Slop-Pocalypse Now

- OR -
Waiting for the End of the World Mired in Capitalist Sludge

Michael Lee

This bar cart brings architectural intrigue and glam style to your dining room or living room with its sleek champagne finish and glass design. Its shelves are made from solid and engineered wood, and it's built on a steel gold frame that interlocks to create the right Art Deco effect.

The Ljubinko Bar Cart via Wayfair 

“Hmmm… maybe this one will do.”
I thought to myself as I hoped to infuse my new living room with some kind of sophisticated aesthetic on the cheap.

I had fallen victim to the materialist trappings of our modern age. I couldn’t just pile my whiskey collection onto the adjacent IKEA Billy bookcase haphazardly and then surround it with anime figures in a masterfully collegiate blending of the high and low brow. No, the spirits deigned that I must give them their own place for display. I’m an adult now after all. But not any place would do, I must signal that I am someone with style, someone with taste, albeit without the Restoration Hardware budget. 

But as I clicked through the 3,433 bar cart offerings on Wayfair, trying to find the right shape, right size, right color for my space, the designs started to blend together. Page after page of “didn’t I see this one already?” led to the realization I was looking at Furniture Slop.

There was no need for 432 of these carts to be an elevated antique gold finish with either mirrored shelves or luxurious white ‘marble’. The different versions of this style of cart should have never reached outside the single digits, yet Wayfair has hundreds. It’s slop.

Poor Tamako, the Shōtengai has become a Sloptengai.

Endless Choice, Endless Suffering

This has become the defining trait of our current era where the abundance of choice has reached its late capital terminus of a world filled with endless slop. When previously the internet opened up new worlds to people who dared to explore, where a forum tucked away deep in the recesses of the internet had torrents of previously obscure 80s Japanese pop albums, or where finding the online storefront of a small menswear store in San Francisco that stocked Kapital denim, Merz b. Schwanen t-shirts and Chup socks could introduce you to some cool clothing labels you’d not heard of before, now we are fully in our slop era where you can buy 12 pairs of fair isle Chup-like socks from Amazon (for the price of one pair of Chup’s gorgeous Hansker sock) from the House of Luckit that also sells a BPA-free 1.2L battery-powered heated lunch box, a hydration running belt, or a 20-in-1 Switch sports accessory pack. Neat.

And in this slop world we now live in, it’s greatest crime might not even be fast fashion or shoddily made furniture, though those are environmentally devastating. Slop World’s magnum opus is in the utter flattening of culture, mashing the last of culture’s dying vestiges into a pulpy gruel to be served to all as the merest form of entertainment sustenance. Just enough to keep us alive, barely nourished. The Enertron from Chrono Trigger’s post-apocalyptic 2300 AD.  HP/MP Restored! …But you’re still hungry.  

The Planet is Dyin’ Cloud (and so are we)

While genAI is certainly the most immediate, and viscerally repugnant, of Slop World’s outputs, this crisis is one of complete cultural rot. Yes, we have released a flood of AI content that, as it washes its deepfaked, plasticky sludge over us, and has shown to be damaging our brains thanks to cognitive offloading, but Slop World is even more insidious than that. Slop World’s ultimate goal is much more coordinated than just “What if Pixar movie, but racist against South Asians” memery. It’s anti-intellectual, it’s anti-human, it’s about control, and it’s about the rich pulling the wool over our eyes one final time as they try and flee with all the spoils of the late capitalist age.

Slop World as a project has been building for decades. The slow poisoning of our world in the name of profit. While the acceleration in recent years has us hurtling towards end times, the steps along the way have always been leading to this eventuality.

A disposable material culture, driven significantly by the plastics industry, has contributed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (remember when people talked about this thing?!), 1.6 million square kilometers of all kinds of crap we have thrown away, swirling in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii. 79,000 tons of plastic is out there, making its way into food systems and eventually into us in the form of microplastics. 

Climate change is reaching (has already reached) a point-of-no-return as our unserious politicians are more beholden to the CEOs and stockholders of fossil fuel companies than to the betterment and stewardship of our one and only planet. That we’ve done nothing to address this, and in fact, have begun backsliding from feigned attempts at change to outright harming our planet once again reveals how capitalism, and keeping profits rolling, is the only thing that matters. I wrote for Kotaku about how in the 90s it seemed like various works of art from television shows like Captain Planet and Stop the Smoggies, to video games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII were trying to grapple with environmental catastrophe, and there was a moment when it seemed like perhaps we wanted to save our planet. But… those in power saw earnest effort towards a healthier, sustainable Earth would only drive stock prices down. There wasn’t a way to financialize a green movement that would benefit shareholders, so we careened back towards consumption and driving capitalism to new heights.

Stop the Smoggies! | CINAR Films

Planned obsolescence in technology is also feeding the beast of capitalism, as making a quality product that lasts is great for the consumer, but if the company only gets to sell you the thing once, that’s also not good for shareholders. Where will the profits come from? The answer is just to make things worse. Have that fridge break down after 5 years, ruin the battery of an iPhone with a new iOS update so folks feel pressured to upgrade. Enshittification & slop are the twin towers of late capitalism. 

A broken internet that is so filled with bloat, advertisements, and is blatantly hostile to users that farms our data and sells it to companies who target us endlessly with more aggressive ads to spend our hard earned cash. Systems of surveillance creating incredibly detailed data sets that not only target slop at us, but contribute to the society of control, where we may have the illusion of freedom, but that freedom could just as easily be revoked through electronic or biometric methods. Palantir having the power to determine if you are allowed to go to a coffee shop across town or access a Discord server.

But Slop World’s assault on our last bastion of relief from this miserable world, our entertainment, is more than just ruthless profiteering, it has a sinister edge to it. It feels like it is poised to be the death blow to our remaining humanity. Late capitalism’s final victim is culture itself. 

Nostalgia Rewrites Everything

It started innocently enough, the slop seemed somewhat refined, spiced with the familiar flavor of nostalgia. Postmodern media would tap into our emotional connection to existing franchises and works of art from our recent past, pulling from that original object just the essence of it. That key affective element, removed from the original work itself. The connective piece that links the referent with our own emotions, we were no longer being asked to think, but only to feel. Postmodernity on its own is not necessarily destructive, but when integrated into capitalist systems it starts to change shape and become more insidious.

This is evident in video game remakes like Resident Evil 4 or Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Rebirth that repackage the original by heightening only the most affective moments, those moments guaranteed to get the most emotional rise out of the player, and doing away with the ‘tired, dated, unnecessary’ elements that cause the original game to ‘drag’. 

Final Fantasy 7 Remake doesn’t want the player to engage with themes of identity and imposter syndrome, or to deeply consider the environmental impacts of a company like Shinra and the hurt it causes the planet. We’re still chasing Sephiroth, but somehow the world of Remake seems fine. Sector 6 isn’t sleazy anymore, it’s campy. Gongaga is a lush, biodiverse jungle, not a bombed out village destroyed by Shinra’s negligence and left to rot. Cosmo Canyon is a tourist trap. Nibelheim is just a fucking wellness center to make Shinra look good. 

TOP: Gongaga in FF7 (1997) | BOTTOM: Gongaga in Final Fantasy Rebirth (2024)

When moving through the world of Final Fantasy VII (1997), the cries of the planet were heard everywhere. People were suffering. We had to do something to save them. In Final Fantasy 7 Remake, our only goal is to find a way to realive our dead waifu. That’s what the third part in the trilogy is going to be about. Finding the right timeline in some garbage multiverse that will bring Aerith back. Along the way, the game will wink at us and nudge us with little referential easter eggs to make us feel smart as we play. Reaffirming us constantly as we’re so fragile now that we can’t live without being coddled in this way.

This coddling of the consumer is Slop World in action. Creating less challenging, schmaltzy cloyingly “smart” media content that makes us feel just good enough to keep going, to keep spending. 

Frictionless entertainment

We also see this in the smoothing of the edges of anything that could be viewed as controversial. Marvel slop is a plastic green screen world where no one swears and no one bleeds. It is a sanitized, weightless world. Anime has scaled back risque fanservice and grotesquerie, or if left in, is immediately called out from being ‘problematic’. As such, there’s much less of it to go around these days.

All this creates a climate where media literacy dies, not surprising at all as theorists Deleuze & Guattari declared in their book Anti-Oedipus that “capitalism is profoundly illiterate.” And as capitalism, particularly the hypercapitalism practiced by private equity, becomes entwined with entertainment, literacy falls by the wayside, replaced by math and analytics. Research shows that some sectors of the market don’t like blood in movies - remove it. Online reactions indicate that a gratuitous panty shot ‘went too far’ - censor it. Culture is no longer narratives, it is algorithms and data. The decisions capitalism makes in our media become normalized, and because of the implied perpetual surveillance of the society of control, the idea of transgression is self-policed. Both on the level of the capitalist corporation, to produce content directed to the median so as to maximize audience and not isolate consumers, and on the level of the individual, to not be seen as a degenerate or lacking in ‘moral’ character for liking something outside of the norm. 

Saten is cancelled. | A Certain Scientific Railgun

Mark Fisher in his seminal book, Capitalist Realism, says of Capitalism:

“Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”

When we give up engagement with art and the world around us, we are reduced to mere spectatorship, which capitalist realism claims will protect us from the peril of belief itself. By stripping all thinking out of art and replacing it with catering to our emotions, it removes our agency and opens us up to being told how to consume media. It’s why we can be manipulated by the recent surge in prudish moralism. 

As spectators only living in our emotions, we are being trained to no longer think about character motivations or anything contextual, but just to read a text as black or white as possible. If you find the fanservice panty shot titillating, you’re a creep (and probably a pedo). If a character is evil, you must hate them, you can’t understand their worldview at all. They are just evil. Capitalism will create the smoothest, most frictionless content to essentially ‘protect’ us from the ‘evils’ of fanservice or gruesome death in our media, because these could cause fanaticism, deviancy, or wrong-think. 

It has led us to this moment where capitalism produces slop for us to consume to shield us from the world outside of its system. It is a lowering of expectations, pacifying us, while also declaring that by remaining in this bubble that we are good. It’s not a world of pure goodness, but compared to an evil other, Slop World is safe, and if we reside in it, we are good people. We get to live in a gilded birdcage. Don’t think about. Just consume product and get excited for next product. 

new world order (/neg)

This has profoundly political implications.    

We’re being lulled into servitude of late capitalism’s wild capitulations and whatever narrative they push is where the masses will go. Just look at the child online safety laws being promoted by governments across the world. ‘Deviant’ media is the scapegoat. Kids shouldn’t look at pornography. But you wouldn’t be against such a law unless… you want kids to be looking at pornography! Sicko!

By using the media environment that capitalism has created around moral degeneracy, it has created a population that would go along with such laws solely on the emotional appeal, without having us think about why such laws need to exist. And if you want to go one step further down the rabbit hole, a law like this just becomes a big data collection operation and who gets that juicy contract? Probably some nut job like Alex Karp and Palantir.

Because entertainment has for decades been such an important piece of our cultural diet, for many it is a key part of their being. For it to be used like this, to move us into a state of pure spectatorship, it leaves us vulnerable to so much. If we are merely spectators, we won’t think to take action against unjust wars, or eco-catastrophe, or rapacious capitalism. Because spectatorship, and the emotional massaging it does, is so sharply focused on the individual, imagining or empathizing with the world outside of ourselves becomes more difficult. For us to tackle any of the larger societal ills we face, there needs to be a collective subject, an identity we can all belong/relate to, yet this media landscape is determined to deny us that.

Just look at an example of a film that tried to shake us out of our spectatorship to consider a collective subject, even while beating us over our heads with its message, Adam McKay’s 2021 Don’t Look Up. Derided by critics for not being a funny enough satire, and making everyone from the President, to tech figures, to media members out to be cartoonish buffoons, the film was an earnest attempt at trying to be so direct in its message that it felt like it was reaching out of the screen and shaking the viewer. It had to try this hard because spectatorship is so paralyzing. Now look, Trump is somehow still President, we have Pete Hegseth as the drunkest, least qualified Defense Secretary ever, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andressen champing at the bit to carve up the world’s resources for themselves while the world burns, the genocide in Gaza, illegal unauthorized wars being fought, and we’re experiencing 100 degree days in Colorado in March. How do you even find a collective subject when literally everything and everyone is falling apart. The chaos is part of the plan. Late capitalism’s media diet just serves as a heavy sedative to allow the chaos to wash over us without resistance.

Entertainment, whether they be films, video games, anime, television shows, music, or books used to be cultural touchstones that could still unite people, bring about discussion and change, create at least little pockets of collectivism. But now, we’re all siloed off in our algorithm worlds, reassured by ChatGPT that all our ideas are the smartest thing they’ve ever heard, and because of the society of control’s constant invisible surveillance, we never leave our bubble or say anything that might get called out.  We’re being fed slop, gorging ourselves at the abundance of media dumped into the trough for us to snarf up. Fattening us up, dumbing us down, so when the system collapses, we’ll be too mired in spectatorship to even realize what’s going on. A front row seat to our own demise. Wonderful.

I guess I’ll just pray that meteor in 2032 destroys us.

All this doom and gloom has me parched. While I wait for the end to come, I’ll grab the Knob Creek 12 Year off the bar cart and pour myself a glass. I never did get the Ljubinko off Wayfair. Found something local that isn’t quite the same, but at least it’s not furniture slop. Who cares, the eco-catastrophe is almost here anyways…

So… how about that Witch Hat Atelier… Looks good…

Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and used to write in other places as well. His work looks at video games, anime, and Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.