Slop, slop everywhere and not a drop to drink.
Slop isn’t new. It’s as old as mass media itself. Slop, or content that is quick and easy to create, is designed to be consumed just as easily and forgotten just as fast. By its very nature, it’s not very memorable. Oftentimes we dissociate while we watch—or read or listen as the case may be. Slop distracts us from ourselves as much as it distracts us from the world.
Slop is accused of degenerating its audience. Thus each new form of slop, is accompanied by a moral panic. In this way, writing itself may be the first slop.
Socrates complained: “If men learn [to read], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written.”
Critics accused reading of causing moral decay into the early modern era. The eighteenth century English writer Samuel Johnson insisted novels were for “the young, the ignorant, and the idle.” The inventor of Corn Flakes, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, warned reading fiction was “one of the most pernicious habits” which “once thoroughly fixed…becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium.”
Before doomscrolling, bed rotting, and dopamine addiction, there was “reading fever” and “reading mania”.
The sloptimist notes that media has been corrupting us since time immemorial. With time, the slop of the past becomes the canon of the future. Slop is always whatever media format is most dynamic and innovative in the present.
Slop has another quality. It is generative. It arrives in volume and displaces older, more refined forms, outcompeting them like an invasive species: a massive kudzu vine rapidly growing in the media ecosystem. The oral epic is overcome by the papyrus scroll; the written word by the printed book; the novel by the radio play; radio by film and television; film and television by artificial intelligence and memes.
Whatever media format is newest is slop. In thirty years time, the twentysomethings of today may mourn generative AI. “Whatever happened to Miyazaki memes? That was real culture.” The teens of 2050 are addicted to Neuralink-enabled orgasms, the feelies predicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The sloptimist positions his taste ahead of the curve. Taking the long view, he is probably correct.
In the parlance of New York, slop is lowbrow brilliant. It serves authentic market demands. Audiences love slop. That is the entire rationale for its existence. Slop excites. Slop titillates. Slop entertains.
Slop resists institutionalization and therefore institutional capture in that it is always ahead. Someday it will be conquered, curated, tamed. Ancient Greek texts and nineteenth century novels become “the books and school of the ages” per Harold Bloom. Sitcoms and gameshows give way to prestige TV. With a little distance, movies are classic cinema.
The New York Times is already institutionalizing our recent entertainment past. Last month, they released a list of “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century”.
What the sloptimist forgets is that most slop is lost to time. Forgotten slop remains slop forever. High culture is not immune to this dynamic, but it has a higher signal to noise ratio. It anticipates the archival needs of preservation. Slop is unbothered. Thus, even slop of quality often disappears.
Daniel Keller, coiner of the term sloptimism, told me at a party that “culture doesn’t always look the way you want it to”. But digital slop does face higher barriers to being remembered. We learn every day that nineties TV classics, created on hard media may be inaccessible. Some have been destroyed. Others are vaulted due to intellectual property issues. Where is The Real World: Seattle? Where is Daria with the original soundtrack? These are low-lift additions to Paramount+. Will MTV even exist when the copyrights expire and distribution is legal? Or will a private equity firm liquidate the media before it can be preserved.
The forgotten penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century, and the faintly remembered pulp fiction of the twentieth, have had more lasting power than nineties TV.
Books, paintings, and sculptures have proven the most durable cultural forms. Even if they have declined in popularity, they may be what is left to future historians when they attempt to divine the social currents of our day.
The internet is closing. There is a global push to lock up content in a prison and make approved media only viewable to those willing to provide legal documentation of their identity and age. The sloptimist of today presumes the freewheeling internet of the early twenty-first century is a given.
But it’s not.
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