Slop, slop everywhere and not a drop of think
how to save the internet in a billion easy steps
A while ago I read this great post (thanks,
!) about how we might be able to save the internet from enshittification (Cory Doctorow’s clever term). That post’s author, Packy McCormick, promotes another great neologism for the 21st Century:Slop.
Slop itself isn’t new, and Packy didn’t coin the term. It refers to the vast tide of “superficial, mediocre, and banal” (and often, but not always, short) posts and tweets and whatnot that washes up every hour of every day in our social media, email accounts, web searches, even dribbling into our text messages on our phones (ick, ick, ick! How do I stop that?!) Humans generated plenty of slop before generative AI came along, but now it’s worse. As Ted Gioia notes, “TikTok was the pioneer of the endless scroll. But within a few months, all of the other social media platforms imitated them. This was the moment when the Annoyance Economy really took off.”1 Now, LLMs are literally trained and optimized to churn out high-quality2 slop with breathtaking speed.
Packy says slop isn’t necessarily bad writing, nor is it all hard-sell sales pitches or nonfactual disinformation. Slop is just mediocrity in pursuit of metrics. Packy says,
The problem isn’t slop itself. Slop on its own is fine. The internet is a big place, and people should be free to produce whatever shitty things they want to produce on their low-traffic websites and low-follower-count social media accounts.
The problem is the fact that we have to see it, that it works.
The problem is the dastardly duo of slop and algorithms.
Once the algorithm’s preferences are known, people throw as much algorithm-shaped slop at it as they can in hopes of winning the engagement lottery.
The bad news is that the internet is never going back to the way it was. It’s too late. The rules of the current game are known and the game is too easy to play.
When things become easier —anyone can make a website on Squarespace, anyone can produce images in Midjourney, practically anyone can start a startup, whatever— the vast majority of the things produced the easy way are total dogshit. When algorithms embrace the dogshit, or the dogshit contorts itself to please the algorithm, the whole visible internet turns to dogshit.
So what can we do to save the internet?
What can we do to keep slop from enshittifying our personal internet experience, at least, and maybe create—or find and join—online communities that are slop-free or slop-resistant, without also killing authentic small talk?
Well, Packy loses me here. I’m not sure I understand all the applications and implications of oncyber v2 but it seems too much like the metaverse and Web 3.0 to really excite me. And although I am a very odd duck in many ways, I’m relatively normal in my adoption of tech and my learning curve to use it and adapt it to unintended ends. So if oncyber doesn’t seem accessible or useful to me, even as a “toy,” it isn’t the answer to “what can we [i.e. you and me] do to save the internet?”
But other things in Packy’s article give me hope.
Like this diagram:
Pace layers aren’t Packy’s idea either3 but they are a super helpful concept and I’m delighted he shared them with us. The idea is that the higher layers are (or can be) the drivers of change in our world, the lower layers change more slowly than the higher layers do, creating stability in the whole system. While being affected by the layers above, they also stabilize them. As their author Steward Brand says in The Clock of the Long Now,
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
I haven’t yet read Stewart Brand’s book, but I plan to. If you have, let me know what you think of it!
One thing about “pace layers” that I’m not sure about is which end of the scale drives change, and which end adds inertia to the system… Packy seems to think that change flows from the top down, and to some degree, that’s true.
It seems to me that the topmost layers (“fashion” (trendiness/virality) and commerce) give the illusion of being powerful, implacable forces of change that have accelerated almost beyond our ability to keep pace with them. But really, shifts in the lowest layers (culture and nature) drive change in the layers above them just as powerfully, albeit so slowly that those who live in and pay close attention to the uppermost layers won’t even notice the tectonic shifts are happening until they have already begun to play out.4 As culture changes, tech and infrastructure (the Internet) will change too: if we all hate the Internet as it is, we’ll look for more comfortable ways to use it, and we’ll look for things that aren’t internet-related to meet the needs and desires that the internet once met for us.
So my humble suggestion for fighting the enshittification of the Internet is to be the grain of sand in the oyster. Express your irritation to the software companies, and try not to use the ones that annoy you most.
Fill out customer satisfaction surveys and complain, in eloquent detail, about the encroaching enshittification of that platform or app, and any slop they might be dishing out.
Then copy and paste your eloquent complaint into an email to their customer service folks, so that your opinion isn’t just part of a data set but a specific “ticket” they need to address.
Support un-shittified alternatives: Bookshop.org instead of Amazon for your books, perhaps. Leave TwittX for BlueSky or Mastodon, or leave all those platforms behind and just nurture group texts with certain friends and family (small groups, please, you can create as many groups as you like). Or go find—and regularly visit—your local bookstore or library.
Don’t participate in the tsunami of slop. Put some thought and heart into whatever you post, in whatever format, on whatever platform you use. Don’t write for the algorithms. Write for your readers. Or for your self. Or heck, for your grandkids, if you are of a certain age. Honestly, if something of yours does go viral, do you want it to be slop, or thoughtful and authentic?
These may seem like minuscule efforts compared to the vast tide we are fighting, but remember the power of chaos theory,5 and the truism that we must be the change we want to see in the world.
And take solace in the power of the lower layers: Culture can be created, eroded, and transformed,6 but Nature cannot be denied for long.
(Cue the arguments about the nature of Nature… I’ll participate in the comments if you want to get into it!)
Have a wonderful Memorial Day!
An Ugly New Marketing Strategy Is Driving Me Nuts: scroll down just past the third image, “the dopamine loop,” to find this quote in its larger context, which happens to be 100% on topic for this post too. I believe my “four steps” (repeated a billion times) would also pivot the internet away from AAM (Annoyance Avoidance Motivation) as much as it would roll back enshittification… and isn’t “annoyance avoidance as a sales tactic” just a new facet of the larger problem?
LLMs work in such a way that, the better they get, the more laser-focused the quality of their outcome gets… right at the top of the bell curve of quality. The exact middle. C+ territory. Better than half of all published work in its training model, and worse than the the other half.
This is one of the many things I like about Packy. He humbly and happily gives credit where credit is due!
Climate change is one such shift in the Nature layer that will unavoidably affect all the layers above it. The Culture shift in the conservative political movement—worldwide—is another thing that most folks didn’t see coming until it suddenly, seismically, emerged.
“A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rain forest can cause a typhoon half a world away”… but also half a year away perhaps. With a margin of error of five months either way! Here’s a great intro to real chaos theory, not the social media oversimplifications of it.
…by stories! Tell yours well and publish wisely. We can help you do that.