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Make the Internet Fun Again

Slop, Creative Destruction, and What's Next for the Internet

Jul 16

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Hi friends ,

Happy Tuesday! Big week in politics, huh?

I’m very glad President Trump is OK and I hope this is a turning point for the country. We have something special going on here and we will be great no matter who is in the White House. Go hug your favorite political enemy; the “other side” is full of people, just like you, just trying to make it however they think best.

Systems like democracy and capitalism can be messy in the short-term, but resilient in the long-term. Just when things look like they’re breaking, shoots of a better way emerge.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Stewart Brand’s concept of Pace Layers, which he uses to describe “how complex systems learn and keep learning.”

Systems like the government necessarily move more slowly than capitalism (commerce), which in turn moves more slowly than fashion (which I’m going to analogize with “the internet” in today’s essay). Because it moves so much more quickly, but I think follows the same rules as other complex systems over time, examining what’s happening with the internet is a good way to understand how these systems work more generally.

The internet today seems almost like it’s broken beyond repair. But it’s at this point – according to Carlota Perez, Joseph Schumpeter, and Clayton Christensen, among others – that the conditions are ripe for new and better solutions to emerge. I’ll write about the internet, but you can think about how similar dynamics apply to other systems that seem to be breaking, too.

The idea for this essay didn’t start with politics, or with anything grandiose, but with a simple, toy-like demo I got from the founder of one of our portfolio companies, oncyber, a couple of weeks ago.

I’m sending this a day late because oncyber just launched v2 a couple of minutes ago, algorithms be damned.

Let’s get to it.

Make the Internet Fun Again

The internet used to be fun.

It was weird. It was frenzied. People didn’t know what they were doing, so they tried things. They didn’t optimize, because they didn’t know what to optimize for. Good websites got found because they were good. Good tweets went viral because they were good.

Then people learned how to get the results of being good, at least in the short-term, without actually being good, by becoming good at optimization.

Optimization is slowly killing the internet.

You can see it most clearly on X, because tweets are the simplest content to make,xand because likes are the fastest form of feedback. There, slop has taken over.

Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever. Making slop has only gotten easier with AI, but it’s not an AI-specific thing.

Slop itself isn’t new, though. Slop is just mediocrity in pursuit of metrics.

Every time you see a website optimized for SEO, a SaaS business optimized for metrics, or a LinkedIn post optimized for engagement, you see slop. If it’s taken over X already, it will take over the rest of the internet soon, too.

Slop, slop everywhere and not a drop of think.

The problem isn’t slop itself. Slop on its own is fine. The internet is a big place, and people should be free to produce whatever shitty things they want to produce on their low-traffic websites and low-follower-count social media accounts.

The problem is the fact that we have to see it, that it works.

The problem is the dastardly duo of slop and algorithms.

Once the algorithm’s preferences are known, people throw as much algorithm-shaped slop at it as they can in hopes of winning the engagement lottery.