First of all, I’m happy you’re here — a few hundred people subscribed after my post on slop capitalism and I’m grateful folks understood and liked it. Since part of my online persona is now “slop capitalism guy” in addition to “skibidi toilet critical analysis guy” and “meme theory/history guy,” I want to clarify in this post how I define “slop” as a type of product and why it matters — and it will likely be my last post on slop for the time being.
Last week, I said:
Slop capitalism is an economic and cultural system in which the primary product is slop and the primary activity is the destruction of value rather than its creation.
And then I sketched out the cultural/economic process I think is at play:
In order to make everything computer, they have to starve civil society into a shape small enough for computer to swallow. Slop is the online culture front of this war on society.
The goal is control, and a method of gaining control is through diminishing the access to information, sense of agency, and ability to reach others which we currently enjoy on social media. Slop is a tool for doing that to our cultural discourse, which mostly takes place on social media these days.
Swap “social media” out with any other facet of society which platform capitalism has seized, and you see an analogous process at play. If Uber replaces restaurants with ghost kitchens and delivery drivers, the most important consequence of that is the social world it forecloses through enclosing a certain category of human activity behind a digital fence. Gone are evenings spent sitting at tables in public, stable jobs and small businesses, bustling main streets, interactions and transactions with other humans which don’t happen through the phone.
But it’s not just that phone outcompetes IRL. It’s that phone, under its current management, tends to do the job worse, and the fact it does the job worse actually helps the tech platforms. The more desperate and precarious platforms can make vendors and customers, the easier they are to control. If your platform becomes a bottleneck for information, services, goods, or access, then by making it worse you can make people hungrier for what you provide and more dependent on you. And the more degraded the materials available to them are, the less possible it becomes for others — whether traditional institutions, individual people, or possible competitors — to build countervailing power.
But what is slop concretely?
Most people think what you mean by “slop” is just “bad content,” and often slop is bad content. But that definition feels misleading, since there’s a lot of bad content that is not slop, and there’s some slop that is good. “Good” may be the wrong word — you enjoy it the way you might enjoy an occasional cigarette when out with the fellas, although you know it’s overall disgusting. That’s how I feel about the orange cat stories.
I also prefer a standard that is a bit more rigorous than just “I like this or don’t like it.” So here is my first draft of a rubric to define slop content — and, to be slop a piece of content need not have all of these qualities, but at least several of them.
Slop content is:
produced with minimal effort (i.e., type a prompt into an AI generator)
arrives in massive quantities (often as a result of point # 1)
is imposed on users, and rarely sought out (this is a point Ryan Broderick describes — nobody looks for slop, it tends to just arrive on your feed)
is derivative, premised not on generating value but on taking it from elsewhere (e.g., image generators taking from artists’ work and not compensating them)
is superficial — what you see is what it is, there is no irony, intention, or meaning going on behind the image. You can explain slop entirely by naming it, even if what it is makes no sense (e.g., “a picture of shrimp Jesus.”)
is ephemeral or flimsy, not built to last or resonate — slop will always choose coming faster over lasting longer
is optimized for “reptile brain,” the part of you which has a knee-jerk response of urgency, fear, or disgust. It is also optimized for algorithms.
These same points might apply to many other online cultural phenomena as well. But the slop diagnosis comes about when otherwise “normal” or “native” behaviors for viral online content are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or occur in a comorbid pattern.
The overall picture and effect created by content which meets this diagnosis is a reduction of value within the overall system. This draws back into my prior definition of slop capitalism as an order in which slop is the central product and the destruction of social value (for the purposes of cementing power) the central activity.
I think the mechanics of how slop content on social media destroys value are as follows:
A) because of its massive quantity (2) and the fact it is imposed (3) by algorithms on users, slop content takes up scarce space on feeds that might otherwise be occupied by more nourishing and value-generating stuff;
B) because of its derivativeness (4) slop prevents actual cultural producers from receiving the attention, reach, and pay they need to make their productions sustainable, support themselves, and effectively contribute to the community,
C) because it is made with minimal effort (1) and is superficial (5) slop serves to lower standards and expectations across the board — it flattens, and in so doing makes depth seem rarer than it really is and makes challenging or novel thought feel more remote than it needs to be. Since slop is the kind of thing you explain entirely by naming, it is strangely stand-alone and in minimal conversation with any other referent — meaning it builds and means nothing beyond its own virality,
D) because it is ephemeral (6) and optimized for algorithm reptile brain (7) slop shortens the horizon of attention and concern, training us to think by hours and days rather than weeks or seasons — putting people in a kind of contextless, frantic present where the past can’t be learned from and the future can’t be anticipated. Slop serves to emphasize the near and the now at the expense of the other and the elsewhere, reducing the interconnectedness of people online.
This is a working definition, and I don’t think it is final or authoritative. I have the sense — as you do with some trains of thought — that there are stations further down the line whose names I don’t know and for which my ticket may not be stamped.
But my overall idea is, these ways in which slop destroys cultural value amount to an artificial narrowing of “the Overton window for being-in-the-world.” The less you see of other people online, the less you see of craftsmanship and care, and the less you see of the broader picture, the slimmer the horizons of your world will be.

Another creator, Nathan Ramos-Park on TikTok, stitched my video on slop capitalism and said it made him think of hamburgers. He argued the genius of a place like McDonald’s is they’ve trained people not to expect a great hamburger, but to expect a McDonald’s hamburger, and turned that into the standard. Through slop, the platforms do the same thing to content. They set the horizons of what you can imagine, expect, or believe the world to be, at the same time as they seize the material means for making the world otherwise. The first maneuver is a way to guarantee and perpetuate the success of the second maneuver. It isn’t enough to monopolize an industry or own the platform everyone is on, you also have to set the terms of the discussion and draw the borders of the imaginable.
What slop’s narrowing of the Overton window for being-in-the-world looks like on the ground level in everyday life is three things: a lowering of expectations, a sense of learned helplessness, and an increase in overall ignorance. It looks like the structure in power seeking to atrophy the muscles you’ve made to navigate the world on your own, while also making it harder to do so because you have to do it through their platforms.
Memes
All of these points I identified as ways slop destroys value are also critiques which people who don’t understand the internet frequently make of memes. Sometimes, memes do meet these criteria. But to me, a tension which makes memes interesting is how often they are at odds with these dynamics.
Memes arise from voluntary human-to-human associations of posters and audiences, and relish what is other, what is odd, what is non-algorithmically optimized. Memes are all about the seemingly-superficial thing that’s actually imbued with so much lore, the seemingly-low-effort thing that actually took weeks to make, the seemingly-derivative thing that actually remixes existing culture in a cunning way, or the seemingly-ephemeral thing that ten years later pops up in a new meme.
I guess what I mean here is memes are humans taking this kind of apparatus which the platforms have made and using it for themselves, to create value in an environment that is optimized to reduce it. And in that respect, memes are as central to the internet’s story as anything else — and it’s likely that, a hundred years from now, people will care more about memes than the minutiae of where the money goes or how the tech progresses.
That’s because the main questions online today are cultural and political. Social media platforms are not operating as businesses anymore. Zuckerberg really wants to be a Roman Emperor. Twitter X operates as an explicitly political project. The discourse and investment in AI is as much about business as it is around a techno-utopianism that eagerly awaits some silicone Messiah. And TikTok sent push notifications to hundreds of millions of phones thanking Donald Trump for saving it in what may have been the most-seen advertisement of all time.
The main thing now is control, not money. To the extent the platforms are still interested in money, it is as a means to gain control. This is one reason why I like the term “technofeudalism” despite Marxists in my comments section pointing out that it’s actually “late capitalism” or the money Amazon makes is arguably still profit not rent. The pathology at play in these people is not greed — rather, they each believe they are Timothée Chalamet from Dune, the chosen one, the Lisan al-Ghaib.
The way to fight it then is to refuse any diminishment of yourself or others. It is through an old-fashioned kind of humanism — not a refusal to go on the internet or a return to print and analog media, but an embrace of the fertile chaos that is human association. The great revolutions were born in coffee-houses and taverns, from conversations that expanded minds, led people to ask for more out of life and the world than contemporary power structures wanted to offer them. There was nothing particularly exceptional about most of those people, it’s just that they made the decision to be larger than they were supposed to be. And today, across the internet and the world, there are millions of people who want to do the same and are presently, in ways small or large, taking those steps.
great piece and so many rabbit holes - I hope you're not actually done with slop.
what is "derivative?" isn't everything inherently remixing old value and adding new value?
for that matter, what are "normal" or "native" behaviors? trends are always partially driven by people trying to capitalize off those trends.
I also think there's a narrow boundary of when a meme becomes "slop." It seems that most trends genuinely start out as innate cultural trends, and then are remixed into slop - where is the line??
We read Animal Farm at class. And then I came here.
This essay hits like chewing strawberry bits before champagne, hoping to bring out the flavours in it. So far, there's a million