If 2025 is the year of slop, then maybe 2026 can be the year we pick up a fork again and actually chew

Slop flattens it, rewarding rapid consumption rather than gradual understanding

Take David Foster Wallace, who argued that television wasn’t evil so much as “irresistible” because it offered “unearned, instant reward” and became dangerous precisely because it was “too good at providing what we wish for.”

Long before AI entered the chat, years of dopamine flatlining and compulsive self-curation had worn down the boundary between the real and the rendered.

Each week, a new piece of viral slop sends the internet into a collective trust fall with no arms waiting at the bottom.

On TikTok, AI-generated clips routinely outperform human-made ones, proof that the algorithm can’t tell the difference and increasingly, neither can we.

This year we tumbled headfirst into the slop-hole, a bottomless pit of mass-produced, low-effort algorithmic waste. Pumped out by generative tools like Midjourney and Sora, slop has seeped into every crushed corner of the internet, spawning thousands of images that arrive pre-stale: mushy, unformed, and shoveled into a digital trough for creatures... See more