You may have already heard about how “Slop” was chosen as the 2025 “Word Of The Year” by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
That’s hardly surprising. It seems everything is becoming slop these days. AI slop. Internet slop. Hollywood slop. Literary slop. Music slop. Google slop. Amazon slop. Instagram slop. Culinary slop. Academic slop. Political slop. A vast sea of slop with billions of people drowning in it.
The thing about monoculture is it always destroys itself. In the 1950s, every banana exported from Central America was a single genetic clone: the Gros Michel. It’s reported to be far more delicious than what we buy today. But when Panama disease hit, it wiped them out completely. All of them. Gone. No genetic diversity meant no defense. The replacement banana, the yellow Cavendish we all know and love, is facing the same fate. Sameness, in agriculture or in content, is biologically unsustainable.
We all know why this is happening. Our world is completely connected and controlled by the Internet, and the Internet is totally controlled by “The Algorithm.” And The Algorithm is programmed to default to slop. Everything becomes flattened out, everything becomes “beige,” because that’s what The Algorithm is optimized to do.
An old Gapingvoid friend, Cory Doctorow, recently caught the commentariat’s attention with his bestselling book, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It”, which explains this recent slop phenomenon as the inevitable result of the way companies are incentivized to make the owners as much money as possible at the expense of the customer, society and yes, even the investors themselves. Things are getting worse because we’ve basically incentivized the world to get worse. We’ve optimized for slop.
And like Neo before he swallows the Red Pill, we sit there uneasily, knowing something is not quite right, something is definitely off, but we’re not quite sure what to do about it.
Depressed? Well, you shouldn’t be.
The thing to remember is, we’re human. And human beings weren’t designed for slop.
Human beings were designed to live in color, not beige.
We believe this problem of slop will inevitably create massive opportunities for brave souls to create alternatives.
And besides, this is nothing new.
Over on You Tube, the academic and Romantic poetry expert, Dr Adam Walker talks about how we’ve been here before, many times.
How the solipsism and navel-gazing of the Medieval Church, plus the population decline following the Black Death (similar in scope to the upcoming massive global population decline of the late 21st Century), created the conditions that made the 15th-Century Italian renaissance possible. Or how the overconfidence of reason, logic and technology of The Enlightenment did the same for the Romantic movement. Or how the over-academic standards of the Paris Salon did the same for the French Impressionists.
We’ve seen this in our own lives too. For instance, some of us will be old enough to remember how Punk Rock came about as a reaction to the dreary, commodified stadium rock and AM radio. Things become dreary and commodified, until some creative types try something crazy and shake things up.
This is what so many artists, innovators and creatives seem so disconnected from reality. Disconnection is an inherent part of the job.
Their job is to unplug themselves from the everyday, pedestrian concerns of normal society and develop their inner world in isolation, only bringing it to light when the world is finally ready for it.
The truth is, “Slop” is a problem as old as time. And thankfully for us, so is the solution.
As Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian novelist censored by Stalin, once wrote: “True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”
The question we must ask ourselves is whether or not we’re brave enough to be one of them.
