Slop: History, Form, and Destiny of an Aesthetics of Distraction

There is a peculiar intellectual defiance in chasing the elusive — a desire to uncover the structures hidden within the shadows of the obvious. This pursuit brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water (2009), in which two young fish, when asked about their environment, respond with a disoriented: “What’s water?” Today, we swim in a new kind of digital water; it is a pervasive, semi-liquid atmosphere that we have come to call ‘slop’ — a liquid that does not just create atmospheres but is itself a cultural atmosphere. Its function is not to exist as specific content to be analyzed (like a fish swimming in water), but as a constant and uninterrupted condition (the water itself). Its presence is calibrated so that it never becomes an apparition, ensuring that the flow remains the basic condition of the media experience, as invisible as it is vital.

Slop is thus the semi-liquid, indistinct content, lacking authorial direction, that does not require attention, and yet, like a subterranean river, flows inexorably around us.

The term slop, in its current meaning, emerged between 2022 and 2023 within online communities, especially on Reddit, X, and forums dedicated to critiquing new media. The first complete formulation arose in the debate surrounding the production of content generated by low-level artificial intelligence (AI) models. Some users began using the expression “AI slop” to indicate the growing mass of automatic content (texts, images, videos), devoid of authorial direction and characterized by approximate, repetitive, indefinite quality. The term caught on for its ability to evoke a semi-liquid, formless, unstable material.

In this original definition, slop is not an aesthetic genre, but a minimal algorithmic output, the result of platforms seeking content with very low cognitive cost. Its main characteristic is the near-total absence of artistic or communicative intent. Slop does not represent an author or a point of view: it represents a process. This is why digital communities interpret it as the most evident sign of an attention economy that has stopped producing meaning to devote itself exclusively to perpetuating flows.

Beyond its algorithmic origin, slop is defined by specific formal and thematic features: a flattening of emotional peaks, a predictable structural cadence that mimics human logic without inhabiting it, and a chromatic or linguistic neutrality designed to minimize cognitive friction. It is a ‘low-resolution’ reality that prioritizes the continuity of the signal over the depth of the message.

In the first few months of 2023, faced with feeds populated by automatically generated videos, articles written by automatic systems, and hyper-standardized images, users perceived above all a continuous repetition, devoid of semantic evolution. The spread of the term owes much to both digital creators and researchers who, between 2023 and 2024, began using it to describe a phenomenon broader than just algorithmic production. It is a cultural form where content aims not to express, but to occupy.

The extension of the concept beyond its original context allows us to interpret slop as a symptom of a deeper change, which goes beyond artificial intelligence: the transformation of content into filler.¹ When it ceases to be a message, it becomes an environment.

One might think of a recent degeneration, a byproduct of technical overproduction, but that would be an unforgivable error of perspective. Slop is not an unforeseen event of modernity; it is the most recent manifestation of an ancient principle, according to which the value of a message does not depend on what it communicates, but on how it occupies the space of attention. In some ways, slop is akin to cursed images²; like them, it does not aim to communicate a meaning, but simply to persist, to occupy space without presenting itself as a specific message to be interpreted. Their “value” — or rather, their viral effect — lies not in a decipherable meaning or a clear narrative, but in their capacity to disturb through an illogical combination of familiar elements. They persist in the imagination precisely because they resist canonical interpretation, creating a sense of inexplicable discomfort. Ultimately, one can argue that both — slop and cursed images — are inexplicable factors that defy normal aesthetic categories.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous formula, “the medium is the message,” proves prophetic today: it anticipates the very logic of slop. Indeed, when communication transforms into a continuous, uninterrupted flow, what takes primary value is no longer the specific meaning of a content, but its purely structural function of keeping alive and fueling the media system itself (McLuhan 23).  

Vilém Flusser also understood that, within technological culture, images no longer have as their primary purpose the representation of reality, but rather to guarantee the functioning of the very system that generates them (57). Slop embodies this principle exactly: it is a continuity mechanism that does not seek a human audience, but addresses algorithms, fueling the flow for the pure sustenance of the media machine.

The idea of content that is present precisely so that it will not be noticed finds foundation in much twentieth-century philosophy. In Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, for example, the term Zuhandenheit indicates the operational availability of objects, their readiness-to-hand, that is, the mode in which objects present themselves when we use them in a practical, non-reflective way, like tools at hand (a hammer while we nail, a doorknob we open without thinking). The object in these cases is “transparent,” fused with the action, and is not thematized as a distinct object. In contrast, Heidegger uses the term Vorhandenheit to define presence-at-hand, objective presence, the mode in which the object presents itself when we observe it in a theoretical, disinterested way, as a thematic presence (the same hammer examined for its physical properties, the doorknob studied for its design). This relationship shows how much of our experience is inhabited by elements that act precisely because they do not emerge into consciousness. That which works remains in the background and thereby supports the world of action (Heidegger 98). Slop is Zuhandenheit applied to digital content; it is the algorithm’s hammer: present, useful to the system, but destined to remain invisible to the user’s conscious gaze, so that the flow proceeds smoothly. Its value lies in the fact that it never asks to be thematized, because its function is to keep the perceptual flow operational.

If Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis shows us how slop acts — by canceling itself into the background to support the flow — another crucial perspective reveals with what consequences it operates, transforming it from a perceptual condition into a force of material alteration of our cultural ecosystem. This is where the critique of political economy meets media studies, applying to the digital a concept born to describe the exploitation of the land: that of “metabolic rift.” Indeed, by applying the Marxist concept of metabolic rift ³ to artificial intelligence, Australian media scholar Kate Crawford identifies a deep “metabolic imbalance” between the voracious production of data and the real consumption of human cultural resources. Just as industrial capitalism erodes natural soil by interrupting regeneration cycles, AI generates a similar split in the digital sphere. Slop thus takes on the appearance of a toxic digital waste that progressively contaminates the internet, poisoning the common ground of human creativity with repetitive and degraded content. In this ecological metaphor, the soil to be preserved is shared human culture, the reservoir of experiences, languages, and authentic creativity from which meanings arise. This soil, instead of being cultivated and regenerated, is progressively exhausted by a perverse cycle: AI systems “consume” human culture to produce slop, which in turn is reused as nourishment to generate (more) new slop. It is a closed and self-destructive circuit, a continuous-cycle degeneration that poisons the media landscape, making it increasingly sterile and homogeneous.

By building this bridge between Marxist ecology and media studies, Crawford’s perspective makes a fundamental leap: slop ceases to be a simple aesthetic phenomenon or an occasional nuisance in our feeds. Instead, it becomes the indicator of a systemic process of extraction and depletion, comparable to the exploitation of a non-renewable natural resource. Its implications, therefore, are not only cultural (an impoverishment of meaning) but extend to the environmental sphere (due to enormous energy and resource consumption) and the social sphere (because it erodes the common foundations of discourse and the collective imaginary).

Another fundamental viewpoint for deciphering slop comes from linguistics and, in particular, from the reflections of semiotician Roman Jakobson. He identified, among the various functions of language, the poetic function (126): that by which a message draws attention to itself, to its form, its sound, its structure — think of a poem, a memorable slogan, a pun. Jakobson observed that when this function is extinguished, the message ceases to be perceived for how it is made and is reduced to a mere vehicle of passage, a simple conduit for transferring information. Slop represents the extreme radicalization of this process. It does not merely neglect the poetic function; it actively avoids it, carefully eliminating any element — a surprising image, an original linguistic construct, a recognizable emotion — that could even accidentally capture the gaze or stimulate thought. It is a message whose true purpose is to be ignored. Its perfection lies not in leaving a mark, but in passing through the perceptual field without leaving a trace, like a shadow that fades at the very moment it is glimpsed.

This logic of the operational background, where value lies in not emerging, finds a decisive counterpart in analyses of language and communication in the postmodern condition. Jean-François Lyotard, reflecting on the fate of discourse in contemporary society, described the condition in which it becomes transparent — so perfectly adherent to the codes and expectations of the communication system as to be indistinguishable from background noise (57). From this perspective, the effectiveness of content is no longer measured by its expressive force or its ability to strike, but,  on the contrary, by its docility, its attitude not to impose itself, to flow without friction and without leaving a meaningful trace.

Slop represents the algorithmic and definitive incarnation of this transparency: it is no longer just discourse that becomes background, but a veritable cultural material designed not to be seen, whose ultimate purpose is to render its own passage through the attention flow invisible.

The principle is also found in the theories on atmosphere by philosopher of science Gernot Böhme. For Böhme, an atmosphere functions when it is not perceived as an object, but as an omnipresent condition (21). Like the water for Wallace’s little fish, the air we breathe is only felt when it is missing.

The philosophical heart of slop is thus its paradoxical nature: to manifest by annulling itself. It is the expressive form of an era in which content does not want to be interpreted, remembered, discussed; it simply wants to pass through perception, like the water in Wallace’s story. Thus, it realizes a completely unprecedented model of communication: no longer the message that asks for attention, but the message that works only as long as it does not elicit it, then disappearing without anyone noticing.

To understand the deep roots of slop, it is necessary to broaden our gaze to a surprisingly extensive cultural genealogy. As often happens, its origins are rooted well before the digital era. Already in the nineteenth century, for example, chapbooks — popular booklets printed on poor-quality paper, often assembled from clippings and recycled texts, and intended for immediate and distracted consumption — embodied an embryonic form of this logic. They were “low-friction” cultural products: serial, standardized, conceived not to be meditated upon or collected, but to be consumed easily, so that the reader would slip into them almost without noticing, as in an indistinct flow. The literary critic Franco Moretti defined this phenomenon with a very incisive image: “the factory in culture” (Moretti 122). With this expression, Moretti means that the logic of industrial production — made of series, copies, and standardization — was beginning to invade (also) the world of books. In practice, in place of the author’s unique gesture, with their voice and artistic intention, there emerged a sort of cultural assembly line that produced texts en masse, all very similar to each other, designed to be consumed quickly and without too many pretensions.

This aesthetic of visual ‘filler,’ which prioritizes environmental function over representational meaning, did not escape art historian Alois Riegl, with his influential theory of Kunstwollen ⁴ (the “artistic will” or formal impulse of an era), which grasped this principle at the end of the nineteenth century. Riegl observes how many ornamental forms of industrial production were not conceived to be observed as works in themselves, but structured so as not to emerge. Their purpose was not to attract attention to themselves, but to constitute an active background, a sort of visual climate that defined the atmosphere of a space without ever becoming its protagonist. In this intuition lies the early recognition of an aesthetic of distraction or discretion (Riegl 41): the creation of forms whose value lies in their ability to permeate the environment while remaining, precisely, in the background of conscious perception — an idea that surprisingly anticipates the imperceptible and environmental logic of digital slop.

Continuing along this genealogical line, a crucial passage occurs at the dawn of the twentieth century with the birth of what philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer dub the “culture industry” (Adorno 145). With this expression, the two Frankfurt School thinkers describe a system in which cultural production — from music to cinema, from literature to radio — is organized according to the same principles as the factory: standardization, efficiency, and mass reproducibility. In this process, art and culture cease to be primarily vehicles of symbolic expression, critique, or individual experience, and are instead transformed into devices of repetition: homogeneous, pre-packaged, and substantially interchangeable products, whose main objective is no longer to communicate deep meaning, but to guarantee regular and predictable consumption, fueling a continuous cycle of production and reproduction. Culture, in other words, becomes a machine of reproduction before being an expression of the symbolic.

Among other possible genealogies, a decisive role belongs not only to ambient music (Muzak) but also to the emergence of visual forms conceived to inhabit the gaze without invoking it. The same logic we find in content that exists to occupy space rather than to communicate, finds a fundamental precursor in the decorative arts of the late nineteenth century, particularly those produced in series by nascent industrial production. Think of wallpaper with infinitely repeated floral motifs, ceramic coverings for subway stations, cast-iron railings with standardized decorations. In these objects, the image renounces its traditional function of representation (depicting a scene, telling a story) and is reduced to a purely decorative surface — the same identical function we assign to the sonic carpet that accompanies us during boring stops at the airport or train station waiting to depart. The ornament does not serve to symbolize anything specific; it serves to cover, to fill a visual space in a pleasant but not demanding way. They are infinitely repeatable patterns, interchangeable motifs whose sole purpose is to wallpaper the gaze without capturing it. In contemporary terms, they are nothing other than visual filler: the nineteenth-century equivalent of an algorithmic background, designed to exist in the periphery of perception, a direct ancestor of the visual slop that saturates our digital feeds.

An even more evident continuity is found in the advertising aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, particularly in mass-produced images for urban billboards. The luminous surfaces of cities — large panels, displays, repetitive sequences of standardized photographs — are not meant to be truly looked at, but to saturate the visual environment with minimal and constant stimulation. In this anonymous overabundance, closer to an atmospheric condition than a message, we already recognize another primitive form of visual slop.

Conceptual art of the 1960s and ‘70s also offers a significant precedent in this sense — works that presented themselves as documents, recordings, sequences, or instructions, designed to evade the spectacular dimension. Critic Lucy Lippard described this aesthetic as a “dematerialization of the art object,” in which form becomes irrelevant and what remains is an almost neutral presence, destined more to occupy a mental place than impose itself as an image (vii).

However, a critical reflection demands that we compare slop with another tradition, apparently distant but useful in comparison by difference, in its opposition to the mainstream: the aesthetics of underground subcultures. If slop is characterized by the will to disappear, to blend into the background, underground cultures — from punk to cyberpunk, from street art to industrial music — have always made visibility, perturbation, and the subversion of codes their manifesto. This is not simple antagonism, but an ontological difference in the relationship with attention. Subcultures build coded languages, deliberately abrasive aesthetics, symbols that function as recognition signals for a community of initiates. Their purpose is to create an alternative space, a counter-environment that resists assimilation into the dominant flow. Slop, on the contrary, does not resist: it assimilates and conforms to the existing. It does not build communities, but bypasses them; it does not create shared meanings, but dissolves them in the anonymous continuity of the algorithm.

Consider the punk culture of the 1970s. Its aesthetic of photocopied covers, handmade fanzines, distorted sounds, and provocative lyrics was anything but slop: it was a cry intended to mark a presence, an attempt to force attention toward marginal and uncomfortable content otherwise kept aside. As Dick Hebdige notes, punk used style as “a form of oblique communication, a way to challenge consensus through the spectacularization of difference” (Hebdige 90). Similarly, the digital avant-gardes of the 1990s — from the first self-managed websites to mail art — practiced a low-fi but intentional form of expression, where every element, however rudimentary, was loaded with an authorial gesture. Slop, on the other hand, is born already inside the procedural logic of the platform, of repeated standardization, of silent production devoid of authorship. It is not the expression of a marginal subject, but the side effect of a system that has eliminated marginality itself, covering it under a layer of incessant (apparently) informative flow.

Even in the most recent forms of digital underground culture, such as certain currents of generative art or glitch aesthetic, one perceives a tension towards meaning, a will to interrogate the limits of the medium. Slop, on the contrary, interrogates nothing. It represents the already-given answer, the content that avoids the question, the banality without alternatives. In this sense, we are faced with an inversion of the very logic underlying underground aesthetics. While the latter seeks to create spaces of autonomy inside or against the system, slop is the system that — like expanding polyurethane — makes space and fills every crack, occupying every interstice with a material that neutralizes the very possibility of an alternative. It is no coincidence that many underground aesthetics have been progressively absorbed and sterilized by platforms — think of the commercialization of graffiti or the reduction of cyberpunk to scenic backdrop. But slop does not need to be absorbed: it is already the native product of that extractive logic that subcultures have tried and will always try to oppose.

The paradox, then, is this: if historically the underground has fought to emerge from invisibility, slop prospers in invisibility itself. A struggle it does not fight, but surrenders in advance to the given condition. Perhaps, as Mark Fisher suggested, we are facing a “cancellation of the future” more subtle than any censorship (23) — no longer the refusal of alternative voices, but a subsequent step: their reduction to harmless background noise. Slop, from this perspective, is not only the antithesis of the underground; it is its digital cemetery, the place where every difference dies out in the continuity of a flow that no longer admits conflicts because it has already eliminated the very ground on which they could arise.

At this point, a crucial distinction is needed, because slop is often confused with another typically digital discursive form: the meme. Although both move in the sphere of rapid and easily replicable content, their nature is diametrically opposed. In perfect continuity with the aesthetics of grassroots countercultures, the meme lives on recognition, requires active participation, is based on a play of citations and distortions that needs a reader capable of grasping the reference. It is, using Richard Dawkins’s categories, a cultural unit that propagates through reinterpretation (251). Slop, on the contrary, does not need to be recognized or reinterpreted; indeed, it functions precisely when it eludes any interpretative gesture. While the meme seeks attention — even if ironic or marginal — slop rejects it.

Even in the memetic dynamics described by Limor Shifman, cultural value derives from the capacity of content to generate variants, to lend itself to collective manipulation, to be cited and reinvented (18). Slop, on the other hand, does not produce variants: it produces replicas. It does not increase semantic complexity; it reduces it. The meme grows through appropriation; slop spreads through indifference. Therefore, although it shares with memes the same algorithmic infrastructure and the same technological environment, slop represents the opposite pole of digital communication: not a social language, but an operational sub-language, a current of content that flows without leaving behind any form of memory.

In the path leading to contemporary slop, spam also constitutes a significant antecedent, not so much for its communicative structure — which still aims to be noticed, even if undesirably — but for its logic of occupation (Brunton 55). Spam invades the channel not to persuade, but to saturate; not to create meaning, but to prevent other meaning from being produced. In this sense, it shares with slop the vocation to fill the space of attention without caring about the relevance or interest of the recipient. However, the difference is substantial: while spam still seeks a reaction, however minimal, slop prospers on the absence of response. Spam is intrusive, slop is discreet. One forces its way, the other insinuates itself. It is precisely this distance between invasiveness and imperceptibility that makes slop a peculiar phenomenon, closer to the systemic background noise that defines the aforementioned Muzak than to a disruptive message.

When the mature web transforms attention into an economic resource and content into tools for producing data, slop becomes an inevitable tool. The content farms of the 2000s, the infinite streams of social networks, the automatically generated videos: all operate according to the same logic, that of content that does not need to be read, watched, or listened to, but simply delivered.

When attention becomes the primary economic resource and content becomes simple tools for generating data, slop reveals itself as the ideal tool. Media scholar Jonathan Beller grasped this juncture with an effective formula: “in the digital age, watching is working” (1). What does that mean? That — as philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has well demonstrated in his texts on the themes of the Docu-sphere and Webfare ⁵ — every glance at a screen, even the most distracted, generates value for platforms in the form of data, engagement, and advertising. In this context, slop represents the purest and most efficient form of this minimal “work”: it is content designed to be “consumed” (or rather, to scroll before our eyes) with minimal cognitive effort, while maximizing dwell time and data production.

This transition marks a shift from what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht defines as a ‘meaning culture’ to a ‘presence culture.’ In this context, slop does not ask to be interpreted; it simply asks to be there, occupying space and time. Furthermore, as Yves Citton maintains in his The Ecology of Attention, the issue is no longer the capture of individual focus, but the saturation of the collective attentional environment. Slop is the perfect fuel for this ecology: a substance that maintains the ‘presence’ of the flow while bypassing the need for ‘meaning.’

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, analyzing consumer society, would have defined these forms as simulacra (11): images or content that have ceased to represent something real (a referent) and that now exist only to guarantee the functioning of the system that produces them. Slop is the perfect simulacrum of the attention economy: it has no author, conveys no sense, does not aim to move or convince. Its only reason for being is the nihilistic maintenance of the data flow in motion, reproducing itself in an infinite cycle, so that the system — i.e., the platforms — can never stop.

The result is a profound aesthetic transformation. Slop does not live in attention, but on its margin. It exists in the background zone of perception, in that liminal space that Merleau-Ponty described as the implicit horizon of every experience (74). For this reason, reducing slop to a mere phenomenon of cultural decay would be naive and perhaps dangerous. It reveals something far more radical: the passage from a culture built on signification to a culture built on the continuity of flow.⁶ In this regard, Nick Srnicek has shown how digital platforms no longer compete on the quality of content, but on the ability to keep the infinite flow of data alive (39). In such an environment, slop is not to be considered an error; on the contrary, it is the tool conceived and realized precisely for the continuous functioning of the machine.

Concerning flow, a clear alarm emerges in Kate Crawford’s analysis regarding the exhaustion of quality human data, a trend that pushes AI models towards a self-destructive cycle. When AI models (for text, images, video, etc.) are trained no longer on original data created by humans (books, photos, films, real conversations), but primarily or exclusively on content previously generated by other AI models (slop retraining), a degenerative cycle is indeed triggered, as described in studies on so-called model collapse.⁷ Slop thus acts like a digital fast food that saturates without nourishing and, in the long run, ruins the palate. Imagine a diet composed only of hyper-sweet or hyper-salty foods: after a while, a ripe fruit or a dish cooked with genuine ingredients would seem bland or “wrong” to you. The same happens to our collective cultural sensitivity after massive and prolonged exposure to slop: perfect but empty images, polished but shallow texts, pre-packaged but feather-light narratives. This homogeneous digital broth accustoms our gaze and our mind to easy, immediate, and repetitive stimulation. The result? Complex human works, rich in imperfections, nuances, and layered meanings — like the dramatic light in a Caravaggio painting, or the poetic reality captured in a Robert Frank photograph — can end up appearing strange, difficult, even “ugly” to an eye now numbed. This creates a real addiction to simple and uniform content, which offers immediate gratification but progressively impoverishes our capacity to appreciate, interrogate, and understand the complexity of the real and of authentic artistic expression.

We are witnessing, again according to Crawford, the final cannibalization of shared human culture. If we continue to let artificial intelligence “eat the future,” in the end there will be nothing left to eat. It is therefore legitimate to ask what awaits us now. With the total automation of content and the capillary integration of generative models, slop will no longer just occupy spaces: it will become the only possible space. Not one atmosphere among many, but the only atmosphere — a rarefied cognitive environment where every stimulus is designed to leave no trace, to require no memory or critical attention, to produce nothing but its own immediate reproduction. A definitive Muzak, no longer sonic but existential: the background hum of a culture that has ceased to signify to devote itself exclusively to perpetuating itself.

The risk then will be not just a clogged feed, but a world where nothingness — just like in Michael Ende’s novel The Neverending Story — spreads in the form of everything. Content will no longer be perceived as an absence of meaning, because meaning will be redefined as an absence of content. The algorithm will no longer need to feign authorship, depth, or emotion; it will suffice for it to flow, to fill, to prevent silence by favoring continuous streaming. And we, immersed up to our necks in this lukewarm broth of micro-stimuli, will end up forgetting what it means to wait, to search, to choose, to remember.

Slop, in the end, is the posthumous victory of emptiness. Not a cultural genre, not a degeneration, but the pure form of nothingness when it learns to reproduce itself infinitely like a virus without ever showing itself as such to our eyes. A nothingness that makes no noise, that does not disturb, that asks for nothing, and that for this reason ends up taking everything.

But if the entire landscape risks becoming a uniform desert, it is legitimate to ask whether a margin still exists for a creativity that is not itself, in spite of itself, assimilable to slop. Perhaps the answer, paradoxically, lies precisely in those practices that slop, by its nature, cannot digest. Think of art forms that make physicality and bodily presence their pivot, like a theater performance, a site-specific installation that exists only in one place and for a limited time, a concert whose quality lies in the imperfection of the moment and in communion with the audience. These are experiences that resist translation into data, or algorithmic replicability, because their meaning coincides with their evanescence.

In another sense, we might witness a return of radical craftsmanship, of hyper-slow and hyper-intentional human gesture, almost as a form of aesthetic asceticism in response to toxic abundance — works that require time, both to be made and to be enjoyed, and that therefore escape the logic of flow.

Then there are those who, within the digital itself, practice subtle sabotage. I think of artists like Hito Steyerl or Trevor Paglen who teach us to “see” algorithms, to make the architectures of the invisible visible, transforming slop from a given condition into an object of inquiry — a fate similar to that of camp, kitsch, and trash, to cite the most well-known examples.

Perhaps, finally, the most desirable form of resistance is that of a human narrative, authentically opaque and complex, that rejects the predictive smoothness of slop. Novels like those of Patricia Lockwood or Fernanda Melchor,⁸ which delve into the chaos of the real and of language, could become the oases where the cultural palate, numbed by the digital diet, rediscovers the taste of the unforeseen and of depth. This is not a nostalgic escape, but the search for a different regime of attention, where value does not lie in the capacity to fill a space, but in that of opening a new one, where it is still possible to waste time, stumble, linger and make mistakes, and even get bored. It is in boredom, after all, that the desire for something else often arises.

The subversive gesture, then, will no longer be to sabotage, but to learn to recognize the desert while we walk in it. Only then will we perhaps be able to truly (re)cognize the water in which we are swimming.

Notes:

1. In this context, ‘filler’ refers to useless or low-value-added content, inserted only to occupy space, time, or attention.

2. ‘Cursed images’ are digital images whose main characteristic is the inexplicable disturbance they generate, combining familiar elements in illogical or disturbing ways. The phenomenon emerged and consolidated in online communities starting in the mid-2010s, often on platforms like Tumblr and Reddit.

3. The concept of ‘metabolic rift’ (metabolic rupture/imbalance) was elaborated by John Bellamy Foster and Jason W. Moore from an intuition of Marx: capitalism breaks the natural cycle of nutrient regeneration between humans and land, irreversibly impoverishing the soil. Kate Crawford applies it to the digital sphere: AI extracts value from the “human cultural soil” (texts, images, collective imaginary) without ever returning it, instead dumping only degraded waste (slop); the result is a progressive depletion and poisoning of the common ground from which new meaning should arise.

4. Kunstwollen refers to the artistic will internal to every era and culture: an autonomous and collective creative impulse that guides the form, style, and technique of art, independent of external factors.

5. Maurizio Ferraris developed the concept of the Docu-sphere to describe the contemporary social environment, in which reality is increasingly constituted and recorded by digital documents — traces, data, files — that produce concrete effects in people’s lives. In this context, Webfare — a neologism combining web and welfare — indicates a social and economic model in which value is predominantly generated by sharing personal data and documents on the web, which become the basis for new services and forms of redistribution.

6. The concept of ‘flow’ was developed by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi to describe an optimal state of consciousness in which a person is completely absorbed and immersed in an activity, characterized by total concentration, loss of the sense of time, and intrinsic satisfaction. In the context of digital media and platforms, the term has been taken up and radically transformed to indicate the uninterrupted continuity of content designed to keep the user in a state of passive and perpetual engagement. Slop represents the ideal material for fueling this algorithmic flow, since its lack of meaning and friction allows for its consumption without interruption.

7. ‘Model collapse’ refers to a generative artificial intelligence model (text, image, video) that is trained primarily or exclusively on data produced by other AI models (i.e., on slop), instead of on authentic human data; the quality of the output progressively degenerates generation after generation.

8. Specifically, I refer to the novels No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead Books, 2022) and Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (New Directions, 2020)