You already know what I’m talking about. The essay that brings with it the «theater of thought» but in the end leaves you holding nothing. Simply put, it’s fluent but vapid. You couldn’t quite complain about it because you couldn’t really name it. They drift through the landscape, like wind blowing a piece of garbage.
Let’s be honest, this phenomenon is nothing new. Consultants perfected it and academics built careers on it. Marketing and advertising have turned it into a genre. But what’s changed is the speed and scale. A machine can now produce it faster than a person can read it. The popular word that captures this is «slop.»
In many ways, it’s perfect and almost has an appropriate tinge of vulgarity in it. But I couldn’t resist adding a bit of structure to the mess.
Superficial
Language
Optimized for
Performance
To me, slop works best as a noun. That’s slop. The internet is filled with slop. This feels like slop. And it seems to have a functional and emotional relationship the word spam and how it captured a technological reality.
But what the word actually names is a relationship between language and thought. Slop is writing that has severed the connection between these components, but sounds like it hasn’t.
How Slop Differs From Bad Writing
It’s important to recognize that slop isn’t simply bad writing. Bad writing is clumsy and unfinished and reflects the process of thinking. Slop operates differently. Its output is optimized for the read rather than the idea. Its purpose isn’t to explore a thought but to create the experience of having encountered one.
Real thinking leaves evidence of its process. A simple test is to challenge the writer about the prose. Does the response reflect the composition or just result in a cognitive shrug? Slop contains the signals of thought without the event itself. What you get is a structured vocabulary that mimics the cognitive journey. What’s missing is the moment where an actual mind met something resistant and had to work its way through.
What Happens When You’re Endlessly Exposed to Slop
The danger isn’t that slop is wrong as much of it is curiously reasonable. My concern is that repeated exposure can change our calibration for what our thinking looks like. We become accustomed to language that arrives, well, sloppy in this sense. And over time, our own thoughts begins to feel inefficient by comparison.
Naming something doesn’t solve a problem, a bit like the introduction of the word «spam.» But it does make the problem more tangible. Before you have a word for a phenomenon, you experience it only as a vague dissatisfaction. Afterward, you can point to it, you can discuss it. And perhaps most importantly, you can challenge it.
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