I thought maybe I’d coined another neologism – “slopocalypse” – but it turns out someone beat me to the punch 13 months ago.
Slopocalypse Now – by Gary Marcus – Marcus on AI
From slop + -pocalypse. Coined by American cognitive scientist and psychologist Gary Marcus in 2025.
See wikitionary –
slopocalypse (plural slopocalypses)
- (artificial intelligence, informal, neologism) A point where AI generated content becomes overwhelming, breaking safety standards and suffocating human produced content.
The idea of “data overload” is hardly new, of course – Neil Postman, Leonard Cohen and his “Blizzard”, but what is new here I guess is
- The sheer volume of the stuff
- The ease with which it is ‘generated’
- The ways it is omnipresent/insidious
- What it is doing to our ability to think, read, communicate etc, forcing us to doubt, to triple guess etc.
- The ‘my god, ‘it’s alive‘, face-hugging and all…
See also Cory Doctorow on enshittification and “digital asbestos”
There are different ways of thinking about the slopocalypse, of course, and those different ways will bring out different sets of emotions.
One is to imagine it as a huge wave, inescapable, like that footage of the doomed people scattering before the huge wall of water, mud, rocks etc in Nepal. It doesn’t matter who you are, how smart and nice you are, you’re all gonna die together (see Tom Lehrer’s song about that, and Paul Kelly’s).
Another is to think of it as a rapidly rising sea level, which will leave us all scrambling for higher ground, or lashing together makeshift life-rafts, like after the wreck of the Gericault. In this one we’ve given up on the late great Fred Jameson‘s “cognitive maps” (from his 1984 NLR essay) and are just trying to keep our heads above water and out of the way of all those USS Indianapolis sharks.
In this vision, it does matter how much ‘cultural capital’ (and other forms of capital, you have). As per a smart friend i will never meet-
“But I do see my 17 year old daughter balancing videos and books so all hope is not lost (although she is from a well off well educated household with a mom who reads a lot.
For the “liferaft-lashing” you need time, self-confidence, other people on the same wavelength, more or less the same skills etc. And I suspect a perspective born of growing to adulthood before the “internet” came along (1996-1999), or, at absolute latest, before the coming of smart phones and social media (2008 onwards). If you don’t have a beforetimes, you won’t know what you’ve lost? I know this sounds “luddite”, but you know, the luddites had a point or three. Blah blah cohort effects blah blah Karl Mannheim…
Here endeth today’s brain vomit. I have to – have to – get back to knocking the vomit-draft chapters into something sane.