The Slop Era
Slop is taking over our lives. Will we ever escape it?
It dominates your social media feeds, has taken over Hollywood, and is already expanding into our built environment. Slop; a slang term to describe any creation that is lazy, reliant on AI or generic algorithm-based decision making, of poor quality, and blatantly created just to make a buck—is everywhere. Slop’s expansion into nearly every facet of our lives is radically shaping this era of culture, and seemingly erupted over night without warning. Truthfully, slop has been infesting our culture for quite some time—indeed longer than many would care to admit. Its growth is poisoning our culture, politics, and without a vigorous response it will come to erode our capacity to create and imagine.
As we launch this discussion, however, it is important to note that there are two types of slop:
1. Corporate Slop: This slop is backed by high-budgets, tons of human input, and is driven purely by corporate greed and efforts to “streamline” everything into functional nothingness.
2. Online Slop: This slop is perhaps more familiar to this audience; it predominantly hails from Indian accounts on X and other social media platforms, relies almost entirely on AI for its creation, and pollutes social media timelines like an Indian river after a Hindu festival.
These distinctions are important because it demonstrates how slop has come to dominate every facet of popular culture and media. This remarkable achievement would not be possible without both types of slop being created and promoted simultaneously. What each type has in common, however, is their singular purpose to make money.
Corporate slop goes about its mission by mining popular nostalgia. For over a decade, viewers have complained about Hollywood’s seemingly endless obsession with sequels, reboots, prequels, and spin-offs. Very few original stories are being told by America’s modern dreamweavers, C-suite executives preferring to rely on older more “proven” creations than to back new and potentially unprofitable ones. It should be stated that in certain respects, this phenomenon is not new. From Hollywood’s beginning a century ago, studios have consistently mined popular genres and stories until audience fatigue makes them so stunningly unprofitable that executives are forced to give up and try something new. What makes our present era of slop so unique is that rather than nostalgia harvesting being an aspect of most corporate profit-strategies it has become their only strategy. Let’s briefly look at a few more specific examples.
For the last nearly-20 years, fast-food chains have struggled to adapt to changing consumer desires and interests. An emphasis on ‘healthier’ food options, rising ‘fast-casual’ chains like Chipotle and Sweetgreen, and a consumer obsession with ‘experiences’ has punted once-dominant chains like McDonalds and Burger King to the metaphorical curb. Early in this phenomenon legacy-chains tried responding by adding healthier options to their menus and a ‘flattening’ of branding design. McDonalds was the first, however, to discover that those strategies pale in comparison to nostalgia’s raw power and grip over consumers. To this end, McDonalds rebranded themselves in a retro style, embracing their mid-century modern roots. Burger King followed suit, and combined the rebrand with limited releases of exclusive products or rereleases of old favorites. McDonalds has been so desperate to reingratiate themselves with consumers they’ve started relaunching their old Happy Meal Land cast of characters like Grimace and the Hamburgler. Their strategies have paid off, and consumers are returning to America’s legacy chains. Death has been stayed off a little while longer.
Disney too has fallen victim to a nostalgia-mining strategy. Endless remakes of their extensive library of animation classics, cloaking destruction of their theme parks in retro-nostalgic branding, and attempted reboots of popular franchises like Star Wars and Indiana Jones have arguably made the House of Mouse America’s master magician of nostalgia. In some ways, this is historically consistent with its historical roots. Founder Walt Disney is arguably America’s greatest-ever practitioner in the dark arts of nostalgia. What sets Disney’s current collapse into cheap nostalgia is its low-quality, poor storytelling, and unlike Walt—a complete disinterest in trying to create something new. For as much a nostalgia miner Walt Disney was, he was just as devoted to technological progress and an optimistic vision of America that’s at stark odds with executives who now run his company. Frankly, Disney is deserving of a more thorough deep dive. At any rate, their proficiency in producing mass-market slop has a new competitor in the form of NBC-Universal. Earlier this month, Universal officially opened their newest Florida theme park, Epic Universe. This third-gate is slop made real and physical. Unlike previous theme parks, Epic Universe has no real theme, instead, it’s a collection of “lands” based around single-Ips NBC-Universal executives believe will be appealing to guests. Tying together these completely unrelated lands is a large garden called “Celestial Park” which posits to be “inspired by the late-19th and early-20th Century world’s fairs.” Alrighty then. There are some attempts at storytelling and placemaking, but these efforts are confined to lands inspired by stories guests are already intimately familiar with. It takes them nowhere new; it keeps them in the same (and profit-safe) bubble of popular culture that hasn’t changed in fifty years. This is corporate slop made manifest: nothing new, nothing innovative, a cultural dead-end.
What then about online slop? Corporate slop is known. We know who is responsible, we know culturally, how to exert enough pressure to force it to change, but online slop? Online slop’s ability to hide its creators, mask its profits, yet so thoroughly dominate our media diets make it arguably more dangerous than corporate slop. What we do know is that most online slop originates from China and India. In China, slop factories are basically backed by the government as a form of subversion of US culture and wealth-extraction. In India, motives are less aligned with Prime Minister Modi’s security aims and far more with individual profit incentives. So how does online slop make a profit, especially if it’s so thoroughly despised by most consumers of online media?
Online slop relies on YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, and Facebook’s wonky algorithms. Anyone who has worked in social media or managed their own successful pages knows that every algorithm is easily manipulated. Through a mixture of ad-buys (to artificially boost content), content spamming, and phantom impressions (running multiple ghost accounts to falsely boost impressions and engagement), procurers in online slop can quickly come to dominate social media timelines. On X, slop content most commonly takes on the form of long, AI-composed threads. Their types can vary, though as X becomes a more right-wing-aligned platform, they tend to take on the form of boosting ‘Western Civilization.’ On other social media platforms, it’s more common to see slop in the form of video reels.
TikTok’s rise in 2020 forced legacy social media companies like YouTube and Meta to quickly develop their own short-form, vertical video features. On YouTube they’re called shorts and on Meta products they’re called reels. I will be using the term reels for efficiency. Because each social media company is in intense competition with one another for users’ attention, they’re all working in overdrive to gain more daily users than TikTok. To this end, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and even Twitter naturally boosts all video content over any other content-type. Subcontinental slop-makers take advantage of this by churning out pure AI video slop, and then using the algorithm manipulation methods I mentioned earlier to boost their views and engagements. This allows their accounts to qualify for each platform’s monetization program and this is where the real money comes in. Depending on the platform, and how good you are at manipulate it, slop-makers can easily make thousands of dollars a month off their slop-farm operations. It is an extremely lucrative system.
Without addressing their perverse incentive models, and adjusting their easily manipulated algorithms, social media companies will continue to abate slops rise online. Corporate slop can only be defeated via consumer choice. Already, Epic Universe is proving to be more of a dud than NBC-Universal executives hoped. Disney’s live-action remakes are starting to falter at the box office (just like their franchise reboots and the seemingly unkillable so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe). Even legacy fast-food chains are discovering there are limits to mining nostalgia.
Slop has no place in our cultural landscape, whether online or coming from corporate America’s creatively bankrupt headquarters. It must be rooted out and destroyed if our culture is to have any hope for revival and progress.
This is the first part in a two part series.