Between slop and enshittification, 2025 saw the internet implode

It’s pitch black outside, long past the time you should have gone to sleep, but the world inside your phone is bright as day. Peak scrolling hours. Hit the Instagram logo: the feed is filled with auto-playing videos from people and brands you’ve never heard of. Switch to TikTok: the app is awash with AI-generated videos of cats making sushi, Union Jack fetishism, and “morbidly obese people breaking things”. Switch to X: the timeline is a festering swamp of ragebait and right-wing propaganda, personally promoted by CEO Elon Musk. Tap back to Instagram and navigate to the Explore page: even on a fresh account, it’s filled with soft-core porn, AI body horror and misogynistic ‘life advice’. Head to Facebook as a last resort and find all of the above, repackaged, deep-fried, and tangled up with a local dispute about recycling bins. The feed is full of slop and we – Big Tech’s little piggies – are filling ourselves up on it. Meanwhile, the so-called information superhighway is falling apart. 

OK, so the internet hasn’t been called the “information superhighway” – a term popularised by the artist Nam June Paik in 1974 – for some time. But the underlying myth lasted much longer, as tech founders throughout the 2010s and early 2020s billed their products (from social media platforms to AI chatbots) as tools for the betterment of human communication, education, democracy, freedom, and enlightenment. Now, this myth itself is starting to crumble. Endless posts lament what journalist Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” of our online lives. Social media is a source of constant angst and authoritarian propaganda. According to a 2025 study, almost half of young British people would rather have lived out their youth in a world without any internet at all, a stat that rises to more than half for young women. Nevertheless, more than a quarter spend more than four hours a day on social media, and way less than half dip below two hours on any given day.

WHAT IS SLOP?

Slop is often characterised as the cause of our addiction to social media in the mid-2020s: picture that scene from A Clockwork Orange where Alex’s eyes are held open in front of a screen, only instead of ‘ultraviolence’ we’re blasted with Italian brainrot and anime-style gooner bait. But the reality isn’t quite so simple. Slop is both a symptom of Big Tech’s profit-maximising ideology and one of its most effective tools. The costs are familiar: worse mental health, shorter attention spans, strained personal relationships, and growing political instability. Slop now plays an increasingly central role in the web’s downward spiral, as it is embraced – and weaponised – by those who produce it and control the channels through which it flows.

In 2025, Merriam-Webster named Slop its Word of the Year, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Before that, it was the subject of numerous reports by artists and cultural commentators like Sean Monahan (sloptimism), Brad Troemel (The ZIRPSLOP Report), Al Hassan Elwan of POSTPOSTPOST and Günseli Yalcinkaya (Slop Making Sense), and Mike Pepi (The Slop Tax). Meanwhile, a bunch of new apps and tools have emerged – like the social platform Perfectly Imperfect, and Slop Evader, an extension that returns your web browser to its pre-ChatGPT state – that consciously position themselves as anti-slop, like antibodies released to combat the spreading virus of “empty yet addictive online content”. 

Right now, though, it still seems like the virus is winning, if only because the human-centric alternatives can’t keep up with the endless churn of generative AI. The public release of ChatGPT in 2022 was a “watershed moment” in this sense, says the writer and curator Shumon Basar, who recently moderated a conversation on slop between Elwan and Yalcinkaya at London’s Ibraaz. The OpenAI chatbot, he says, was among the vanguard of a series of tools that automate the production of images, music, video, and writing that are “high-resolution on the surface but low-grade in meaning” – the definition of slop. 

THE BREAKING OF THE SLOP DAM 

Haven’t we always made some version of content with little meaning? Of course. In an August 8Ball post titled “sloptimism”, the writer and consultant Sean Monahan points out the wide range of supposedly slop-adjacent content that came before generative AI, from Oscarbait movies, to the Hallmark channel, to the novel (according to 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson). Daniel Lopatin, the musician known as Oneohtrix Point Never, said something similar in his November interview with Dazed: “Slop is what we do... it’s not particular to AI, unless you woke up yesterday.” When you introduce AI tools like Sora or Nano Banana into the mix, however, it makes a big difference, enabling the lightning-fast production of slop on a mass scale.

When we use the term slop, we’re referring to images, video, music, and writing that’s high-resolution on the surface but low-grade in meaning.

Year on year, these tools have grown in both quality and accessibility, and the content they produce reached “launch velocity” in 2025 with the release of apps like OpenAI’s Sora 2, Meta’s Vibes, and Google’s Nano Banana Pro. Today, we’ve passed into the realm of “deepfake realism”, as Basar calls it. “We now have to assume, with everything we see on a screen, that there is a very high chance it’s been AI-generated.” This goes for footage of everyday life, since AI tools are increasingly competent at mimicking IRL hardware like the iPhone camera. But it also applies to high-budget content, thanks to industry deals with the likes of Disney or straightforward rip-offs of copyright-protected art such as Studio Ghibli films. Internet researcher (and Dazed contributing editor) Günseli Yalcinkaya agrees with this grim diagnosis: “Increasingly, it feels like we exist in a Phillip K Dick reality, where it’s becoming harder to tell apart what’s real from what’s slop.”

Following a trajectory that was relatively easy to predict back in 2023 – but seemingly impossible to change – this proliferation of hyperrealistic AI imagery has undermined our trust in everything that appears on our screens, regardless of whether it was ever true to begin with. We’re sometimes deceived by slop itself, but its abundance also forces us to doubt the images and clips that once functioned as evidence of reality. In some cases, this uncertainty has been exploited to dark and deeply cynical ends, as related by Basar in his introduction to the Ibraaz session: “When grotesque images of starving children in Gaza made it to our screens, Israeli officials and its populace dismissed these as ‘AI generated.’ So too does mainstream media.” Here, widespread, high-fidelity slop provided a sense of plausible deniability.

In a more indirect way, the endless stream of empty content simply serves as a distraction from more pressing matters, making it trivially easy to “flood the zone” (to borrow a term from Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump). This makes slop a useful tool for people like Silicon Valley executives or politicians – including the Trump White House – who “wish to take control of mass narratives” for their own personal gain, Yalcinkaya says. “By overwhelming the feed with low-nutrition content, slop increases the amount of information noise to navigate online.” It’s much harder to verify an incriminating image of a world leader with Jeffrey Epstein, for example, if there are thousands more fake photos floating around online showing Epstein with your favourite celebrity... or catching the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk.

THE RISE OF THE DISTRACTION ECONOMY

This is all an offshoot of what Basar calls the “distraction economy” (a play on the more commonly cited ‘attention economy’). In the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of the Twitter feed or exhaust the Facebook timeline, but this is no longer the case in the age of the infinite scroll. And these companies didn’t transition to an endless feed (enabled by machine-generated, algorithmically-recommended content) by sheer accident, Basar adds. “It was a mission statement.” It’s distraction, not attention, that has us in its grip when we’re flicking between different social media apps instead of just putting down the phone. It’s a culture of distraction, not attention, that guides companies like Netflix to churn out dumbed-down content for ‘second screen’ viewing, and that contributes to a broader erosion of the human imagination. “Everything is a distraction from everything else,” says Basar. “The primary objective is to keep you locked into the feed... into that sense of blissful, dopamine-driven dissociation that feels best three hours after we should have gone to sleep.” 

Slop, churned out with unimaginable speed by machines that know us better than we know ourselves, is “precision-honed content” for the distraction economy, made to tap into our most basic evolutionary impulses. It’s no coincidence that it overwhelmingly involves babies and/or cute animals in saccharine-sweet scenarios or – even better – positions of peril. Security camera footage of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline. Machinery crushing an old-age pensioner. A dog saving a baby from being abducted by an eagle. “Grok is this real?”

Of course, it’s our most basic emotions – namely anger, fear, and disgust – that are in the crosshairs when it comes to politically charged slop as well, like the White House’s Ghiblified photo of a woman who’s crying as she’s arrested by Ice. With these kinds of images being used to downplay rising authoritarianism (or mock its victims) as well as generate anti-immigrant propaganda and whitewash ongoing genocide, it’s no surprise that, as Yalcinkaya points out: “Slop has been branded the new aesthetics of fascism.” At the same time, adds Basar, it functions as a kind of emotional “painkiller” that allows us to distract ourselves into a state of acquiescence, even in a time of livestreamed genocide, when we’re no longer able to pretend that we don’t know what’s going on in places beyond our immediate surroundings – and, more disturbingly, how we ourselves are implicated in these humanitarian crises and manmade disasters.

This raises difficult but consequential questions: Is slop actually a calculated strategy, by tech titans and/or the political elite, to distract us into submission? Or did it emerge unintentionally from a tangled web of new technologies and lax economic policy? Is it simply a “convenient byproduct of late capitalism” that people have seized upon to serve their own ends? 

ENSHITTIFICATION

So who is responsible for the slop-filled jankspace we find ourselves living in today, and why did they create it? Cory Doctorow’s writing on enshittification (and 2025 book of the same name) attempts to answer this, describing the mechanisms behind the seemingly inevitable decline of online platforms. He describes this as a three-part process: “First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” At the end of this process, they finally roll over and die.

In The ZIRPSLOP Report, published in June this year, Brad Troemel illustrates how the first stage of this process, where companies make utopian claims about their digital platforms and briefly seem to deliver on them, was enabled by favourable economic policies designed to stimulate growth in the wake of events like the 2008 financial crash and Covid pandemic (see: ZIRP). Eventually, though, economies grow less favourable and investors come knocking – most recently, this happened around the end of 2022. This means companies have to monetise their product, fast, and often at the users’ expense.

Slop slots into this theory quite nicely. If our time (and distraction) equals money for Big Tech platforms, their interests lie in accelerating the development of empty AI content to keep us locked into the feed and extract as much money as they can until we log off... or our brains overheat and explode. In this scenario, slop is just the next phase of the internet’s gradual decay – or its acceleration beyond human logic.

Make no mistake, slop is a tool of control

THE SINISTER SIDE OF SLOPMAXXING

Then, there’s a more sinister interpretation: the ‘elites’ were slopmaxxing from the start, as an underhand method of control. It would be easy to dismiss this as a fantasy pedalled by conspiracy theorists in tinfoil hats, if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t openly labelled today’s social media as a psychological “weapon” amid a recent US TikTok buyout by a consortium of anti-Palestine billionaires. Or if we hadn’t already seen how militarised nations make use of memes and AI deepfakes to augment their violent campaigns. For Yalcinkaya, the implication is clear. “Make no mistake,” she says, “slop is a tool of control.” 

With companies like Disney investing $1 billion in OpenAI and allowing Sora to use its characters, while widespread protests by those in the creative industries largely fall on deaf ears, one thing seems abundantly clear: slop may have peaked in 2025, but it isn’t going away any time soon. “We Are Charlie Kirk”, the AI-generated gospel song commemorating the assassinated right-wing commentator, was the “absolute watershed” for Basar, particularly since it topped Spotify’s charts following TikTok virality in November. “That means we’ve crossed a line,” he says. “That is the most important song of the year.”

Whether it’s intentional or not, slop is something we’re going to have to live with – something that millions, or billions of people consume every day. Whether it continues to serve the interests of the hyper-rich and their companies is, perhaps, more up for debate. After all, many avant-garde art movements have been wrestled from the clutches of governments, military researchers, and technologists in the past. Any ideas on how to wrangle slop to serve our best interests instead, and reverse-engineer the enshittification of the internet? We’ll be accepting answers on the back of a Chimpanzini Bananini postcard.