I’m convinced I was ahead of my time. This year, Spirit Halloween also started selling brainrot-themed costumes, and people are racking up tens of millions of views for dressing up as AI slop characters. None of this should really surprise you: Halloween costumes are a reflection of pop culture, and generative AI is playing an ever-larger role in shaping that culture.

But there’s something deeper going on here. Well beyond a single holiday, it’s become a trend to ironically embody machine subjectivity. There are countless viral videos of “humans stealing AI jobs” and skits recreating AI slop in real life and musicians performing the saxophone riff from AI microdramas. The Instagram account @ahh.gpt regularly pulls millions of views for pretending to talk like ChatGPT.

In all of these examples, the human voluntarily becomes the machine, adopting the mannerisms of a chatbot or generated artifact for humorous effect. The action is an inversion of the default reality where the machine becomes the human by absorbing our training data, mirroring our behavior, and replacing us at work.

To exist in modern society is to be confronted with the oppressive sense of being a cog in a machine, puppeteered by an automated system beyond anybody’s control. By instead treating the machines as our marionettes, we temporarily flip the script and reassert our own agency. We are proving that whatever AI does, we can do too—and more. The unspoken implication is typically that the machine is doing something incorrectly, failing at its attempt to imitate us.

In her Theory of the Gimmick, the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai argues that there is a dark humor inherent to the labor-saving devices of late capitalism. So many of our tools are designed to save time and money, but end up feeling closer to Rube Goldberg machines, where a complex process is used to accomplish something that could actually be quite simple.

Generative AI is the ultimate gimmick, intended to optimize workflow but actually consuming unnecessary energy to create a deteriorated product. Yes, it ultimately captures our attention, but not without making us aware of its simultaneous excess and deficiency. There is a new style of “post-human” humor, layered on top of the brainrot aesthetic of the early-to-mid 2020s, that exposes these gimmicks through the subversive positioning of humans as agents of online degradation.

This could take the form of ironically producing and consuming slop, which is already funny through a certain cynical lens, but it could also mean becoming part of the gimmick, wasting labor to recreate a waste of labor. By voluntarily participating from the same perspective as the machines, you highlight their contradictions while establishing agency beyond the system.

Problematically, there is a fine line between puppeteer and puppet. An NPC actor begging for galaxies on TikTok Live is actually just someone who needs social media to survive, and ironic slop is actually just slop. As such, this mode of humor risks being captured by the same process it’s critiquing.

“Brainrot” was always centered around the individual “rotting of the brain,” where you are complicit in your own mental decay. Post-human humor acknowledges that the decay is unavoidably embedded in a larger network of enshittified platforms and agentic systems. It satirically asserts itself as part of that network, deliberately rotting other people’s brains as a concurrent act of protest and power.

I’ll admit I felt a strange thrill in becoming Tung Tung Tung Sahur. I’ve spent years worrying about how AI and algorithms are affecting us, and for that one night I could let go of all those concerns. Why resist the absurdity when I could instead embrace it? It’s not just subversive—it’s liberating.

Upcoming events

November 2 @ 10:45 am: Boston, MA - SciCom summit (information here)
November 2 @ 5:30 pm: Cambridge, MA - Harvard Linguistics Department (information here)
November 6-8: Kilkenny, Ireland - Kilkenomics Festival (tickets here)
November 8 @ 7:30 pm: Dublin, Ireland - Trinity College Dublin
November 10 @ 5:15 pm: Cambridge, UK - Cambridge Union
November 11 @ 5 pm: Cambridge, UK - Cambridge Psychology Society
November 12 @ 6:30 pm: London, UK - Waterstones Gower Street with Sophia Smith Galer (tickets here)

Gonzo journalism is back in vogue. It’s hip to be ever-so-slightly complicit in gooning subculture or agentic discourse or the dinergoth scene, as long as you can retreat to a sense of editorial detachment. These are the weirdos, not me—I’m just reporting on the phenomenon.

I went to that pro-data-center party, just like I went to the anti-data-center parties in New York City. It’s the same incestuous swarm of substackers and journalists accidentally interviewing other substackers and journalists. Everybody wants to be first to the spectacle, to have that smug victory of categorizing the sideshow into ruthlessly accurate archetypes.

And oh boy was it a thrill to actually talk to the AI finance crypto startup libertarian swamp creatures. It’s tempting to write about how the pro-data-center gender ratio was 5:1 or how that one Palantir employee proudly described himself as “spiritually Israeli” or how the protesters were booed off the stage by people chanting USA USA USA. But that’s what everybody else is writing about. It was more accurately a bunch of horny young republicans flirting with each other.

Same with the Luddite parties. I could describe the carabiner-wearing alt tattooed artists locking their flip phones in Yondr pouches, but they’re really just a bunch of horny young progressives flirting with each other.

I remember meeting the gooning article guy at a Luddite rave a while back. He’s working on a book, and I’m sure it’s going to be very well written. But you also get the sense that he’s running from something. He couldn’t go a minute without hitting his vape and making some kind of snide remark about the other party-goers.

Clearly, I’m also running from something. All the media vultures are, because we were never here for the story. That was always a pretense for the adrenaline rush of pinning up another specimen for dissection. In our briefly ironic moment of inhabiting the Weird Thing Happening, we feel alive before once again withdrawing to the postmodern discomfort of collecting ideologies like trading cards.

That Sam Kriss article covering the founders of Sperm Racing was incredible. But I also know the founders of Sperm Racing, and toured their headquarters a week before the piece came out. Everything Kriss wrote was accurate: it is a “social-media hype machine” run by agentic content hustlers. They’re also incredibly complex humans with a range of motivations and beliefs. So are the progressives and republicans and writers I’m writing about. When we categorize them, we reduce them so that we may vicariously experience their stories.

Not that there isn’t value to this kind of reporting. I think the Sperm Racers should be scrutinized for their line of work. I think there’s a public interest to reporting about gooning and data centers and the woke pockets of New England. But the main appeal, to both the journalists and the public, is a voyeuristic feeling of superiority over the Other. Our self-congratulatory critique opens a window into their lives, distracting us from living our own.

Last February, I went with my journalist friend to Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. It was incredible. The town is covered in groundhog statues and the festival rages from midnight to the early morning. At one point, the Star-Spangled Banner starts playing and morphs into the Imperial March from Star Wars. Then Josh Shapiro gets on stage and shouts that PETA can take our groundhog over his dead body. The crowd goes crazy and fireworks explode overhead.

Part of the appeal was the gimmick—it’s easy to read the event through a camp or provincializing lens—but both of us agreed that we really just wanted to be there. Hell yeah I want to get excited over a soothsaying rodent. Maybe I should suspend my pretensions, stop labeling everything, and actually just be here. Or, you know, I could write another substack essay.

The posts are all different, but all the same. A man hides in the bushes from the authorities. A shirtless old woman yells obscenities at her camera. A wild-eyed college burnout shares his discovery that we’re living in a 300,000-year-old simulation.

Each video has millions of views, and the comments range from concerned to encouraging. “Keep talking to the AI, it’s working.” “Please get help!” “I think bro is onto something.” In any case, the audience shares a frame of reference that the user does not: we are sane, and they are insane.

Now I’m on Old Person Instagram. A woman taps her phone in confusion. Another squints at her screen before starting to speak. A third accidentally zooms onto her own forehead. Here, the comments are warmer, but the underlying relation is the same as on schizogram. There is a power dynamic between the viewer and the poster: they don’t understand the internet, but I do.

In both of these instances, the naïve user unwittingly serves as a “lolcow”—an internet laughingstock who can be milked for laughs just like a “cash cow” can be milked for money. Except it’s really more about control. The humor is only enjoyed when the viewers can situate themselves as more knowledgeable or important.

The classic example of a lolcow is Joshua Block, known online as @worldoftshirts. Block is a clearly autistic young man known for drinking on camera and being goaded into public meltdowns by his viewers. While some people genuinely try to help, and others antagonize him further, both the instincts to protect and attack come from an assumed position of power over the lolcow. The feeling of asymmetry gives you a license to intervene, to try to shape this person’s life for better or for worse.

But every influencer-viewer dynamic comes with its own asymmetry. To look at someone is to objectify them, projecting a certain interpretation that cannot possibly match onto their more complex reality. To look at an image or video, meanwhile, is to objectify without the possibility of reciprocity. As Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, “photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal.”

They can’t see me, but I can see them.

With this asymmetry, the influencer inherently becomes a spectacle to be poked and prodded for your amusement. People check in on Charli D’Amelio like she’s their personal Tamagotchi. Millions unfollowed Vexbolts and helped MrBeast overtake T-Series and trolled KSI with the chair emoji. You, the viewer, can help determine an influencer’s reality. As popular as they might appear, they can’t do anything back to you. They are the court jester and you are their king.

Everybody trying to make it online inevitably experiences some form of audience capture, where our followers push us into expressing certain ideas and behaviors—so everybody is a lolcow to some degree. I like to think of myself as fairly independently minded, but I still feel myself regularly conforming to what I think my audience will appreciate.

There’s a spectrum, to be sure. The more you rely on your followers, the more you have to debase yourself for their approval: begging for galaxies on TikTok live, letting people dictate what you say on Cameo, selling little moments in your life. Then there are those who keep posting even though they’re clearly the butt of a joke: Ned Fulmer, the “cuh dey board” guy, arguably George Santos. These are more traditional lolcows, pathologically catering to the people who despise them.

But at least these influencers still know what’s happening. Another type of lolcow doesn’t understand that they are amusing to their audience, or at least doesn’t understand why. This includes the elderly, the naïve, and the mentally disabled, but the asymmetry could also manifest as educated versus uneducated, urban versus rural, ironic versus sincere.

Every so often, I’ll come across a viral video of a Russian family eating breakfast together or an African man carrying water across a river or two Cambodian men building houses in the jungle. While these videos can provide a genuinely interesting window into another world, part of the appeal is that the Western viewer can judge them as “quaint,” “rustic,” or “provincial.” We feel a sense of touristic power behind our screens, watching the reel from a more sophisticated viewpoint.

Many international content creators might understand this way of looking, but I’m sure many do not. They are not situated in the same interpretive frame. They know that people enjoy watching their videos, but they don’t know it’s because they’re part of the algorithmic freak show: a collection of digital specimens to be examined by the cosmopolitan observer. This imbalance only adds to the spectacle.

Just as lolcows exist along a continuum, so do their viewers. On the extreme end, agitators coordinate abusive behavior on Kiwi Farms, but everyone is complicit to a lesser extent. As the internet has shifted away from 2010s influencer culture to idealize a raw, unmediated style of content, I’ve specifically noticed a rising interest in these “lolcow lite” genres, where you get to feel a heightened sense of agency without resorting to overt cyberbullying.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the schizo/boomer/foreign style of video has become more popular just as we are losing control over the internet as a whole. Everything feels like a psyop right now, but at least I can laugh over this crazy guy who doesn’t know how to use his phone properly.

Ironically, the lolcow aesthetic is already being exploited by malicious actors—it’s fairly trivial to make an AI-generated profile where you mimic the semiotics of naïveté while actually baiting engagement.

Regardless, I am concerned that these kinds of posts will only continue to go viral as we become desensitized to our own spectatorship. As they do, the online dynamics we subject influencers to will trickle down to everyone else. I regularly see random people’s Instagram posts blow up because they have a funny last name or embody an internet stereotype. By making yourself legible, you make yourself vulnerable to attack, because someone will find a way to perceive you harmfully.

The word “respect” in Latin literally means “to look back.” The proper way to treat each other as human beings is to act as if everyone can meet our gaze—seeing us the way we see them. If we don’t learn to look back, we’ll keep trying to control each other, and everybody online will be a lolcow to someone else.

Upcoming events:
November 2: Boston, MA - SciCom summit
November 6-8: Kilkenny, Ireland - Kilkenomics Festival
November 8: Dublin, Ireland - Trinity College Dublin
November 10: Cambridge, UK - Cambridge Union
November 11: Cambridge, UK - Cambridge Psychology Society
November 12: London, UK - Waterstones Gower Street

The male strawberry embraces his wife and goes back to washing the dishes. He’s a loving husband, doing his part as a homemaker while she earns the wages. He’s not at all concerned about her domineering manager, a banana in a business suit.

If you’re familiar with AI fruit videos, you already know where this is going. It’s the same story every time: the strawberry wife has been cheating, and eventually the secret is revealed when she gives birth to a banana son.

It’s easy to write off AI slop as meaningless drivel, and in one sense it is. I doubt the creators of these videos have any intention other than going viral. At the same time, to go viral, you need to recreate the emotions targeted by engagement optimization algorithms.1 One of those emotions appears to be a fear of interracial cuckoldry.

After analyzing over 100 cheating fruit videos, I found that some fruits are more consistently coded as “masculine” or “feminine” than other fruits. Those at the extremes, like the eggplant or peach, are thinly veiled caricatures of Black people—and they are also framed as the objects of desire. In every single same-fruit relationship, the cuckold is abandoned for the “more masculine” fruit, while the cuckquean is abandoned for the “more feminine” fruit.

Even though the videos are created thoughtlessly, their narratives inflame actual cultural tensions through the recurring character archetypes. The underlying story is captivating because we can vicariously project it onto our actual stereotypes while maintaining a plausible deniability of it being “just AI.”

The propaganda researcher Marcus Bösch has observed something very similar with AI-generated videos of Orthodox Jewish rabbis giving investment advice. As stock characters, the rabbis simultaneously serve the role of the “wise old man” and the “greedy penny-pincher”—reinforcing antisemitic tropes in order to sell get-rich-quick investment books through the links in their bios.

The counterintuitive thing about these videos is that, unlike deepfakes, slop does not position itself as real. It acknowledges its own representational artificiality while targeting real emotions: harnessing platform affordances to stir up emotional insecurities and grievances.2

In this sense, the AI-generated image rejects the epistemology of the photograph just as the photograph rejected the epistemology of the oil painting. The typical goal of the camera is to depict the objective truth, while paintings and slop only allude to it. The “cheating strawberry” and “rabbi influencer” are therefore better understood as allegorical figures, similar to Liberty Leading the People below.

In this painting, Delacroix was never claiming that a bare-breasted goddess actually came down to lead the July Revolution. Instead, he captured what the uprising felt like, which is why the painting resonated so widely. Now that we can no longer trust photographs, it only makes sense that we would return to this communicative style.

I also see a parallel to early oral tradition, where folk stories emerged as a way of encoding cultural knowledge. These fables did not have clear authorship or facticity, but nevertheless gestured toward important morals, each ratified through its own repetition.

Consider the “Italian brainrot” trend in March 2025, where each AI character had its own personality. Bombardiro Crocodilo was almost always the bad guy, and Ballerina Cappuccina was almost always the love interest. Over the course of thousands of videos, they formed their own canon of stories, not unlike Hades and Aphrodite in Greek mythology.3

Tung Tung Tung Sahur, meanwhile, was more of a “trickster” figure that could serve any narrative—like Hermes or Anansi the Spider—and this is arguably why he outlived the initial trend. Something about his blank adaptability made it possible for viewers to cast him as a kind of folk hero, one who could even help pop the AI bubble he emerged from.

It’s a mistake to evaluate AI slop on the basis of a single video, author, or detail, because it’s not trying to discretely communicate information. Instead, we should consider the emergent meanings iterated through our storytelling process. Why are these specific narratives resonating?

Increasingly, our myths can be manufactured through “slopaganda,” where a fiction is deliberately repeated enough times to start feeling real,4 but the mundane truth is that most of our allegories are just echoing a misaligned profit incentive. Unlike oral tradition, or Eugène Delacroix, slop does not attempt to communicate a specific ideology. The parables of the cheating strawberry and the AI rabbi are only part of our canon because they were rewarded by an unfeeling algorithm.

I do see a spark of hope in “brainrot” as a reactionary meme aesthetic, where digital communities come together to forge their own sense of meaning. Part of Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s appeal is that he was reclaimed by the digital commons, giving us an opportunity to assert our own values through each new story. Or maybe this feeling of resistance is yet another emotion rewarded by the metrics, and we need to seriously re-evaluate the way those metrics work.

Apologies for publishing less frequently here—I’m quite busy writing my second book. I did, however, recently publish two op-eds which you can read here:

• Financial Times - How Online Fandom Reshaped Our World

• Washington Post - Why Tools to Detect AI-Generated Text Are Doomed

How could this be? A “classic” is supposed to withstand the test of time. But there it was on the menu—probably because somebody thought a deli was supposed to have a “classic” sandwich, so they went ahead and invented one. Looking around, I saw that the interior design followed the exact same logic. Everything appeared copy-pasted from someone’s idea of what a deli was supposed to look like, with none of the human character that actually creates a deli. Instead of a bodega cat, there were rows of private-equity-backed protein snacks. Instead of a foreign soccer game on the television, the wallpaper was covered in nonsensical phrases like “yum, fun, delicious!”

After some internet sleuthing, I discovered that the Leonard deli was actually operated by a billion-dollar multinational conglomerate, and that’s where the pieces fell into place. This was a big company masquerading as a mom-and-pop operation, adopting the semiotics of a local bodega while actually churning out delislop all across New York City.

For the next few months, I stubbornly avoided the fake deli. But it was the only 24-hour location around me, and the late-night munchies eventually won out.

Turns out that, under the right circumstances, I really like the Leonard classic sandwich. And the people inside are actual New Yorkers. By my fifth visit, the Egyptian man at the register was already calling me “boss” and my fake deli started feeling like the real thing. By the twelfth time, I knew the other regulars.

The general state of postmodernity is critiquing everything, and the general state of late capitalism is escalating its own artifice. This puts consumers in an exhausting position where the only barrier to identifying slop is our ability to perceive it. If you look around, everything manmade can be considered “fake”—but sometimes you just need a snack after midnight.

Either we endlessly alienate ourselves, or we selectively embrace slop on our own terms. Perhaps this is the metamodern perspective, where we simultaneously perceive hyperreality and reject its associated malaise, but a true metamodernist wouldn’t need the label. At the end of the day, you know the sandwich is fake but still find it tasty.

This does not mean blindly accepting the sandwich. Consider the midwit meme above. The wojaks are flattened characters representing the already flattened metric of “IQ.” The image presents a false binary, implying that the uninformed opinion is naïvely correct, but it fails to register that there is a difference between a sandwich and the performance of a sandwich. In reality, the enlightened monk character should recognize how both perspectives are true across different frames of reality.

With that distinction, he can choose when to enjoy a sandwich and when to critique it—and the same consideration holds for examining memes. You can understand that my commentary relies on reduction, and also see that it gestures at something important. By discerning how you discern, you learn and act strategically.

During the day, I still patronize local businesses and support zoning restrictions on large corporations. At night, when I have no other option, it’s okay to enjoy a corporate deli sandwich. These are not contradictory behaviors because they address different problems. On one level of thinking, I want my local community to do better. On another, I want a sandwich, and this is my local community.

I feel the same way about the internet. I love it and I criticize it. I see how, even though everything is arbitrarily constructed, there are real people making real connections, just like I became friends with the Egyptian deli guy. At the same time, my deli and the internet have an impersonal, transactional architecture that worsens the overall experience.

Life is too precious to get pissed off by slop, yet the slop is unavoidably multiplying—including in real life. My goal as a media critic is to dispassionately identify when a medium does something wrong, and passionately celebrate when the medium does something right. No matter what, I can still live a good life while nudging the world in a better direction.

I’m worried that the typical “touch grass” rhetoric critiques the performance of the internet over recognizing its real impact. When we wallow around complaining that everything is fake, we refuse to see the actual people in the metaphorical deli. We ignore the impact it has on our neighborhood. And, like it or not, the algorithm is bleeding into everything: music, language, fashion, you name it.

The midwit decries everything as slop; the conscientious observer steps in and out of different perspectives. Everything is fake, but everything is real—to resign yourself to one interpretation is to limit your worldview.

The core paradox: as soon as something is identified as “good,” it becomes optimizable. As soon as something is optimizable, it is scaled and mass-produced. Eventually, unavoidably, the concept is devalued and we get slop.

“Taste” was never the solution, because “taste” is identifiable. Shortly after the internet latched onto Pierre Bourdieu, every influencer immediately began replicating the same pretentious semiotics; every Brooklyn cafe adopted the same minimalist aesthetic; and every brand moodboard incorporated the same modernist tasteslop.

Then we pivoted to “whimsy,” supposedly the unpredictable antidote to a predictable algorithm—and yet thousands of social media gurus are now posting guides on how to be more whimsical. The term has been aestheticized into polka-dot goblincore frolicking oblivion, completely debasing the original notion of “following your individual whims.”

Along with whimsy-slop, we’ve seen the rise and fall of authenticity and wabi-sabi—both intended as a return to unmediated imperfection, both hoisted on their own petards. “Authenticity” is now something you can perform, while “imperfection” is now something to perfect.

I’ve previously written about how internet aesthetics like corecore and hopelesscore emerged as ways of critiquing the algorithm, but were quickly subsumed by the engagement treadmill. The same is true for any brainrot genre—each meme emerges because it speaks to a cultural frustration, but is inevitably flooded by digital carpetbaggers trying to score easy “likes” and “views.”

If “slop” is the precipitate of optimization, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of slop. Suppose you want to make your interests undiscoverable, so you prioritize illegibility. Now you’ve incentivized me to produce ambiguityslop (which is arguably why the word “vibe” became a buzzword last year). Or perhaps you want to gatekeep your interests—now we’re back at tasteslop.

Slop realism is the understanding that, like capitalism, “slop” is a Moloch—a structure we are forced to participate in, which worsens society. While there is still something to be said for actual authenticity, whimsy, and taste, even your personal preferences are being measured and targeted in a way that will only generate more slop with time.

This outlook seems bleak, and it is easy to surrender to the metrics, but I see it as an imperative to shine. In the words of Mark Fisher,

“The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately large effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility.”

I see these glimmers in our language, our memes, and our tenacious insistence on rejecting the world we don’t want to live in. I’m also drawn to the footnote of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which similarly refuses to give in to Moloch:

Everything is holy! Everybody’s holy! Everywhere is holy! Everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

“Slop” happens when we forget to treat everything as holy, a Germanic word meaning “whole.” Optimization focuses on the legible, the measurable, the specific—and, in doing so, it hollows us out, failing to account for our indescribable totality. The only solution is to make everything important, all at once, and now your metrics are worthless.

My book Algospeak is now out in paperback!! Order the book here :)

Edit: before you comment that my take is “too online,” please read my previous essay where I outline how the structural cause of slop exists regardless of the internet.

One school of thought blames the user. They made an irresponsible choice, and this was the consequence of their action—but they may not have had full control over their decisions, and they certainly didn’t have full awareness of what they were consuming.

Many people instead blame the drug dealer who cut the heroin. They’re the culprit, they committed the horrible act—but I’m sure the dealer would prefer their customer to stay alive. If the cost of heroin were the same as the cost of fentanyl, they’d rather distribute the safer product their customer actually wanted.

Maybe the problem is the fentanyl itself: the fact that there is a highly dangerous, cheaper alternative to heroin. The opioid literally killed the user, and its lower costs incentivized the dealer to act recklessly. And yet to focus entirely on fentanyl is to ignore each person’s agency in the situation, and the mechanisms that distributed the drug in the first place.

Perhaps the government should have intervened, perhaps the laboratory should never have synthesized a dangerous substance—or perhaps we just want a simple story. The less comfortable truth is that “blame” is distributed everywhere from the start of the process to its finish. A drug overdose, however terrible, cannot be chalked up to a single neat explanation, but to an ecosystem of actions and incentives spanning the entire drug trade.

Although fentanyl is an extreme example, the underlying framework of blame is the same for “slop” on social media—and I promise this analogy will make more sense in a moment. When the concept was first formulated on 4chan in the late 2010s, it began as a direct outgrowth of “goyslop,” the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jewish elites is feeding the masses cheap, unhealthy food.

In a new paper, the internet archaeologist Sophie Publig argues that the original sense of the word is critical to understanding its modern usage. Both the conspiracy theory and the actual reality of “AI slop” rely on 1) a hidden intentional agent; 2) a degraded substance distributed to a passive mass; and 3) a knowing critic who is able to see through it all.

Publig mirrors Mike Pepi’s brilliant theory of slop materialism, which argues that instead of asking “what is slop?” we should rather be asking “when do we slop?” Unfortunately, Pepi falls into the classic trap of claiming that “slop” is exclusive to AI, which is kind of like saying drug overdoses are exclusive to fentanyl. In truth, both exacerbate an existing problem: that there are misaligned actors structurally incentivized to create low-quality content for their unsuspecting consumers.

Cultural critics like Sean Monahan and Ruby Justice Thelot make excellent arguments that “slop” has always existed. Hallmark movies, penny dreadfuls, and pulp magazines were all “slop” of their time, in that they prioritized profit over meaningful communication. Under this framing, in the words of Max Read, “slop” is something “fully optimized to its domain to the point of texturelessness or characterlessness.” I’ve also expressed a similar definition in my earlier Notes on Slop here.

The issue with regarding slop as a noun, rather than a verb, is that it decenters the productive process. Once we know we’re consuming a degraded substance, the blame rests either on the creator for producing it, or the user for participating in it.

“Slop” isn’t really your fault if you’re addicted to your phone. It’s not really the fault of the Lithuanian 24-year-old making racist videos that are good for engagement. It’s not even quite the platform’s fault. “Slop” is instead an ecology, including everything from the annotation workers in Nigeria to the data centers on indigenous land to the way you scroll on social media. Nobody is to blame, and everybody is to blame.

After reading almost every analysis I could find on the matter, my favorite opinion comes from the Northwestern University Professor Jessica Hullman:

Slop is not merely a genre of media, it is an attitude of production, a cynical operating posture… it is an ethos of resigned instrumentality that disgusts us with its intentional satisficing and lack of effort the way kitsch disgusted some art critics, a refusal of responsibility to authenticity, situatedness, and the risks associated with individualistic expression. A practical nihilism that threatens to engulf our own more sparse yet genuine attempts at production. From this perspective, the act of denial makes slop more like a spiritual threat than a type of content.

“Slop” is a spiritual threat spanning from Hallmark movies to the opioid crisis. While these problems have immensely different severity, the ecology is the same. All the incentives are telling us to participate in a corrupt system, and we slop when we succumb to the devil on our shoulder. The only way to reject it is to reject nihilism at every level of participation:

1. change the incentives for producing and consuming slop

2. change the distribution structure

3. produce content intentionally

4. consume content intentionally

5. be mindful of the entire ecology, rather than a single symptom

If you want to combat a spiritual threat, make everything sacred. If slop is optimized in a way that feels meaningless, we have to reconsider our optimization and make the world feel meaningful. This is a battle for the human soul.

JULY 9 at 7:30 pm: I will be in conversation with Daniel Keller, coiner of the word “sloptimist,” at the TIAT gallery in San Francisco. Get your tickets here.

A few of us were jokingly monitoring the situation on Polymarket. The prediction market gave the Knicks a 99.6 percent chance of losing. One of my friends decided he would have higher expected value in going home, so he left the watch party.

Then, miraculously, the tide shifted. The Knicks came back, possessed with electric ferocity, to win the game by a single point. At the buzzer, the entire bar was roaring at the top of its lungs, jumping in ecstasy, drunkenly high-fiving complete strangers. I can’t describe the primordial passion I felt in that moment. It was a barbaric, religious fervor I’ve only experienced a few times in my life.

Walking home through the revelry, my thoughts drifted back to the prediction market. What was the point? The main reason people watch sports is because they don’t know what’s going to happen. If the game were completely predictable, we would all follow my friend’s lead and skip the fourth quarter. Instead, we stay watching for that one-in-a-hundred hope of things going unbelievably right.

In his book The Uncontrollability of the World, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa connects sports-watching to the giddiness of a first snowfall. No matter how advanced our weather forecasts get, there’s still a delightful magic in letting that initial snowflake land on your tongue. It is the unexpected “intrusion of a new reality,” reawakening your childish astonishment in the surrounding world.

The inexorable project of modernity is to make itself legible, manageable, and profitable. With each advance in categorization, however, we make ourselves a little more boring. Ski resorts create artificial snow before the first flurries arrive; Polymarket tells you when to leave the basketball game.

Without coincidences, we numb ourselves into mathematical indifference—until a sufficiently uncontrollable event wakes us up from our sluggish subroutines. In these moments, we have the chance to realize how little we actually knew, and look around with renewed wonder.

But what if this could happen more often? I love faceplanting into the perfect sentence. I love when my friend invites me to a random movie and I have no idea what’s about to happen. That’s how you write poetry and fall in love with a cult classic. And yet ChatGPT always “knows” the next token, while TikTok always “knows” the next video I want to see. The prediction becomes reality, and I forget to notice the snowflakes.

What good is the “wisdom of the crowds” when I want to feel stupid? What good is predictive text when I want to write unpredictably?

The quant traders talk a lot about “updating their priors”—adding new information to create a more accurate prediction of the world. I find it interesting that their priors are never complete. You always have to collect new data, change more parameters, slowly refine the model as the world evolves.

Maybe there’s something to be said for downgrading our priors as well. So many of our best moments come out of inherently incomplete knowledge. It might be better to choose what to know, and what not to know—and I personally don’t want my basketball games spoiled for me.

Humans have an uncanny way of dissolving into their tools. When you swing a hammer, you don’t really conceive of it as separate from your body. It is instead an extension of your arm—what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand. Same with your smartphone. As you scroll, you melt into your screen.

Most of our lives are experienced in this state of flow. Sure, you can pause to theorize about hammers and smartphones, but you mostly just consider them when they stop working. You only perceive a table that wobbles; you only think about a television that fills with static.

We typically find these glitches annoying, but they’re incredibly powerful opportunities to understand our media. An eraser smear or ink blot disrupts the process of reading, reminding you about the writer on the other side.

The glitch calls attention to mediation. A lamp falls from the sky in The Truman Show; a cat reappears in The Matrix. Now we are aware that something exists between us and “true” reality. We can ask “why did this happen?” and the answer is often that things weren’t what they appeared to be.

My glasses seem to show me the world until a smudge resurfaces how blurry my vision really is. The written word seems to contain information until a typo points out that no, it’s actually a flattened representation of someone else’s knowledge. And TikTok seems “real” until you are left staring at your reflection in a black mirror.

Each advancement in technology is supposed to remove glitches, making it easier for us to interface with media, but it always brings new glitches for us to notice. The interval of adoption is therefore incredibly important: we can either be lulled into a new form of sleepwalking or wake up from our previous stupor.

Right now, for example, our language is glitching. People are using the words “delve” and “intricate” more than they used to, because AI chatbots are biased toward certain vocabulary, and now they’re influencing the way we speak. Incel terms like “mogging” and “maxxing” have fully become mainstream, demonstrating how we’re being shaped by social media algorithms.

It’s easy to dislike these words, and you can “fix the problem” by refusing to say them. But wiping the smudge off your glasses doesn’t change how they influence your way of seeing. Language has always been socially constructed; it’s always evolved around the technology available to us.

Glitches are symptoms of a much deeper problem: that every medium is imperfect. We like to ignore this uncomfortable truth, so we settle into mindless routine. Then a technical interruption punctures our fog of expectation, and we get upset.

Meanwhile, the best things in life are all glitches:

the entire reason we like            poetry

and humor and romance and art

is that there was a certain way things were supposed to unfold, but then something goes pleasantly wrong. We are pulled out of our trance and appreciate the flawed world around us.

Perhaps we should stop hating glitches and instead realize how they give us meaning, and the agency to change our surroundings. If a hammer is unbalanced, you can change the handle. If our language is shaped by incels, we can change the incentive structures online. Glitches show how reality is flexible, and that can go both ways.

Or we can keep stumbling around with our eyes closed, getting angry when things don't work perfectly. By refusing to sit with our tension, we’ll stay blindly irritated and accomplish nothing.

RECENT MEDIA

• I just wrote this op-ed for the Washington Post, explaining how AI chatbots are biased toward Romance language etymologies.

• I was interviewed for this NYT article on “mogging”

• I also talked about incel language on NPR’s Code Switch

UPCOMING EVENTS

• June 9: I’m recording a live podcast with CNN’s Clare Duffey at the Paley Center for Media. Tickets available here.

• June 25-26: I’m talking about slop and reality at Vidcon in Anaheim, CA.

• June 30: I’m hosting a teach-in for the NYC “Summer of Ludd” at the Penington Friends House at 5:15 pm.

The coalition includes, but is not limited to:

• New York City Neo-Luddites

• Data center NIMBYs

• Crunchy MAHA moms

• Jonathan Haidt disciples

• Post-rationalists

• Spiritual and religious revivalists

• Anti-AI populists

• Third space advocates

• Anybody refusing to use social media

• Anybody using a “dumbphone”

The revolution means different things to different people, but it can best be categorized by its refusal to be categorized. The movement rejects rational optimization to embrace the subjective, irrational, and emotional.

The revolution will not be clipped into digestible short-form video.

It will not wear Apple watches and Oura rings.

It will not track your step count.

The revolution will not be on Partiful;

It does not care who attends the function.

There will be no Instagram posts of private equity-owned boba,

No six-week financing with Afterpay.

Letters, not Letterboxd,

Good reads, not Goodreads.

The revolution will not be discounted on Uber Eats.

It will not require a USB-C adapter; it will power itself.

Roses will be given without Hinge,

Messages will disappear without Snapchat.

Tuned in, not LinkedIn,

Tapped in, not Untappd.

The revolution will not be stored in a data center.

It will not appear in an AI overview,

measuring every angle and orifice with cold metal instruments.

There will be no peptide injections.

There will be no Slack notifications,

Email notifications,

Text notifications,

New York Times notifications.

The revolution does not come with paywalls and mini-games.

It will not have Fubo or Tubi or Pluto.

It will not have unlimited storage; there is nothing to store.

The Amazon is a river,

Google is a number,

and Apples are for eating.

The revolution will not be on Kalshi or Polymarket.

It will not monitor the situation;

The revolution is the situation.

There will be no estimated time of arrival.

There will be no blinking blue location.

You won’t have to know where you are; there is nothing to know.

If you want to Find Your Friends, just Be Real.

Groups chat without groupchats,

Voices call without voicecalls.

The revolution will be liked and shared without likes and shares.

It lives without livestreams,

and is content without content.

“I” exists without “phone.”

Spotify will be deleted, not wrapped.

The revolution will not rate things out of five stars;

It is one with the stars.

There will be no Venmo requests.

There will be no two-step verification;

you don’t need proof of who you already are.

The Revolution is representation against representation. It sees our attempts to categorize meaning as meaningless. All the information in the world, compiled into a Borgesian Library of Babel, would be utterly useless. Better, then, to make your own meaning: fighting for what you want rather than what you’re supposed to want.

The Revolution will change the world, and change nothing. It bottlenecks our desires into a cathartic outpouring against the machine, but will eventually leave us adrift again—searching for the real answer within.

TikTok’s “trending searches” often read like an advertisement, because that’s exactly what they are. These are the things you’re supposed to look up, the things that bring in the most revenue. The search results are reliably clean, polished videos, showing exactly the content you expected to see.

As soon as you stray from the beaten path, however, you begin to encounter demons. You were never supposed to search “agd74864skgmkvc.” The old rules don’t apply here. You are in the TikTok Farlands, where horrible entities lurk in the shadows.

The Farlands are no different than the monster under your childhood bed, or a medieval cartographer writing hic sunt dracones at the edge of a map. Whenever we exceed our ability to categorize, the supernatural takes over. ChatGPT can’t stop talking about goblins, and your algorithm can’t stop spawning Lovecraftian abominations.

It certainly feels like we’ve come a long way from drawing sea dragons in the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve mapped the world many times over, and our data centers hold ever more granular information about our identity and behavior. There should be no place for monsters in this realm of logic.

And yet, when you search “agd74864skgmkvc,” you are filled with the cosmic dread of knowing that there are a billion other results like this. For every video about a Kehlani album, there is an ocean of eldritch horrors beneath the surface. The rational world we interact with is a scrim over a frightening terra incognita, vaster than we can possibly imagine.

Across the world, various religions have built their cosmogonies around the concept of primordial chaos—a disordered abyss often containing incomprehensible creatures. Eventually, meaning and order emerge from confused nothingness, creating the world as we understand it today.

Our attempts to explain online anomalies—creepypastas and SCP wiki pages and jokes about the “TikTok Farlands”—are the same as the beasts of the Old Testament or the monsters of Greek mythology. They gesture at the unknowable, creeping past the borders of reason to become our shared reality.

Each online community has its own oral tradition, and each meme is like a monster emerging from the shared folklore. Nobody can really tell you where Big Chungus or Tung Tung Tung Sahur came from. Perhaps they are messengers from the void, reminding us of the internet’s cavernous liminality. How dare we try to categorize it into neat little Calvin Klein advertisements? Here there be dragons.

Yes, the memes are absurd, but the entire universe is absurd. This is the abyss gazing back at you, reminding you that you have no more inherent meaning than a cartoon character. Of course, you have the option to make your own—so do you really want to spend your time looking at any of this?

If you can’t make up your mind, there are probably many more memes hibernating under obscure search terms, waiting to be awoken from their slumber. When the time is right, the monsters will materialize.

Media I’m enjoying

• This excellent account covering Chinese fashion aesthetics

• If you missed it, please read Eliza McLamb’s investigation of “fake fans” in the music industry

• The Call of Cthulhu

• Zarbworld’s map of internet aesthetics

• I keep thinking about Moral Outrage Porn by Nguyen and Williams

The main thing that struck me about the scheme was how everything superficially looked great on paper. Each cartel miner has an official license, so the middlemen buy their gold without asking any questions. Then they legally sell it to American refineries, who melt it down and resell to the U.S. Mint, which doesn’t inquire where the original metal came from.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article, because we all take shortcuts that seem too good to be true. It’s so easy to order a wool sweater on Amazon, wait for a box to materialize on your doorstep, and call it a day. But unless you know the sheep, and you know who knitted the sweater, and you know who sold it, and you know who transported it, you can’t guarantee that you didn’t just contribute to animal cruelty or child labor.

Sure, you can walk to the local store and pay extra for that “fair trade” label, but you’re only really paying for your own peace of mind. Just like “American legal gold,” the certification probably covers up a litany of worker abuses you’d rather not know about. At the end of the day, you still have no clue where your fair trade alpaca wool cardigan actually came from.

This is a problem that will only worsen as our society continues globalizing and our supply chains grow more mediated. You order your avocado toast in a Brooklyn cafe, the waiter brings it out, and maybe you think about how the chef prepared it. You’re probably not thinking about the refrigerated semi-truck that brought it to the wholesaler, or the packaging plant that prepared it for transportation, or—oops—the fact that avocado farming is also heavily tied to Mexican drug cartels. The further we get from the source, the easier it is to ignore this inconvenient fact.

As someone who researches the online information ecosystem, I’m similarly concerned that we don’t know where our memes come from. Something starts trending, it gets chalked up to an innocent joke that’s “not that deep,” and then we don’t question it further. In reality, the meme probably spawned from some depraved imageboard full of misogynistic incel Nazis. Then it was amplified by a string of content creators trying to cash in on the shock value for their own benefit.

Other times, a meme is trending because someone is actively trying to manipulate your reality. Most new musical artists seem like they appear out of nowhere nowadays—but that’s because they’re all paying for AI accounts to artificially inflate their content. Governments are openly conducting memetic warfare against their own citizens. Gambling degenerates are mainstreaming ideas just to make a quick buck. You think a trend is popular because it’s popular, but it’s avocado toast gold bars.

We are in a crisis of taking things at face value, which simultaneously makes us civically negligent and less present in our own lives. It feels great to knit your own sweater or pick your own fruits, not only because it’s ethical, but because you’ve earned it. In the same way, nothing compares to the satisfying rush of truly grasping an idea for yourself.

The more we understand our surroundings, the better citizens we are, and the more grounded we are in our own lives. And yet our hypermediated reality makes this harder than ever, which is why I think we have to examine everything around us. Don’t just eat or wear or say something without peeling back the layers to question where it came from. Once you’ve earned it, you’ll be happier to accept it as your own.

In medieval times, your life would revolve around the few calls you got. You would wake to the rooster’s call, heed the call to prayer, gather with the town crier’s call, and occasionally be called to arms—all'arme in Italian, literally the source of the word alarm. The expectation was that you would answer the call: to refuse was to bring shame upon yourself.

Today, we are inundated with calls—friends, spam, countless push notifications—each demanding our attention throughout the day. With these calls, you are always presented with the option to accept or decline.

There is a certain feeling of guilt that comes with declining. I feel terrible when I don’t respond to a friend’s message, or leave an email unanswered. Each time we choose not to engage like this, the shame gets repressed. Somewhere in the depths of my subconscious, the unanswered obligations are probably eating away at me, making me slightly more anxious throughout my day.

With billions of people all feeling this feeling, it makes sense that we would end up with memes about receiving calls. Shortly into Trump’s first presidency, we got the “Obama is calling” memes; in 2023 we got “John Pork is calling,” depicting a photoshopped pig character. By 2025, the genre exploded, resulting in “fih is calling” and “the big leagues are calling.”

The immediate joke, of course, is the absurdity of the caller ID. There is no reason you should have John Pork or “the big leagues” in your phone contacts, which creates a humorous dissonance between expectation and reality.

Beneath this layer, however, there is the more timeless call for your attention. The phone interface makes you the real subject of the meme. Barack Obama and the fish want to speak to you specifically. This raises two questions: what could they possibly want, and should I answer this?

For Harvard and “the big leagues,” the answer is obvious. The meme ironically validates you, exhorting you to join a position of importance in society. And yet, because you have the agency to ignore them, you are elevated as even more important.

Obama achieves a similar effect, but the post-presidency timing of the meme positions him more as a character from your past, briefly emerging from that shameful place in your psyche. You already let his party get voted out of office, ignoring your previous calling when it mattered most. Now he is summoning you back to your political duty—if you ignore him, you repeat that earlier failure.

John Pork and “fih” are even more direct representations for representations in your subconscious. If you’re online enough, their calls make you recall previous memes. Like Tung Tung Tung Sahur, they emerge from seemingly nowhere to summon your engagement and redirect it to your own “brainrot.”

Both characters are visually unappealing, which is the point. They are like old acquaintances you’re trying to avoid. You are primed to want to decline, to push back the memories until they surface again. Like “the game,” they are an ongoing, inescapable infohazard always haunting the back of your mind. In this way, they call attention to the oversaturation of our memetic ecosystem—why are we getting so many more calls than we used to?

There is one final divergence which I find the most important. John Pork was always a product of the internet, originally created with digital tools to serve as a “virtual influencer” on Instagram. The fish, meanwhile, is primal. The earliest people emerged from fish, hunted fish for survival, and inscribed images of fish as sacred symbols. Fish are literally the spawn point: the word “spawn” comes from fish, and now we mostly use the word in video games.

The call of “fih,” in juxtaposing something ancient with a modern interface, doubles as the call of the wild. It cuts through our hypermediated reality, summoning us back to a more natural state of being. The very instinct to decline shows how alienated we’ve become from our own roots.

Are you going to accept the call?

If you can make it, I’m hosting a mass reading of Howl by Allen Ginsberg tomorrow at 5:30 sharp in Washington Square Park, NYC. Free books for the first three hundred people to arrive. RSVP here or just show up.

dissociating themselves through the enshittified ragebait clickbait looking for a dopamine fix,

nonchalant doomers repressing the AI overview of the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who Kalshi and Rainbet and OnlyFans and Doordash sat up vaping in the ambient glow of slot-machine phones drowning in the depths of 4chan contemplating memes…

I’m not going to rewrite any more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl because it’s already perfect. It’s impossible to read the poem without extending it to yourself and your cultural moment. We’ve all been crushed by the oppressive machinations of conformity and consumerism. What can we do but lash out in creative fury, impaling ourselves on the palisades of modernity?

The most terrifying thing about our alienation and atomization is that it appears inexorable. No matter how we protest, our society will continue blindly optimizing itself into oblivion. With each technological advancement, the vultures circle lower, stripping away the flesh of our humanity to reveal the robotic carcass beneath.

In part II of his poem, Ginsberg portrays this culture of industrial progress as Moloch, an ancient deity associated with child sacrifice. Those who worship Moloch have access to power and prosperity, but their participation contributes to an evil demonic practice. Howl screams out that modern society is doing the same thing.

As a social media influencer, I try to be acutely aware of how the algorithm creates its own “banality of evil,” channeling our natural human impulses in a negative direction. I want to inspire people to challenge these structures and pursue meaning, but I know that I’m also worshipping Moloch, contributing to the dopamine slot machine myself.

Every once in a while, I’ll get stopped in the street by a fan. Sometimes they tell me that I inspired them to study linguistics. This is the best compliment I can get. Other times, they tell me I’m the only reason they stay on YouTube Shorts, and that’s the worst insult I can get.

To be on social media is to accept this paradox: we know that algorithms can be used for good, but we also know that the overall structure is evil. I mostly reconcile this tension by using my videos to push people toward my writings and lectures, and hopefully giving them the tools to be curious by themselves.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time with the New York City Neo-Luddite movement, who have their own way of rejecting Moloch. The Luddite organizing praxis revolves around the idea that “the event is the medium.” It’s one thing to write a substack thinkpiece about how we should build community, and it’s another thing to just do it. By hosting an event, you are making something happen outside of the oversaturated, hypermediated world of the internet, and that’s the best possible way of making more events happen.

I’ve voiced specific criticisms about the Luddites before, but I strongly agree that we just have to make things happen. Sometimes you have to HOWL, and get other people howling, which is why I’m working with the Luddites to co-host a mass reading of “Howl” in Washington Square Park on Monday, May 4, at 5:30 pm. Everyone is welcome, and if you can’t make it, please read the poem as assigned reading.

I’m with you in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland.

-Adam

The first is an AI-generated picture of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and the second is Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico. The former is widely derided as “internet brainrot,” while the latter is widely considered an artistic masterpiece.

Depending on your digital literacy and sense of humor, you might find the first picture funny, or irritating, or confusing. You know that it is an AI meme, so you probably view it as “low art” unworthy of further inspection.

The second picture, meanwhile, invites contemplation. The long shadows and dreamlike landscape create an unsettling atmosphere. The ominous scene can spark anxiety, terror, or queasiness. The painting has clear artistic merit, so you probably view it as “high art.”

You might already be offended by where I’m going with this juxtaposition. Perhaps you’re morally opposed to generative AI, or think it shouldn’t be held in the same esteem as a carefully detailed, intentional work of human art. Or maybe you find the comparison funny and think I’m trolling.

But let’s put aside our cultural pretensions for the moment—I promise we’ll return to them—and just ask how the images make you feel. I find them strikingly alike in many ways. Both occupy a warmly lit, liminal setting punctuated by a creeping obscurity. This uncanniness threatens our sense of order and rationality, thrusting us into the realm of the subconscious. Here, we inhabit an irrational, menacing world where anything could happen, like a monster appearing around the corner.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Chirico’s looming shadow are that monster. They are there to haunt your psyche. Obviously, the symbolism of the grim alleyway was more purposeful, but starting with the “death of the author” helps us understand that the brainrot meme achieves a similar effect in the poetic imagination. This is important to understanding why the image has resonated so widely over the past year.

Even after we introduce authorial intent, Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s identity comes from the sound of a drumbeat summoning Indonesian Muslims to the meal of sahur. As the ethnomusicologist Luigi Monteanni explains, that holds its own sensonarrative power. Gongs and drums have been used in religious traditions throughout millennia to induce a hypnotic feeling of attention. Something about the repetition takes us into the present, resonating on an affective level.

Today, the call of the drumbeat still stirs something inside us, translating our previously ritualistic attention into social media engagement. In this sense, “triple T” is a harbinger of our own memetic vulnerability. He is an infohazard—an idea you don’t want to be exposed to—which nevertheless pervades your latent thoughts. This appears to be part of the unspoken joke.

From the phenomena outward, we can layer in context to gather more information. As part of a greater canon of “Italian brainrot,” Tung Tung Tung Sahur is funny for his perceived foreignness. Being one of the earliest AI-generated memes, he stands as an ironic critique of post-truth discourse. With each subsequent meme, he takes on additional life, and there is even more to analyze. Things are funny for a reason, and things go viral for a reason.

Now you can re-introduce your personal biases. There are many valid concerns we should hold about AI and social media, but we can’t let that cloud our understanding of what’s happening online. Rather than immediately dismissing a meme as “brainrot,” which cuts off further inspection, we must look at it as art: something that resonates with other human beings. And just like you don’t have to like modern art, you don’t have to like these memes either.

It’s worth noting that “Impressionism,” “Fauvism,” and “Cubism” all started out as insults before they became known as serious art movements. Each development was thought of as “low art” offending our cultural sensibilities, much like “brainrot” today.

Admittedly, brainrot is decentralized and less deliberate, but that’s because it’s part of a new, folkloric paradigm of art. We’ll have to develop novel ways of criticizing this medium, relying on phenomenology and context before authorship, and building up to describe our current moment.

Upcoming:

I’m hosting a public reading of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg in Washington Square Park on May 4 at 5:30 pm. RSVP for more details here, or just show up.

I remember the question striking me as flippant. We were an hour into the forum—crowded by Berkeley standards—and all the other students had been asking more interesting, earnest questions about language or algorithms.

I suppose I could have answered literally, or come up with my own glib response, but the topic was out of scope and I didn’t want to embarrass the professor sitting next to me. I chose to salvage the moment by broadly answering about how “gooning” was evolving into a metaphor for “wasting time.”

Following the event, the student came up to greet me. He introduced himself as Steve, shook my hand, and thanked me “for the clip” with a sheepish grin. I was still somewhat confused until a few hours later, when a video of our interaction began going viral on TikTok.

The entire question had been a setup, recorded from the start without my knowledge. Steve had deliberately interrupted our academic discussion to say something provocative for online likes and views.

Going through his social media, I realized this was a pattern: Steve had built up a followership of several thousand by asking random celebrities and strangers unprompted questions about gooning. I felt used.

In the grand scheme of clip farming, of course, this was relatively inconsequential. I’ve previously written about “rizz influencers” who film unsuspecting women for their pick-up videos, and Louis Theroux just released a fantastic documentary analyzing how manosphere influencers foment controversy just to build internet clout.

But all of these examples have one important thing in common: they somehow “cash in” on another person’s prestige (be that money, influence, attractiveness, or newsworthiness) for their own advantage.

I’m reminded of the philosopher Daniel Boorstin, who argued that celebrities are “human pseudo-events,” famous for being famous. The more relevant someone is, the more other people will try to demonstrate adjacency to that individual, which makes everybody appear more popular. It’s smart to cast a trendy actor for a blockbuster movie, because the movie will sell more tickets, but that inadvertently makes the actor even more trendy. The same is true on social media, which is why influencers do “collabs” with one another: they are symbiotically helping each other go more viral.

If I were to expand on that, I’d note that there are two distinct ways by which you can cash in on someone’s popularity: parasitism1 or mutualism.

A mutualistic pseudo-event is closer to Boorstin’s definition, and the lesser of two evils. When I was marketing my book Algospeak, I got interviewed by several newspapers and TV shows. These outlets only talked to me because I was relevant enough for their audiences to pay attention, but in exchange I became better known to those audiences. We both benefitted from the relationship.

That’s not to say mutualistic virality is good for society. Louis Theroux highlights how redpill “alpha males” and OnlyFans models mutually benefit from appearing in each other’s videos: the alpha males get to be seen around attractive women, while the models are able to convert some viewers into subscribers. This relationship is beneficial to the individuals involved, but spreads misogyny and porn addiction to the rest of society. (Maybe the goondemic is real.)

A parasitic pseudo-event, meanwhile, happens when only one person benefits from the interaction. Tabloid paparazzi were an early example, while stream snipers are their algorithmic equivalent. Celebrities and influencers do not want to associate with these people; their lives are hijacked for someone else’s gain.

In some cases, influencers do tolerate these one-sided relationships: Clavicular has notably turned many stream snipers and swatting incidents into free content. These interactions, while closer to commensalism, are still nonconsensual. I actually reposted Steve’s TikTok video onto my YouTube channel and got a million views, so it was technically good for me, but it still felt extractive.

That’s because, if the underlying mechanism of symbiotic virality is to siphon off relevance from another person, it necessitates treating them as a means rather than an end. The entire point of the interaction is about how you can use someone else for your own online fame.

I appreciate the irony of me commenting on this as an influencer, and you’re welcome to form your own opinions about that, but I believe it’s still possible to communicate meaningfully online. The difference is intent: are we doing things just to go viral, or is there a deeper purpose?

The point of communication is literally in the word—to build community, where we treat other people like they matter. If the end goal of social media is to build interpersonal connections, rather than make content for its own sake, then we can still use a medium for good. Otherwise, we’re letting the medium use us instead.

I’m excited to announce that I’m officially writing a new book with Bloomsbury USA! The working title is Reality Drift and it should come out in fall 2027—stay tuned for more details down the line.

I’m also hosting a mass reading of Howl by Allen Ginsberg in Washington Square Park this May 4 at 5 pm. More information to follow.

At first glance, the advertisement doesn’t say anything at all. A vibe is a feeling, so I’m being encouraged to “feel more feelings,” but I’m always feeling feelings. The idea should be redundant, right?

Of course, more pragmatically, “vibe” is just a buzzword. The term has been showing up everywhere in recent years. Software engineers practice “vibe coding,” an expression coined in 2025. College students “vibe check” one another, an idea popularized in 2019. Google Trends shows the phrase “what a vibe” sharply increasing in usage since 2024, while the phrase “vibe shift” is from a 2021 Substack post.

The last time we were talking about “vibes” like this was the 1970s—the term for an “ambient sensation” was shortened from “vibration” in 1967, spawning the idea that you can have “good vibes” or “vibe with someone.” Then the vibes fell off in the 80s and now they’re back, like moustaches or bell-bottomed pants.

I’m sure part of the resurgence has to do with hip-hop culture, which continued using the word after it fell out of favor with the mainstream. Eventually, due to the sinusoidal nature of trends, the term started re-emerging: Kendrick Lamar came out with “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” in 2013, while 2 Chainz released “It’s A Vibe” in 2017.

But I also think there’s something deeper going on. Vibes are, in the words of the UNC Professor Robin James, a form of “lay phenomenology” articulating something that philosophers have been trying to pin down for over a century. Heidegger called it stimmung. Walter Benjamin gestured at it through aura. To us, it’s a “vibe,” but all of these get at the same thing: we have vague, ineffable feelings about a situation.

And, if you think about it, the 70s were the last time ambient emotions were this culturally important. The hippie movement, turmoil around the newly televised Vietnam War, and the popularity of mind-altering drugs all contributed to a greater social emphasis on uncertainty and emotion. Then society became more precise, and we had less of a reason to discuss the imprecise. Computers introduced exact lines of code; the Reagan era established a sense of authority and hierarchy.

Now, in the 2020s, things once again feel uncertain and emotional. It makes sense that we would return to “vibes” at a time when we once again need to express vague feelings.

I can’t help but notice that our two most important technological developments—AI and social media algorithms—are both based on neural networks, which process information in a way that the human brain cannot understand. Our information is no longer neat and discrete, but represented in an ever-changing high-dimensional vector space. Our only option is to interact with these technologies through background intuition.

Consider “vibe coding,” the feelings-based approach to programming that depends on our aesthetic appraisals of how large language models (LLMs) will generate code. This term emerged because we can’t possibly articulate exactly what we want the AI to do, but we can “feel it out” through the “vibes”—our vernacularization of that ambient feeling.

As a social media influencer, I also have to “feel out” the direction of the algorithm to tap into social trends. This is not something that can be put into words; I instead rely on the general sense I get of how things are shifting between algorithmic weightings and the online zeitgeist. Once again, the best way to interface with the technology is an atmospheric, aesthetic appraisal.

Everyone on social media struggles with some version of this feeling. We are forced to “train” our algorithms into showing us the content we want to see, while remaining subjected to a fragmentary, transient kind of discourse. It’s impossible to get the full picture, so we may as well embrace our animal spirits.

And yet the sign outside my local gym shows how the vibes can be captured and commodified. As soon as something starts trending, like the word “vibe” itself, it’s immediately taken advantage of by people trying to make money off of you. Then the trend gets distorted into something unrecognizable.

In tracking how ideas spread, I constantly see how easily our cultural proclivities can be bent and redirected. I’m worried that our increased emotional resonance comes at the expense of logic and reason, which makes it easier to manipulate culture. If we’re not thoughtful about interacting with the world, our conversations and politics just start following the “pulse” of what’s happening, even when that’s a bad thing.

That’s not to say we should ignore our feelings entirely. The best of humanity is emotional and rational. In the words of Francisco de Goya, “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.”

In other words, we should feel more vibes, but also remain vigilant. That means trying to learn what's happening inside our chatbots and algorithms. It means getting as full a picture of reality as possible, to see how we’re being affected, because whoever controls our feelings controls our culture.

Over the past week, an “AI Fruit Love Island” series has been racking up hundreds of millions of TikTok views for its campy parodies of reality TV plotlines. It has all the fan subculture and internet discourse of a real-life drama, even though it’s entirely artificially generated.

This phenomenon was presaged by a viral trend of AI fruits cheating on each other, a meme fad of “niche” fruits eating themselves, and an ASMR genre of glass fruit cutting videos. Many viewers seem genuinely absorbed by the content, while others watch out of absurd fascination.

So why is AI fruit slop everywhere, and what does it mean?

I’m sure part of the appeal is the same reason fruits have resonated through art history: as timeless symbols of fertility, sensuality, and pleasure. The perception of ripeness and sweetness extends to the human body; it’s easy to see ourselves reflected in something like an apple or a strawberry.

Then there’s the idea of the “forbidden fruit.” All of the AI videos are about desire in some form or another. The carnal whims of the Love Island contestants are no different than Eve and the apple, or Persephone and the pomegranate. Their cravings are immediately met with harsh consequence.

The viewer, too, is complicit in the pursuit of ephemeral pleasure. It feels good to watch a glass peach get sliced in half, but then what? Our satisfaction is fleeting. We are Tantalus reaching for the receding branch, convinced we can find happiness in the next scroll.

In this regard, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chinese concept of chī guā, or “melon-eating,” which describes a passive, entertained form of spectatorship. The idea is that you’re watching a drama unfold while snacking on watermelon seeds, kind of like how Americans eat popcorn in the movie theater.

In Chinese internet culture, references to the “melon-eating masses” have become a self-deprecatory critique of detached viewership. The melon-eater sits on the sidelines, vicariously enjoying the spectacle in front of them while not contributing anything meaningful to society. Scandals and gossip are a form of morbid entertainment—and yet this pleasure is once again fleeting.

The “melon,” synonymous with the media we consume, shows that the act of viewership is the same as any other forbidden fruit. As long as we have the next morsel, we remain in a state of distracted stimulation, but eventually we all come to reckon with post-nut clarity.

You are consuming melons consuming melons consuming melons. Then you wake from the doomscroll, cast out of the garden of Eden, facing the regret of a gluttonous Thanksgiving feast.

The beauty of “AI Fruit Love Island” is that everything happens with a knowing wink. Reality TV was already doing all of this to a lesser extent, but this is such blatant slop that it becomes absurd to look at. The sheer irony breaks the fourth wall: we are all in on the joke that we are eating melons.

I see a glimmer of hope in this subversion. The more we are self-aware, the more we can meaningfully engage with our world. I don’t think it’s inherently bad to look at slop you know is slop. It’s a far greater danger to be unaware, because then you consume mindlessly. At least now you can question how you’re engaging with fruit—what you’re getting out of it and how you’re participating in it.

Upcoming events

• March 27—I’m talking at the Ohio State University. Details here.

• I’m going to organize some public readings in New York City in April and May. Stay tuned.

What I’m consuming

• The TalkingCities TikTok account is posting some banger architecture videos

• The movie Synecdoche, New York

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf, by Niggle”

I’m sitting in a Buddhist temple, listening to monks chant the Heart Sutra. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. The words technically have a meaning, but I find myself carried away by the rhythm instead. The mantra washes over me, connecting me to the present moment.

I’m scrolling on Twitter, seeing the same words show up in every post. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. These terms also have a definition, but in practice they’re only funny because they’re funny.

Incel brainrot might not be the path to enlightenment, but there is an important connection between these examples. Any time we repeat a word too much, we become desensitized to its meaning. This phenomenon, called semantic satiation, causes us to attend to form over content. All that matters is how we experience an utterance.

As dictionary definitions dissolve, we make meaning for ourselves. The word “eraser” is more about how the consonants feel in my mouth. The Heart Sutra is a ritual inducing a meditative mindset. “Clavicular” is an ironic critique of the social media ecosystem.

The funny thing about algorithms quantifying and categorizing every aspect of society is that they can only do this on a legible, “objective” level. Measurements only work when we agree there’s something to measure, like the shared definition of a word.

Semantic satiation, meanwhile, is subjective. There’s no way to assign value to your individual sensation. Nobody can pinpoint whether you experience a word as beautiful or funny or sacred. “Brainrot,” as an aesthetic of nonsensical repetition, therefore subverts the algorithm. It creates an emotional meta-meaning that will always be absent from a vector space.

That which cannot be quantified cannot be commodified. Language is only profitable when we believe that meaning can be “captured” into words. A social media platform might be able to make money off the keyword “Clavicular,” but it is blind to the raw feeling of being inundated with the term. And yet there’s still a message happening on that embodied level.

If anything, it’s more authentic to feel meaning as a subjective, emotional thing. The kind of “objective meaning” we identify through definitions and embeddings actually emerges from our all-encompassing sensory context, expressed collectively through our interactions over time.

The Heart Sutra teaches that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is no fixed interpretation of language, but it is precisely in its unfixedness that language reveals its meaning. The beauty of semantic satiation is that it destroys the “containers” of denotation. Instead of using words to connect to something else, we connect to the words themselves—revealing that it was all form, and none of it.

What I’m consuming

• This Harper’s article on “agentic” Silicon Valley culture by Sam Kriss

• Harry Miller’s tutorials on walking, standing, and making shit happen

• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges

Where I’m speaking

• Austin, TX - March 13 presentation for SXSW

• Columbus, OH - March 27 lecture for the OSU Linguistics Department

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Harlow monkey experiment as the internet obsesses over Punch-kun, a socially anxious Japanese macaque that returns to his stuffed monkey whenever he struggles to interact with the other macaques.

It’s easy to see why Punch is captivating people’s hearts. We’re literally monkeys ourselves. Everybody can project their own stories onto him; all of us have sought out comfort in difficult situations.

However, the Harlow experiment is a warning about how our monkey instincts can be used against us. When I look at the photograph of the wire and cloth mothers, I see the physical and digital worlds we’re moving toward. One is stripped bare of everything but the basic resources for survival, while the other is an ersatz source of comfort.

The cloth mother is an AI chatbot or a social media influencer. She looks real enough to comfort your monkey brain into feeling a minimum amount of social connection. We turn to her when we can’t find any actual monkeys.

The wire mother is the self-checkout lane in a grocery store, or the sleek grey fast casual restaurant. You get what you want, without interacting with anyone, and then the space practically begs you to leave.

The more our physical spaces are optimized and transactionalized, the less the real world will look like the real world. At the same time, the better our technology gets, the more our digital world will appear like it’s the real thing. We’ll increasingly find ourselves clinging to it in anthropomorphic consolation while everything else withers to wire.

Following the surrogate mother experiment, most of Harlow’s monkeys turned out severely socially impaired, struggling to bond with other monkeys. I worry the same will be true for us, because artificial connection can never replace actual connection.

Punch, meanwhile, symbolizes how things could still go right. His stuffed animal helps him develop social skills and learn to interact with the other monkeys. The zoo is carefully designed for him to thrive; resources aren’t separated from community.

It’s a basic human instinct to seek the cloth mother. We need to feel connected to people and things. Arguably, this is what makes us human in the first place. But the things don’t have to come at the expense of the people. It’s possible to develop both our real world and our technology in a way that cultivates warmth and meaning.

This starts with carefully building our environments to augment the best in ourselves. We can’t focus on just the online, or even just the offline. Society now depends on both, and neglecting either would lead us into Harlow’s dystopia.

Cute animal videos will always go viral, but I’m sure there’s a reason Punch resonated so much in this current moment. He’s a lonely monkey, and we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. We’re all drawn to the “stuffed animals” in our own lives, but we should recognize that these are means to an end, rather than the end itself. Instead, we must use our tools to build community where we can, understanding that we are monkeys as well.

Upcoming speaking events:

• This Wednesday 2/25 at CU Boulder - details here

• This Thursday 2/26 at UC Berkeley - details here. Event is currently full but they might move to a bigger room

• March 13 at SXSW, Austin - details here

As always, if you liked this essay, please consider buying my book Algospeak! Thanks for your support :)