slop capitalism

towards a unified theory of slop

A few weeks ago I ended a post everything's computer, but how? with this line:

The tech platforms intend to replace civil society, which they relied upon without repaying and destroyed without understanding, with an unpredictable, inhuman process, the only end of which is the perpetuation of itself.

I believe most people who are paying attention would agree with that take. Platforms, as writers like

Mike Pepi

describe, have spent the last two decades nibbling away at the institutions that used to run the world. With the second Trump administration, we have reached a critical point in this process — but you could already feel the camel straining years before the latest straw.

In this post, I want to define a term I stumbled into coining — “slop capitalism” — and talk about what it means for culture and the internet. I’m interested in slop because pointing and poking at it exposes things that are otherwise hard to grasp concretely. Blaming the algorithm can feel like blaming the air, blaming Zuck or Musk obscures the infrastructures that allowed for them, and the field of action which interests me most is the everyday — the user’s encounter with digital media.

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. Platforms suck nowadays, and it’s on purpose because they get more money for breaking stuff and keeping it broken than for building stuff. The reason why you must affix “reddit” to every Google Search, talk to three bots over the phone to answer a question about your health insurance, and see empty storefronts all over your hometown is because they are trying to shrink your world so it can be more easily evaporated into their cloud.

Perhaps Netflix CEO Reed Hastings put it best:

…when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin.

The goal of these companies is to take up as much time, attention, and space as possible. One way they have done this is by creating compelling products and experiences — addictive interfaces, fine-tuned algorithms. Another way they’ve done it is by breaking the frames that used to parcel out time and space as people lived in them: your favorite show no longer airs specifically on Tuesdays from 8 to 9 PM but any time you want, meaning it’s now competing with activities that used to hold those slots. People used to have to walk to the store to buy a plunger or talk to a friend, but now it’s just a click away — Amazon and WhatsApp compete with “going out in public” the same way Netflix competes with “sleep.”

Source: Public Domain Image Archive

Downstream of this disruption of our traditional ways of orienting in time and space is the platforms’ destruction of social value. By competing with “going out in public,” the platforms work to destroy “public.” We see the reduction of what you might call the Overton window for being-in-the-world, so that the only things which fit within it are those the platforms can most easily scan and control.

When a neighborhood bar and its employees are replaced by nine UberEats ghost kitchens and precarious gig workers, it’s bad not just because value is unjustly scraped up by an exploitative platform. It’s also bad because the net amount of value in the system (understanding “value” as not limited to money but also as community, experiences, and quality of product or service) is reduced. The food is worse, the lives of the people who make, deliver, and eat it are worse, and main streets go silent.

A similar thing is going on culturally with AI slop, as commentators like Lauren Meisner at

Centennial World

and others have pointed out. If sixteen out of every twenty reels you see are AI slop, like cherished mutual

Adam Aleksic

reported a few months ago, then that’s sixteen chances you’re missing to meet somebody, learn something, ask a question, and practice empathy. That’s also sixteen chances which a thoughtful creator, news outlet, or real-life friend is missing to connect with you. Meta’s much-maligned plans to add AI-generated profiles are part of this same slop project.

some slop reels, gathered by 4040 Media

It is this opportunity cost of AI slop that bothers me more than the fact that it’s AI, or that it’s bad. Slop reduces the overall value of the system, making it easier to control.

Growing up Slop: Gen Z

Speaking to

Frederick Woodruff

on his podcast a while back, he asked me about being a “Gen Z time creature,” and a way of describing my experience came to me, prompted by his questions. I said we (meaning, those of us born in the mid-90s to mid-00s) grew up with the phone as a middleman between ourselves and new experiences.

To make friends, we joined a group chat. To date, we went on Tinder. To find a job or make money, we went on Indeed and LinkedIn. To find art and culture that spoke to us and our experiences, we went on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. The phone ushered us into the adult world and seemed to develop at the same pace we did, becoming more complex, problematic, and capable at the same rate as we and our friends.

Google Maps was in the car giving directions as you learned to drive. Zuck sat shotgun as you whiled away time on Instagram waiting for your talking phase crush to reply, knowing that as soon as the notification popped up, you’d read it — but since the user interface of Apple’s iPhone allowed you to turn off read receipts, you’d have as long as you needed to craft a response that wouldn’t seem chalant. The platforms slid in between you and every person or thing in the world, making access smoother, cheaper, and more immediate — whether the thing was porn, radical politics, transportation, niche music and memes, or food delivery.

Such middlemen are nothing new — they just weren’t in the phones. Back in the day, you had radio DJs who chose which records to spin, matchmakers, reporters, headhunters, clerks, bureaucrats. These middlemen were by no means benign, nor were they all-powerful. But now they are gone as a daily presence in the lives of most people. To the extent they still exist, they are forced to fit their services into the predetermined grooves of the platforms and algorithms.

Last year, Google rolled out an AI Overview feature that told people to eat glue. At the time I worked for Know Your Meme, a website that runs (as many do) on traffic from search. Paired with Facebook’s decision to deprioritize links from reputable sources, we understood this as a kind of death sentence for the entire industry. People would read the AI overview and not click our links, meaning we’d make less money.

Most of all, I was confused: not only was Google worse at its job of connecting people to information, but it was actively destroying the economic foundation of the commons it drew from. If nobody can make money running a website, there won’t be any more websites for Google to find in its search results or train its AI on. It seemed self-destructive.

But it makes total sense when you realize that in the same way Netflix’s real competition is “sleep,” Google’s competition is “people knowing things.” The platforms are now incentivized to make people weaker, stupider, and less connected. It’s the same reason why you might question whether a job-board social platform actually wants you to get hired, or a dating app actually wants you to find love. Their power comes from you needing them to access whatever facet of social experience they have captured, because other options have been eliminated.

If the people running things right now get their way, we will have a future where all the middlemen are computer. Linda MacMahon, Secretary of Education and former chairwoman of WWE, wants AI (which she incomprehensibly calls “A-one”) to replace teachers. Already with DOGE, Grok AI scans through the government’s systems to ensure ideological conformity. Over in Israel, AI has replaced military leadership, generating lists of bombing targets.

You see it in your day-to-day life too. One of my favorite posts on Substack, by

Eddie Huang

, Big Tech Has Disrupted The Social Contract, describes how decency and service have been demolished by tech platforms. Under slop capitalism, the bad stuff is not a side effect or collateral, but the point. 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. 404 Media aptly described it as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality.

Memes Against Slop

If you have followed this newsletter for a while, you’ll see that I tend to stumble into new ideas and they develop across posts. What I do on the internet is an open-book research process: on my TikTok, I’ll sketch out an idea, read the comments, and adjust accordingly. I’ll write it out here, see what people tell me, read it over, and then adjust again.

So that’s why I began this post quoting myself and am quoting myself again here. In last week’s I am John Pork and So Are You, I wrote:

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. Such is the dark economics and semiotics of slop.

By filling feeds with slop, you crowd out new data, new ideas, and the chance to see how other people live — you deprive people of the tools they need to make sense of their own lives and learn. Since culture now primarily exists online, attacking the social media feed as a source of information, human contact, and self-expression means going right at the jugular of civil society.

AI orange cat is, sadly, the enemy now

In September, I wrote that the scroll is “fireside, church pew, library shelf, concert seat and bedside table wrapped into one. The scroll is among the most sacred spaces in our culture,” and I still believe that. I hate AI slop because I love brainrot. What grifters who post thirty reels of AI-generated shock garbage are doing is degrading the social media platform as a cultural space — and attacking the communities which animate platforms.

I’ve come to see brainrot, in a way, as a means of fighting back against slop — even if only aesthetically. By taking AI-generators and content, and turning them to make very human jokes and stories with whimsy and spark, what creators do is assert themselves in spite of slop. Memes have always jousted with the more spammy and commercial sides of the internet, exploiting quirks in algorithms and mocking (or ironically embracing) spam, whether it’s the 97 year old diner in New York that still makes Coke the old-fashioned way or Donghua Jinlong’s Industrial Grade Glycine.

Even on slop reels themselves, the human touch intrudes. I reported on orange cat AI stories for the BBC a while back, and one of the things I noticed was people in the comments sections would have real emotional responses or share stories about their own lives in response to the AI-generated cats. This collision of AI-generated slop and human response was actually key to the virality of the AI cat slop: the videos blew up following a trend of people filming their toddlers’ tearful reactions to the AI cat stories.

AI slop’s destructive project is being resisted online, perhaps ineffectively, and perhaps inadvertently. The story is not some simple and inevitably successful top-down imposition. I always think of Michel de Certeau and his insistence on the “tactics” of ordinary people who “faire avec,” (make with, literally) the slop which mass media feeds them. In a memorable passage in Arts de faire: L’invention du quotidien (1983) de Certeau writes:

…readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.

People on social media are also nomads and poachers. The pharaoh here is Zuck. Reading, for de Certeau, is a way of using the resources and terms of power to find a picture of the world that is meaningful to you. In another place, de Certeau writes:

Misunderstood producers, poets of their own business, inventors of paths in the jungles of functionalist rationality… consumers trace their own routes, senseless on the surface because they are not coherent with the built-up space, written and prefabricated, where consumers move. […] Even though they have, for material, the vocabularies of cliché languages (those of the television, newspaper, supermarket, city planning) and even though they remain enframed by prescribed syntaxes (the temporal regulation of hours and schedules, the conventional organization of spaces, etc.) their traversals remain distinct from the system they infiltrate, drawing upon that very system the weave of their own distinct interests and desires. They circulate, come and go, overflow and gush across an imposed terrain, foamy movings of an ocean that threads its way among the rocks and crannies of an established order.

The problem with slop capitalism, in my view, is its attempt to restrict these improvised “traversals” of people even further, to engineer the ocean so it flows the way they want it to flow. The easiest way to do that is reduce the amount of water you’re working with — replace the “jungle of functionalist rationality” which de Certeau saw in the cities of the 1980s with the desert of artificial rationality we see in the cities and social platforms of 2025.

You watch this desert encroaching already, as ghost kitchens replace restaurants and Amazon replaces corner shops, as opportunity grows scarcer and services enshittify, as feeds fill with AI-generated slop. In order to ward off poachers, the kings have replaced the animals in the game preserve with robot critters that have neither meat nor fur.

not good.

Of course, people always find a way — and we are already resisting this, at least a little, by laughing at it. The task at hand is to take that further: shatter their rationality before it suffocates you. Be your fullest self, go where you want, and embrace your status as a producer — don’t log off.

And don’t accept the deal offered by the platforms: your humanity in exchange for the scraps they drop from the table, and the convenience of not having to leave your house or think very hard to access them.