Latest / Never Post / Paper Report Live: Special Slop Edition

Transcript

Paper Report Live: Special Slop Edition · Never Post

• 0:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:14
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:16
  Rugnetta, and we have a sloppy episode for you today. A couple
• 0:21
  weeks ago during our '20 twenty six stream week, the team got
• 0:25
  together and recorded a paper report live. Paper report is a
• 0:30
  segment wherein the staff of Never Post read a number of
• 0:33
  academic papers and discuss their reactions as a group, and
• 0:38
  it is normally members only content. So special treat for
• 0:42
  you all, a peek into the kinds of things you get as a member.
• 0:46
  In this edition of Paper Report, we discuss a set of papers all
• 0:50
  from one edition of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the
• 0:55
  Cultural Commons special issue on brain rot, AI slop, and.
• 1:03
  We're gonna take a quick break right now and listen to some ads
• 1:06
  unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, Mike
• 1:10
  from a couple weeks ago is gonna explain more. Friends, hello,
• 1:23
  and welcome to the most recent, the newest, the second edition
• 1:27
  of Paper Report where members of the Never Post staff read
• 1:32
  academically published papers, academic papers from journals,
• 1:36
  and give you our thoughts upon them after having read them
• 1:41
  allegedly.
• 1:42
  Georgia Hampton: I did.
• 1:43
  Mike Rugnetta: Hans. Joining us
• 1:46
  Hans Buetow: in I did. I did. I read. I know how to read.
• 1:48
  Mike Rugnetta: I did read. Hi, guys. Been to parties, and I
• 1:51
  know how to read. I
• 1:53
  Jason Oberholtzer: love these saga journals.
• 1:57
  Mike Rugnetta: Joining us in order of how recently I think
• 2:00
  they read the paper, new most recent first.
• 2:03
  Georgia Hampton: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
• 2:05
  Mike Rugnetta: Hans Butoh.
• 2:06
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. I did read it. I read it.
• 2:08
  Georgia Hampton: I read it.
• 2:09
  Hans Buetow: Did I understand it? Did I have yogurt dripping
• 2:13
  out of my mouth while I shoveled it in?
• 2:15
  Jason Oberholtzer: Oh, we don't need that. No one needs that.
• 2:18
  Mike Rugnetta: Never never post senior producer.
• 2:19
  Jason Oberholtzer: On my stream week.
• 2:21
  Hans Buetow: This is your first introduction to me. Yes.
• 2:24
  Jason Oberholtzer: Talking yogurt on my stream week.
• 2:27
  Hans Buetow: It's
• 2:29
  Mike Rugnetta: more likely than you think. Never post producer
• 2:31
  producer Georgia Hampton.
• 2:33
  Georgia Hampton: I'd say that's correct.
• 2:34
  Hans Buetow: So when when did you read yours?
• 2:35
  Georgia Hampton: I did read it this morning. I was going to
• 2:37
  last night, but ended up not having time. But I had, like, a
• 2:41
  good chunk of time, and it felt normal and regular style.
• 2:46
  Hans Buetow: Unbothered. Regular style. Well, now that I've had
• 2:48
  so much yogurt, I feel normal and regular too.
• 2:50
  Mike Rugnetta: So No. No. I mean, you did just eat yogurt.
• 2:53
  So
• 2:54
  Georgia Hampton: I hate that this
• 2:57
  Jason Oberholtzer: through line is now uneditable.
• 3:03
  Hans Buetow: This is what you get when you are a member of
• 3:05
  Never Post.
• 3:05
  Jason Oberholtzer: I'm going to open standalone Melodyne to
• 3:08
  figure out how to delete yogurt from this.
• 3:12
  Mike Rugnetta: Never Post executive producer Jason
• 3:14
  Overholt.
• 3:14
  Jason Oberholtzer: I'm an adult, and I read my paper yesterday.
• 3:17
  Georgia Hampton: I'm just a little I'm just a baby.
• 3:19
  Hans Buetow: Oh, no. Georgia.
• 3:21
  Jason Oberholtzer: I feel
• 3:22
  Georgia Hampton: so bad. Girls? Girls?
• 3:24
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm a baby.
• 3:24
  Hans Buetow: Girls? Girls? Mike, we're assuming Mike Rugnetta
• 3:29
  host, esteemed host, we're assuming that you probably read
• 3:32
  this days ago, weeks ago. Oh, yeah. Wow.
• 3:36
  Well,
• 3:36
  Georgia Hampton: before I mean, should we say that you assigned
• 3:39
  us papers?
• 3:40
  Mike Rugnetta: Went went to the author's houses individually
• 3:44
  Hans Buetow: Yes.
• 3:45
  Mike Rugnetta: Across the world. Yes.
• 3:46
  Hans Buetow: I'm guessing you read all of ours too.
• 3:48
  Mike Rugnetta: Put a pen in their hands while they were
• 3:50
  sleeping. Oh. Whispered into their ear. Wow.
• 3:55
  Hans Buetow: Automatic writing. Automatic writing.
• 3:57
  Georgia Hampton: Yes. Yeah. It's automatic writing.
• 3:59
  Mike Rugnetta: Write that paper you've been thinking about. Wow.
• 4:01
  No. You've got slop in there. Oh, no.
• 4:04
  No.
• 4:06
  Hans Buetow: It's just yogurt. It's just yogurt.
• 4:08
  Mike Rugnetta: I read the introduction over the weekend,
• 4:11
  and I read my paper last night. Mhmm. But I have had these open
• 4:16
  for a while. So let's talk about what it is we're gonna do and
• 4:19
  what the sort of overarching theme here is. So each of the
• 4:23
  four of us have read an individual paper from a special
• 4:27
  collection that was published, I wanna say really recently, like
• 4:32
  as recently as this month, but I could be wrong, by the European
• 4:37
  Journal of Cultural Studies.
• 4:39
  It is a special issue, and the special issue is called Cultural
• 4:42
  Commons on Brain Rot, AI Slop, and the Enchidification of the
• 4:47
  Internet. This is a special collection from the European
• 4:52
  Journal of Cultural Studies that is, I believe, all open access,
• 4:57
  which is something that we got lucky with last time too for our
• 5:00
  paper report. All the papers were open access. This time, I
• 5:04
  purposefully went and looked to see if there was anything that I
• 5:06
  could get where we could have an interconnected conversation with
• 5:10
  a bunch of things that were open access. And we really lucked out
• 5:13
  because not only is that the case, it's also about slop and
• 5:17
  then shitification and brain rot and stuff.
• 5:19
  So right in our wheelhouse. Yeah. All this to say, that
• 5:22
  means you, the audience, if you want, you can go and read some
• 5:25
  of these things. So, Hans, I'm doing a screen share. Do you
• 5:28
  wanna pull
• 5:29
  Hans Buetow: do wanna I got you, babe.
• 5:30
  Mike Rugnetta: Show that there? So we all read this, which is
• 5:34
  the introduction, the introductory statement to the
• 5:36
  collection, and there are just a few things that I wanna talk
• 5:39
  about in relation to
• 5:40
  Hans Buetow: it. Okay.
• 5:42
  Mike Rugnetta: Well I read this.
• 5:43
  Georgia Hampton: I I thought so. Okay.
• 5:47
  Mike Rugnetta: Jason, Georgia, did you guys read this or no?
• 5:49
  Yes. Okay. Great. Jason?
• 5:51
  Jason Oberholtzer: My mic isn't working.
• 5:52
  Hans Buetow: Okay. Great.
• 5:53
  Georgia Hampton: I don't know where I am.
• 5:55
  Mike Rugnetta: So the long and short of this is, like, most of
• 5:58
  this is just they go over what is in the collection. So, like
• 6:03
  Mhmm. This is the paper that I read. This is the paper that
• 6:05
  Jason read. We won't go through all of this because a bunch of
• 6:09
  it is just saying what they're going to do so that there is
• 6:11
  some context for having done it.
• 6:12
  But there are things in here that I think are really useful
• 6:15
  to have in our brains and to understand and to just sort of
• 6:18
  like think with as we hear about these things. Brain rot, this is
• 6:22
  like a description of brain rot that's interesting, but I think
• 6:24
  it's stuff that we all maybe as regular users of the Internet,
• 6:29
  like understand. We don't need this spelled out for us. The
• 6:31
  term brain rot is also widely used in this context to refer to
• 6:34
  not just a style of content, but a state of being that is
• 6:38
  imagined to arise from engaging with it, an existential
• 6:41
  condition characterized by a sense of cognitive or sensory
• 6:44
  depletion brought on by being chronically online. And we
• 6:48
  talked about this in a segment that we did was it a year ago?
• 6:51
  Was that last year? Yeah. Yeah. Like teens using teens looking
• 6:56
  at content that they termed brain rot as a way to sort of
• 7:00
  escape the affective pressures of productivity that like so
• 7:06
  much of using the Internet, encountering the media
• 7:10
  environment, using media in their day to day lives is very
• 7:13
  very hard to not feel as though you are expected to be
• 7:16
  productive even when those things are at least nominally
• 7:21
  entertainment. So brain rot is a way to be like, no.
• 7:24
  I'm gonna use media. I'm gonna interact with the information
• 7:28
  environment, and I'm not gonna be productive. I am in fact
• 7:31
  going to be the opposite of productive. I'm going to look at
• 7:34
  something meaningless, and not only is it going to have no
• 7:38
  intellectual effect on me, it actually might have a
• 7:41
  deleterious one. Yes.
• 7:42
  Like, I might just choose to poison myself a little bit.
• 7:46
  Jason Oberholtzer: And then somehow this like instigated a
• 7:49
  discourse with our listeners where people got so concerned
• 7:52
  that what they were doing was brain rot. That, like, fell
• 7:56
  exactly into, like, the capitalist trap that these
• 7:59
  papers are talking about, where people were writing in, like, is
• 8:02
  it okay to read a book? Or do the crossword. Do you have to
• 8:05
  have fun?
• 8:05
  Georgia Hampton: Doing the crossword specifically being
• 8:08
  something that someone was considering brain rot, which
• 8:10
  just to clarify, it is not You're just at all.
• 8:14
  Hans Buetow: You're just fine. We hold you. We we see you, but
• 8:17
  you're okay.
• 8:17
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Is talking with my friends
• 8:19
  brainwashed?
• 8:20
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
• 8:21
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Fellas. Is it is it gay to rot the brain?
• 8:30
  So I think that's so that's a great thing to keep in mind.
• 8:34
  Right?
• 8:34
  It's not just a genre of media, it is a state of being. And this
• 8:39
  is kind of the nugget of the the special collection, the special
• 8:45
  special issue. What we will suggest is that the terms brain
• 8:48
  rot, AI slop, and engineification signal a new
• 8:51
  phase of digital capitalism, one emerging in the wake of
• 8:54
  generative AI's widespread integration into the foundations
• 8:57
  of platform culture. These concepts, we argue, exemplify a
• 9:01
  further intensification of what has been described as platform
• 9:04
  capitalism, which I think we're all familiar with, or more
• 9:08
  recently, vibes capitalism
• 9:10
  Hans Buetow: Mhmm.
• 9:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Where attention, data, and affect are
• 9:13
  relentlessly mined for value. In this context, content is
• 9:19
  increasingly loosened from communicative or
• 9:22
  representational value, functioning as a means of
• 9:25
  modulating attention at scale and optimizing the emotions,
• 9:29
  moods, and atmospheres that flow through platforms. This process
• 9:33
  can be seen and felt at many different cultural, social, and
• 9:37
  economic levels. Yeah. Which like, boom.
• 9:40
  That's just describing how it is.
• 9:42
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that feel you hear that,
• 9:44
  and you're like, yeah. The water is wet.
• 9:47
  Yeah.
• 9:49
  Mike Rugnetta: There are two things that I wanna focus on
• 9:50
  here, which are which are, like, minor, but I think they're
• 9:55
  worth, like, giving a little bit of time to. The first is when
• 9:58
  the word content first started to become a label that was put
• 10:02
  on things that were put online, the group of people who were the
• 10:07
  most against it and, you know, and I'm sure still are, one of
• 10:11
  their main sort of arguments against it was that it really is
• 10:17
  just saying the quiet part loud in a way. Just like when you
• 10:21
  call what is what is content? It is contents. It is the un
• 10:26
  undifferentiated mass of things inside of a container that
• 10:31
  collects things.
• 10:33
  Doesn't necessarily matter what those things are. It's just a
• 10:36
  mass collective term for what's inside something else. The
• 10:41
  suggestion being that it kind of doesn't matter what it is, or
• 10:44
  that you can't really see what it is. They're just it's just
• 10:47
  contents. It's things on the other side of an opaque
• 10:51
  container.
• 10:52
  And the sort of like next logical jump to it was like,
• 10:56
  it's just things that you put next to ads. Mhmm. It is the
• 10:59
  undifferentiated mass of media that goes into the container of
• 11:04
  a web page that also contains advertisements. There doesn't
• 11:08
  need to be given much thought to what it is other than to make
• 11:11
  sure that you can figure out how to get people to look at it and
• 11:15
  value it so that they will give it their time, and so that they
• 11:17
  will then see the ads next to the content, which really is
• 11:22
  just the the other content next to the content that we call
• 11:27
  content. Right?
• 11:29
  Ads and ads is content is the contents also in the container
• 11:35
  where the content is.
• 11:36
  Jason Oberholtzer: I need a cigarette.
• 11:37
  Hans Buetow: That's an old idea. Right? That's exactly the same
• 11:40
  idea. That's what a magazine is. A magazine is a container.
• 11:43
  100%. Like, that's the word for container. So you have an
• 11:45
  ammunition magazine, which is, you know, something that houses
• 11:48
  your ammunition. You have a information magazine, which is a
• 11:51
  thing that houses your information, and it's got the
• 11:53
  ads. It's placing content next to ads.
• 11:56
  The ads themselves are a form of content. So it makes sense that
• 12:00
  that would be the framework we'd enter into And, Mike, what time
• 12:02
  period are we talking about that that was generally our
• 12:04
  framework? Up until when?
• 12:06
  Mike Rugnetta: I mean, up until when or starting when?
• 12:09
  Hans Buetow: I think up until when.
• 12:10
  Mike Rugnetta: So you're saying, like, when when is the point at
• 12:12
  which calling things content became just what those things
• 12:16
  are called? Yeah. What those what that piece of media is
• 12:18
  called. Yeah. I don't know.
• 12:20
  Six years ago? Five years ago?
• 12:22
  Hans Buetow: Wow. That recent. Okay.
• 12:23
  Mike Rugnetta: I think so. Okay. I think that there was probably
• 12:25
  still a pretty like, at the start of the pandemic or maybe
• 12:29
  right before, there was still some meaningful amount of
• 12:34
  resistance to calling certain amounts of things or certain
• 12:38
  types of things content
• 12:40
  Hans Buetow: that
• 12:42
  Mike Rugnetta: I don't think is as strong Yeah. Isn't as sort of
• 12:47
  adamant as it used to be.
• 12:49
  Jason Oberholtzer: I think you're right. There was some
• 12:50
  amount of marshaling of irony while we were beating the
• 12:54
  retreat on that term that now has given up.
• 12:57
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. So this next part of like content
• 13:00
  increasingly loosened from communicative or
• 13:02
  representational value functioning as a means of
• 13:04
  modulating attention at scale is like that's sort of the next
• 13:08
  level of that. Right? Like, content is not only contents in
• 13:16
  container where there is also ads.
• 13:19
  It is also the means to an end, the means to a programmatic end
• 13:25
  of just figuring out what it is that people will spend their
• 13:30
  time doing. So in a way, right, it's like thinking about
• 13:34
  content, thinking about media and the information environment
• 13:38
  and all of these things that contain for an audience so much
• 13:44
  cultural, social, artistic, emotional meaning and saying,
• 13:48
  well, actually, none of that matters. Yeah. Or or really all
• 13:51
  of that is just secondary. What this is really about is putting
• 13:56
  it through the ringer in order to figure out what second order
• 13:59
  things we can say about it so that we know whether or not
• 14:02
  someone will watch it for six minutes.
• 14:04
  It doesn't matter what it's about. It doesn't matter what it
• 14:07
  depicts. It doesn't matter what the signs of it are. It just
• 14:11
  matters how much time someone will spend on it, which to me
• 14:14
  feels like
• 14:15
  Hans Buetow: And it doesn't matter who spends it?
• 14:17
  Mike Rugnetta: No. No. Not at
• 14:18
  Georgia Hampton: all. Doesn't even matter if it's a person.
• 14:19
  Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, it's an it's an operational purpose rather
• 14:23
  than, like, a representational purpose.
• 14:25
  I mean, that goes into the paper I read, which is very much about
• 14:29
  the aesthetics of that and the purpose of that aesthetics,
• 14:31
  which is so
• 14:32
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm very excited to hear about
• 14:33
  Hans Buetow: it.
• 14:33
  Georgia Hampton: It's so interesting. I'm I kind of wanna
• 14:35
  turn it into an episode or something. It's so cool. But,
• 14:38
  anyway, yes. That, like, it doesn't really matter what it
• 14:41
  is.
• 14:42
  Even, like, the content doesn't matter beyond its function of
• 14:46
  generating engagement
• 14:48
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
• 14:49
  Georgia Hampton: From anything.
• 14:49
  Mike Rugnetta: And I think that we feel that. That is something
• 14:52
  that people feel. It feels like you, in a lot of ways, being
• 14:57
  online right now, and in some spaces more than others, in the
• 15:00
  large corporate social spaces, most increasingly incorrectly
• 15:07
  named social spaces, it feels as though you get stuck, or it
• 15:11
  feels as though there is a massive amount of work that
• 15:14
  needs to be done in order to continue to apprehend these
• 15:19
  things. And I think that all of this is related, and this is
• 15:21
  what this last section that's highlighted that I wanna talk
• 15:24
  about gets to, which is for everyday users, exposure to
• 15:27
  brain rot and slop content through platforms entails an
• 15:31
  intensification of affective and cognitive labor. That just means
• 15:36
  that all of this stuff being so bad and generated by the second
• 15:44
  order significance of media that you are familiar with and do
• 15:49
  appreciate means that it's just harder to feel and think about
• 15:55
  these things.
• 15:56
  It's like there's just a a husk around them that you have to
• 16:00
  break through. Navigating endlessly shifting kaleidoscopic
• 16:04
  feeds now require continuous acts of appraisal, filtering,
• 16:09
  and interpretation, even as the distinction between authentic
• 16:12
  and synthetic content becomes increasingly unstable. Right? So
• 16:16
  it doesn't matter if it looks real or feels real, and maybe
• 16:22
  doesn't matter that it is real. You still, because of the
• 16:26
  environment, feel like you have to do extra affective and
• 16:29
  cognitive labor to appreciate these things.
• 16:32
  This affective labor entertains entertains, but leaves us more
• 16:36
  depleted, contributing to a shitty new layer to the forms of
• 16:40
  digital fatigue that characterize user experiences of
• 16:43
  platforms more broadly. I could tell you for sure they were so
• 16:47
  excited to write shitty new layer justified by
• 16:51
  Georgia Hampton: I know. It really it really stood out. I
• 16:53
  was like, oh, absolutely. I
• 16:56
  Mike Rugnetta: just think this is, like, so like, very
• 16:59
  powerful. I relate to this in a way, and I think it puts it in
• 17:02
  terms that I find really strong.
• 17:05
  Hans Buetow: So we read some papers about it. Yeah. And let's
• 17:09
  elaborate on what this is.
• 17:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Georgia, do you wanna go first
• 17:11
  Georgia Hampton: since you I can go first, Tony. So the paper I
• 17:14
  read is called doing the numbers, the operational
• 17:18
  aesthetics of AI slop. And it's it it's so good. Like, I I
• 17:24
  really Totally. I really recommend you guys also reading
• 17:28
  it.
• 17:28
  Like, I think it's so interesting.
• 17:30
  Hans Buetow: I Who's our author?
• 17:31
  Georgia Hampton: Forgive me for what I'm about to do
• 17:33
  pronunciation wise. Jernej Markels and Jaco Kemper. And
• 17:41
  there's, I think, a couple other authors, but those are the two
• 17:43
  listed. Yeah. Selfishly, I was so happy you assigned this to me
• 17:47
  because in my brief stint as a philosophy major, which ended
• 17:51
  very quickly, aesthetics was my, focus of philosophy.
• 17:55
  And so this is very interesting to me. But basically, what this
• 17:59
  paper argues in its most simplified form is that AI slop
• 18:04
  creates an operational aesthetic culture in comparison to, like,
• 18:10
  a representational aesthetic culture.
• 18:12
  Mike Rugnetta: Interesting.
• 18:12
  Georgia Hampton: So what that means is I'll quote directly
• 18:16
  from the paper. It does this, quote, in the sense that its
• 18:20
  primary aim is not to represent the world, but rather to act on
• 18:24
  it. It functions as a signal aimed at maximizing engagement
• 18:29
  metrics. So, basically, what we were just talking about, that
• 18:32
  rather than creating any kind of visual media whose aesthetic
• 18:36
  goal is to represent or even elicit, like, a subjective
• 18:40
  relationship with that media itself for you to spend any
• 18:44
  meaningful time with it to garner meaning from it, none of
• 18:50
  that is even a goal anymore with AI Slop. The goal instead is to
• 18:56
  generate engagement.
• 18:58
  Engagement that doesn't even necessarily have to be human
• 19:01
  engagement. This paper goes on to specifically mention that so
• 19:05
  much activity online is bots.
• 19:08
  Hans Buetow: Mhmm.
• 19:08
  Georgia Hampton: And for AISLOP to kind of reach its aesthetic
• 19:12
  goals, its operational goals, it doesn't matter if the
• 19:16
  engagement, the comments, the sharing, anything is actually
• 19:20
  done by human beings. And in fact, it often isn't done by
• 19:23
  human beings. And that all of this, this operational kind of
• 19:27
  aesthetic culture to to the authors of this piece may offer,
• 19:32
  like, the clearest example, like, visualization of
• 19:38
  capitalism and its goals. Woah. So I have I have quotes that
• 19:43
  basically say this.
• 19:45
  Let me find them. I have several bolded things. AI slop binds an
• 19:50
  infinite reproduction and recombination of established
• 19:53
  cultural reference to a quantifiable model of aesthetics
• 19:56
  that favors rapid engagement and circulation. And then moving on,
• 20:00
  the generative culture of AI slops seems to push the
• 20:03
  structural cynicism of capitalism, which believes in
• 20:06
  nothing but meaningless calculations to its extreme form
• 20:11
  as AI platforms remove meaning from content and reduce it
• 20:15
  almost exclusively to its exchange value. Like, they use
• 20:18
  an example of this that I probably could pull very quickly
• 20:22
  from the actual paper of what they called, I believe, shrimp
• 20:27
  Jesus.
• 20:29
  Hans Buetow: Mhmm. Yeah. Shrimp Jesus. I remember shrimp Jesus.
• 20:31
  Georgia Hampton: Imagine an AI rendering of Jesus as a shrimp
• 20:34
  or, like, Jesus with, like, gigantic rolls of money. Like
• 20:38
  like, there's it's often Jesus. It's often, like, religious
• 20:43
  patriotic symbolism, like, you know, that kind of thing. Trying
• 20:46
  to interpret them is pointless, not
• 20:50
  Mike Rugnetta: just pointless. Yeah.
• 20:51
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Like, they literally write, recourse
• 20:54
  to an interpretive framework that would, for instance, read
• 20:57
  shrimp Jesus as a representation of faith or a symbol of god's
• 21:01
  love feels as pointless as eating soup with a fork. Nice.
• 21:06
  Nice. They they were having a lot of fun with this one.
• 21:08
  Yeah. Good job. And, basically, most of the paper is kind of
• 21:12
  examining what this operational aesthetic is, what its aims are.
• 21:16
  But that's that's the core of it. That, like, AI slop is a as
• 21:21
  an aesthetic as something that is, you know, presenting an
• 21:25
  aesthetic message, if you can even say that, is not only,
• 21:30
  like, denying the kind of representational, like,
• 21:33
  subjective interaction that you would have with any kind of
• 21:37
  aesthetic media that isn't this, but rather is, like, redrawing
• 21:41
  the boundaries of what that means to include an aesthetic
• 21:46
  that only values its operational like, output.
• 21:49
  Its engagement. Its engageability.
• 21:53
  Mike Rugnetta: It it makes me think of two things. A David
• 21:55
  Bowie interview that I watched recently where he was like, I
• 21:58
  think the worst territory for an artist to be in is to be
• 22:02
  thinking about what the end product will be before you've
• 22:05
  made it and to imagine who is going to like that end product.
• 22:09
  And he was like, not only do I think that that makes bad art, I
• 22:12
  think that that's in fact bad for society. Yes. And that it
• 22:15
  is, like, literally pretty destructive and dangerous.
• 22:19
  And I was like, That's that's now in a lot of ways.
• 22:24
  Georgia Hampton: Oh, yeah.
• 22:24
  Mike Rugnetta: The consideration of the end product before it is
• 22:28
  finished and the thought of how many likes or streams or
• 22:32
  whatever will this get. It's like, gotta make the thing on
• 22:35
  purpose that will be good.
• 22:37
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. And then on top of that, you have just
• 22:39
  the sheer volume of this kind of aesthetic media, which also this
• 22:44
  paper goes into pretty interestingly about, like
• 22:46
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
• 22:47
  Georgia Hampton: The components of this operational aesthetic
• 22:49
  dealing directly with immediacy. And, you know, what better tool
• 22:55
  to do this than generative AI, which can create images of
• 22:59
  shrimp Jesus in half a second? Like, it's Yeah. It's just it's
• 23:04
  the perfect tool for this kind of I don't even wanna say
• 23:07
  abundance, because that's not what it is. It's just volume.
• 23:10
  It's noise. This paper even touched on something I'm always
• 23:14
  interested in, which is, you know, the online culture that's
• 23:17
  fixated on, like, cores and moods and vibes as replacements
• 23:23
  of any kind of meaningful aesthetic categorization because
• 23:27
  that's not really what it is.
• 23:28
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Or, like, art making community, really, is
• 23:31
  Georgia Hampton: what Exactly.
• 23:31
  Mike Rugnetta: Like it replaces. Yeah.
• 23:33
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Even something as culturally broad
• 23:36
  as, like, I don't know, goth or something. Like, it's not even
• 23:41
  that. It's just, like, what what is the thing I can look up and
• 23:45
  see a bunch of content about?
• 23:48
  Mike Rugnetta: Hans, you look like you're gonna say something.
• 23:50
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Because my paper, titled feed them slop.
• 23:55
  Mike Rugnetta: Yum
• 23:55
  Hans Buetow: yum. Alignment, attunement, and the affective
• 23:59
  lure of slopaganda by Robert Topinka goes a little bit hard
• 24:04
  at some of the points that you were just making. Like, the pave
• 24:07
  it's a great pivot from what you were just saying in Georgia of
• 24:10
  this idea of ambience. Right? So he's talking Robert's talking a
• 24:14
  lot in this about ambience is that it's this is all about how
• 24:18
  the attunement of a Slop AI is ambient rhetoric.
• 24:26
  It's not so it's drawing in the concept of ambient rhetoric, and
• 24:30
  so he says, which describes rhetoric not as persuasion
• 24:33
  between individual agents, but as a process of attunement to
• 24:37
  conditions, moods, and affordances. Sure.
• 24:41
  Mike Rugnetta: That's the vibe. That sounds like the vibe.
• 24:44
  Hans Buetow: And that's actually what it's and that's why it's
• 24:47
  not for anyone specifically. It it does the whole thing here.
• 24:50
  And so in this, he actually actually goes into he talks
• 24:56
  about Trump's Gaza as being, like, a a form of this, is that
• 25:00
  it's really easy to deny what's behind it and what's intended
• 25:03
  and who it's for and what it means, but it somehow resonates.
• 25:06
  Right? That's where he jumps off.
• 25:08
  It somehow resonates with us. And he goes through and ends up
• 25:13
  with Charlie Kirk and the and the Kirk and the yeah. And what
• 25:18
  I found interesting about this kinda culmination of his
• 25:22
  argument into this is that this is completely acceptable to a
• 25:30
  wide range of people. It resonates rhetorically across a
• 25:34
  lot
• 25:35
  Mike Rugnetta: of Perfect sense.
• 25:36
  Hans Buetow: This makes perfect sense.
• 25:37
  Jason Oberholtzer: If you
• 25:37
  Hans Buetow: are on one side, you're gonna look at this, and
• 25:39
  you're gonna grab it. You're gonna be like, you see? And if
• 25:42
  you are on the other side, assuming it's a binary, you're
• 25:45
  gonna grab it. You're gonna look at it. You're gonna say, you
• 25:47
  see?
• 25:48
  And it's a picture of it I'm just gonna read you a little do
• 25:51
  people know about the the Kirk about about this wild world?
• 25:58
  Unfortunately. So this is quoting. Soon after his murder,
• 26:02
  Charlie Kirk was reborn as Terminator in AI generated
• 26:05
  videos featuring the far right conspiracist, Alex Jones,
• 26:08
  depicted with a Hitler mustache rousing Kirk from his bed. After
• 26:13
  referring to Jones with the n word, a recurring trope in
• 26:15
  subsequent Kirkinator video, Kirk joins Jones in a superhero
• 26:19
  style flight to Agartha, a white sceptered subterranean kingdom
• 26:23
  presided over by a smiling Hulk Hogan, JD Vance in purple gowns
• 26:29
  with an oversized head and curly hair, the big boy Vance meme,
• 26:32
  and a white Cash Patel welcoming Kirk to Valhalla referencing
• 26:36
  Patel's actual remarks
• 26:38
  Mike Rugnetta: after this. Is a new one for me.
• 26:40
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Like, what a description.
• 26:43
  And so what all what he's saying all of that is is all of that is
• 26:48
  simply AI being trained into feeling out the vibes. Mhmm. And
• 26:55
  the and the rest of the rhetorical resonances that will
• 26:59
  get it shared. It's kind of it reminded me a little bit of,
• 27:02
  like, biological, the way that, natural selection is described
• 27:07
  to us. Right?
• 27:08
  You have this mutation, and if it works with the current
• 27:11
  circumstances, you're gonna be able to reproduce. And so if you
• 27:14
  make something that's not resonant in a particular way,
• 27:17
  then it's not gonna reproduce. And there's one line in here
• 27:19
  which I think is just fascinating. Ambient rhetoric.
• 27:22
  When talking about ambient rhetoric, the ambient resonance
• 27:26
  of something, how well it bounces off of the walls into
• 27:30
  us, can help explain why slop resonates even when it's crude,
• 27:36
  meaningless, or pointless, which is where I think a lot of us get
• 27:39
  stuck in thinking about it.
• 27:40
  Being like, but but but but the thing. Mhmm. And it talks about
• 27:44
  ambient rhetoric doesn't matter. That stuff doesn't matter
• 27:48
  because its effective lure is that affect as an experience of
• 27:52
  intensity is distinct from emotion, which is intensity
• 27:56
  owned, recognized, and assigned subjective content.
• 28:00
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Emotion is the thing you have the word for.
• 28:03
  Georgia Hampton: Yes. Yes.
• 28:04
  Hans Buetow: But that's not what AI and the people making the AI.
• 28:09
  That's not the realm they're functioning on.
• 28:11
  Georgia Hampton: No. I mean, it's pure vibe. Like right?
• 28:14
  Hans Buetow: It's like Pure rhetorical attune like, the
• 28:17
  thing I like about this paper is there's all rhetorical
• 28:19
  attunements. Right? They have effect ambient resonance,
• 28:24
  ambient propaganda, ambient rhetoric. They have the they
• 28:28
  started out with the emotional sediment of looking at one of
• 28:32
  these.
• 28:32
  Mike Rugnetta: Hans, chat is raising some interesting
• 28:34
  questions about how active this process is as far as, like, an
• 28:39
  an operator of the technology, you know, versus letting a
• 28:44
  generative system kind of figure out what things should look
• 28:48
  like. Right? We assume that there is always human
• 28:51
  involvement in the act of posting, but there does not
• 28:54
  necessarily need to be human involvement, or there can be
• 28:57
  varying amounts of human involvement in the act of
• 29:01
  prompting and generating.
• 29:03
  Hans Buetow: Well, they actually address that because they talk
• 29:05
  about the prompt that the prompt is actually one of the most
• 29:08
  important things about that.
• 29:11
  Mike Rugnetta: Well, because I imagine that it both it encloses
• 29:15
  space and leaves certain space open for interpretation, and I
• 29:20
  would expect that the tension between those two things is
• 29:24
  where the model gets to be like, well, you know, however however
• 29:29
  it is made by Sam Altman or John Anthropic. I don't know. I've
• 29:34
  always
• 29:35
  Hans Buetow: John Anthropic.
• 29:37
  Mike Rugnetta: You know, like, however it is designed. Right?
• 29:39
  Those are those are the places where it gets to huge scare
• 29:43
  quotes, decides what what things look like.
• 29:47
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. And so what you're doing is the line is in
• 29:49
  the case of AI slop, the prompter is a rhetor, as in
• 29:52
  rhetorical, is the rhetor constraining the model's
• 29:55
  capacity in ways attuned to ambient affects. When you're in
• 29:59
  there doing these prompts, you are essentially taking this vast
• 30:03
  90% of this data has been taken from very privileged places with
• 30:08
  very specific particular point of view and narrowing the beam
• 30:13
  onto that. And so it it it gives it enough parameters to be able
• 30:17
  to say to be successful enough of the time at saying, I'm
• 30:21
  catching the vibe. Yeah.
• 30:23
  And it's kind of because it's wide aperture like that that
• 30:27
  it's not I'm targeting this person or I'm saying this thing.
• 30:31
  And he's talking about, like, this is you can anyone can get
• 30:33
  suckered into any of this stuff, and so it's not even for any
• 30:36
  individual ideology or anything. It can kind of go anywhere. It
• 30:41
  just has to resonate.
• 30:42
  Mike Rugnetta: I would be so curious to know, but not curious
• 30:45
  enough to do it myself. Like, if you were to run, like, a local
• 30:51
  Chinese model that had a that was, like, benchmarked six
• 30:56
  months ago or something just on your computer
• 31:00
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 31:00
  Mike Rugnetta: And then ask it to generate similar things.
• 31:04
  Right? But then go and do something that's always
• 31:06
  connected to the Internet, that's a frontier model that,
• 31:09
  like, people are constant you know, these companies are
• 31:12
  constantly updating. You know, is how what's the vibe gulf
• 31:18
  between the two? Mhmm.
• 31:20
  And is there and is there one?
• 31:22
  Hans Buetow: Mhmm. I think that's important. And and and
• 31:25
  part of it is, like, what's being trained into them. Right?
• 31:27
  Part of it is that, you know, he's talking in this paper about
• 31:31
  how it's all being encoded just in what's being trained, what is
• 31:34
  being trained on.
• 31:35
  That's giving it a parameter of, oh, this is the universe in
• 31:38
  which I exist because this is the sum total of my data. Okay.
• 31:41
  I get kind of the boundaries, and then you further refine the
• 31:44
  boundaries in there.
• 31:45
  Mike Rugnetta: That's fascinating. Yeah.
• 31:55
  Georgia Hampton: Jason, I wanna know about your paper.
• 31:57
  Jason Oberholtzer: I think it's actually a good place to end up
• 32:00
  with these three, because the paper that I read titled
• 32:03
  Degenerative AI, AI Slop Brain Rot, and the Gimmick of
• 32:07
  Generative Culture, which was authored by Adeel Gallip, who's
• 32:13
  at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, and Ludmilla
• 32:17
  Lapinacci, who's at the University of Leeds, spends a
• 32:22
  fair amount of time on the framing of things. And I'm going
• 32:26
  to jump to their final sentence where they tell you their point
• 32:30
  before we take you guys through the journey.
• 32:31
  Georgia Hampton: Of course.
• 32:32
  Mike Rugnetta: For anybody who doesn't read a lot of academic
• 32:35
  papers, a thousand percent, you should read the abstract first
• 32:38
  and the conclusion second. Yes.
• 32:39
  Hans Buetow: Big time. Big time. Yes.
• 32:42
  Jason Oberholtzer: Because they are arguing that we focus on
• 32:44
  this kind of media. Brain Rot as a media, as something that,
• 32:49
  like, we are all the conversation heretofore has been
• 32:52
  like in the weeds of it. They're taking the container. And
• 32:55
  they're thinking we should look at it differently or from a
• 32:58
  different critical position. So they say, ultimately, in
• 33:00
  focusing on those genres and experiences that are usually
• 33:03
  assumed to be invariably unproductive and degenerative,
• 33:07
  we hope to highlight their potentiality for critical
• 33:10
  academic inquiry, which can perhaps further explore them as
• 33:13
  particular frictive forms that complicate and contribute to
• 33:17
  discussions on the growing and shitification of digital
• 33:20
  culture.
• 33:21
  In making that argument, they're relying really heavily on this
• 33:26
  paper from 2020. This book actually from 2020 from Xi'an
• 33:31
  Nye, The Theory of the Gimmick, Aesthetic Judgment and
• 33:35
  Capitalist Form. And I spent some time today looking through
• 33:40
  parts of that book. It's I bought it. It seems fascinating.
• 33:43
  I cannot wait for it to get here.
• 33:44
  Georgia Hampton: Sounds awesome.
• 33:45
  Mike Rugnetta: I gave you this one, Jason, because I was like,
• 33:47
  if anybody on the staff is gonna be into a book about the gimmick
• 33:50
  Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be Jason.
• 33:52
  Hans Buetow: Oh, that's awesome. That's my back.
• 33:54
  Georgia Hampton: Objectionable and yet strangely attractive.
• 33:58
  Yeah. This is what they call the gimmick. This looks awesome.
• 34:02
  Hell yeah.
• 34:03
  Jason Oberholtzer: So I think one of the main challenges, with
• 34:07
  the paper even though they they present their case, I think,
• 34:11
  fairly, legibly. But one of the challenges is that they are the
• 34:15
  the bulk of their argument is we should think of brain rot along
• 34:19
  the lines that Nye is thinking about the gimmick as this
• 34:24
  ultimate form of, like, capitalist output. And so, like,
• 34:29
  they give you the answer for why that should be true, and then
• 34:31
  the answer to like deeply what that means, I think is contained
• 34:34
  in 350 pages of Ni's work. So I do not have the rest of that,
• 34:38
  but I have like the outline of it to give you why they think
• 34:41
  that is interesting, and I think it's interesting enough to have
• 34:44
  bought the book. So they start the paper, do Gadelope and
• 34:49
  Lupinacci, kind of cataloging some of the interesting
• 34:52
  terminology that is used most frequently to describe this
• 34:57
  material, to describe brain rot stuff.
• 35:00
  And I just put it all under the heading of body stuff. Yeah. It
• 35:04
  is Cronenbergen. So this is from their paper. Slop has become the
• 35:08
  shorthand for derivative, and low quality synthetic content
• 35:12
  that aims to simply fill up and saturate social media, and keeps
• 35:15
  us passively entertained, resulting in feeds that are
• 35:17
  contextless, stupefying, and most importantly, never ending.
• 35:21
  In this scope, AI slop is often described with references to
• 35:24
  metabolic processes, in which the content itself is analogous
• 35:27
  to an unappetizing ultra processed food that is easy to
• 35:31
  digest, even though not tasteful or particularly refined. More
• 35:36
  broadly, generative AI has been described as operating within a
• 35:38
  metabolic cycle of consumption and excretion, resulting from
• 35:42
  Big Tech devouring the total creative output of humankind,
• 35:45
  and then puking out extremely bad versions of this
• 35:48
  regurgitated work.
• 35:50
  Georgia Hampton: Jesus.
• 35:51
  Jason Oberholtzer: And that is like, there's seven citations to
• 35:54
  that. They are they are full quoting other people's Mean it.
• 35:57
  Yes. Phrase by phrase, they're full quoting other people's
• 35:59
  language that they've used to make these sentences.
• 36:03
  Hans Buetow: You know what this reminds me of? It's a little bit
• 36:05
  of the the episode that Mike did about horror.
• 36:08
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. And Oh, Foodgore.
• 36:10
  Hans Buetow: Right? Though this feels very similar about, like,
• 36:13
  the horror that we're attracted to. Please continue, Jason. Tell
• 36:15
  us more.
• 36:16
  Jason Oberholtzer: So they didn't say that brain rot in
• 36:18
  turn, so that is slop, our regurgitative Cronenbergian
• 36:21
  mess. And brain rot is primarily understood here as a popular
• 36:25
  genre of surrealist AI generated or assumed to be AI generated
• 36:29
  slop. And therefore, largely under suspicion both for its
• 36:33
  apparent meaninglessness and its potential hidden meanings.
• 36:37
  Encoded meanings, really, like Yes. Yeah.
• 36:40
  Exactly that. They continue this framing here and I think like
• 36:43
  this is sort of important here. This happens both like as a way
• 36:47
  of being or as a way of like feeling about it and like a
• 36:50
  couple quotes they pull here to describe the feeling or the
• 36:54
  state of being in brain rot is an overwhelming almost narcotic
• 36:58
  effect, Unsatisfying and annoying. A deterioration of a
• 37:02
  person's mental or intellectual state. And here is where like we
• 37:06
  start the parallels into what Nye is basically saying at
• 37:08
  length
• 37:09
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 37:09
  Jason Oberholtzer: Is the capitalist economy in which we
• 37:12
  exist where output starts to take on these sorts of
• 37:15
  qualities. And then the second piece of framing here is as a
• 37:18
  method of production, the production of brain rot.
• 37:21
  Described as easy to generate AI material, produce with minimal
• 37:24
  effort, a world of creativity without craft, deskilled, which
• 37:28
  people are offloading. And so therefore, it becomes a gimmick,
• 37:33
  the gimmick of generative culture. Illegitimate, wasteful,
• 37:37
  and deceptive.
• 37:39
  So in the theory of the gimmick, Nye argues that the
• 37:42
  contradictions that explain why tricks are perceived as icky and
• 37:46
  yet somehow alluring are related to three interconnected issues
• 37:50
  of capitalist life. Labor, value, and time.
• 37:54
  Georgia Hampton: That's it.
• 37:54
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Those are the big three. I tried to
• 37:56
  briefly summarize what go into those three buckets here. Labor,
• 38:00
  these gimmicks are both time wasting and time saving. So we
• 38:05
  think about brain rot.
• 38:06
  The creation of brain rot is time saving. It takes nobody, no
• 38:10
  amount of time to make a thing and isn't that a productivity
• 38:13
  gain, but it is time wasting that when you touch it, your
• 38:16
  time is getting sucked from you. You are rotting into this space.
• 38:19
  This is not a productive use of your time. So we have created
• 38:23
  production by saving creation hours by turning to this, and
• 38:26
  yet stolen production by having you engage with it at the same
• 38:30
  time.
• 38:30
  That's the paradox and the labor of it.
• 38:32
  Georgia Hampton: Can I say something that is very in line
• 38:34
  with
• 38:34
  Mike Rugnetta: Yes?
• 38:34
  Georgia Hampton: What you're saying from my paper, which is
• 38:37
  that from an aesthetic perspective, you know, so many
• 38:40
  AI adherents declare that these models and tools will
• 38:44
  democratize art making and creative processes. The paper I
• 38:48
  read argues that the only thing it democratizes is the
• 38:53
  participation in a specific form of aesthetic productivity. Yes.
• 39:00
  Like, you're doing is Productivity. Democratizing
• 39:03
  speed.
• 39:04
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. It democrat you democratize access to
• 39:07
  output. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 39:09
  Hans Buetow: Yep. That's good. Well said.
• 39:10
  Mike Rugnetta: I think it's this is also related to the stuff
• 39:13
  that's from the introduction, which is like, there is a way in
• 39:16
  which the affective and intellectual labor that is
• 39:20
  needed or that is sort of forced from you when appraising feeds
• 39:25
  full of this stuff causes time to dilate a little bit. There's
• 39:29
  a kind of speed bump or roadblock or we'll talk about it
• 39:35
  in my paper, a kind of goo you get stuck in that, like, slows
• 39:39
  everything down just because of all of the extra labor that you
• 39:42
  have to exert in order to even perceive and contextualize it
• 39:48
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 39:49
  Mike Rugnetta: An effort which is maybe pointless in some
• 39:51
  senses.
• 39:51
  Jason Oberholtzer: And I think it's really relevant that a lot
• 39:54
  of analysis reaches for the same kind of language. Like our
• 39:59
  disgust is ironically so viscerally human that all we can
• 40:05
  do is talk about slop and metabolic process and goo and
• 40:09
  ooze and that is just the feeling that this emotes from
• 40:13
  ironically, one of like the more anodyne mechanical processes of
• 40:17
  creation. Okay. So that's labor. Labor.
• 40:21
  We got time wasting and time saving in conflict with each
• 40:24
  other. Value. This is again, sort of the theory of the
• 40:29
  gimmick as proposed by Nye, now sort of used as a skin to
• 40:34
  approach brain rot. Value of brain rot is quote, compelling
• 40:39
  but meaningless. Their computational capitalism's most
• 40:43
  recent hype and also its biggest embarrassment.
• 40:46
  It is bad economics. Companies are losing money, the promised
• 40:50
  savings are not materializing, and in fact, and this is quoting
• 40:54
  from them, AI sloppers do not make much money from circulating
• 40:58
  slop, but rather through selling how to slop tutorials.
• 41:03
  Hans Buetow: Oh. Cool.
• 41:05
  Mike Rugnetta: You too can slop. You there, sir. Would you like
• 41:09
  to slap?
• 41:09
  Georgia Hampton: Greetings, trameleur.
• 41:11
  Hans Buetow: I'm one. Come on.
• 41:14
  Jason Oberholtzer: What do you buy in?
• 41:15
  Georgia Hampton: What do you sell in?
• 41:17
  Jason Oberholtzer: So that is the paradox of value.
• 41:20
  Compelling, but meaningless. And beyond the tumult and the fervor
• 41:24
  of its financing, actually, it is inconsistent to tell the
• 41:29
  extent to which value is being produced. Finally, time. They
• 41:33
  talk about the current moment in generative AI and brain rot
• 41:38
  technology, specifically, as presented here already in a
• 41:42
  state of temporal manipulation where it is already quote too
• 41:47
  late.
• 41:49
  Georgia Hampton: Interesting.
• 41:51
  Jason Oberholtzer: AI has arrived. Everybody is using it.
• 41:54
  We need to have it. There is nothing we can do to turn this
• 41:58
  around. It has already arrived, and it is too late to do
• 42:01
  anything about it.
• 42:02
  All of which are deeply untrue things.
• 42:05
  Georgia Hampton: Yes.
• 42:05
  Jason Oberholtzer: But this is how it is presented.
• 42:06
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Yes. I refer you to my most re recent
• 42:10
  episode.
• 42:11
  Georgia Hampton: Mhmm.
• 42:11
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yes.
• 42:12
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Inevitability is an interesting,
• 42:14
  like, concept in the middle of all this.
• 42:17
  Jason Oberholtzer: Right?
• 42:18
  Georgia Hampton: Because there's also a a sort of I feel like
• 42:20
  when inevitability is invoked in conversations about this, it is
• 42:24
  very much producing a level of cynicism and hopelessness,
• 42:31
  powerlessness. Like, it's not treated as something we can
• 42:35
  engage like, the that slop or any presence of AI is something
• 42:38
  we can engage with, question, push back on, categorize,
• 42:42
  investigate in any meaningful way. Like, I I don't know. I
• 42:45
  find the use of inevitability is always to a specific end, which
• 42:49
  is to make you feel sort of cynically placated Yeah. Anyway.
• 42:54
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. So that's basically how they
• 42:56
  stretch the concept of brain rot and generative AI in this moment
• 43:00
  across the skein that Nye has so graciously provided here, and
• 43:05
  they wrap it up with this conclusion, or their penultimate
• 43:08
  paragraph. I'll save you the final conclusions for yourself.
• 43:11
  Together, these three dimensions detailed above, labor, value,
• 43:15
  and time, expose the inherent contradictions of generative AI,
• 43:18
  and offer us a useful conceptual vantage point for making sense
• 43:21
  of the overall mix of captivation and dissatisfaction
• 43:25
  that seems to permeate the assumed everyday encounter with
• 43:29
  these products. As gimmicky aesthetic forms, slop and brain
• 43:33
  rot are marked by ambiguities.
• 43:35
  They depend on highly sophisticated computational
• 43:37
  systems, and yet result in deskilling, cognitive
• 43:40
  offloading, and creative craftlessness. They rely upon
• 43:43
  endless injection of wealth from venture capital, and yet result
• 43:46
  in perceived impoverished creative outputs. They are, as
• 43:51
  the aesthetic category of the gimmick theorized by Shian Nye,
• 43:55
  sad marvels. Always enchanting and repulsive at once, and never
• 44:00
  simply one or the other. Gun noises, sirens, Chiron.
• 44:07
  Absolutely rips. I think the final point to put on this is,
• 44:13
  in as much as I'm understanding the greater point that is Naya
• 44:16
  is making, I think she's also making an argument that like,
• 44:21
  this has always been the the gimmick as she says, is the
• 44:24
  hallmark of capitalism, and perhaps has like a value we need
• 44:28
  to understand past the like slam dunking of certain sentences
• 44:32
  like we just ended that paper with. Mhmm. And that's what I'm
• 44:35
  interested to investigate more from her work.
• 44:37
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. But Mike, you read something too. Right?
• 44:39
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. And there's a lot of it seems like there's a
• 44:41
  lot of sort of similarities or synergies, like connecting
• 44:44
  points between what I read and what Jason read. What I read was
• 44:48
  actually, I didn't realize it at first. It's pretty short,
• 44:50
  relatively straightforward, and kinda just tries to go ahead and
• 44:53
  make one one point and is sort of like a charge or an
• 44:58
  encouragement to think about the things that you might call slop
• 45:03
  in a very specific way inspired by the fact that you would call
• 45:08
  them slop. So Hans, if you wanna I'm sharing my screen.
• 45:10
  If you wanna pop up the paper, we can take a look at it. So I
• 45:14
  read Computational Gallert, Compressions of Culture.
• 45:19
  Hans Buetow: Wait. I'm sorry.
• 45:19
  Mike Rugnetta: What was that?
• 45:20
  Georgia Hampton: You read what?
• 45:21
  Mike Rugnetta: Computational Gallert? Gallertie?
• 45:27
  Hans Buetow: Gallert. By
• 45:28
  Mike Rugnetta: Daniel de oh, boy. Sorry, Daniel. Daniel de
• 45:31
  zoo? Zoo?
• 45:33
  Hans Buetow: Zoo? Yeah.
• 45:36
  Mike Rugnetta: And the the basic charge here is, like, right, we
• 45:41
  call it slop because we perceive it as not mass culture, but hog
• 45:46
  feed. Right. And I
• 45:50
  Georgia Hampton: think Slop.
• 45:51
  Mike Rugnetta: This this connects to the kind of
• 45:54
  gustatory not gustatory, metabolic set of metaphors like
• 46:00
  what Jason was talking about. Right? These are this is all
• 46:03
  about sort of gorging, binging undifferentiated masses, just
• 46:14
  massive huge amounts of material that when considered are just
• 46:21
  sort of disgusting in a way or are massive in that they are a
• 46:31
  mass. It is a mass of things. Yeah.
• 46:33
  Which is I I don't think a way that you ever describe something
• 46:36
  that you like. No.
• 46:39
  Georgia Hampton: No. I I'm glad you're mentioning kind of the
• 46:41
  grotesque quality. To go back honestly to your piece that
• 46:46
  about horror and and, like, disgust as a tool of engagement,
• 46:51
  I think I think the disgusting, grotesque nature of this kind of
• 46:56
  content is very essential to talking about it at all.
• 47:00
  Mike Rugnetta: So that's I mean, really, that's what Daniel talks
• 47:03
  about in this. And he starts with this idea from Marx, the,
• 47:07
  Gallert, which is there's a point in here about how it is
• 47:12
  translated. The 2024 English translation translation of
• 47:22
  Capital renders the German word Galert as gelatinous blob rather
• 47:26
  than the more formal condulation of earlier editions. This was
• 47:30
  thought to better convey its association with food processing
• 47:33
  and industrial waste, the troubling history of which Marx
• 47:36
  was well aware. And what the Gullaher is is it's basically
• 47:39
  like the, what is made, the mass of labor that is made when
• 47:48
  actual human beings exert force and labor, in the application of
• 47:55
  their bodies, but then are just removed.
• 47:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
• 47:58
  Mike Rugnetta: They are sort of just separated. This is, I
• 48:01
  think, not quite alienation. It's sort of a more almost
• 48:05
  primordial version of the idea. And what is left behind is this,
• 48:10
  like, yeah, congelation. As the distilled and compressed human
• 48:13
  labor objectified in commodities and capital that possesses a
• 48:17
  phantom like objectivity, Gallert simultaneously provides
• 48:21
  an apt figure of labor's violent conversion into capital.
• 48:25
  Just as the gelatin produced in large kettles or acid baths no
• 48:30
  longer showed any identifiable traces of the bones or other
• 48:34
  animal waste products fed into it. This is what I was thinking.
• 48:38
  Yeah. So there is no longer existed any sensuous trace of
• 48:42
  the concrete human labor absorbed into capital via market
• 48:46
  commodity exchange. Shotgun sound.
• 48:49
  Shotgun sound.
• 48:50
  Hans Buetow: Damn. Yeah. It's it's extrusion. It's congealing.
• 48:54
  It's like the same sort of thing where it's com you know, it's
• 48:57
  the chicken McNugget.
• 48:58
  It's the it's plastic. Right? You don't see the dinosaur bones
• 49:01
  anymore.
• 49:01
  Mike Rugnetta: Those of you who follow me on Instagram will know
• 49:04
  that I'm currently in my goo period.
• 49:06
  Georgia Hampton: Oh, big time. I've been meaning to talk to you
• 49:08
  about this. I've been very invested.
• 49:13
  Mike Rugnetta: Gooing it up, you know, getting served lots of
• 49:15
  Belzona videos. But I think that there's there is something that
• 49:22
  feels it's very visceral. This is very, very visceral, I think,
• 49:27
  for a number of reasons, and then it is I think a lot of us
• 49:30
  feel like we are being force fed some things. We do not feel in
• 49:35
  control of many of the things that enter into our our brains
• 49:40
  or our our bodies in a way. We feel as though a lot of the
• 49:44
  things that we're being shown are an undifferentiated mass.
• 49:49
  We have to do work to parcel things out as they cross our
• 49:54
  feed, and that work is exhausting. So we feel like we
• 49:56
  are we really are, like, laboring in a way.
• 49:59
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 50:00
  Mike Rugnetta: There is both a sense and the actuality that,
• 50:03
  like, the things that we love in culture that exist are being
• 50:09
  melted melted down metaphorically in order to fuel
• 50:12
  these processes or ripped apart literally in other senses for
• 50:17
  the people who have been following the news about Amazon
• 50:20
  and Anthropic destroying book collections. Like, much like the
• 50:26
  creation of gelatin, which Daniel goes on to talk at length
• 50:29
  about. Right? Like, these these this raw material is boiled, is
• 50:37
  dissolved in acid, is destroyed to make this thing that we are
• 50:42
  told is good for us. In the sense of gelatin, it was
• 50:48
  supposed to be a meal replacement for poor people.
• 50:51
  Yep. They thought that boiling collagen out of bones would mean
• 50:55
  that it would create a nutritious, if, you know, not
• 51:01
  exactly flavorful meal meal replacement for people who
• 51:05
  couldn't get nutrients or sustenance otherwise, and that
• 51:08
  ended up not being the case. That it ended up being that you
• 51:11
  can't, it turns out, subsist on gelatin alone. And similarly,
• 51:16
  right, you're told, you know, after books are ripped apart and
• 51:21
  all of preexisting culture is ingested into these things, that
• 51:25
  it's like, here now is your new productivity aid. This will make
• 51:28
  you a writer.
• 51:30
  This will make you an artist. This will allow you access,
• 51:33
  right, pursuant to our conversation we've just had,
• 51:36
  right, this will democratize a certain aspect of creative
• 51:41
  creative action, creative involvement, access to creative
• 51:45
  communities, and it turns out, you know I mean, I guess we'll
• 51:48
  see, but one suspects it seems like it is turning out that that
• 51:52
  is not the case. And that really it's like, you've just you've
• 51:56
  just kind of done a bunch of horrific things and made a bunch
• 51:59
  of goo.
• 52:01
  Georgia Hampton: You know how I said before that I was glad we
• 52:03
  were talking about the grotesque part of this? I changed my mind.
• 52:07
  Mike Rugnetta: It's actually just kinda yucky.
• 52:09
  Georgia Hampton: It's actually yucky and gross, and I don't
• 52:11
  like it, and I don't wanna do it anymore.
• 52:15
  Mike Rugnetta: There's this line, continuous with the
• 52:17
  industrial and or manual labor. What Marx called our species
• 52:21
  being is rendered fluid before being solidified for systematic
• 52:26
  extraction and regeneration as capital.
• 52:29
  Hans Buetow: This is so good. I don't like this. I love it. I'm
• 52:33
  the honor.
• 52:35
  Georgia Hampton: Hans, I thought you would be with me on this.
• 52:39
  Mike Rugnetta: You know when you have an itch and for like,
• 52:42
  you're carrying
• 52:42
  Hans Buetow: your
• 52:42
  Mike Rugnetta: groceries and your nose itches Mhmm. And you
• 52:46
  have to go a certain amount of time with an itchy nose before
• 52:50
  you can do it, and then you finally put the groceries down,
• 52:52
  and you scratch your nose, but you scratch it a little bit too
• 52:55
  hard because of how excited you were to be finally be this feels
• 52:59
  like that
• 52:59
  Georgia Hampton: a little bit. God, That's so true.
• 53:02
  Jason Oberholtzer: Also, because, like, you have you have
• 53:04
  shimmied the grocery bags down to your wrists to free your
• 53:07
  fingers, and the counterweight of that pushes your scratch
• 53:11
  finger hard against your nose. Yeah. So goes the baggage of
• 53:15
  this material around your wrists when you try to satisfy
• 53:17
  yourself. Exactly.
• 53:20
  Georgia Hampton: Damn.
• 53:20
  Mike Rugnetta: But I think it's all I think this is why it's
• 53:22
  like it's it's hard to separate how you feel from all of these
• 53:28
  things because it involves multiple lifetimes of media made
• 53:34
  to make you feel things.
• 53:36
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 53:38
  Mike Rugnetta: And there is a way that that media is treated
• 53:41
  that seems to kind of fundamentally deny that that is
• 53:44
  the case. It is as though, like, the people who are engaging in
• 53:50
  this technological activity are like, woah. Like, why such
• 53:54
  strong feelings about these things about human feelings?
• 53:58
  Hans Buetow: Mhmm.
• 54:00
  Mike Rugnetta: And the sort of this idea of, like, your species
• 54:03
  being both as labor and as an emotional effective existence
• 54:08
  being rendered fluid so that it can then be resolidified or
• 54:13
  extracted by another process is just very evocative, and it
• 54:17
  feels right in a way that I think is, you know yeah. Like,
• 54:24
  scratches scratches an itch in a way.
• 54:27
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. It really does.
• 54:28
  Mike Rugnetta: But also kinda hurts.
• 54:29
  Georgia Hampton: Well, it's like scratching an I mean, not to use
• 54:31
  just another metaphor, but, like, you know, scratching an
• 54:34
  itch so much that it becomes a worse problem. That is itchy
• 54:38
  forever.
• 54:38
  Mike Rugnetta: And now I'm bleeding.
• 54:40
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Like, that you just use it. I don't
• 54:42
  know. And I think it also I'm not sure if y'all's papers did
• 54:45
  this. I mine didn't really, but, like, the, you know, the the
• 54:51
  slow creep of, like, addiction that these tools encourage and,
• 54:56
  like, the the, you know, warm bath of pleasantry of of lack of
• 55:03
  effort, of lack of pushback, that encourages more use of
• 55:08
  these kinds of tools, like, actual act of using them.
• 55:12
  And
• 55:13
  Mike Rugnetta: Sure. Like, the in the I mean, this is kinda
• 55:15
  what Hank Green talked about
• 55:16
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
• 55:17
  Mike Rugnetta: Right, when he got called out. Like, the
• 55:18
  intoxication
• 55:20
  Georgia Hampton: Yes. Intoxication is a better word.
• 55:21
  Mike Rugnetta: Of being, like, the power of all I have been
• 55:25
  told for the last twenty five years is that the most important
• 55:28
  thing is to produce as much as possible. And now here I have
• 55:32
  the producing things genie.
• 55:35
  Georgia Hampton: Mhmm.
• 55:35
  Hans Buetow: Oh, yeah.
• 55:36
  Mike Rugnetta: And that is just an extremely intoxicating
• 55:39
  prospect.
• 55:40
  Georgia Hampton: Oh, yeah.
• 55:40
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. Or the, the guy who got caught
• 55:43
  generating his, exonerative paper for three m for his report
• 55:49
  on the yeah. Right?
• 55:50
  Georgia Hampton: Yes. Even Like I was shown some clip of that
• 55:54
  podcast, Stavie's World with Stavros Helicos, talking to some
• 56:00
  actor that I don't really know, but I think he was in New Girl,
• 56:03
  where the actor was like, oh, yeah. I ask AI all the time to,
• 56:07
  like, interpret my dreams. And I, like, just do it in the
• 56:10
  morning. He's like, listen to me.
• 56:11
  I sound like someone who's trying to convince you that my
• 56:14
  problem isn't a problem of, like Yeah. Well, I just do it in the
• 56:17
  morning and sometimes at night and sometimes in the middle of
• 56:19
  the day of just being like, hey. I had a dream where this crazy
• 56:23
  thing happened to me. Like, what does that mean? And he justified
• 56:26
  it by being like, you know, I don't wanna talk to my wife
• 56:29
  about it.
• 56:29
  We've been together for too long. She doesn't care. Like,
• 56:33
  you know, and all of that justifying this Yeah. Use of
• 56:38
  something that is happy to just have you use it as much as
• 56:40
  possible.
• 56:41
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. And that's the other thing. Right? It's
• 56:42
  intoxicating, and, also, it is designed to, it is I think it is
• 56:48
  both designed for a certain interlocutor, and it is designed
• 56:53
  to turn you by steps into that interlocutor. Yes.
• 56:57
  Oh, yes. That's why, like, I think a lot about Hank being
• 57:00
  like, you know, I had my notes. I wrote my notes. I I wasn't
• 57:05
  reading something that was AI generated. I promise, even
• 57:09
  though he said I appreciate the pushback, which, right, is the
• 57:11
  like, sort of one of the stereotypical phrases.
• 57:14
  And I totally believe Hank because I believe I believe him
• 57:17
  when he says he came to rely on it too much. He spent a lot of
• 57:21
  time with it. And I think when he spent when you spend a lot of
• 57:24
  time with it, it sort of it will mold you in a way. Oh, yes.
• 57:28
  Like, it's in the same way that you pick up the mannerisms and
• 57:32
  the speech patterns of all of your friends and your spouse and
• 57:35
  stuff.
• 57:36
  Like, it's the same it's this gonna gonna be the same thing
• 57:38
  with a chatbot. Think that it's it's like the phantasm of us of
• 57:44
  social engagement, of us of a social process.
• 57:47
  Georgia Hampton: Oh, yes. Because it's also it's not just
• 57:49
  molding you. It's molding to you. So it's like, oh, you want
• 57:52
  it to be like this? Absolutely.
• 57:54
  It can be like this. It can be anything you want. I can do
• 57:57
  anything.
• 57:58
  Mike Rugnetta: So I these were all great, and I'm very excited.
• 58:01
  I wanna go read the rest of this collection. Yeah. So this was
• 58:04
  just to remind everyone. This was a special issue of the
• 58:07
  European Journal of Cultural Studies, and it came out this
• 58:11
  year, I think very recently.
• 58:13
  And it is called the Cultural Commons on Brain Rot, AI Slop,
• 58:19
  and the Enshitification of the Internet. Okay. That's the end.
• 58:24
  Thanks, friends, for listening. Thank you for being members.
• 58:26
  Thank you for joining us. Thank you, chat, for joining us in the
• 58:29
  stream. If you wanna become a member, can go to neverpoe.st
• 58:33
  and click on a few of the buttons we have around there for
• 58:35
  becoming a member. It's a deal. It's a steal.
• 58:37
  It's $4 a month. Okay. Great. Thank you, friends. We'll we'll
• 58:41
  see
• 58:41
  Hans Buetow: you soon.
• 58:41
  Mike Rugnetta: Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye, mate. That is the show
• 58:55
  we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the
• 58:58
  main feed on or around Thursday, September 17.
• 59:02
  If you would like to become a member for $4 a month and get
• 59:05
  access to more things like paper report, team chats, Wigos, and
• 59:10
  more, go to neverpost.st and click on buttons all willy nilly
• 59:14
  until you're giving us money. The rest will work itself out.
• 59:18
  Never Post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the
• 59:21
  mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer
• 59:24
  is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer,
• 59:27
  and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta.
• 59:33
  Jesus Christ, my dusty socialist. There's enough sun
• 59:36
  for everyone, you state. Your crown chipped like a front tooth
• 59:40
  after a bar fight. Behind you, a red curtain. Excerpt of by
• 59:47
  Spencer Rees.
• 59:49
  Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's
• 59:52
  distributed by Radiotopia.