Slop, Brain Rot, and Online Discourse

Slop, Brain Rot, and the Rise of Low-Quality Online Content

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris. Today we are going to talk about sloth. It is a word that has an old origin, but a new meaning in the online world, and it refers to information that is just puzzled together and haphazardly thrown out there in the most uncareful kind of way.

It is oftentimes used of AI-derived images and information that doesn't actually make sense. You've all seen the images of people with six fingers or two sets of arms and that kind of thing, and it's just referred to as slop.

This is careless. I've seen the rise of this kind of thing with AI, but even preceding AI, I've just seen some of the bigger, more influential, supposedly, accounts on social media tend to be traffickers.

Of slop, and they don't care.

This is a big problem, actually. I wanted to talk to someone that I thought would have a deeper insight on this based on a post I read, and that is the man behind the Abrahamic Metacritic on Substack.

If you go to critiqueanddigest .substack .com or the Abrahamic Metacritic, if you Google that, you will find Hussein Abubakar Mansour, who has been on the podcast before and is going to give us his perspective on slop and how it is affecting serious institutions today.

Thank you, Hussein, for coming on again. I appreciate you being on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

I saw a post you made, and you mentioned working for at least one think tank. I think you had some other experiences as well, where you could tell they were marketing their output, their information, their product to the online world, and doing so in a way in which they were attempting to gain a lot of internet traffic, to go viral, to do so in provocative ways, perhaps, but really just sloppy ways, to put out bad information specifically to gain a hearing.

I can't tell you how much that concerns me, if that kind of thing is trusted on the think tank level. I just want to open it up to you. Maybe share some of your experiences here with the downgrade of institutions and why even institutions we maybe used to trust, we can't trust as much anymore because they are listening to a different call and marketing to a different algorithm instead of trying to uphold standards of decency and journalism.

Right.

How Slop and Brain Rot Work as Attention Economy Terms

So as you said, slop, I believe, is actually probably the most important cultural development.

In this decade.

And it's obviously not a good one. And it's mostly driven by the internet. It's not a new phenomenon, primarily. If we go back to, for example, the idea of brain rot, slop, which is a low-effort, low-quality content produced for mass, mass-produced in order to basically, the sole purpose is to generate engagement, right?

Capture attention, generate engagement, not actually to achieve anything else, so achieve.

Virality.

And it causes brain rot. And brain rot itself, as a term, it's actually not a new term, brain rot, it's much, much older than even the internet. Brain rot was coined in the 19th century to describe the effect on people's brains and the dulling effect of reading this mass-produced, cheap literature that was made possible by the 19th century.

It's just a greater purchasing power capitalism. And so a lot of people were churning books. Everybody's familiar with these books. You find them, they're still a thing, you find them at the airports, bookstands.

A lot of the books are just this kind of slop that meant to capture your attention. But of course, now, with AI, with social media, with the transformation of social media also in the past few years, slop now is probably the majority and overwhelming majority of content that's produced online.

You already have statistics that show that the overwhelming majority of texts produced online today are all AI and LLM generated, large language models. And I think this is now becoming true even of visual media, as a lot of people see.

And because of this, first of all, let me talk about the institutional issue that we touched. First of all, not everybody is doing this. And also people are not, I don't think that people are conscious of what's going on to.

Them.

What's happening is because of that transformation of the models of people's attention, the habits of reading, how do you get access to people? You have now a lot of institutions that traditionally did not think they need some sort of a public outreach.

They didn't need to be out there on social media. Now everything is changing. Everybody thinks they have to be on social media. For example, when it comes to think tanks, there was a point in the past in which think tanks actually had physical publications.

So if you have a think tank that thinks about any issues, let's say Indo-Pacific geopolitics, they would actually have physical publications that would send to people with their analysis and so on. Obviously, with the advance of internet, a lot of this changed.

So now we don't even, you know, they stopped having physical publications and then they just have their websites and publish the reports on websites. And then after a while, with the rise of social media and platforms, the people who work in think tanks, well, you have to go out and build your own platform and so on.

But this process happening in a sloppy way, as you said, then leads a lot of people unconsciously to drift their institutions slowly into producing online low quality slop as they are chasing that mirage of engagement and algorithm.

And as I said, like you can already see this happening with many institutions. For example, you know, the think tank that I talked about when, you know, I just had a brief engagement with them. At one point, they decided we need social media.

These are serious people, very, you know, very seasoned professionals who produce serious intellectual output about the world. And the management decided that they needed an online presence, they need social media.

Presence.

So they don't know how to do that because that's not their job. So they hired the social media professionals, which is today one of the most lucrative jobs. I don't exactly understand how you become a social media professional expert, but they exist and they hired them.

And now they are the ones now who are starting to optimize the output of the institution in order to be possible to convert to content that achieves virality. And obviously, that is a very different criteria and standard of output than an output that is meant to be consumed otherwise.

And gradually you can see, again, like sometimes unconscious, it's not people being dishonest.

Grifters.

It's just because of they are decided to chase this end, they drifted it slowly. Oh, we have to make the we have to make it shorter. Oh, well, we have to speak on a more simple language so people can understand and so on and so forth.

And you just creep in that direction until you end up with a one minute sloppy video that's just meant to to capture people's attention. And that's basically the information that's in it. It's just completely, completely useless if not counterproductive.

PragerU and the Difference Between Simplification and Slop

There's a lot there. I want to get specific so people know what we're talking about. So let me throw something out for you. When PragerU started, you remember the PragerU videos, I think they still make them.

Would that be categorized in your mind as slop? They're very short. They're very simple, oftentimes oversimplifying complicated situations. I never cared for them for that reason, although on some topics I found them helpful in a mass audience sense.

How would you categorize something like that?

No, I don't think I don't think that was slop. I think you can you can say, you know, I don't like it because it's too simple. These are much more complex issue. That's I think that's an acceptable criticism.

It's because what PragerU did and actually I did one of their videos, just a disclaimer, one of those short videos. First of all, it was a five minute video usually, which is by today's standards is very long.

So all of these.

That's true. That's true.

It's very long. I worked with another, you know, for also a very I was a contractor very briefly for an actual big social media influencing company that puts out and the and the internal instruction. I'm not kidding.

Was make a video as if you're talking to five year olds. That's that's how that's how basically they they they trained their content careers. PragerU was not like this. It was a five minute video. They had serious people making the video.

Right.

So you don't get just a face in order.

Slop.

It depends on outrage and aura and things like that. PragerU got real, you know, real actually subject matter experts who usually try to summarize a big idea that they have. That's how they they reached out to me.

I had a big article about issues with terrorism and Islam, and they wanted me to summarize that article in the insights in five minutes. And you have graphs and you have visuals that help. And then people who are interested in more, they can go find the work of that subject.

Matter.

Right. Expert.

And a but that's not that's that's not what's left now is way shorter. And first of all, information that is largely decontextualized. So it's vague. It's entirely geared towards generating some sort of an emotion, whether to make you angry, whether to entertain you, but not really to get you invested in an issue.

So engagement, farming, rage baiting. I see these things as resulting in audience capture eventually. So you are constantly dividing. You're constantly throwing out red meat for a certain audience that believes something, whether true or not.

They believe something that's it's controversial enough to really get eyeballs on it. And then you become the slaves to that audience because they're going to expect you to keep throwing out that red meat.

And if you try to give them some decent material, they're not going to know what it is. Either they'll ignore it or they'll actually go after you and try to to discredit you in some way because you're not giving them that.

I mean, it's almost like a drug, I suppose. They're they're they're wanting to greater and greater levels of transgression and these kinds of things. That's what I'm observing happening online. I see it with real content creators who are just throwing stuff out there with minimal study to see if it sticks and framing it in unnecessarily offensive ways to provoke maybe someone with a bigger audience to notice them.

And then it's just a divide and conquer, divide and conquer, divide and conquer. Since we're in the middle of it, I mean, where does this end up going eventually, especially when a think tank or a serious institution or figure who actually wants to do real things in the world kind of acquiesces to this?

What's the end result? Have we seen have we seen the full effect of what this actually does or are we still in the experimental phase, you think?

Foreign Accounts, Grifting, and the Right-Wing Slop Ecosystem

Yeah, I know.

I think I think it already got very bad pretty quickly. And there are multiple things that I think then points, by the way, I have actually experienced this with two different think tanks. One of them actually stopped quite, quite quickly.

So one of them actually kind of didn't see where it got stuck. But one, to be honest, the director of the think tank is an extremely thoughtful, educated man. And so in two weeks he looked at the stuff.

I was like, what is this? I don't want this anymore. Cancel the contract with the social media people. And we're just going to do everything. So there are people who are very thoughtful and they kind of see this as like, this is not what I want to be.

How bad it got. Let's talk about when X decided to add that button where you can see where people are.

From. That's right.

And then we discovered that large amount of very large accounts, specifically right wing. And I think this is something that needs actually an honest conversation. Turned out to be based in the third world from in Pakistan, in India, in all of these places.

Not to mention, of course, we don't know how much of these are basically foreign foreign ops. But I'm going to actually remove that element entirely. I'm going to not going to talk about Iran and Russia and China for certain are doing this.

But no, we will talk about accounts that are just first of all, they have the incentive. I mean, think about it. You're in a poor country. You now you have AI that can generate content for you. America is very polarized.

Now the world has been annexed into one space Internet wise. You can. There is a lot of incentives to go into that American sphere, create a fake account and start baiting Americans and generating this amount of engagement that now X, as we know, monetizes quite well.

A so you actually end up getting getting, especially by third world standards, probably very sums of cash monthly, monthly from this kind of engagement. This is how bad it got. That is, you have you have these major right wing account that turned out not even American pushing all of these rage bait and so on.

The issue that you that you said is very important because here you have a correlation between two things or you have a coinciding of two things. You have the issue of slop and grifting, which are they are not identical, but they now work together.

That is, if grift slop is the type of content, grifting is saying things for the sake of following. That is, you actually say things so you can get people to follow you. That's it. You don't believe it doesn't matter what you actually believe.

That's not the question. I'm trying all the time to kind of measure the temperature to see to optimize what I say in order to give me the most amount of following. It's not identical with slop now, but you see them often in common.

And now a lot of slop is that is that kind of grifting. And the problem is that. I think especially people on the right, I think slop, everybody has slop and grift, I think, and the left has its own slop, slop and grift, but I think it's a much, much bigger problem in the in the right wing sphere.

You wrote a great substack essay about this. And you said the problem is that the right is too easy to satisfy. That is, if you give them something very cheap, just a cheap read me, but just read and raw, they'll just they'll just be happy.

And that's what basically happens on the Internet to the extent that now you have especially the right wing influencing sphere, to be completely honest, has been taken over by this slop. Some of it, of course, is the anti-Semitic stuff.

It's one of the best slop itself. It's probably one of the oldest forms of slop in the modern world. If you read like the old anti-Semitic literature, the Protocols of Zion, for example, about that's that was slop.

Right. A lot of a lot of the right wing online sphere, sadly, is drowning in this flood.

Of slop. That's one of the problems I think that right wingers have because we don't have the same institutional standards and credibility. Now, it's not to say the left has good standards. They say they do and they don't live up to them, but they still have these legacy institutions in their pocket and they can give them somewhat of a framework, I think, for operating.

There's a there's a hierarchy, which is the ironic part of the whole thing, because they are egalitarian, but they actually have a hierarchy in operation to forward their egalitarianism where the right truly is more egalitarian in the way that they.

I mean, it's a dog eat dog world. I've been in these spaces, you know, I've been to places even like CPAC and stuff. It's like people's personalities jostling with each other in competition all the time.

And it's disappointing, honestly. It's quite I remember in 2020 when I went to CPAC, I was quite disillusioned by what I saw. And I really expected there to be more principle and working together. And it's there's a lot of grifters.

And now I think the problem is a lot worse because of A .I. and the Internet being such a primary medium for expressing opinions.

The thing about the right, just very quickly. Yeah, the thing the thing is, the left, a lot of the right today, of course, was formed by a reaction against the extreme aggressive thought and speech policing by the left.

And that's true. So so there is an element here that's tragic. And we have to just I think we have to also be realistic and admit that part of this is kind of a tragic moment, a coincidence of things because of and I was part of that reaction.

I've always been afraid. I remember when the left had its, you know, imperial moment, that was always like, when am I going to get cancelled? Am I going to when am I going to lose my livelihood? It's just it was a real thing.

So I think all of us, all the people who now or many of us reacted very violently against this. One of that reactions with Elon's taking over X, taking over X, basically removing all the standards that the old Twitter had, which were used to aggressively thought police people, they banned Trump, for instance, as we as we all know, they banned a lot of right wing influencer.

Anybody who said who descended in the covid covid narrative were banned. You had you had M .D.'s from Harvard who Harvard, who Twitter banned because they didn't want to hear their opinions on vaccine.

So Musk took over, basically said everybody can say everything. And then you had the monetization model and that contributed to the rise of of slop in this way. So you on the right now you're torn between two things.

You don't want thought policing anymore. That's exactly the experts have been trying to dominate us. So that means that you had to be this egalitarian in terms of like everybody can say everything and kind of try to destroy the left's hierarchy of information.

And then but that means that you don't have the ability to police and that makes you vulnerable to this amount of slop and so on.

Why X Rewards the Wrong Things and How to Curate Your Feed

Yeah, I was thinking the other day about what would have to happen on X to make it better and to return standards, because right now it's basically a very egalitarian place where anyone can say anything from an anonymous account if they want to say it and it can gain traction.

The hierarchies that exist are really just. Based upon the ability to ratio, and now we know that there's foreigners that are very involved in this kind of thing, and I don't know what the algorithms are doing themselves, but I have my own suspicions on that front.

And it's just it rewards all the wrong kind of things. And the blue checkmark that used to be there was associated with some kind of an institutional credibility, but it was left coded. So they would use that to hammer the right like where the gatekeepers you're not.

We can keep you out. The problem was it was institutional credibility is a good thing. Like dumping that is not good. It's just that we had the wrong people and the wrong institutions and stuff. And so if there is a way to bring back the blue checkmark for from a right wing, a competent right wing perspective, institutions and figures that represent skin in the game.

And if there's a way to, I don't know, make it so that it's less egalitarian in that sense, I suppose. I don't know what other things could be done, but we used to have these standards of speech. So you would get nixed real quick for, quote unquote, hate speech.

And of course, these were abused terribly and they were ill conceived, most of them. There still are some of those those standards, but they're not really applied a lot. Every once in a while they are, but it's not as often.

And here's the thing, like it's in the name of free speech and everyone is his own king, everyone's their own content creator, that now we have this very egalitarian playing field where we've eliminated any kind of excellence, any kind of standards of truth.

We have to bring those back somehow in a very responsible way. And I don't know that Elon is interested in doing this, but Twitter is going to be terrible, I think, unless you can curate your own page and you know how to curate your own kind of feed until such a point someone else is going to kind of come in and curate it.

So that's just my gut on the whole thing. I don't see that happening, but I do curate my own feed. I don't know if you do that. I mean, do you use block, mute, list, because these features have been good for me.

Yeah, yeah. I'm extremely intentional. I think that's I'm sure that you are, too. And I think that's what everybody needs to be. You need to. And that's my essay about slop. Ultimately, at the end, that's what I'm trying.

If you are a passive consumer, then you can't complain about what's going to happen to you. Things are going to happen to you if you're just passively following. You know, you have to be intentional about, first of all, your cultural habits.

What culture do I consume? And this is not just online. I want to say especially for Christians, you know, you have to be deliberate about what kind of music I and my kids listen to, what kind of a culture, what kind of things I look at.

There's a story that I think is immensely important from St. Augustine's confession about his best friend, Olypius. And, you know, they end up converting together, you know, when they receive grace. But he talks about when Olypius fell and he went, you know, lost with the debauchery of the gladiator games that Olypius wanted to be a good man.

He wanted to not to go to gladiating games. And he knew that he was weak. So he decided he would never look at them and he would never go. And then one time, just a brief story, you know, he's a group of bad friends, bad influence.

They dragged him to there. So he decided to shut his eyes so he wouldn't even see. And then they actually held his eyes open. And then the description of St. Augustine of this is basically the moment that he opened his eyes is almost as if arrows pierced him.

And that's it. He was captured and he became an addict of the gladiating games and the blood and so on and so forth. I love this story because it really, I think, captures something very important about gaze and looks and desire.

If you are just passively, if you think that this doesn't matter, you're just going to look and waste this one minute on this cheap stuff and so on and so forth. You really are hurting yourself. You're hurting your brain.

You're hurting your cognitive abilities and you're really hurting yourself spiritually significantly. So I think I don't know if I am like you. I'm not optimistic that Elon is interested in in really fixing.

I mean, the guy talks with I'm very appreciative of a lot of things that he's done, but he's very incoherent. A lot of things he talks about the importance of the family and structure and stability and so on.

Yet he's leaving his website, this the home of slop porn that didn't exist in the old old Twitter and all of these all of these terrible things. So I'm not I'm not optimistic about this. So I think what we need is digital literacy and pushing people to actually take the scrolling seriously, that this is an actual activity that affects you, affects the people around you, the people that you care about.

And it affects your your spiritual health.

The Cost of Passive Consumption and the Need for Digital Discernment

Yes, yes. The dopamine receptors love the scrolling and there's a big money market to be made there. I have my own consternation over this. I mean, I was told and I don't get deep into this stuff because I get people contacting all the time.

Oh, I can grow your YouTube channel to one hundred thousand followers very quickly. And I know what they're going to do. It's like it's going to do things that I don't want to have done to my YouTube channel.

But one of the things I was told is like, you got to have shorts. And so I resisted this for a long time. Opus clip makes it so easy. They'll just like, you know, it's probably a I tools. They just make shorts and then I can approve which ones to use or whatever.

But I'm I'm a divided person even on this. And I wonder, I'm like, am I contributing to something I shouldn't like? I'm not throwing slop out there. There it's clips from legitimate podcasts I'm doing on legitimate topics.

But I don't want to encourage short attention spans. I really want people to do the reading and the thinking you mentioned at the beginning, the whole discussion over Zionism or Israel. I don't remember which term being kind of infested with this.

And I have seen it in so many areas. But that is one of the primary areas I have seen slop. Just like almost everything that I see said about that topic is slop. I don't know if you have any words you want to share or examples you want to give about that particular topic to just kind of warn people.

There's a smart way to talk about this. And there's a really dumb way out there that is being trafficked into our circles.

You can you can usually tell. I mean, yes, it is probably one of the areas of the most slop. That's why also it's growing. It's also kind of this. Now you get very, very sad linkage that we talked about ideologically between the American right and the third world.

So you have now people on the right saying things that until they only only until a few years ago, you would only hear them from like a Middle Eastern Uber driver. And you would laugh about it because like, you know, it's Middle Eastern.

We are, you know, bizarre, bizarre beliefs about the world. But now you find them basically mainstreamed in the right Zionist conspiracies. I mean, you have you have a you have crazy figures like like Candace Owens.

But you have also a lot of people on social media who's just producing AI stuff, whether images, whether texts. You know, you sent me that post of this guy writing. Basically, you can tell it's like short sentences of this soulless writing.

Oh, they wanted to abort you. And then when they couldn't abort you, they wanted to make you gay.

And we couldn't.

And it's just like anger, rage. And you can guess who they mean by they like they don't even have to. And there is a huge number of engagement with with.

I was at your web and post that I went after because I was just like, this is not it's not that simple, like that's not exactly how this works. But that will get you a lot of followers and a lot of people interested in what you're saying.

And the sentiment that I find is like the people who are captured by that think like, finally, someone said it. Finally, the truth is out there. Right. And I I don't know how oftentimes to even reason with those people.

I've kind of become someone who mutes and ignores or blocks if they become super. I don't know, I rate when challenged, but, you know, more so, I guess I mute and I just don't want to be part of the stupid discussions.

I feel like I'm insulting people's intelligence, sometimes even responding to just stuff that should be obviously noticeably untrue or just overly simplistic. I don't know how you combat this stuff. I don't know if you have any advice, because I am still trying to figure this out because there's people I love.

I just put preference with it. There are people I love genuinely who I don't think have the time to devote to researching every issue that get taken in by some of this stuff. And it's not because they have ill or bad motives.

No, I don't see. So I wrote something in a different context about this, about basically desire and being captured by by things. I think these people are captured. I don't think I don't think they are.

I think they just kind of Olympia's after he saw the gladiating games and he just stuck there. He can't he can't move from there because he just enjoy it. It is even his body became dependent on all of the dopamine circuits in his head and so on.

So I think I think, no, these people, I have nothing against them. I actually feel bad for them. I think they are captured by these very short circuit of, you know, dopamine rewarding in in in their heads that they get addicted to.

And I think that if there are people who you love that you see doing this, first of all, you have to tell them like, hey, spend more time with other people, you know, spend more time talking about a single subject for a prolonged time.

Kind of. And also try to just get them interested in other forms of content. I mean, you're not going to. You're not going to convince them to basically abandon a habit into nothingness. No, I think you have to help them find good things that are much more rewarding and much more beneficial for them.

I'm not saying that this is perfect. I mean, maybe I'm saying the obvious, probably saying the obvious for a lot of people. But I think I think it's the obvious because it's true. It's just very hard, very hard to do.

I do have a hope that there's going to be burnout because I have had people contact me and say things like, John, you know, I was in a chat group or whatever that was just feeding on hate, basically. I mean, I've had people tell me this.

And thank you for saying something that helped me see my way out of this. And it's not like I get those every day, but I've gotten enough of that kind of thing where people are. It leads to blackmailing a lot of this stuff.

It leads to, you know, you're angry all the time. You always think you're being oppressed. You always think that someone's doing something to you. And it's a constant feed of that. And it becomes very stressful.

It becomes the decapitating or handicaps. You'll put it that way. It does decapitate you, too, because you lose your ability to think. But it really, I think, leads you to dark places. And when you're tired of that, my hope is you look up and you realize, wait a minute, I got sucked into a black hole.

I need to back out of here, this whole thing and get on some healthy stuff. I need to be in the Bible. I need to be with real people. I need to be in associations in my community and reading good books as and also I need to be careful of what podcasts and social media accounts I follow.

And I don't know when we hit the brick wall on this, when the wave crashes. But I'm I'm hoping to see that, that there will be a reward system emerging from all this where actually skin in the game is what matters.

Virtue, bravery, competence. And we can restore leadership on those terms. And maybe this is a necessary step we have to pass through to get to that. I don't know. But that's my optimism. I don't know if you have any optimism on this.

The Value of Intentionality, Community, and Scripture

Yeah, I'm optimistic that actually it will make people hopefully it will make people spend less time online. I mean, if the online space is this flood of slop, I hope that people a lot of people will get tired and just like tired of their phones and spend more time with people.

And I want to remind you that the listeners that both slop and feed originally, it's like they are agricultural terms. Feed is what you put for animals. It's not something that humans you don't you don't put feed.

You put food for humans to sit and dine. It feed is something that you put down and slop as well. Slop is just like whatever you put, you know, it's a slop that you throw out usually to pigs and pork farms.

That they eat. And it's just you deserve to eat better, so to speak. You deserve to consume consume better information. And and that means exactly you said, you know, the Bible, talking to people, read real books.

So on there is a place we live in the online world. It's not going to go anyway. But I think we have to deal with it. Intentionality. The last thing I would say is that remember that every engagement you do is not harmless.

That is, if you have a piece of bad slop, whether hatred, whether bad information, whether a grifter, whether so on, and you engage with it, you added a number. And that number is going to add, you know, add another number.

And then you end up with this insane amount of engagement that financially rewards that system. So it makes it worse and then traps other people who are going to see that this video had two million views or, you know, have a million likes.

And then they will they will watch it themselves. So what you think is a passive activity, and that makes sense from a Christian anthropological and cosmological perspective, what you think is a is is a passive, harmless activity.

You're hurting nobody but yourself, by yourself, by by consuming this. That's not the case. You're actually hurting other people by basically amplifying and participating in this in this bad system.

That's good. Yeah, that's absolutely true. I think it's even better if you're going to go after any of the screenshot it. So you're not adding to their post or they're like just. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Critique the content. But don't don't don't add to what they're doing. I wonder whether or not this will be a kind of a test case. If James Fishback in Florida, who's kind of like one of your first seekers of a very important executive office who who throw slop out all the time, like he has some maybe interesting policies.

But a lot of what he says is just like the scale and the scale at which he says it. It's like every day there's a new policy, a new thing, a new proposal, and many of them completely impractical. There's just no sense of like what he can actually do from that executive office.

Many of them, I think, baiting people into engaging with him. But he's big online and his support in Florida is like, you know, four or five percent right now. And you see, this goes to what you were saying about get offline.