there is no online authenticity

at the end of the day, everything is slop

Well, it’s happening again.

As with every internet trend, the “Italian brainrot” meme genre started out as a genuine expression of our cultural moment. The surreal, AI-generated animal hybrids crossed national and linguistic boundaries to highlight the murky coexistence of the online real with the hyperreal, speaking to us as an absurd response to our own algorithmic anxiety.

Now, however, it’s been captured in the engagement spiral of Instagram slop, devolving into often anti-Semitic or racist content posted purely for our attention. Dozens of accounts remix the same exaggerated or sexualized formats, co-opting the trend to get as many clicks as possible. Functionally, it’s become no different from the hopelesscore edits or the LeBron memes or any other example of online slop: an “authentic” joke that became “inauthentic,” and is starting to feel tired.

Two clear examples of engagement bait—but still somehow on the less offensive end of what I’ve seen on Instagram.

The same thing is happening with language. I just contributed to a fairly depressing piece by Taylor Lorenz on the crypto market behind trending slang. In short, as each word gets more popular, its associated memecoin rises in value, because it represents a portion of our attention to capitalize on.

I’ve already extensively covered the engagement treadmill—the pattern of creators hijacking trending keywords to go more viral—but this is happening on a much deeper level than you can possibly imagine. You can’t separate the development of any online trend from the way it commodifies our free time.

This, then, naturally raises the question: is anything online authentic? How do we separate where a real human phenomenon ends and “slop” begins? Any attempts at a distinction fail for the same reason that it’s so hard to define “authenticity” in art: it’s inherently a subjective definition.

Even the metric that feels most compelling to me—the artist’s intent—is clearly still contextual. A work of art can be created with multiple, complex emotions. As an educational TikTok influencer, I also churn out videos with an intention of virality. Is that slop? On the other end of the spectrum, maybe the racist AI creators have at least some intention of making a funny joke, however perverse. But that means there’s still human effort to communicate something—so are their videos partially “art”?

Originality, too, is a poor metric, because all memes draw on previous cultural ideas. You can’t write off “slop” as “that which is derivative” when everything, including works of high creativity, is forged in the context of what it means to be human today.

I’m also struggling to define how a “normal” or “authentic” trend works. Even if we agree that the HUZZ crypto-coin represents a commodification of the word “huzz,” haven’t we been doing that forever? When Burger King named themselves after royalty, they too capitalized on the word “king” as a meme in our minds, hijacking its associations of prestige so that they can grab our attention and sell us things. So it’s not even the algorithmic medium that “corrupts” an idea. It’s just a thing that happens naturally, although the algorithm definitely seems to be compounding that.

The unofficial Burger King crypto-coin has been down lately.

At the end of the day, I think “authenticity” is just another story we tell ourselves to make sense of reality. There’s no intrinsic authenticity to a meme; rather, it’s us moralizing about what is “good” and “bad.” The commodification of the meme is as real as the rest of it, but we just like to call it “bad.”

In his seminal essay Categories of Art, the philosopher Kendall Walton argued that we evaluate all art through our perception of the category it belongs to. If it’s in a “good” category, it’s high art; if it’s in a “bad” category it’s low art. We’re kind of doing the same thing when we distinguish between “real memes” and “slop.”

That’s not to say it isn’t useful to make our moralizing little stories. Distinguishing between “high art” and “low art” helps us become more sophisticated members of society. It’s just important to remember that what counts as “sophistication” is also something humans made up.

Breaking down the high art/low art distinction can be a fun opportunity to remember that you can make your own rules. Who cares if reality TV is the “slop” equivalent of television programming when you still have fun watching it? Who cares if trashy romance novels are repetitive mass-produced cash grabs? You’re the one reading them, and it’s more about your experience than anything else.

That’s really the thing—it comes down to you. It’s pointless to worry about how everything is technically “inauthentic” when you can construct your own stories about what you like. That means continuously finding what you’re comfortable with. Personally, I still enjoy some of the “slop” brainrot memes, but draw the line if they feel racist, or oversaturated, or too derivative. (Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart put it best in his description of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”)

It’s probably true that, just as “huzz” feels more commodified than the word “king,” we do have to make more of these evaluations online. Since the algorithm accelerates trends, it also accelerates how often you have to redefine authenticity. This takes an emotional toll: now you have to spend more time renegotiating what feels good to watch, instead of just feeling good. That’s where you have to make a second decision: how much time you want to spend online at all.

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