I am John Pork, and so are You

AI slop

What may be the most important fact about internet culture in 2025 is that in ten minutes, using one or several of the AI generators available for free or a relatively low fee, you can create a minute-long reel that is an abomination to any higher power or sense of decency — but also exactly what the algorithm wants to serve.

I talked about it in a recent live video here with

Adam Aleksic

, and this post is downstream of my conversation with him — here’s the video:

Using the AI generators, you can post at a higher volume than anyone who’s actually drawing, editing, or recording. Throwing that many darts at the algorithmic target means a few will inevitably stick. And since the platforms reward posting frequency and shock value, it means our feeds are now full of AI-generated content that goes weirder and harder than anything we’ve seen before.

Exorbitant amounts of electricity and cash are turning into racist reels and scammy schlock slapped together by teenagers gaming monetization programs, as Adam documented. 404 Media has led the pack in covering this stuff. I wrote an article on the orange cat AI stuff for the BBC a few months back, which is why my FYP still serves me every new permutation of the orange cat genre as they develop — from Sheikh cat celebrating Ramadan to carnivore cat cooking up his animal friends.

An AI slop reel is a digital black hole: it sucks in light and reflects nothing back. The numbers affixed to orange cat go up as more and more value plummets in, measured in whatever way you want to measure value: seconds of human lives, gigabytes of processing power, units of carbon burned. This is the dark economics and semiotics of slop. It is not parasitic or exploitative, as earlier culture industries were, but straight-up destructive. It sustains itself by eliminating all competition, taking up more and more space.

I wrote a post about this earlier, calling the paradigm “slop capitalism.” Slop on our feeds is not collateral damage of unrestrained AI development and technofeudalism, but its central manifestation. This is a regime that seeks to destroy all value growing beyond its walls in order to further entrench itself. The platforms win by a kind of strange degrowth: a simplifying of the cultural world, a pruning of the economic sphere, and a refining of the human self into something easier to control. They are monopolists who have learned the best way to dominate the world is to starve it into a shape small enough for them to swallow. They accomplish this goal by reducing the possible scope of what you and the communities you live in may imagine and attempt. Slop’s degradation of internet culture helps them do it, by depriving people of the tools they need to think through their lives and reach one another.

Like an algal bloom or patch of kudzu, AI slop wins by suffocating whatever else may try to draw the light, generating monocultural landscapes of greedy, gushing green.