Slop as a way of life

Drew Austin in Kneeling Bus. This piece was originally published in July 2025. Keep scrolling for headlines we’re following.

Yesterday morning, I walked past the small grocery store on my block and heard REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” emanating from inside. I’d usually ignore that kind of thing but here it suddenly struck me as absurd—it was 9:30 am on a weekday and there was absolutely no reason for that song to be coming out of an empty grocery store.

Not even annoying or dissonant, it was just the least appropriate accompaniment for the moment, in its own subtle way. And of course there was no reason for it—no person had chosen the song and the process that led to it playing then had no audience in mind. Music fills the aisles of retail businesses so reliably that it’s more notable to encounter silence, and usually the playlist is sonic wallpaper of the proto-Spotify Top 40 variety, but here the mismatch was just enough to nudge me out of my sleepwalk and make me smile. It was slop.

Lately the idea of slop has fascinated me. I’ve started seeing it everywhere and grasping for a more expansive definition of it. Slop is probably the definitive term of our current digital experience; it increasingly functions as shorthand for all of our vague frustration with digital technology. Although most people wouldn’t call that REM song slop, its appearance in that context fits my working definition: content as environmental filler, a choice that’s not quite right (but also not quite wrong), which nobody really wanted, probably unnoticed, meant to only register at a subliminal level, and put in place to negate a worse alternative: silence.

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel.

It’s tempting to define slop as Potter Stewart did pornography (“I know it when I see it”) but that would just further obfuscate an already murky concept. Today, “slop” implies AI more than anything else, and primarily refers to the AI-generated content that is flooding the internet. The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Instagram Story Likes and Markers of Digital Affection (being-on-line)

• Man who became popular in Blinking White Guy gif raises over $300,000 for multiple sclerosis research (The Guardian)

• The best place to eat Cypriot food in the UK (Vittles)

• Dashboard Culture vs. Camouflage Culture (Matt Klein)

• The Life and Death of the American Foodie (Eater)

Visit CLONE.FYI for hourly updates on culture and technology.