🆕 Never Post! Paper Report Live: Special Slop Edition

The Never Post staff meet to discuss four academic papers on how the internet is getting worse, each from a special edition of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. How is slop like gelatin? In many more ways that you might immediately assume! Tune in to hear about them all!

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Brainrot, AI slop, and the enshittification of the Internet

• Intro 
• Georgia, Doing the numbers: The operational aesthetics of AI slop
• Hans, Feed them slop: Alignment, attunement, and the affective lure of slopaganda
• Jason, Degenerative AI: AI slop, brainrot, and the gimmick of generative culture
• Mike, Computational Gallerte: Compressions of culture

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our contributing producer is Kurt White. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Jesus Christ, my dusty socialist,

“There’s enough sun for everyone,” you state,

your crown chipped like a front tooth

after a bar fight. Behind you a red curtain.

Excerpt of Ephphatha by Spencer Reece

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and we have a sloppy episode for you today. A couple weeks ago during our '20 twenty six stream week, the team got together and recorded a paper report live. Paper report is a segment wherein the staff of Never Post read a number of academic papers and discuss their reactions as a group, and it is normally members only content. So special treat for you all, a peek into the kinds of things you get as a member.

In this edition of Paper Report, we discuss a set of papers all from one edition of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the Cultural Commons special issue on brain rot, AI slop, and. We're gonna take a quick break right now and listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, Mike from a couple weeks ago is gonna explain more. Friends, hello, and welcome to the most recent, the newest, the second edition of Paper Report where members of the Never Post staff read academically published papers, academic papers from journals, and give you our thoughts upon them after having read them allegedly.

I did.

Hans. Joining us

in I did. I did. I read. I know how to read.

I did read. Hi, guys. Been to parties, and I know how to read. I

love these saga journals.

Joining us in order of how recently I think they read the paper, new most recent first.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Hans Butoh.

Yeah. I did read it. I read it.

I read it.

Did I understand it? Did I have yogurt dripping out of my mouth while I shoveled it in?

Oh, we don't need that. No one needs that.

Never never post senior producer.

On my stream week.

This is your first introduction to me. Yes.

Talking yogurt on my stream week.

It's

more likely than you think. Never post producer producer Georgia Hampton.

I'd say that's correct.

So when when did you read yours?

I did read it this morning. I was going to last night, but ended up not having time. But I had, like, a good chunk of time, and it felt normal and regular style.

Unbothered. Regular style. Well, now that I've had so much yogurt, I feel normal and regular too.

So No. No. I mean, you did just eat yogurt. So

I hate that this

through line is now uneditable.

This is what you get when you are a member of Never Post.

I'm going to open standalone Melodyne to figure out how to delete yogurt from this.

Never Post executive producer Jason Overholt.

I'm an adult, and I read my paper yesterday.

I'm just a little I'm just a baby.

Oh, no. Georgia.

I feel

so bad. Girls? Girls?

I'm a baby.

Girls? Girls? Mike, we're assuming Mike Rugnetta host, esteemed host, we're assuming that you probably read this days ago, weeks ago. Oh, yeah. Wow.

Well,

before I mean, should we say that you assigned us papers?

Went went to the author's houses individually

Yes.

Across the world. Yes.

I'm guessing you read all of ours too.

Put a pen in their hands while they were sleeping. Oh. Whispered into their ear. Wow.

Automatic writing. Automatic writing.

Yes. Yeah. It's automatic writing.

Write that paper you've been thinking about. Wow. No. You've got slop in there. Oh, no.

No.

It's just yogurt. It's just yogurt.

I read the introduction over the weekend, and I read my paper last night. Mhmm. But I have had these open for a while. So let's talk about what it is we're gonna do and what the sort of overarching theme here is. So each of the four of us have read an individual paper from a special collection that was published, I wanna say really recently, like as recently as this month, but I could be wrong, by the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

It is a special issue, and the special issue is called Cultural Commons on Brain Rot, AI Slop, and the Enchidification of the Internet. This is a special collection from the European Journal of Cultural Studies that is, I believe, all open access, which is something that we got lucky with last time too for our paper report. All the papers were open access. This time, I purposefully went and looked to see if there was anything that I could get where we could have an interconnected conversation with a bunch of things that were open access. And we really lucked out because not only is that the case, it's also about slop and then shitification and brain rot and stuff.

So right in our wheelhouse. Yeah. All this to say, that means you, the audience, if you want, you can go and read some of these things. So, Hans, I'm doing a screen share. Do you wanna pull

do wanna I got you, babe.

Show that there? So we all read this, which is the introduction, the introductory statement to the collection, and there are just a few things that I wanna talk about in relation to

it. Okay.

Well I read this.

I I thought so. Okay.

Jason, Georgia, did you guys read this or no? Yes. Okay. Great. Jason?

My mic isn't working.

Okay. Great.

I don't know where I am.

So the long and short of this is, like, most of this is just they go over what is in the collection. So, like Mhmm. This is the paper that I read. This is the paper that Jason read. We won't go through all of this because a bunch of it is just saying what they're going to do so that there is some context for having done it.

But there are things in here that I think are really useful to have in our brains and to understand and to just sort of like think with as we hear about these things. Brain rot, this is like a description of brain rot that's interesting, but I think it's stuff that we all maybe as regular users of the Internet, like understand. We don't need this spelled out for us. The term brain rot is also widely used in this context to refer to not just a style of content, but a state of being that is imagined to arise from engaging with it, an existential condition characterized by a sense of cognitive or sensory depletion brought on by being chronically online. And we talked about this in a segment that we did was it a year ago?

Was that last year? Yeah. Yeah. Like teens using teens looking at content that they termed brain rot as a way to sort of escape the affective pressures of productivity that like so much of using the Internet, encountering the media environment, using media in their day to day lives is very very hard to not feel as though you are expected to be productive even when those things are at least nominally entertainment. So brain rot is a way to be like, no.

I'm gonna use media. I'm gonna interact with the information environment, and I'm not gonna be productive. I am in fact going to be the opposite of productive. I'm going to look at something meaningless, and not only is it going to have no intellectual effect on me, it actually might have a deleterious one. Yes.

Like, I might just choose to poison myself a little bit.

And then somehow this like instigated a discourse with our listeners where people got so concerned that what they were doing was brain rot. That, like, fell exactly into, like, the capitalist trap that these papers are talking about, where people were writing in, like, is it okay to read a book? Or do the crossword. Do you have to have fun?

Doing the crossword specifically being something that someone was considering brain rot, which just to clarify, it is not You're just at all.

You're just fine. We hold you. We we see you, but you're okay.

Yeah. Is talking with my friends brainwashed?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Fellas. Is it is it gay to rot the brain? So I think that's so that's a great thing to keep in mind. Right?

It's not just a genre of media, it is a state of being. And this is kind of the nugget of the the special collection, the special special issue. What we will suggest is that the terms brain rot, AI slop, and engineification signal a new phase of digital capitalism, one emerging in the wake of generative AI's widespread integration into the foundations of platform culture. These concepts, we argue, exemplify a further intensification of what has been described as platform capitalism, which I think we're all familiar with, or more recently, vibes capitalism

Mhmm.

Where attention, data, and affect are relentlessly mined for value. In this context, content is increasingly loosened from communicative or representational value, functioning as a means of modulating attention at scale and optimizing the emotions, moods, and atmospheres that flow through platforms. This process can be seen and felt at many different cultural, social, and economic levels. Yeah. Which like, boom.

That's just describing how it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that feel you hear that, and you're like, yeah. The water is wet.

Yeah.

There are two things that I wanna focus on here, which are which are, like, minor, but I think they're worth, like, giving a little bit of time to. The first is when the word content first started to become a label that was put on things that were put online, the group of people who were the most against it and, you know, and I'm sure still are, one of their main sort of arguments against it was that it really is just saying the quiet part loud in a way. Just like when you call what is what is content? It is contents. It is the un undifferentiated mass of things inside of a container that collects things.

Doesn't necessarily matter what those things are. It's just a mass collective term for what's inside something else. The suggestion being that it kind of doesn't matter what it is, or that you can't really see what it is. They're just it's just contents. It's things on the other side of an opaque container.

And the sort of like next logical jump to it was like, it's just things that you put next to ads. Mhmm. It is the undifferentiated mass of media that goes into the container of a web page that also contains advertisements. There doesn't need to be given much thought to what it is other than to make sure that you can figure out how to get people to look at it and value it so that they will give it their time, and so that they will then see the ads next to the content, which really is just the the other content next to the content that we call content. Right?

Ads and ads is content is the contents also in the container where the content is.

I need a cigarette.

That's an old idea. Right? That's exactly the same idea. That's what a magazine is. A magazine is a container.

100%. Like, that's the word for container. So you have an ammunition magazine, which is, you know, something that houses your ammunition. You have a information magazine, which is a thing that houses your information, and it's got the ads. It's placing content next to ads.

The ads themselves are a form of content. So it makes sense that that would be the framework we'd enter into And, Mike, what time period are we talking about that that was generally our framework? Up until when?

I mean, up until when or starting when?

I think up until when.

So you're saying, like, when when is the point at which calling things content became just what those things are called? Yeah. What those what that piece of media is called. Yeah. I don't know.

Six years ago? Five years ago?

Wow. That recent. Okay.

I think so. Okay. I think that there was probably still a pretty like, at the start of the pandemic or maybe right before, there was still some meaningful amount of resistance to calling certain amounts of things or certain types of things content

that

I don't think is as strong Yeah. Isn't as sort of adamant as it used to be.

I think you're right. There was some amount of marshaling of irony while we were beating the retreat on that term that now has given up.

Yeah. Yeah. So this next part of like content increasingly loosened from communicative or representational value functioning as a means of modulating attention at scale is like that's sort of the next level of that. Right? Like, content is not only contents in container where there is also ads.

It is also the means to an end, the means to a programmatic end of just figuring out what it is that people will spend their time doing. So in a way, right, it's like thinking about content, thinking about media and the information environment and all of these things that contain for an audience so much cultural, social, artistic, emotional meaning and saying, well, actually, none of that matters. Yeah. Or or really all of that is just secondary. What this is really about is putting it through the ringer in order to figure out what second order things we can say about it so that we know whether or not someone will watch it for six minutes.

It doesn't matter what it's about. It doesn't matter what it depicts. It doesn't matter what the signs of it are. It just matters how much time someone will spend on it, which to me feels like

And it doesn't matter who spends it?

No. No. Not at

all. Doesn't even matter if it's a person. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, it's an it's an operational purpose rather than, like, a representational purpose.

I mean, that goes into the paper I read, which is very much about the aesthetics of that and the purpose of that aesthetics, which is so

I'm very excited to hear about

it.

It's so interesting. I'm I kind of wanna turn it into an episode or something. It's so cool. But, anyway, yes. That, like, it doesn't really matter what it is.

Even, like, the content doesn't matter beyond its function of generating engagement

Yeah.

From anything.

And I think that we feel that. That is something that people feel. It feels like you, in a lot of ways, being online right now, and in some spaces more than others, in the large corporate social spaces, most increasingly incorrectly named social spaces, it feels as though you get stuck, or it feels as though there is a massive amount of work that needs to be done in order to continue to apprehend these things. And I think that all of this is related, and this is what this last section that's highlighted that I wanna talk about gets to, which is for everyday users, exposure to brain rot and slop content through platforms entails an intensification of affective and cognitive labor. That just means that all of this stuff being so bad and generated by the second order significance of media that you are familiar with and do appreciate means that it's just harder to feel and think about these things.

It's like there's just a a husk around them that you have to break through. Navigating endlessly shifting kaleidoscopic feeds now require continuous acts of appraisal, filtering, and interpretation, even as the distinction between authentic and synthetic content becomes increasingly unstable. Right? So it doesn't matter if it looks real or feels real, and maybe doesn't matter that it is real. You still, because of the environment, feel like you have to do extra affective and cognitive labor to appreciate these things.

This affective labor entertains entertains, but leaves us more depleted, contributing to a shitty new layer to the forms of digital fatigue that characterize user experiences of platforms more broadly. I could tell you for sure they were so excited to write shitty new layer justified by

I know. It really it really stood out. I was like, oh, absolutely. I

just think this is, like, so like, very powerful. I relate to this in a way, and I think it puts it in terms that I find really strong.

So we read some papers about it. Yeah. And let's elaborate on what this is.

Georgia, do you wanna go first

since you I can go first, Tony. So the paper I read is called doing the numbers, the operational aesthetics of AI slop. And it's it it's so good. Like, I I really Totally. I really recommend you guys also reading it.

Like, I think it's so interesting.

I Who's our author?

Forgive me for what I'm about to do pronunciation wise. Jernej Markels and Jaco Kemper. And there's, I think, a couple other authors, but those are the two listed. Yeah. Selfishly, I was so happy you assigned this to me because in my brief stint as a philosophy major, which ended very quickly, aesthetics was my, focus of philosophy.

And so this is very interesting to me. But basically, what this paper argues in its most simplified form is that AI slop creates an operational aesthetic culture in comparison to, like, a representational aesthetic culture.

Interesting.

So what that means is I'll quote directly from the paper. It does this, quote, in the sense that its primary aim is not to represent the world, but rather to act on it. It functions as a signal aimed at maximizing engagement metrics. So, basically, what we were just talking about, that rather than creating any kind of visual media whose aesthetic goal is to represent or even elicit, like, a subjective relationship with that media itself for you to spend any meaningful time with it to garner meaning from it, none of that is even a goal anymore with AI Slop. The goal instead is to generate engagement.

Engagement that doesn't even necessarily have to be human engagement. This paper goes on to specifically mention that so much activity online is bots.

Mhmm.

And for AISLOP to kind of reach its aesthetic goals, its operational goals, it doesn't matter if the engagement, the comments, the sharing, anything is actually done by human beings. And in fact, it often isn't done by human beings. And that all of this, this operational kind of aesthetic culture to to the authors of this piece may offer, like, the clearest example, like, visualization of capitalism and its goals. Woah. So I have I have quotes that basically say this.

Let me find them. I have several bolded things. AI slop binds an infinite reproduction and recombination of established cultural reference to a quantifiable model of aesthetics that favors rapid engagement and circulation. And then moving on, the generative culture of AI slops seems to push the structural cynicism of capitalism, which believes in nothing but meaningless calculations to its extreme form as AI platforms remove meaning from content and reduce it almost exclusively to its exchange value. Like, they use an example of this that I probably could pull very quickly from the actual paper of what they called, I believe, shrimp Jesus.

Mhmm. Yeah. Shrimp Jesus. I remember shrimp Jesus.

Imagine an AI rendering of Jesus as a shrimp or, like, Jesus with, like, gigantic rolls of money. Like like, there's it's often Jesus. It's often, like, religious patriotic symbolism, like, you know, that kind of thing. Trying to interpret them is pointless, not

just pointless. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, they literally write, recourse to an interpretive framework that would, for instance, read shrimp Jesus as a representation of faith or a symbol of god's love feels as pointless as eating soup with a fork. Nice. Nice. They they were having a lot of fun with this one.

Yeah. Good job. And, basically, most of the paper is kind of examining what this operational aesthetic is, what its aims are. But that's that's the core of it. That, like, AI slop is a as an aesthetic as something that is, you know, presenting an aesthetic message, if you can even say that, is not only, like, denying the kind of representational, like, subjective interaction that you would have with any kind of aesthetic media that isn't this, but rather is, like, redrawing the boundaries of what that means to include an aesthetic that only values its operational like, output.

Its engagement. Its engageability.

It it makes me think of two things. A David Bowie interview that I watched recently where he was like, I think the worst territory for an artist to be in is to be thinking about what the end product will be before you've made it and to imagine who is going to like that end product. And he was like, not only do I think that that makes bad art, I think that that's in fact bad for society. Yes. And that it is, like, literally pretty destructive and dangerous.

And I was like, That's that's now in a lot of ways.

Oh, yeah.

The consideration of the end product before it is finished and the thought of how many likes or streams or whatever will this get. It's like, gotta make the thing on purpose that will be good.

Yeah. And then on top of that, you have just the sheer volume of this kind of aesthetic media, which also this paper goes into pretty interestingly about, like

Yeah.

The components of this operational aesthetic dealing directly with immediacy. And, you know, what better tool to do this than generative AI, which can create images of shrimp Jesus in half a second? Like, it's Yeah. It's just it's the perfect tool for this kind of I don't even wanna say abundance, because that's not what it is. It's just volume.

It's noise. This paper even touched on something I'm always interested in, which is, you know, the online culture that's fixated on, like, cores and moods and vibes as replacements of any kind of meaningful aesthetic categorization because that's not really what it is.

Yeah. Or, like, art making community, really, is

what Exactly.

Like it replaces. Yeah.

Yeah. Even something as culturally broad as, like, I don't know, goth or something. Like, it's not even that. It's just, like, what what is the thing I can look up and see a bunch of content about?

Hans, you look like you're gonna say something.

Yeah. Because my paper, titled feed them slop.

Yum

yum. Alignment, attunement, and the affective lure of slopaganda by Robert Topinka goes a little bit hard at some of the points that you were just making. Like, the pave it's a great pivot from what you were just saying in Georgia of this idea of ambience. Right? So he's talking Robert's talking a lot in this about ambience is that it's this is all about how the attunement of a Slop AI is ambient rhetoric.

It's not so it's drawing in the concept of ambient rhetoric, and so he says, which describes rhetoric not as persuasion between individual agents, but as a process of attunement to conditions, moods, and affordances. Sure.

That's the vibe. That sounds like the vibe.

And that's actually what it's and that's why it's not for anyone specifically. It it does the whole thing here. And so in this, he actually actually goes into he talks about Trump's Gaza as being, like, a a form of this, is that it's really easy to deny what's behind it and what's intended and who it's for and what it means, but it somehow resonates. Right? That's where he jumps off.

It somehow resonates with us. And he goes through and ends up with Charlie Kirk and the and the Kirk and the yeah. And what I found interesting about this kinda culmination of his argument into this is that this is completely acceptable to a wide range of people. It resonates rhetorically across a lot

of Perfect sense.

This makes perfect sense.

If you

are on one side, you're gonna look at this, and you're gonna grab it. You're gonna be like, you see? And if you are on the other side, assuming it's a binary, you're gonna grab it. You're gonna look at it. You're gonna say, you see?

And it's a picture of it I'm just gonna read you a little do people know about the the Kirk about about this wild world? Unfortunately. So this is quoting. Soon after his murder, Charlie Kirk was reborn as Terminator in AI generated videos featuring the far right conspiracist, Alex Jones, depicted with a Hitler mustache rousing Kirk from his bed. After referring to Jones with the n word, a recurring trope in subsequent Kirkinator video, Kirk joins Jones in a superhero style flight to Agartha, a white sceptered subterranean kingdom presided over by a smiling Hulk Hogan, JD Vance in purple gowns with an oversized head and curly hair, the big boy Vance meme, and a white Cash Patel welcoming Kirk to Valhalla referencing Patel's actual remarks

after this. Is a new one for me.

Yeah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Like, what a description.

And so what all what he's saying all of that is is all of that is simply AI being trained into feeling out the vibes. Mhmm. And the and the rest of the rhetorical resonances that will get it shared. It's kind of it reminded me a little bit of, like, biological, the way that, natural selection is described to us. Right?

You have this mutation, and if it works with the current circumstances, you're gonna be able to reproduce. And so if you make something that's not resonant in a particular way, then it's not gonna reproduce. And there's one line in here which I think is just fascinating. Ambient rhetoric. When talking about ambient rhetoric, the ambient resonance of something, how well it bounces off of the walls into us, can help explain why slop resonates even when it's crude, meaningless, or pointless, which is where I think a lot of us get stuck in thinking about it.

Being like, but but but but the thing. Mhmm. And it talks about ambient rhetoric doesn't matter. That stuff doesn't matter because its effective lure is that affect as an experience of intensity is distinct from emotion, which is intensity owned, recognized, and assigned subjective content.

Yeah. Emotion is the thing you have the word for.

Yes. Yes.

But that's not what AI and the people making the AI. That's not the realm they're functioning on.

No. I mean, it's pure vibe. Like right?

It's like Pure rhetorical attune like, the thing I like about this paper is there's all rhetorical attunements. Right? They have effect ambient resonance, ambient propaganda, ambient rhetoric. They have the they started out with the emotional sediment of looking at one of these.

Hans, chat is raising some interesting questions about how active this process is as far as, like, an an operator of the technology, you know, versus letting a generative system kind of figure out what things should look like. Right? We assume that there is always human involvement in the act of posting, but there does not necessarily need to be human involvement, or there can be varying amounts of human involvement in the act of prompting and generating.

Well, they actually address that because they talk about the prompt that the prompt is actually one of the most important things about that.

Well, because I imagine that it both it encloses space and leaves certain space open for interpretation, and I would expect that the tension between those two things is where the model gets to be like, well, you know, however however it is made by Sam Altman or John Anthropic. I don't know. I've always

John Anthropic.

You know, like, however it is designed. Right? Those are those are the places where it gets to huge scare quotes, decides what what things look like.

Yeah. And so what you're doing is the line is in the case of AI slop, the prompter is a rhetor, as in rhetorical, is the rhetor constraining the model's capacity in ways attuned to ambient affects. When you're in there doing these prompts, you are essentially taking this vast 90% of this data has been taken from very privileged places with very specific particular point of view and narrowing the beam onto that. And so it it it gives it enough parameters to be able to say to be successful enough of the time at saying, I'm catching the vibe. Yeah.

And it's kind of because it's wide aperture like that that it's not I'm targeting this person or I'm saying this thing. And he's talking about, like, this is you can anyone can get suckered into any of this stuff, and so it's not even for any individual ideology or anything. It can kind of go anywhere. It just has to resonate.

I would be so curious to know, but not curious enough to do it myself. Like, if you were to run, like, a local Chinese model that had a that was, like, benchmarked six months ago or something just on your computer

Yeah.

And then ask it to generate similar things. Right? But then go and do something that's always connected to the Internet, that's a frontier model that, like, people are constant you know, these companies are constantly updating. You know, is how what's the vibe gulf between the two? Mhmm.

And is there and is there one?

Mhmm. I think that's important. And and and part of it is, like, what's being trained into them. Right? Part of it is that, you know, he's talking in this paper about how it's all being encoded just in what's being trained, what is being trained on.

That's giving it a parameter of, oh, this is the universe in which I exist because this is the sum total of my data. Okay. I get kind of the boundaries, and then you further refine the boundaries in there.

That's fascinating. Yeah.

Jason, I wanna know about your paper.

I think it's actually a good place to end up with these three, because the paper that I read titled Degenerative AI, AI Slop Brain Rot, and the Gimmick of Generative Culture, which was authored by Adeel Gallip, who's at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, and Ludmilla Lapinacci, who's at the University of Leeds, spends a fair amount of time on the framing of things. And I'm going to jump to their final sentence where they tell you their point before we take you guys through the journey.

Of course.

For anybody who doesn't read a lot of academic papers, a thousand percent, you should read the abstract first and the conclusion second. Yes.

Big time. Big time. Yes.

Because they are arguing that we focus on this kind of media. Brain Rot as a media, as something that, like, we are all the conversation heretofore has been like in the weeds of it. They're taking the container. And they're thinking we should look at it differently or from a different critical position. So they say, ultimately, in focusing on those genres and experiences that are usually assumed to be invariably unproductive and degenerative, we hope to highlight their potentiality for critical academic inquiry, which can perhaps further explore them as particular frictive forms that complicate and contribute to discussions on the growing and shitification of digital culture.

In making that argument, they're relying really heavily on this paper from 2020. This book actually from 2020 from Xi'an Nye, The Theory of the Gimmick, Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. And I spent some time today looking through parts of that book. It's I bought it. It seems fascinating.

I cannot wait for it to get here.

Sounds awesome.

I gave you this one, Jason, because I was like, if anybody on the staff is gonna be into a book about the gimmick Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be Jason.

Oh, that's awesome. That's my back.

Objectionable and yet strangely attractive. Yeah. This is what they call the gimmick. This looks awesome. Hell yeah.

So I think one of the main challenges, with the paper even though they they present their case, I think, fairly, legibly. But one of the challenges is that they are the the bulk of their argument is we should think of brain rot along the lines that Nye is thinking about the gimmick as this ultimate form of, like, capitalist output. And so, like, they give you the answer for why that should be true, and then the answer to like deeply what that means, I think is contained in 350 pages of Ni's work. So I do not have the rest of that, but I have like the outline of it to give you why they think that is interesting, and I think it's interesting enough to have bought the book. So they start the paper, do Gadelope and Lupinacci, kind of cataloging some of the interesting terminology that is used most frequently to describe this material, to describe brain rot stuff.

And I just put it all under the heading of body stuff. Yeah. It is Cronenbergen. So this is from their paper. Slop has become the shorthand for derivative, and low quality synthetic content that aims to simply fill up and saturate social media, and keeps us passively entertained, resulting in feeds that are contextless, stupefying, and most importantly, never ending.

In this scope, AI slop is often described with references to metabolic processes, in which the content itself is analogous to an unappetizing ultra processed food that is easy to digest, even though not tasteful or particularly refined. More broadly, generative AI has been described as operating within a metabolic cycle of consumption and excretion, resulting from Big Tech devouring the total creative output of humankind, and then puking out extremely bad versions of this regurgitated work.

Jesus.

And that is like, there's seven citations to that. They are they are full quoting other people's Mean it. Yes. Phrase by phrase, they're full quoting other people's language that they've used to make these sentences.

You know what this reminds me of? It's a little bit of the the episode that Mike did about horror.

Yes. And Oh, Foodgore.

Right? Though this feels very similar about, like, the horror that we're attracted to. Please continue, Jason. Tell us more.

So they didn't say that brain rot in turn, so that is slop, our regurgitative Cronenbergian mess. And brain rot is primarily understood here as a popular genre of surrealist AI generated or assumed to be AI generated slop. And therefore, largely under suspicion both for its apparent meaninglessness and its potential hidden meanings. Encoded meanings, really, like Yes. Yeah.

Exactly that. They continue this framing here and I think like this is sort of important here. This happens both like as a way of being or as a way of like feeling about it and like a couple quotes they pull here to describe the feeling or the state of being in brain rot is an overwhelming almost narcotic effect, Unsatisfying and annoying. A deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state. And here is where like we start the parallels into what Nye is basically saying at length

Yeah.

Is the capitalist economy in which we exist where output starts to take on these sorts of qualities. And then the second piece of framing here is as a method of production, the production of brain rot. Described as easy to generate AI material, produce with minimal effort, a world of creativity without craft, deskilled, which people are offloading. And so therefore, it becomes a gimmick, the gimmick of generative culture. Illegitimate, wasteful, and deceptive.

So in the theory of the gimmick, Nye argues that the contradictions that explain why tricks are perceived as icky and yet somehow alluring are related to three interconnected issues of capitalist life. Labor, value, and time.

That's it.

Yeah. Those are the big three. I tried to briefly summarize what go into those three buckets here. Labor, these gimmicks are both time wasting and time saving. So we think about brain rot.

The creation of brain rot is time saving. It takes nobody, no amount of time to make a thing and isn't that a productivity gain, but it is time wasting that when you touch it, your time is getting sucked from you. You are rotting into this space. This is not a productive use of your time. So we have created production by saving creation hours by turning to this, and yet stolen production by having you engage with it at the same time.

That's the paradox and the labor of it.

Can I say something that is very in line with

Yes?

What you're saying from my paper, which is that from an aesthetic perspective, you know, so many AI adherents declare that these models and tools will democratize art making and creative processes. The paper I read argues that the only thing it democratizes is the participation in a specific form of aesthetic productivity. Yes. Like, you're doing is Productivity. Democratizing speed.

Yeah. It democrat you democratize access to output. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. That's good. Well said.

I think it's this is also related to the stuff that's from the introduction, which is like, there is a way in which the affective and intellectual labor that is needed or that is sort of forced from you when appraising feeds full of this stuff causes time to dilate a little bit. There's a kind of speed bump or roadblock or we'll talk about it in my paper, a kind of goo you get stuck in that, like, slows everything down just because of all of the extra labor that you have to exert in order to even perceive and contextualize it

Yeah.

An effort which is maybe pointless in some senses.

And I think it's really relevant that a lot of analysis reaches for the same kind of language. Like our disgust is ironically so viscerally human that all we can do is talk about slop and metabolic process and goo and ooze and that is just the feeling that this emotes from ironically, one of like the more anodyne mechanical processes of creation. Okay. So that's labor. Labor.

We got time wasting and time saving in conflict with each other. Value. This is again, sort of the theory of the gimmick as proposed by Nye, now sort of used as a skin to approach brain rot. Value of brain rot is quote, compelling but meaningless. Their computational capitalism's most recent hype and also its biggest embarrassment.

It is bad economics. Companies are losing money, the promised savings are not materializing, and in fact, and this is quoting from them, AI sloppers do not make much money from circulating slop, but rather through selling how to slop tutorials.

Oh. Cool.

You too can slop. You there, sir. Would you like to slap?

Greetings, trameleur.

I'm one. Come on.

What do you buy in?

What do you sell in?

So that is the paradox of value. Compelling, but meaningless. And beyond the tumult and the fervor of its financing, actually, it is inconsistent to tell the extent to which value is being produced. Finally, time. They talk about the current moment in generative AI and brain rot technology, specifically, as presented here already in a state of temporal manipulation where it is already quote too late.

Interesting.

AI has arrived. Everybody is using it. We need to have it. There is nothing we can do to turn this around. It has already arrived, and it is too late to do anything about it.

All of which are deeply untrue things.

Yes.

But this is how it is presented.

Yeah. Yes. I refer you to my most re recent episode.

Mhmm.

Yes.

Yeah. Inevitability is an interesting, like, concept in the middle of all this.

Right?

Because there's also a a sort of I feel like when inevitability is invoked in conversations about this, it is very much producing a level of cynicism and hopelessness, powerlessness. Like, it's not treated as something we can engage like, the that slop or any presence of AI is something we can engage with, question, push back on, categorize, investigate in any meaningful way. Like, I I don't know. I find the use of inevitability is always to a specific end, which is to make you feel sort of cynically placated Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah. So that's basically how they stretch the concept of brain rot and generative AI in this moment across the skein that Nye has so graciously provided here, and they wrap it up with this conclusion, or their penultimate paragraph. I'll save you the final conclusions for yourself. Together, these three dimensions detailed above, labor, value, and time, expose the inherent contradictions of generative AI, and offer us a useful conceptual vantage point for making sense of the overall mix of captivation and dissatisfaction that seems to permeate the assumed everyday encounter with these products. As gimmicky aesthetic forms, slop and brain rot are marked by ambiguities.

They depend on highly sophisticated computational systems, and yet result in deskilling, cognitive offloading, and creative craftlessness. They rely upon endless injection of wealth from venture capital, and yet result in perceived impoverished creative outputs. They are, as the aesthetic category of the gimmick theorized by Shian Nye, sad marvels. Always enchanting and repulsive at once, and never simply one or the other. Gun noises, sirens, Chiron.

Absolutely rips. I think the final point to put on this is, in as much as I'm understanding the greater point that is Naya is making, I think she's also making an argument that like, this has always been the the gimmick as she says, is the hallmark of capitalism, and perhaps has like a value we need to understand past the like slam dunking of certain sentences like we just ended that paper with. Mhmm. And that's what I'm interested to investigate more from her work.

Yeah. But Mike, you read something too. Right?

Yeah. And there's a lot of it seems like there's a lot of sort of similarities or synergies, like connecting points between what I read and what Jason read. What I read was actually, I didn't realize it at first. It's pretty short, relatively straightforward, and kinda just tries to go ahead and make one one point and is sort of like a charge or an encouragement to think about the things that you might call slop in a very specific way inspired by the fact that you would call them slop. So Hans, if you wanna I'm sharing my screen.

If you wanna pop up the paper, we can take a look at it. So I read Computational Gallert, Compressions of Culture.

Wait. I'm sorry.

What was that?

You read what?

Computational Gallert? Gallertie?

Gallert. By

Daniel de oh, boy. Sorry, Daniel. Daniel de zoo? Zoo?

Zoo? Yeah.

And the the basic charge here is, like, right, we call it slop because we perceive it as not mass culture, but hog feed. Right. And I

think Slop.

This this connects to the kind of gustatory not gustatory, metabolic set of metaphors like what Jason was talking about. Right? These are this is all about sort of gorging, binging undifferentiated masses, just massive huge amounts of material that when considered are just sort of disgusting in a way or are massive in that they are a mass. It is a mass of things. Yeah.

Which is I I don't think a way that you ever describe something that you like. No.

No. I I'm glad you're mentioning kind of the grotesque quality. To go back honestly to your piece that about horror and and, like, disgust as a tool of engagement, I think I think the disgusting, grotesque nature of this kind of content is very essential to talking about it at all.

So that's I mean, really, that's what Daniel talks about in this. And he starts with this idea from Marx, the, Gallert, which is there's a point in here about how it is translated. The 2024 English translation translation of Capital renders the German word Galert as gelatinous blob rather than the more formal condulation of earlier editions. This was thought to better convey its association with food processing and industrial waste, the troubling history of which Marx was well aware. And what the Gullaher is is it's basically like the, what is made, the mass of labor that is made when actual human beings exert force and labor, in the application of their bodies, but then are just removed.

Yeah.

They are sort of just separated. This is, I think, not quite alienation. It's sort of a more almost primordial version of the idea. And what is left behind is this, like, yeah, congelation. As the distilled and compressed human labor objectified in commodities and capital that possesses a phantom like objectivity, Gallert simultaneously provides an apt figure of labor's violent conversion into capital.

Just as the gelatin produced in large kettles or acid baths no longer showed any identifiable traces of the bones or other animal waste products fed into it. This is what I was thinking. Yeah. So there is no longer existed any sensuous trace of the concrete human labor absorbed into capital via market commodity exchange. Shotgun sound.

Shotgun sound.

Damn. Yeah. It's it's extrusion. It's congealing. It's like the same sort of thing where it's com you know, it's the chicken McNugget.

It's the it's plastic. Right? You don't see the dinosaur bones anymore.

Those of you who follow me on Instagram will know that I'm currently in my goo period.

Oh, big time. I've been meaning to talk to you about this. I've been very invested.

Gooing it up, you know, getting served lots of Belzona videos. But I think that there's there is something that feels it's very visceral. This is very, very visceral, I think, for a number of reasons, and then it is I think a lot of us feel like we are being force fed some things. We do not feel in control of many of the things that enter into our our brains or our our bodies in a way. We feel as though a lot of the things that we're being shown are an undifferentiated mass.

We have to do work to parcel things out as they cross our feed, and that work is exhausting. So we feel like we are we really are, like, laboring in a way.

Yeah.

There is both a sense and the actuality that, like, the things that we love in culture that exist are being melted melted down metaphorically in order to fuel these processes or ripped apart literally in other senses for the people who have been following the news about Amazon and Anthropic destroying book collections. Like, much like the creation of gelatin, which Daniel goes on to talk at length about. Right? Like, these these this raw material is boiled, is dissolved in acid, is destroyed to make this thing that we are told is good for us. In the sense of gelatin, it was supposed to be a meal replacement for poor people.

Yep. They thought that boiling collagen out of bones would mean that it would create a nutritious, if, you know, not exactly flavorful meal meal replacement for people who couldn't get nutrients or sustenance otherwise, and that ended up not being the case. That it ended up being that you can't, it turns out, subsist on gelatin alone. And similarly, right, you're told, you know, after books are ripped apart and all of preexisting culture is ingested into these things, that it's like, here now is your new productivity aid. This will make you a writer.

This will make you an artist. This will allow you access, right, pursuant to our conversation we've just had, right, this will democratize a certain aspect of creative creative action, creative involvement, access to creative communities, and it turns out, you know I mean, I guess we'll see, but one suspects it seems like it is turning out that that is not the case. And that really it's like, you've just you've just kind of done a bunch of horrific things and made a bunch of goo.

You know how I said before that I was glad we were talking about the grotesque part of this? I changed my mind.

It's actually just kinda yucky.

It's actually yucky and gross, and I don't like it, and I don't wanna do it anymore.

There's this line, continuous with the industrial and or manual labor. What Marx called our species being is rendered fluid before being solidified for systematic extraction and regeneration as capital.

This is so good. I don't like this. I love it. I'm the honor.

Hans, I thought you would be with me on this.

You know when you have an itch and for like, you're carrying

your

groceries and your nose itches Mhmm. And you have to go a certain amount of time with an itchy nose before you can do it, and then you finally put the groceries down, and you scratch your nose, but you scratch it a little bit too hard because of how excited you were to be finally be this feels like that

a little bit. God, That's so true.

Also, because, like, you have you have shimmied the grocery bags down to your wrists to free your fingers, and the counterweight of that pushes your scratch finger hard against your nose. Yeah. So goes the baggage of this material around your wrists when you try to satisfy yourself. Exactly.

Damn.

But I think it's all I think this is why it's like it's it's hard to separate how you feel from all of these things because it involves multiple lifetimes of media made to make you feel things.

Yeah.

And there is a way that that media is treated that seems to kind of fundamentally deny that that is the case. It is as though, like, the people who are engaging in this technological activity are like, woah. Like, why such strong feelings about these things about human feelings?

Mhmm.

And the sort of this idea of, like, your species being both as labor and as an emotional effective existence being rendered fluid so that it can then be resolidified or extracted by another process is just very evocative, and it feels right in a way that I think is, you know yeah. Like, scratches scratches an itch in a way.

Yeah. It really does.

But also kinda hurts.

Well, it's like scratching an I mean, not to use just another metaphor, but, like, you know, scratching an itch so much that it becomes a worse problem. That is itchy forever.

And now I'm bleeding.

Yeah. Like, that you just use it. I don't know. And I think it also I'm not sure if y'all's papers did this. I mine didn't really, but, like, the, you know, the the slow creep of, like, addiction that these tools encourage and, like, the the, you know, warm bath of pleasantry of of lack of effort, of lack of pushback, that encourages more use of these kinds of tools, like, actual act of using them.

And

Sure. Like, the in the I mean, this is kinda what Hank Green talked about

Yeah.

Right, when he got called out. Like, the intoxication

Yes. Intoxication is a better word.

Of being, like, the power of all I have been told for the last twenty five years is that the most important thing is to produce as much as possible. And now here I have the producing things genie.

Mhmm.

Oh, yeah.

And that is just an extremely intoxicating prospect.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Or the, the guy who got caught generating his, exonerative paper for three m for his report on the yeah. Right?

Yes. Even Like I was shown some clip of that podcast, Stavie's World with Stavros Helicos, talking to some actor that I don't really know, but I think he was in New Girl, where the actor was like, oh, yeah. I ask AI all the time to, like, interpret my dreams. And I, like, just do it in the morning. He's like, listen to me.

I sound like someone who's trying to convince you that my problem isn't a problem of, like Yeah. Well, I just do it in the morning and sometimes at night and sometimes in the middle of the day of just being like, hey. I had a dream where this crazy thing happened to me. Like, what does that mean? And he justified it by being like, you know, I don't wanna talk to my wife about it.

We've been together for too long. She doesn't care. Like, you know, and all of that justifying this Yeah. Use of something that is happy to just have you use it as much as possible.

Yeah. And that's the other thing. Right? It's intoxicating, and, also, it is designed to, it is I think it is both designed for a certain interlocutor, and it is designed to turn you by steps into that interlocutor. Yes.

Oh, yes. That's why, like, I think a lot about Hank being like, you know, I had my notes. I wrote my notes. I I wasn't reading something that was AI generated. I promise, even though he said I appreciate the pushback, which, right, is the like, sort of one of the stereotypical phrases.

And I totally believe Hank because I believe I believe him when he says he came to rely on it too much. He spent a lot of time with it. And I think when he spent when you spend a lot of time with it, it sort of it will mold you in a way. Oh, yes. Like, it's in the same way that you pick up the mannerisms and the speech patterns of all of your friends and your spouse and stuff.

Like, it's the same it's this gonna gonna be the same thing with a chatbot. Think that it's it's like the phantasm of us of social engagement, of us of a social process.

Oh, yes. Because it's also it's not just molding you. It's molding to you. So it's like, oh, you want it to be like this? Absolutely.

It can be like this. It can be anything you want. I can do anything.

So I these were all great, and I'm very excited. I wanna go read the rest of this collection. Yeah. So this was just to remind everyone. This was a special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and it came out this year, I think very recently.

And it is called the Cultural Commons on Brain Rot, AI Slop, and the Enshitification of the Internet. Okay. That's the end. Thanks, friends, for listening. Thank you for being members.

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Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye, mate. That is the show we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, September 17.

If you would like to become a member for $4 a month and get access to more things like paper report, team chats, Wigos, and more, go to neverpost.st and click on buttons all willy nilly until you're giving us money. The rest will work itself out. Never Post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta.

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