Humanity is in its slop arc: there has never been a time where such an amount of quantity of content is produced and disseminated. There has never been a time where content is so easily generated. The one thing that defines slop is low effort. It’s the reason it’s so ubiquitous, you just generate a throwaway trash hoping to cash on the the current best thing and then move on to the next. It gets copied, it becomes a tsunami of the sameness over and over again. tasteless. empty calory goo. But low effort and thoughtlessness of it is the key.

Usually the resulting product is pretty low end. There is no craft in slop and since it’s low effort, mass production typically results in bad quality. Usually. But we are beginning to see examples of high end slop — where the resulting product is actually pretty damn good.

Let’s take a step further: what happens when slop gets too good? What happens when you can create a whole cultural movement: songs, novels, paintings, movies, sculptures, all without too much effort and in a matter of days, if not hours? We’re not there yet but the trends certainly point towards that direction. Let’s try to imagine us living in that (maybe not so distant) future.

frictionless human experience

You suddenly have an idea, a curious thought, a fanciful imagination figment, or a compelling story that you would like to share with the world. You have now two choices:

• You can sit down and think of how this thought evolves into a full fledge artistic product, planning how the idea should take shape and be communicated. This will require preliminary conversations with other people, thought about the message, and potentially many months of producing the cultural artifacts required. Even if it’s a single painting it could take you months on end as you stare at multiple canvases and mull over the colors and shapes. But most importantly, the whole process will change you , the iteration of culture through yourself and your peers will change how you view the world. It will reaffirm or transform some of your values, change your cultural taste, give you new ideas for future exploration, and hopefully also nudge a bit how other people think. But in the end you will be different because of your craft. Even if in the end you try to optimize your artifacts for engagement, and even if no one cares to consider your ideas, its imprint in you will be the most profound.
• You can spin up the culture AI agent c3-mini-high, give it the seed idea, and just let it fly. In seconds, you have multiple short stories, several concept art sketches, a whole soundtrack of potential jingles and short form videos, all optimized to the cultural zeitgeist of the moment. You are diligent, but the deluge is just too much, and you’re really excited to share this idea with the world. So you only skim the stories, sort of give a hand-wavy ok to the concept art, and tell c3-mini-high to deploy. You sometimes check your phone to see how your project is doing but you’re already thinking about the next thing: you see, you have this new interesting idea…

In one scenario, you evolve in your views and your humanity is defined by how you spend time in the craft, creating a path full of the friction of experience:

In the other, the pace is breakneck, and your humanity is more defined by the boiling point of the massive amounts of ideas you are exposed to. There is no friction, just a random walk of experiences with no real coherent path, it’s turning up the heat, it’s the boiling point.

Now you might want to romanticize the first option but consider looking at this in from a completely dispassionate angle. In a society that mostly prefers the first option, we get to explore more in depth parts of our cultural space as the human experience is defined by the union of strongly stirred cultural movement. A society that prefers the second option might explore local versions of the cultural space more thoroughly but not go as far into the wilderness at the first. In the end the difference between the two will be shaped by the geometry of our “cultural manifold”, which is mostly defined by how strong are the energetics of barriers to access the full range of human experience.

an impulse society

As you use c3-mini-high to deploy your tenth cultural movement this quarter, you observe how the influence of its artifacts waxes and wanes again, a mere blip in a vast ocean of cultural ripples everywhere, where virality is measured in hours instead of days. You take a break and see some kids playing in park. You wonder what we should be teaching them to help them live in this boiling world: what world model or cultural framework is the right one to navigate writhing mass of cultural hechatoncheiries that we have created. The reality is that there’s really nothing to teach. Things just move to fast and it has become impossible to adapt our cultural processes to this new rhythm. Cultural evolution might just not be quick enough for us anymore. Reactive impulse is all we have. In this world markets have evolved to match such impulse and physical things in general have lost ground to more virtual constructions that are able to match the quick change of impulse of the masses. Why manufacture something to sell to the masses if the cultural window for the market of that thing will have shift quicker than what it takes to ship it? Instead, the most valuable and coveted artifacts are now constantly morphing cyber gachas that ride the wave of the flash AI cultural movements: platforms that can adapt to the insane changes of such tides.

In the long run, such transformation will put in increasing spotlight the true invariants of the human experience. We will get to see which parts of us we cannot do without and we cannot infinitely accelerate without disastrous consequences. It will be a painful experience for sure, as a global spiritual malaise will permeate everything until we realize the true human invariants, the true tenets, that we cannot alter.

the fall and rise of cultural fitness barriers