The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
―Edward O. Wilson
Above: Slop is for pigs, not people.
When scrolling X like a mindless miscreant (let he who is without sin cast the first stone!) I stumbled upon the below screenshot:
Go back, read it once more, and shake the shiver from your spine.
Though it’s spooky season and Halloween draws near, these words are more terrifying than any ghost or ghoul.
To me, the aforementioned words represent hell. And hell is not only a destination, but the slow, subtle realization that your nightmare is becoming reality.
If TikTok was a gun, OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s new short-form, AI-generated “vibes” engines are nuclear weapons aimed squarely at the human attention span. They’ll make TikTok look like a teddy bear.
Every generation inherits a new narcotic. Ours is infinite content, slop disguised as progress that results in this:
What “slop” is (and why it’s everywhere)
We’ve entered the Age of Slop: content that’s frictionless, soulless, infinite — optimized for dopamine per second, not meaning per minute.
Naval Ravikant once said, “The devil is cheap dopamine.” He’s right.
A fundamental rule of technology is that every innovation begins as a tool we embrace, becomes a toy we abuse, and ends as a master that abuses us.
TikTok was the appetizer. The main course was just unveiled and it may very well kill us.
Want proof of our voracious appetites? The Washington Post analyzed ~1,100 TikTok watch histories: in five months, some users’ daily watch time rose +916%, with the heaviest hitting over ten hours. On average, light users more than doubled to ~70 minutes/day.
Numbers like these aren’t “user engagement.” They’re a slow-motion psychological experiment with no control group. The article goes on:
Watching “short-form videos [tends] to lower one’s self-control, which then leads to more impulsive behaviors,” David said.
This can have negative effects on our lives outside the app. In a 2024 study, David reported that watching TikTok videos is more strongly correlated with “phubbing” — a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing” — when people choose to pay attention to the videos rather than the people they are with…
After five months, the data trends for both groups suggested features of compulsive behavior — repeatedly feeling urges to do something, even if the person thinks it’s harmful in the long run.
Increases in watch time could be a sign of bingeing behavior, where a person finds it’s hard to stop something once they start.
Opening the app more often may represent craving, while the faster swiping for new videos could be an indication of automatic or habitual behaviors.
In short, this behavior is breaking our brains.
I personally write this as someone who’s had to put the phone in the other room just to remember what silence sounds like.
At some point, engagement turns into neurochemical enslavement.
Something has got to give.
When Infinite Jest stops being fiction
The late, great David Foster Wallace imagined an Entertainment so irresistible that people stop eating, sleeping, living. His doorstopping tome used to be a satire about excess. It’s now become a product roadmap
OpenAI Researcher Will put out a warning earlier this year:
Unfortunately for humanity, it’s too late.
We just did thanks to Meta and OpenAI, respectively:
These poisonous products represent dangerous shrapnel from the collision of social media and AI.
They are not creative tools, but addiction factories chock full of short video loops (trained on other people’s videos without consent!) engineered for compulsive consumption.
We are handing a glowing, candy-colored infinity to a Paleolithic brain. The slop is candy laced with arsenic and the gap between what we can make and what we can steward is widening into an impassable abyss.
Infinite Jest imagined entertainment so captivating it killed you by delight. Silicon Valley just calls that “retention” and ARR.
Growth unchecked is the ideology of cancer and humanity’s prognosis is increasingly dire.
Two tweets come to mind:
And yet, there’s a dark irony to all of this: attention monetized by ads funds research. The slop isn’t a byproduct, but the business model.
This endless treadmill is soul sucking, but it’s the only mechanism society has ever found to subsidize frontier science at scale.
Google Ads led to DeepMind which led to Transformers (the technological breakthrough that makes generative AI work)
Meta Ads led to VR which led to the Metaverse (lol)
So yes, we drown in the slop, but it’s the same slurry fueling AI’s progress. OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, et al need infinite engagement to justify infinite compute.
Therein lies the moral bind: slop funds science; slop also hollows souls.
What a hell of a Catch-22; talk about two steps forward and one step back.
Refusing the Feed
It’s not that this technology is evil. It just is.
The danger lies in us; namely our inability to handle abundance with discipline.
We’re wired for scarcity; given infinity, we gorge and make ourselves sick.
Per Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Read instead of refresh.
Build instead of binge.
Choose friction over feeds.
The digital trough is the new gutter. Let’s keep our minds out of the mud and muck lest we all soon look something like this:
On a long enough timeline, I suspect we will all become WALL·E people—rolling in padded chairs, screens inches from our faces, brains running on low power mode unless we feed ourselves a diet that nourishes our mind, body, and soul.
I beg and beseech you on bended knee to refuse to become pigs living off algorithmic slop. Otherwise, Orwell’s warning from Animal Farm may turn into our collective epitaph:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Leave the slop in the pigpen where it belongs.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
I think that it is only old weirdos from my generation or older who have been able to resist this crap, as it holds no interest for us. I agree young people and all future generations are doomed.
Individuals wiill be faced with a new temptation: To live in the simulation.
Though, in some sense, this not a new temptation at all... It's a completion of the original temptation—the fundamental archetype—of living in a world where "My will be done" as opposed to "Thy (God's) Will be done."