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, per my previous post, "slop" is not purely an online thing - even offline, you consume "slop bowls" and are subject to all the trends emanating from the internet
I agree, and I don't mean to present the extremely online vs offline dichotomy as if being "offline" makes one entirely immune to slop (broadly), or the internet. Certainly not capitalism.
I also wrote an essay recently where I used the terms of capitalist realism for AI. It's important to question the fundamental logics upholding the investment and proliferation of the technology that simply is not serving us at all. And in fact, doing great harm.
If slop is not just something we consume but something we *do*, slop the verb, do we have distinct questions for: When does slop become our dominant *consumption*? and, When does slop become our dominant *production*?
Strong agree with the extremely online vs extremely offline idea. What started as a way to get rid of the anxiety from being online has blown up into a mere contrarian movement against being online and has become what it swore to destroy. It's doing the same things just with the superiority complex of being in the real world, without actually being in it because the proof of being offline is being shared on online social media.
movements aren’t dictated. the real ones decided against being always online and really did it. what’s left is the message, offered by the hypocrites, to reach people who haven’t considered it yet
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 :)
As an optimist, to me, "just choose to be positive!" is more of a toxic positivity. To me, it's more "notice the beautiful/holy when you can. And it's everywhere." Of course it's human to not be able to do that 24/7 -- sometimes we just need to let ourselves be sad/depressed/furious. But that, too, is holy.
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 cannot emphasize enough that "slop" is not an internet thing, but exists everywhere offline. Aside from information, I see foodslop, architectureslop, and languageslop everywhere in the offline world. The point is in how we engage with metrics, regardless of the internet.
This gets into the idea of “Slop” as a product of context collapse which you’ve mentioned before, but I think it elides the very real differences between the physical world and the internet. Foodslop has been happening since at least the 1970’s where interesting and unique cultural food is compressed and watered down by corporations due to mass manufacturing and the need for national distribution. This is a fundamentally different process than algorithmic slop or slop generated by AI even if it can all be described as forms of “context collapse”. I still think it’s useful to separate what you have previously described as “info hazards” from the cultural flattening that occurs through the “least common denominator” effects of late stage capitalism.
I'm not talking about context collapse - 1970s foodslop and modern internet slop both come from misaligned actors watering down a product for the metrics. Hopefully my previous post explained this better, but when we focus on the internet in particular, we miss the larger structural root of the issue.
I’ll go back to your previous post to try to better understand your point about the metrics, but it sounds like you’re getting into a discussion of “enshitification” and the various ways that late stage capitalism is affecting the quality of everything.
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?
Some say 'goyslop' to which I retort firmly 'pigswill'.
Aged eight rising nine, I was institutionalised in an all-male boarding school, which fed us slop. What we didn't eat was scraped off our plates by the kitchen staff into large plastic bins, became pigswill to feed the local farmer's porkers, which were slaughtered, dismembered into ham and chops, sliced into bacon.
Pigs are super smart and intuitive. The only way to kill a porker humanely is to sneak up behind him, put a bolt in his brain before he realises what's happening.
Winston Churchill, who liked pigs, famously declared that a dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig treats you as his equal.
Orthodox Judaism and Islam share their doctrinal prejudice that pigs are unclean but will slaughter cows revered by Hindus.
My slop, therefore, may not be your slop. Likewise, as a classicist and mathematical physicist who detests sloppiness and slobbishness, I decline to participate in the pseudo-criticism, and intellectually dishonest deconstruction of western modernism, masquerading as scholarship in much of the arts and humanities, especially in the USA.
idk if it's a deconstruction so much as a slow death of enthusiasm, because how for everything one yearns to have more of, there's been some sort of deconstruction into a formula.
if you see enough of it you see the formula and the thing you loved is now a formula, no longer the thing. w the rise of the bubble algorithm, you can't escape overconsumption of what you love.
aside from the clear laziness of prompting an ai, design standards and style categories as an economic response to supplier overcrowding has always been a thing, but in the past you'd have to make an effort to see the formula, and even when you did find it, the journey was long and arduous so the arrival was satisfactory.. now, w for you algorithms, the formula is predigested, you skip the work that would have made you competent to judge it and maybe even improve on it.. it might just be a skill issue, it might be muscle atrophy.. there's so many other muscles to compensate, the loss can only be intuitive
... 'slow death of enthusiasm' is a great expression.
I sought to use the term 'deconstruction' in what I've understood, perhaps wrongly, to be the sense I imagined it to be used by Foucault and his followers — or if not by him then by North American academic feminists setting out to deconstruct the meaning of patriarchy then to deconstruct indeed patriarchy itself.
In my main discipline of mathematical physics, in which I seek to model the universe, big and small, I start by identifying a phenomenon that intrigues me. It's always a mishmash of bits and pieces. Hence, I start by trying to sort out all the bits into separate piles. Then, I try to create a mini-model of each bit, then put the mini-models together, to build a bigger model.
I used to do this with a pencil on paper. Now, I do it in my head. Then I walk, run, throw, ride, climb, hop, skip, jump, while I beaver away at reassembling all the bits in my brain. I keep turning over the image of my big model, looking at from different perspectives, often for many years. Often, I have to pull it apart, start again from scratch. Eventually, I might decide my model is not perfect but works well enough for the time being. I leave it to sit for a while. Later, I return, tinker with it. Leave it. Come back. Repeat. The model is never finished. It's a work in progress.
did I just get job fomo? yes, yes I did. how many people can say their output allows for relaxation time? or that it's even necessary.. AND get paid for it 🥹 artists and writers but they don't get paid for the tau, just for the output
I want to say you write beautifully and the range of topics you touch on is just 👌 but mostly the connections you make are absolutely delicious if the brain could taste neural pathways hehe
I agree that it's a work in progress, even the "slop" has the capacity to be useful, while annoying. I don't think your usage of deconstruction was wrong, ultimately it is what's being done, I do think the narrow pov is because of my previous comment.. maybe if it had been more nuanced, deconstruction would have been the only definition
> 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".
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
Can we meta this into slopslop as the corecore of midmids?
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
Insane vocab word thank you for dropping this
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, per my previous post, "slop" is not purely an online thing - even offline, you consume "slop bowls" and are subject to all the trends emanating from the internet
I agree, and I don't mean to present the extremely online vs offline dichotomy as if being "offline" makes one entirely immune to slop (broadly), or the internet. Certainly not capitalism.
I also wrote an essay recently where I used the terms of capitalist realism for AI. It's important to question the fundamental logics upholding the investment and proliferation of the technology that simply is not serving us at all. And in fact, doing great harm.
If slop is not just something we consume but something we *do*, slop the verb, do we have distinct questions for: When does slop become our dominant *consumption*? and, When does slop become our dominant *production*?
Strong agree with the extremely online vs extremely offline idea. What started as a way to get rid of the anxiety from being online has blown up into a mere contrarian movement against being online and has become what it swore to destroy. It's doing the same things just with the superiority complex of being in the real world, without actually being in it because the proof of being offline is being shared on online social media.
movements aren’t dictated. the real ones decided against being always online and really did it. what’s left is the message, offered by the hypocrites, to reach people who haven’t considered it yet
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 :)
As an optimist, to me, "just choose to be positive!" is more of a toxic positivity. To me, it's more "notice the beautiful/holy when you can. And it's everywhere." Of course it's human to not be able to do that 24/7 -- sometimes we just need to let ourselves be sad/depressed/furious. But that, too, is holy.
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 cannot emphasize enough that "slop" is not an internet thing, but exists everywhere offline. Aside from information, I see foodslop, architectureslop, and languageslop everywhere in the offline world. The point is in how we engage with metrics, regardless of the internet.
This gets into the idea of “Slop” as a product of context collapse which you’ve mentioned before, but I think it elides the very real differences between the physical world and the internet. Foodslop has been happening since at least the 1970’s where interesting and unique cultural food is compressed and watered down by corporations due to mass manufacturing and the need for national distribution. This is a fundamentally different process than algorithmic slop or slop generated by AI even if it can all be described as forms of “context collapse”. I still think it’s useful to separate what you have previously described as “info hazards” from the cultural flattening that occurs through the “least common denominator” effects of late stage capitalism.
I'm not talking about context collapse - 1970s foodslop and modern internet slop both come from misaligned actors watering down a product for the metrics. Hopefully my previous post explained this better, but when we focus on the internet in particular, we miss the larger structural root of the issue.
I’ll go back to your previous post to try to better understand your point about the metrics, but it sounds like you’re getting into a discussion of “enshitification” and the various ways that late stage capitalism is affecting the quality of everything.
Deleting linkedin is on my bucket list
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?
This is substack-slop
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.
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!
Some say 'goyslop' to which I retort firmly 'pigswill'.
Aged eight rising nine, I was institutionalised in an all-male boarding school, which fed us slop. What we didn't eat was scraped off our plates by the kitchen staff into large plastic bins, became pigswill to feed the local farmer's porkers, which were slaughtered, dismembered into ham and chops, sliced into bacon.
Pigs are super smart and intuitive. The only way to kill a porker humanely is to sneak up behind him, put a bolt in his brain before he realises what's happening.
Winston Churchill, who liked pigs, famously declared that a dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig treats you as his equal.
Orthodox Judaism and Islam share their doctrinal prejudice that pigs are unclean but will slaughter cows revered by Hindus.
My slop, therefore, may not be your slop. Likewise, as a classicist and mathematical physicist who detests sloppiness and slobbishness, I decline to participate in the pseudo-criticism, and intellectually dishonest deconstruction of western modernism, masquerading as scholarship in much of the arts and humanities, especially in the USA.
idk if it's a deconstruction so much as a slow death of enthusiasm, because how for everything one yearns to have more of, there's been some sort of deconstruction into a formula.
if you see enough of it you see the formula and the thing you loved is now a formula, no longer the thing. w the rise of the bubble algorithm, you can't escape overconsumption of what you love.
aside from the clear laziness of prompting an ai, design standards and style categories as an economic response to supplier overcrowding has always been a thing, but in the past you'd have to make an effort to see the formula, and even when you did find it, the journey was long and arduous so the arrival was satisfactory.. now, w for you algorithms, the formula is predigested, you skip the work that would have made you competent to judge it and maybe even improve on it.. it might just be a skill issue, it might be muscle atrophy.. there's so many other muscles to compensate, the loss can only be intuitive
... 'slow death of enthusiasm' is a great expression.
I sought to use the term 'deconstruction' in what I've understood, perhaps wrongly, to be the sense I imagined it to be used by Foucault and his followers — or if not by him then by North American academic feminists setting out to deconstruct the meaning of patriarchy then to deconstruct indeed patriarchy itself.
In my main discipline of mathematical physics, in which I seek to model the universe, big and small, I start by identifying a phenomenon that intrigues me. It's always a mishmash of bits and pieces. Hence, I start by trying to sort out all the bits into separate piles. Then, I try to create a mini-model of each bit, then put the mini-models together, to build a bigger model.
I used to do this with a pencil on paper. Now, I do it in my head. Then I walk, run, throw, ride, climb, hop, skip, jump, while I beaver away at reassembling all the bits in my brain. I keep turning over the image of my big model, looking at from different perspectives, often for many years. Often, I have to pull it apart, start again from scratch. Eventually, I might decide my model is not perfect but works well enough for the time being. I leave it to sit for a while. Later, I return, tinker with it. Leave it. Come back. Repeat. The model is never finished. It's a work in progress.
did I just get job fomo? yes, yes I did. how many people can say their output allows for relaxation time? or that it's even necessary.. AND get paid for it 🥹 artists and writers but they don't get paid for the tau, just for the output
I want to say you write beautifully and the range of topics you touch on is just 👌 but mostly the connections you make are absolutely delicious if the brain could taste neural pathways hehe
I agree that it's a work in progress, even the "slop" has the capacity to be useful, while annoying. I don't think your usage of deconstruction was wrong, ultimately it is what's being done, I do think the narrow pov is because of my previous comment.. maybe if it had been more nuanced, deconstruction would have been the only definition
What a kind, generous comment! Thank you so much!
Sloptimization
using this from now on
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.
> 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.
Just like optimism do a point can be blissful ignorance/toxic positivity, cynicism and hopelessness can become immobilizing or apathy.
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".
Do u have beef w goodhart or avoid using the term for other reasons
I hope you know that I was hearing your "tiktok voice" narrating in head and I read faster 😁
yeah, shabby chic walked so slop could run 😶
Mark Fisher lives in my walls
Pop culture searching aimlessly for identity