By volume alone, slop may be the most visible and successful by-product of the generative-AI era to date. It is also a hallmark of what I’ve previously described as a collective delusion around artificial intelligence—where the breathless hype and imagined future of building a godlike superintelligence and curing cancer collides with the dull... See more
Oupi Goupi is shared by many, from film theorists who drew parallels between Lakaka’s work and that of Godard to cartophilists who are collecting newly produced Goupiland Pokémon-coded cards.
Imagining a world where a metalabel is a common paradigm that people create. Where the output is a little bit slower. Where there is more deliberation, more pairs of eyes on things. I think it’s just a healthier experience.
The final notes of the AI-and-I essay are cowed resignation, awed acquiescence, and what Trotsky called the “terrifying helplessness” of cultural production at “the beginning of a great epoch”
If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.