Slop Suggests the Existence of Its Opposite

LinkedIn Hell and other metaphysical realms.

I’ve met a shocking number of people who became religious or spiritual after a horrifying personal experience of evil. They all say almost the same line: After that, I knew for sure evil was real, so I realized its opposite must also exist.

“Slop” is a very interesting and apparently new subcategory of evil. It’s no coincidence, too, that we’re struggling to name its opposite. Some call it craft, some call it art, but both fail to truly counterbalance the gravity of the cultural antimatter that is slop.

“Art” has been reduced to entertainment on one hand, and economically and practically meaningless (yet somehow immeasurably precious) cultural expressions on the other. Then there’s craft, which is maybe a more concrete and therefore more wieldy term than art, but it bleeds helplessly into slop at its margins. It suggests that there is a repeatable process that can be mastered. AI is, if nothing else, excellent at mastering the right concrete steps and still excreting slop.

So without a satisfactory term for the opposite of slop, we’re just interpretive dancing at each other about the somehow self-evident importance that something is “made by humans!” You can squawk all you want about the inherent worth of a human made product, but unless you can point to something that is actually epistemologically distinct about it, we have no defensible moat. Humans have imperfections, but AI can imitate imperfections. Besides, imperfections are themselves a shadow of a quality, that being perfection, which is better suited to robots, anyway.

The AI people are completely fine with the ethics of machines taking our work, too. Horse whipping no longer propels you down the road, and you no longer dig tunnels with a hammer and pickaxe. If there isn’t anything meaningful for us to do that AI can’t do, then as far as they’re concerned we at least get to go to a paradise utopia where all of our needs are paid for. You don’t need to believe in that promise for them to bank on it. Pointing out that AI makes errors is also pretty easily rebuffed, because AIs are demonstrably making fewer of those errors all the time. They imitate human reason with pretty high fidelity in the newest models, as far as I can tell. If they’re making silly mistakes now, they maybe won’t be soon enough.

I’m not saying that we have no ground to stand on. But if you refuse to point out what actual nameable quality human beings have that the AI somehow doesn’t have access to, AI people will just tell you that the AIs are going to get better at everything that makes people people, at the very least until they’re a hell of a lot better than you.

We’re stuck with a problem: We need a strong metaphysic of the opposite of slop.

Slop, like the larger patterns of evil, insists upon itself. We don’t need to explain ourselves when we accuse people of posting slop. By now, we’ve all experienced that disgust. The opposite of slop certainly exists, but insists upon itself less. It flutters away from those with demands for power and bad intentions. Just because it will not land on sloppers, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

In the YouTube world, there are growing legions of AI copycat channels. They rip video ideas and steal entire visual styles from the big-name channels. They slop out what, on the surface, seems to be just as high quality as what otherwise takes months to render in Blender. They make large sums of money with those fakes. They even have Discord chats teaching others how to do the same (for a low-low price).

One of the big YouTube creators recently made a video about this ecosystem. His argument against the practice was emotionally appealing, but it also lacked a terminology for the opposite of slop. He said things like, human beings actually made our video. OK. What exactly is imbued in your images through the millions of clicks in Blender versus a quick AI generation? To the untrained eye, they look basically the same. We’re meant to react with intuitive disgust, which, by the way, I do. But the slop guys can just say they’re saving time and we’re just being big Luddites.

I actually love slop. For almost all of modernity, we have been in a long process of devaluing subjective experience in favor of the objective scientific view of things, which is wrong. Slop on YouTube is like my friend who got high on weed one time and experienced the presence of a demon who was the trajectory of the rest of his sad life. Slop is like a cultural bad trip, forcing us to re-establish some linguistic and cultural norms around categories of irreducible subjective experiences.

In Plato’s Seventh Letter, he wrote to some of his friends in Sicily who were struggling with succession of rulers. Of one of the new rulers, Dionysius II, Plato said that he only understood the surface of philosophy, nothing else. Dionysius II thought knowing the words meant he actually understood the ideas. He was angry at Plato for suggesting otherwise.

Using symbols does not mean you possess knowledge of what they symbolize. This is because, according to Plato, there are five elements to reality. The first three he called the symbol, the definition, and the image. These are the ones Dionysius II was obsessed with: the little linguistic formulas that he could bend and manipulate toward whatever end he was trying to achieve. The other two, Plato said, were more important: True Knowledge and the Thing in Itself.

All of human language is entirely composed of the first three, and does not give you immediate access to True Knowledge. To arrive at True Knowledge, you had to be exposed to a variety of arguments and symbols and definitions and images and experiences. True Knowledge, at some sudden moment, crosses over into you like the kindling of a flame. The words and the formulas and the expressions are always just a bad approximation.

Dionysius II was engaged in the ancient version of slop. He mistook the surface expression of things for True Knowledge of the Things in Themselves. He used the symbols to get whatever he happened to already have wanted, which, no surprise, were not good things to want, because they were coming from a man with little True Knowledge. Plato even said that anybody who would set out to write a treatise from first principles exposed himself as not knowing anything.

Modern people have taken on the shallow philosophy of Dionysius II as Gospel. Materialists and rationalists effectively factor out the Knower from the evaluation, so the symbol is confused for True Knowledge. Because of this fundamental error, we tend to get lost in squabbles over definitional differences and category errors (analytic philosophy and rationalist discourse).

Bucking that trend, the American philosopher Charles Peirce took up more productively where Plato and other philosophers left off. He said we are fundamentally triadic in our consciousness. Now, Plato broke the first of this triad into a smaller three: the symbol, the definition, and the image. We can just call those all “symbol.” The other two would be the Knower and the Thing in Itself. There’s nothing in the universe, even far away quasars and bangs at the beginning of time, that escapes this irreducible three: the symbol, the symbolizer, and the symbolized. If we’re the ones looking at them, we’re the third in their dyad.

Modern researchers are now rediscovering and validating Charles Peirce. They’re writing papers about how the reason AI has not come into a subjective consciousness is because it is ultimately a dyadic phenomenon. It is ones and zeros, cause and effect, and only through our observation of it does it become triadic. In other words, it is completely dependent on our own consciousness for its phenomenological existence. It has no direct experiences. This is great. Serious people are once again understanding the idea that phenomenology actually has something real to tell us about the way the material world unfolds for us. It’s also a foothold we might be able to work with to describe the opposite of slop.

Slop itself obviously requires triadic consciousness to be a coherent concept. Nothing that the AI produces can be deemed slop or not slop without a human subject judging it to be so. In fact, the way the machine learning systems work is that they produce a lot of outputs, and a human judges them. We do this by paying attention. We tell them over long training periods that this looks like a cat, or this doesn’t look like a cat, or this is good writing, or this is bad writing. Our attention is constantly interwoven into the system’s outputs, as we tend to forget. The reason their outputs feel like slop is because they contain millions of instances of vague human attention, not actually aimed at the true object of any given prompt.

The reason we knee-jerk accept the definition of slop without necessarily accepting a further non-materialist explanation of things is because we have an intuitive understanding of the Platonic realm, if not an explicit one. We feel a natural revulsion to slop, and negative emotions are much more powerful than positive emotions. So we’re much more likely to give a hard definition to a negative phenomenological experience than to a positive one because, like evil, it insists upon itself. Again, though, the negative form suggests the existence of a positive form.

Slop has been greatly expanded by the powers of AI, but it is not really new. People have always been hacks or copycats or genre writers or mass products. There are endless definitions for what we mean when we say something is not authentic, a vague gesture where a keen insight is wanted. What these things all have in common is that they lack layers upon layers of that irreducible, triadic attention.

I’m about to describe magic to you. You’ll believe in it. There seems to be something that happens when a human being with some amount of True Knowledge pays close attention to any object. This object could be a small business, a novel, a poem, a movie, a band, or any other Thing you could pay attention to. That object will become layered with his attention like a croissant.

What we widely agree upon as the great classics are deemed that because they are imbued with an attentional depth that approaches infinity. By unfolding these layers of attention as a reader, it may kindle you with True Knowledge. As it’s paid attention to upon rereading or rewatching or re-examining, it tends to unfold like hyper-space-origami, presenting itself differently each time. This is the opposite of slop.

Now, slop often crassly imitates a gloss of the sorts of things that were once known to contain attention. For this reason, AI slop YouTube channels always have to be knockoffs of a well-established and deeply respected channel. No slop channel can be the origin of a new vibe. The 3D models they make with AI have to be based off of the sorts of 3D models that were previously made with deep attention. Not because real humans did it. Rather, because the project of spending time with 3D objects in a software like Blender gives their focused attention ample time to imbue these objects with the magic fire. We intuitively like it even when we don’t consciously understand we’re seeing it. When you see a YouTube thumbnail for the first time, even if you don’t quite know what you’re looking at, something in you recognizes it as deeply paid attention to. The only exception to this is when you are tricked by an intentional imitation.

What copycats are banking on is that millions of viewers on YouTube have watched a great Veritasium video or two. They came away from it with a sense that they’d been paid attention to and their humanity affirmed, which left them with a positive memory of that channel’s look and feel. When they see a knockoff that imitates the vibe, they might be tricked into playing their video.

The problem, of course, is like Dionysius II’s philosophy, slop does not contain True Knowledge, so the attrition rate is going to be enormous. In fact, there is a well-known rebound effect: people start to feel the original creator’s videos are AI generated, causing harm to the entire ecosystem. The original creators are punished by the parasites as much as the parasites are punished for being parasites. To survive, you have to recreate new styles from scratch.

This is a pattern that’s been around for a long time. If you create something great, hacks are going to imitate it. You’ll seem like a hack if you keep doing it. That’s why great artists have to constantly rebrand and recreate themselves. This is a microcosm of the eternal battle against parasites, which exist on the deep biological level as well as the spiritual.

I’m not suggesting that we should just leave the parasites alone to do whatever they want because it’s all part of the circle of life or whatever. There’s a place for police. As far as YouTube is capable of it, they should manually remove and punish these people. At the same time, the arc of history is toward justice, and it is indeed sometimes long.

It’s not just YouTube grifters. We are presented with the temptation to be a slop parasite, all the time. In a lot of ways, the entire postwar American tradition of white collar work, where you basically do nothing and get paid a steady paycheck and retirement and medical care, is an elaborate system of expansionist welfare slop. We call them bullshit jobs, or email jobs. They were predictable and safe for about 80 years in America. They’ve been so stable for so long, in fact, that a lot of people have really forgotten that all parasites need a host. There must always be some original creation, some hyper-object, at the core of whatever corporation or conglomerate produces the parasite jobs as a byproduct of its existence.

Now, some people will say there is a lot of money to be made in bullshit jobs and that maybe the best thing to do is have a “day” job where you suckle on the long-ago memory of a hyper-object so you can spend your nights and weekends on things you actually care about. Lots of people have tried this over the years, and a few people even claim to have gotten away with it. Maybe. I’m skeptical. A bullshit job inherently drains my ability to pay attention well. Those who work these sorts of meaningless-feeling jobs will always seem to be unable to stop it from spreading into their personal work, their family life, and even their ability to be fully human.

You see this illustrated well in Fight Club. Norton’s character has a well paid 90s white collar office job, which is effectively bullshit. Of course, he deeply intuits that he’s participating in a parasitic relationship with a corporation that hates him but cannot fully identify and cure itself of his parasitic load. The conclusion of the movie is kind of dark. It seems to think there’s no such thing as true creation. The only thing that exists is destruction, and it’s better to participate in destruction than to be a nutless parasite. That insight might be helpful for people who are nutless, but it’s far from the final answer.

The truth is that whatever spirit he was working for, at some point in its forgotten origin, was not parasitic. A real person gave it the attentional seed that the entire multi-billion dollar corporation was built around. Everything that is economically profitable is either a source of True Knowledge or a parasite on it. It is sometimes extremely difficult to figure out how (and I don’t know your situation), but anyone, anytime, may participate in some true creation, usually by sacrificing short term security (which people tend to love more than life itself).

Now, I understand slop and true creation exist at every level of the fractal. Maybe even the majority of all giant corporations are effectively entirely parasites, slop purveyors. They’re low attention and tend to boom and bust quickly. They always obviously (if you know what you’re looking for) feed off something that already exists.

The thing about all slop, like evil, is that it’s like shadows. It doesn’t have any substantial reality outside of its parody of good. Even though our world is very confusingly cut across many levels with these shadows — there are fractals of good and slop at every level of every organization, from infinite scale and minute closeness — we can at least rest assured that what we should do as individuals is simple: Increase the amount of time we spend paying attention to the objects that draw us toward themselves with joy, and participate less in the electric blue mustardy thinning out.

The reason people hate LinkedIn with so much passion is because there are very few real creations there maintaining all the anxious attention. There are hordes of slop pirates trying, by careful wording and marketing and manipulation, to sink their teeth into these few true objects. They want to secure a safe bullshit job and make a nice salary. But there’s just not enough of that to go around. The majority of people who are making something truly good, and therefore sustaining and profitable and meaningful, avoid LinkedIn. Nobody who makes something layered with real attention wants it to be overwhelmed by LinkedIn HR parasites.

I actually failed to understand this situation for several years. I applied to, I’m not kidding, a thousand jobs on LinkedIn. I had a banger resume. I got five interviews, three of which were scams, two of which went to the final stages and fizzled out after like six months of back and forth. I have since realized that it’s almost always a much better use of my time to pay deep attention to what calls me, even if I can’t see how it will pay my bills.

I know what I’m suggesting is scary, because we all want a salary and health insurance (some people do get these things the right way, by the way). We’re afraid to get sick and not have enough for retirement or our kid’s college. I get it. Life is terrifying and the unknown is always looming just around the corner. But you just can’t half-way do this. People always underestimate how much attention you have to pay to create good things. More than you can imagine. An essay may seem simple, for example. It’s just a conglomeration of words. On the surface, anybody can do it. But what’s hopefully behind these mostly false symbols and definitions and images is the writer, trying to kindle an impossible flame.

Slop is indeed the enemy, but it’s just a shadow. It’s a reminder of what cast it. So anytime you see it, don’t despair. Don’t fight it with hatred, either. People, over a long enough time frame, really do want its opposite. Bet on the arc. I promise you, things will tend to miraculously bend in your favor if you fully give up on slop and go all in on your object.

I find that you will receive helpers, mentors, aids, and windfalls that you can’t account for in any spreadsheet, but nevertheless come to those who believe.