Slop works well when the metaphor applies more literally. Slop is pig feed and made from leftover food waste. Most of the food waste is garbage, but some of it might be leftover Thanksgiving turkey. But when put all together and fed to pigs, it’s all slop. To the pigs, it’s all the same. They devour soiled napkins, guts, and prime cuts without distinction.
So there’s two key aspects to slop: (1) the aggregated mess of substance and (2) the uncritical devouring of that substance.
Using that conception, I think of a lot of network tv, cable news, almost anything AI generated, airport books, etc. Even when “creative” humans are involved, the end product is so optimized for the market that it’s just slop. And my own anecdotal experience is that probably 80-90% of US americans don’t care/couldn’t tell. Much like pigs.
Marx: "In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk." – Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital
'If you say “slop” to your parents, they will assume you’re talking about “low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet”'
Assuming a lot about the savviness of other people's parents.
Slop is anything that's considered of such low nutritional value for humans that it is collected and disposed of by feeding it to hogs. It's an example of taking something of no value for one purpose (nourishing people) and putting it to productive use (feeding hogs, which are in turn slaughtered to feed humans). So the hog basically processes the slop, converting it to pork. This process is kind of like data analytics, where data are analyzed to produce "digestible" information.
Will we ever again have a word of the year that isn't just some way to over explain the digital world? Is it wordslop when they do this cheap and lazy gimmick every single year?
I think your definition is good, but maybe add “where texture or character would otherwise be expected.” A hammer isn’t toolslop because we expect it to be a commodity. The fact that basically all brands have converged on an undifferentiable design is fine because that design is essentially perfect and anyway nobody ever expected a hammer to have personality. A Toyota Venza is carslop because it represents removal of character from something (the personal car) that has historically been imbued with a lot of character in American society.
To make slop is to render something that *was* more than a commodity just a commodity.
Just riffing here but two things come to mind, the first is infantilisation, slop implies pigs but I think a lot about the idea that being fed 'content' is a kind of baby state: it's decided for us what we're going to eat & all we have to do is sit there & eat it. (Shades of Wall-E...) The 'here comes the aeroplane' bit is also applicable in this sense: packaged in lies.
Basically slop is horrible because it's cynical: it's pure commerce wearing creativity's skin. This is especially sacrilegous to those of us (artists etc.) who have dedicated our lives to the labour of true communication. Also, I guess, it's horrifying to understand most people can't tell the difference / don't care.
The porcine connection to slop has been mentioned multiple times already, but I don't think you can overstate its centrality to the concept. For slop to exist, there must me a piggie to consume it.
I clearly remember online content being refered to as slop long before the proliferation of genAI content, and it was almost always in reference to the piggies that consume it. Sometimes lovingly tongue-in-cheek, like the Chapo boys, sometimes contemptuously.
Some of what we call slop is more akin to guilty pleasure content. (I know true crime docs are rotting my brain, but I'm just a little piggy and I can't help myself.)
Other times it's more malicious, as in the case of cheap engagement bait targetted at screen-addled dopamine junkies.
So, to me, a critical part of defining slop is observing the relationship between the slop creator, the slop consumer, and the incentive structures between them. The moral valence of the slop depends on where you are in the food chain.
I must say (which, incidentally, goes in favour of your definition) that no sane person with any amount of human will to live, would ever not consider crossover SUVs to be carslop. They are made for the word, and the word for them.
1. Yes, optimization is perspectival, but when something is presented as fit for a certain purpose, it should be, in fact, optimized for that purpose. Hammers generally are, but a hammer that's badly made and therefore breaks when used could reasonably be called "toolslop". For most of what's known as "slop" on the web - "fake news, engagement bait, sexualized content, and other types of feedslop", as you wrote recently - there's a mismatch between at least implicit promise and delivered substance: fake news is presented as news, but it's lies; engagement bait is presented as exciting and important, but it's exaggerated and banal; etc. That mismatch is partly why the dismissive term "slop" feels appropriate.
2. Slop may involve not only optimization but faddishness. Take carslop. (It's definitely a thing, and "carslop" isn't a bad term for it. Thanks for coining a term I hadn't quite realized I need but will now be using.) I doubt it's just a matter of optimizing for reliable operation or even economical manufacturing. I suspect carmakers pay close attention to each other's designs, and if some model becomes popular, for whatever reason, models resembling it follow, not because its visible characteristics are functionally superior but because they're what success currently looks like. And perish the thought your designs look outdated! A similar dynamic probably applies to much slop on the web, and I expect the training of "AI" models on output from "AI" models will intensify it.
It's making me think of the origins and applications of the word "Ersatz", which paradoxically now seems to carry a weight of authenticity and charge to it.
One thing I’ve been thinking for slop along the lines of “fully optimized” is that slop is characterized by addressing “market need” as the whole reason for its existence. It is the space between large TAM content and exists to gap fill between higher-effort posting, like movies, writing a book, etc. In a way slop often feels overly personal, as if a whole graphic design studio is in the employ of a single person to make them a birthday card.
Is Chris Anderson's Long Tail a touchstone for this discussion? Platforms that tend to enable more content might reveal miracles but they also encourage slop
Speaking broadly, when something is "optimized for the better" it is usually optimized for one thing and the trade-offs that need to be made for this optimization give that thing character or even a kind of beauty. Chasing a single ideal of perfection might be wrong-headed, risky, or produce unacceptable trade-offs but I don't think it engenders forgettable slop. The cybertruck is many things and few of them are good, but it is not forgettable.
Sloptimization (sorry!) occurs when you are optimizing on too many dimensions at once. Chipotle excels at producing food that is easy to consume, has a reasonable shelf life, a cheap supply chain, is just fresh and whole enough to message it, and requires few staff with real cooking expertise since everything is unitary and interchangeable. This is precisely the kind of business that can "scale" while producing an utterly mediocre, forgettable product that avoids design risks by letting its customers do the work of putting the meal together.
The conditions of production, not just consumption, contribute to the proliferation of products that produce sensation without any aesthetics at all.
Slop works well when the metaphor applies more literally. Slop is pig feed and made from leftover food waste. Most of the food waste is garbage, but some of it might be leftover Thanksgiving turkey. But when put all together and fed to pigs, it’s all slop. To the pigs, it’s all the same. They devour soiled napkins, guts, and prime cuts without distinction.
So there’s two key aspects to slop: (1) the aggregated mess of substance and (2) the uncritical devouring of that substance.
Using that conception, I think of a lot of network tv, cable news, almost anything AI generated, airport books, etc. Even when “creative” humans are involved, the end product is so optimized for the market that it’s just slop. And my own anecdotal experience is that probably 80-90% of US americans don’t care/couldn’t tell. Much like pigs.
Is there a big gap between commodification and slopification
Marx: "In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk." – Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital
commodification is an antecedent condition of slopification maybe?
enshittification of the term "slop"
'If you say “slop” to your parents, they will assume you’re talking about “low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet”'
Assuming a lot about the savviness of other people's parents.
Slop is anything that's considered of such low nutritional value for humans that it is collected and disposed of by feeding it to hogs. It's an example of taking something of no value for one purpose (nourishing people) and putting it to productive use (feeding hogs, which are in turn slaughtered to feed humans). So the hog basically processes the slop, converting it to pork. This process is kind of like data analytics, where data are analyzed to produce "digestible" information.
Will we ever again have a word of the year that isn't just some way to over explain the digital world? Is it wordslop when they do this cheap and lazy gimmick every single year?
It's just that techrealm is the field ripest for viral neologisms. But yeah, boring
I think your definition is good, but maybe add “where texture or character would otherwise be expected.” A hammer isn’t toolslop because we expect it to be a commodity. The fact that basically all brands have converged on an undifferentiable design is fine because that design is essentially perfect and anyway nobody ever expected a hammer to have personality. A Toyota Venza is carslop because it represents removal of character from something (the personal car) that has historically been imbued with a lot of character in American society.
To make slop is to render something that *was* more than a commodity just a commodity.
Yes, this. The elimination of actual... design
Just riffing here but two things come to mind, the first is infantilisation, slop implies pigs but I think a lot about the idea that being fed 'content' is a kind of baby state: it's decided for us what we're going to eat & all we have to do is sit there & eat it. (Shades of Wall-E...) The 'here comes the aeroplane' bit is also applicable in this sense: packaged in lies.
Basically slop is horrible because it's cynical: it's pure commerce wearing creativity's skin. This is especially sacrilegous to those of us (artists etc.) who have dedicated our lives to the labour of true communication. Also, I guess, it's horrifying to understand most people can't tell the difference / don't care.
The porcine connection to slop has been mentioned multiple times already, but I don't think you can overstate its centrality to the concept. For slop to exist, there must me a piggie to consume it.
I clearly remember online content being refered to as slop long before the proliferation of genAI content, and it was almost always in reference to the piggies that consume it. Sometimes lovingly tongue-in-cheek, like the Chapo boys, sometimes contemptuously.
Some of what we call slop is more akin to guilty pleasure content. (I know true crime docs are rotting my brain, but I'm just a little piggy and I can't help myself.)
Other times it's more malicious, as in the case of cheap engagement bait targetted at screen-addled dopamine junkies.
So, to me, a critical part of defining slop is observing the relationship between the slop creator, the slop consumer, and the incentive structures between them. The moral valence of the slop depends on where you are in the food chain.
I must say (which, incidentally, goes in favour of your definition) that no sane person with any amount of human will to live, would ever not consider crossover SUVs to be carslop. They are made for the word, and the word for them.
It's so slop it's gem.
You should read my "notes on slop" from october - we have pretty much the exact same take
Two observations:
1. Yes, optimization is perspectival, but when something is presented as fit for a certain purpose, it should be, in fact, optimized for that purpose. Hammers generally are, but a hammer that's badly made and therefore breaks when used could reasonably be called "toolslop". For most of what's known as "slop" on the web - "fake news, engagement bait, sexualized content, and other types of feedslop", as you wrote recently - there's a mismatch between at least implicit promise and delivered substance: fake news is presented as news, but it's lies; engagement bait is presented as exciting and important, but it's exaggerated and banal; etc. That mismatch is partly why the dismissive term "slop" feels appropriate.
2. Slop may involve not only optimization but faddishness. Take carslop. (It's definitely a thing, and "carslop" isn't a bad term for it. Thanks for coining a term I hadn't quite realized I need but will now be using.) I doubt it's just a matter of optimizing for reliable operation or even economical manufacturing. I suspect carmakers pay close attention to each other's designs, and if some model becomes popular, for whatever reason, models resembling it follow, not because its visible characteristics are functionally superior but because they're what success currently looks like. And perish the thought your designs look outdated! A similar dynamic probably applies to much slop on the web, and I expect the training of "AI" models on output from "AI" models will intensify it.
It's making me think of the origins and applications of the word "Ersatz", which paradoxically now seems to carry a weight of authenticity and charge to it.
One thing I’ve been thinking for slop along the lines of “fully optimized” is that slop is characterized by addressing “market need” as the whole reason for its existence. It is the space between large TAM content and exists to gap fill between higher-effort posting, like movies, writing a book, etc. In a way slop often feels overly personal, as if a whole graphic design studio is in the employ of a single person to make them a birthday card.
Is Chris Anderson's Long Tail a touchstone for this discussion? Platforms that tend to enable more content might reveal miracles but they also encourage slop
Speaking broadly, when something is "optimized for the better" it is usually optimized for one thing and the trade-offs that need to be made for this optimization give that thing character or even a kind of beauty. Chasing a single ideal of perfection might be wrong-headed, risky, or produce unacceptable trade-offs but I don't think it engenders forgettable slop. The cybertruck is many things and few of them are good, but it is not forgettable.
Sloptimization (sorry!) occurs when you are optimizing on too many dimensions at once. Chipotle excels at producing food that is easy to consume, has a reasonable shelf life, a cheap supply chain, is just fresh and whole enough to message it, and requires few staff with real cooking expertise since everything is unitary and interchangeable. This is precisely the kind of business that can "scale" while producing an utterly mediocre, forgettable product that avoids design risks by letting its customers do the work of putting the meal together.
The conditions of production, not just consumption, contribute to the proliferation of products that produce sensation without any aesthetics at all.