This is a good video, and others from this channel I’ve watched are interesting. The titles of his video belie the compelling societal analysis they do. He has one video about a game streamer that...
This is a good video, and others from this channel I’ve watched are interesting. The titles of his video belie the compelling societal analysis they do.
He has one video about a game streamer that went viral ranting against pronouns in the game Starfield. Normally, I wouldn’t click on a video like that, but the story of the subject and the character analysis was very interesting. The overall phenomena was similar to audience capture, where someone gives some loud portion of their audience what they want (in the streamer’s case: anti-woke reactionaries) and ends up becoming captured by that audience until it subsumes their identity and distorts their perception entirely.
The video on Fallout was also compelling, delving into what it actually means to experience an apocalypse, and the messages being communicated by the series in that respect.
This video in particular about “slop” content did not leave me with any particularly novel takeaway. Their definition of slop mostly just clarifies what I essentially already knew: lots of modern content is regurgitated, exploiting prior brand value and dragging down the source material rather than truly being additive or an iterative improvement.
What I wonder about “slop” is if it’s avoidable on an individual level? It seems like many musicians, artists, creators of any kind—they start with a unique perspective and passion, and success in one area causes them to ouroboros, milking one idea that worked before until the spark is gone. Somehow, refinement turns into regurgitation—and therefore older works have more character than newer ones. (This seems to be a similar process to the radicalization of the streamer mentioned above: doing more of what you get rewarded for and over-optimizing until the value is lost)
Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame infamously retreated after ending his comic strip, and stubbornly resisted commercialization and the generation of Calvin and Hobbes-themed slop.
George R. R. Martin seems to have no interest in making slop based on A Song of Ice and Fire, even if Hollywood does.
Maybe the secret to never producing slop is to be completely unreasonable from a commercial point of view, particularly if you strike creative gold.
It's a double edged sword that will never have a good answer imo. I do agree that artists should pursue thought-provoking/unexplored creations, but we as a society idolise, even fetishize, the...
Maybe the secret to never producing slop is to be completely unreasonable from a commercial point of view, particularly if you strike creative gold.
It's a double edged sword that will never have a good answer imo. I do agree that artists should pursue thought-provoking/unexplored creations, but we as a society idolise, even fetishize, the need for artists to be original (and demonize those that sell-out).
Perversely, it's also common for fans to lash out at artists that stray "too far" from the material they initially liked, you see this a lot in music, even if they are openly trying something new. We know originality doesn't mean popularity or financial success, and this has been true for generations (even Mozart struggled to make ends meet!), so some level is commercialisation is required for artists to make a living. Drawing the line is hard.
Tantacrul has a great video about musical elitism which discusses something similar in a lot more depth, which I'd recommend checking out. https://youtu.be/azpxUnIgsts
I have not seen this creator before. "Slop" (or at least the intentional creation of it) certainly seems like a novel phenomenon. I think the creator made a strong argument connecting "slop" to...
I have not seen this creator before. "Slop" (or at least the intentional creation of it) certainly seems like a novel phenomenon. I think the creator made a strong argument connecting "slop" to the perverse incentives of corporations to make something that will hold somebody's attention.
However, the conclusion of this video really fell flat for me. Specifically, I do not think "slop" is defined by something that uses the existing value of the brand without adding to it. The creator themself nearly arrives at this conclusion in their script.
I mentioned Daredevil as an example of good, non-slop, valuable, attractive, Netflix content, but it is a Marvel adaptation. It exploits the already existing, captured value of brand recognition and attachment to a specific, established character.
Instead of recognizing their definition of slop has issues, they decide that there is a "slop spectrum".
There is a "slop"-iness to Daredevil. The edges of the slop principle do become hazy the closer you look. [...] So maybe there's a slop spectrum.
If you consider nearly any event in the cultural zeitgeist, there is at least some exploitation of existing value; it helps get people invested. Avengers: Endgame, the Drake/Kendrick beef, the Star Wars sequels, Taylor Swift's Eras concert. Or, literally any product with a recognizable brand. Most of marketing is about developing and building off of existing cultural value.
That doesn't make everything that has ever been made that builds off previous work slop. Building off previous works can result in an incredible global experience like Eras, or it can forever damage the reputation of the previous work like Star Wars almost overnight. Neither of these examples feel like slop to me because of how strong people felt about these things. These events made people feel things.
I would describe slop as simply palatable. Acceptable. Mediocre. Not doing anything novel, interesting, or challenging, but simply repeating what is known to work. Pillar of Garbage accurately identifies that a) slop slowly degrades the reputation of a brand over time and b) many successful brands are exploited to generate slop that gets guaranteed attention.
There's always been mediocre work. Today, those works simply aren't remembered because they were uninteresting. I think the real novelty of this era is what this creator points out Netflix is doing. Intentionally creating slop to avoid losing people's attention. This might be bad for the culture, but it's clearly what the free market demands. Netflix is profitable when every other independent streaming service is dead, and the dependent ones remain subsidized. This seems unique to the post-Information era.
For those of you who watch F.D. Signifier's analysis of hip hop culture, I think he had a compelling reason why this has happened. F.D. describes the pre-Internet hip hop culture as being dominated by the gatekeepers: record executives, radio hosts, and other powerful industry figures who used to decide who got seen. If you wanted to publish a record, get your song on the radio, and otherwise get a spotlight, you needed to go through the gatekeepers. As a result, the gatekeepers got to determine what the culture looked like, for better or for worse.
In the post-Internet era, F.D. makes the case that while still powerful, these gatekeepers are forced to bend a knee to the all-powerful algorithms. If your song doesn't become a TikTok sensation, another one will. If your streaming service doesn't optimize for watchtime and retention, Netflix will. As the creation and consumption of media is democratized, the algorithms determine what works.
I think what we see happening today is companies learning that slop is what works consistently. They are deciding to produce slop, fully aware that it deteroriates their brand value, to generate capital. Since the gatekeepers lack power, they won't fight fair in the battle for attention. Instead, when some superstar comes out of the masses with new, exciting brand value, they'll use their capital to buy in and repeat. Low-risk with guaranteed returns.
I'm glad I watched the video. I do not think I would have thought about this or come to this conclusion otherwise.
How Money Works recently gave a shoutout to Micro-Econ-YT. They said that they were a former employee of How Money Works who branched out to do their own thing.
How Money Works recently gave a shoutout to Pillar of GarbageMicro-Econ-YT. They said that they were a former employee of How Money Works who branched out to do their own thing.
Just to get a little meta with this, Damsel seemed strangely familiar to me during the first half of the video until I realized, no I hadn't watched it myself, but I had watched a summary of it on...
Just to get a little meta with this, Damsel seemed strangely familiar to me during the first half of the video until I realized, no I hadn't watched it myself, but I had watched a summary of it on one of those YouTube channels where a text to speech voice explains the plots of movies to you... The slop has truly captured me.
A common question. I have two reasons: I often use headphones as white noise rather than to positively listen to something, so anything with a voice blocks out noise and helps me focus on work,...
A common question. I have two reasons:
I often use headphones as white noise rather than to positively listen to something, so anything with a voice blocks out noise and helps me focus on work, especially if it's not interesting which this usually is not
A lot of those channels seem to be run by people in other countries and so they can be good vehicles for discovering new films I wouldn't come across otherwise (French, Russian, South Korean and Chinese films seem to come up a lot). On the rare occasion a film is beginning to sound actually good, I stop it to avoid spoilers and make a note of the title to look up later.
This is a good video, and others from this channel I’ve watched are interesting. The titles of his video belie the compelling societal analysis they do.
He has one video about a game streamer that went viral ranting against pronouns in the game Starfield. Normally, I wouldn’t click on a video like that, but the story of the subject and the character analysis was very interesting. The overall phenomena was similar to audience capture, where someone gives some loud portion of their audience what they want (in the streamer’s case: anti-woke reactionaries) and ends up becoming captured by that audience until it subsumes their identity and distorts their perception entirely.
The video on Fallout was also compelling, delving into what it actually means to experience an apocalypse, and the messages being communicated by the series in that respect.
This video in particular about “slop” content did not leave me with any particularly novel takeaway. Their definition of slop mostly just clarifies what I essentially already knew: lots of modern content is regurgitated, exploiting prior brand value and dragging down the source material rather than truly being additive or an iterative improvement.
What I wonder about “slop” is if it’s avoidable on an individual level? It seems like many musicians, artists, creators of any kind—they start with a unique perspective and passion, and success in one area causes them to ouroboros, milking one idea that worked before until the spark is gone. Somehow, refinement turns into regurgitation—and therefore older works have more character than newer ones. (This seems to be a similar process to the radicalization of the streamer mentioned above: doing more of what you get rewarded for and over-optimizing until the value is lost)
Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame infamously retreated after ending his comic strip, and stubbornly resisted commercialization and the generation of Calvin and Hobbes-themed slop.
George R. R. Martin seems to have no interest in making slop based on A Song of Ice and Fire, even if Hollywood does.
Maybe the secret to never producing slop is to be completely unreasonable from a commercial point of view, particularly if you strike creative gold.
It's a double edged sword that will never have a good answer imo. I do agree that artists should pursue thought-provoking/unexplored creations, but we as a society idolise, even fetishize, the need for artists to be original (and demonize those that sell-out).
Perversely, it's also common for fans to lash out at artists that stray "too far" from the material they initially liked, you see this a lot in music, even if they are openly trying something new. We know originality doesn't mean popularity or financial success, and this has been true for generations (even Mozart struggled to make ends meet!), so some level is commercialisation is required for artists to make a living. Drawing the line is hard.
Tantacrul has a great video about musical elitism which discusses something similar in a lot more depth, which I'd recommend checking out.
https://youtu.be/azpxUnIgsts
I have not seen this creator before. "Slop" (or at least the intentional creation of it) certainly seems like a novel phenomenon. I think the creator made a strong argument connecting "slop" to the perverse incentives of corporations to make something that will hold somebody's attention.
However, the conclusion of this video really fell flat for me. Specifically, I do not think "slop" is defined by something that uses the existing value of the brand without adding to it. The creator themself nearly arrives at this conclusion in their script.
Instead of recognizing their definition of slop has issues, they decide that there is a "slop spectrum".
If you consider nearly any event in the cultural zeitgeist, there is at least some exploitation of existing value; it helps get people invested. Avengers: Endgame, the Drake/Kendrick beef, the Star Wars sequels, Taylor Swift's Eras concert. Or, literally any product with a recognizable brand. Most of marketing is about developing and building off of existing cultural value.
That doesn't make everything that has ever been made that builds off previous work slop. Building off previous works can result in an incredible global experience like Eras, or it can forever damage the reputation of the previous work like Star Wars almost overnight. Neither of these examples feel like slop to me because of how strong people felt about these things. These events made people feel things.
I would describe slop as simply palatable. Acceptable. Mediocre. Not doing anything novel, interesting, or challenging, but simply repeating what is known to work. Pillar of Garbage accurately identifies that a) slop slowly degrades the reputation of a brand over time and b) many successful brands are exploited to generate slop that gets guaranteed attention.
There's always been mediocre work. Today, those works simply aren't remembered because they were uninteresting. I think the real novelty of this era is what this creator points out Netflix is doing. Intentionally creating slop to avoid losing people's attention. This might be bad for the culture, but it's clearly what the free market demands. Netflix is profitable when every other independent streaming service is dead, and the dependent ones remain subsidized. This seems unique to the post-Information era.
For those of you who watch F.D. Signifier's analysis of hip hop culture, I think he had a compelling reason why this has happened. F.D. describes the pre-Internet hip hop culture as being dominated by the gatekeepers: record executives, radio hosts, and other powerful industry figures who used to decide who got seen. If you wanted to publish a record, get your song on the radio, and otherwise get a spotlight, you needed to go through the gatekeepers. As a result, the gatekeepers got to determine what the culture looked like, for better or for worse.
In the post-Internet era, F.D. makes the case that while still powerful, these gatekeepers are forced to bend a knee to the all-powerful algorithms. If your song doesn't become a TikTok sensation, another one will. If your streaming service doesn't optimize for watchtime and retention, Netflix will. As the creation and consumption of media is democratized, the algorithms determine what works.
I think what we see happening today is companies learning that slop is what works consistently. They are deciding to produce slop, fully aware that it deteroriates their brand value, to generate capital. Since the gatekeepers lack power, they won't fight fair in the battle for attention. Instead, when some superstar comes out of the masses with new, exciting brand value, they'll use their capital to buy in and repeat. Low-risk with guaranteed returns.
I'm glad I watched the video. I do not think I would have thought about this or come to this conclusion otherwise.
How Money Works recently gave a shoutout to
Pillar of GarbageMicro-Econ-YT. They said that they were a former employee of How Money Works who branched out to do their own thing.Just to get a little meta with this, Damsel seemed strangely familiar to me during the first half of the video until I realized, no I hadn't watched it myself, but I had watched a summary of it on one of those YouTube channels where a text to speech voice explains the plots of movies to you... The slop has truly captured me.
i promise i don't mean this in a rude way but i really want to understand...what would possess you to do that?
A common question. I have two reasons:
I often use headphones as white noise rather than to positively listen to something, so anything with a voice blocks out noise and helps me focus on work, especially if it's not interesting which this usually is not
A lot of those channels seem to be run by people in other countries and so they can be good vehicles for discovering new films I wouldn't come across otherwise (French, Russian, South Korean and Chinese films seem to come up a lot). On the rare occasion a film is beginning to sound actually good, I stop it to avoid spoilers and make a note of the title to look up later.