NOTES ON SLOP REALISM
I’ve been really dialed in on the word OPTIMIZED, which Adam — the etymology nerd — identified as related to the culture of Slop Content.
“Authenticity is now something you can perform while imperfection is now something to perfect.”
Adam looks to the role of critical aesthetics, like Corecore, as a brief moment of critique before becoming subsumed into the “engagement treadmill.”
It’s easy for engagement carpetbaggers to copy an aesthetic to score easy likes and views.
Adam remembers Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, in which he refuses to give into the Moloch of his day: Everything is holy! Everybody’s holy! Everywhere is holy! Everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
Adam identifies the opposite of SLOP realism as an imminent recognition of the (w)holiness of life.
NOTES ON SLOP ECOLOGY
Adam looks at who is to BLAME for the phenomenon of the degradation of the aesthetic and cultural standards. Is it the user, the dealer, the drug itself? The state for not intervening?
SLOP comes from the 4Chan conspiracy that Jewish Cabals were poisoning the food for the Goys aka the Hebrew word for Gentiles. It’s been pretty successfully reappropriated in the sense of AI SLOP, not referring anymore to the original underpinning conspiracy theory. And its more common parlance extends from this reappropriation.
SLOP, it seems, is everywhere. It’s not an IF question, it is a WHEN issue. Hallmark movies, pulp magazines. SLOP has been optimized and scaled to the point of texturelessness, characterlessness.
In this sense, SLOP is not a genre nor limited to a specific subject. It is the general ethos of production, resigning ourselves to our own instrumentality. A refusal of our responsibility to our situatedness.
Slop is more of a spiritual threat than a specific content.
Adam outlines some rules he has:
1. change incentives for producing/consuming slop
2. change distribution structures
3. produce content intentionally
4. consume content intentionally
5. be mindful of the entire ecology rather than one symptom
1. change incentives for producing/consuming slop
2. change distribution structures
3. produce content intentionally
4. consume content intentionally
5. be mindful of the entire ecology rather than one symptom
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