that. Maybe the more important question isn't whether optimization inevitably creates slop, but what values our systems are optimizing for in the first place. Otherwise, we're evangelizing a narrative that mistakes popularity for selling out and scale for the end of meaning.
I'm concerned about the levels of anxiety that kids growing up as natives within this culture are going to have. Adolescent me was obsessed with getting more than 30 likes on my impact-font memes and goofy selfies. Teens today might be worried about deep parts of their identity being aesthetifed, churned through the algorithm, and eventually being dismissed as slop once every facet of it has been identified and parameterized. I already feel this way when I engage with memes around the niche electronic music / IDM community, and it's very icky. But at least I know how to disengage and be comfortable in liking what I like. Lexapro isn't ready for this
First off, thank you for writing this. For me personally, as of late, I have been embracing the idea of “be the change you want to see in the world,” and coincidentally I have also found my voice as a writer (I have two lit degrees and have written a lot of research papers, but I never seriously considered writing creatively before) and thus, my Substack was born about a month ago. (I love verbosity and flowery language, so my prose can be quite abstract if you’re into that lol.)
Tbh I think the best way to combat the slop problem is for people to truly look inward and live in a way that feels authentic to them as individuals, but in order to do that, they can’t share as much of what they’re doing, or anything at all, because it should be for them. But everyone is living for everyone else’s eyes, and it feels like the plot’s been lost.
I wanna get out of the slop machine cycle. It feels like the bad place
People crave something that is antithetical to the consumerist, individualized and personalized exceptionalism (which includes your unique and special trauma and neurodivergence).
Land based governance. This is an economic system which means it is a value system.
The wholeness is a restitution of not only indigenous peoples back into land stewards and governments, but also the restoration of bodies and land back into one relationship.
The biological and material is the imaginal and spiritual. The emotional and the cognitive as a united place without special hierarchies.
Story, State, Action.
Definitely, even not being chronically online translates into this reward-punishment system, where we are constantly grading our realities. It only feels gratifying if the other contributes in the acceptance of how we incentivise our “authenticity”.