Slop is Everywhere For Those With Eyes to See

The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat. The absence of a clock on a casino wall can keep you gambling through the early morning. On social media, our For You Pages give us the illusion of infinite content. How our environments are designed influences how we consume. And wouldn't you know it, everything around us is designed for maximum consumption.

Open TikTok, and you can easily burn through a hundred videos or more before you glance at the time. It doesn't help that the For You Page hides the time on our phones.

We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption. We don't see it because, well, we're conditioned not to, but slop always arrives on time. Slop is inevitable. Slop is quintessential. Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see.

Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV, all hold examples of what happens when demand exceeds supply— companies fill the gap with slop. The free market loves a good filler. So, why should the digital realm be any different?

The For You page is designed to keep us playing the dopamine slot machine for as long as possible. The Average Time on Site metric is still the goose that lays the golden eggs, and both TikTok and Meta are reporting that their egg baskets have never been fuller.

But, there's a problem. On any given platform, only 1-3% of users publish content. It's called the 90-9-1 rule, and platforms that rely on free user generated content have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the commercialized web. The introduction of the For You Page, and the illusion of endless content, has only exasperated the inequity.

Curation used to be part of our media consumption process. We would hop from website to website looking for a laugh. We used to click on hyperlinks for Christ's sake. Now, all we must do is sit at the trough and let daddy Zuck feed us.

In a recent essay, Joan Westenberg makes a complementary argument that the algorithm has “flattened” curiosity by eliminating the need to “hunt” for our content. They go on to say:

There’s a concept in behavioral science called the “effort heuristic.” It’s the idea that we tend to value information more if we worked for it. The more effort something requires, the more meaning we assign to the result. When all knowledge is made effortless, it’s treated as disposable. There’s no awe, no investment, no delight in the unexpected—only consumption.

(I'm reminded of the scene in Jurassic Park when the tour Jeep pulls up to the Tyrannosaurus rex exhibit. Doctor Grant says “The T-Rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt.”)

This type of mindless consumption is not only harming our curiosity, it's helping to cheapen creativity for the people who produce what we consume.

Creativity isn't scalable. Content creation has a hard productivity ceiling. Every human-created video on our feeds require some level of writing, production, and editing. Yet the For You Page has made the content consumption so efficient, that perhaps demand has exceeded supply.

If you're a product manager for a social media platform, you can reduce the friction of publishing content to the app, or ship better editing tools, but you can't optimize creative spark. You can't treat humans like content-generating machines (as much as they have tried). Despite the illusion of infinite scrolling thanks to the FYP, art remains a finite resource bound to the whims of human creativity.

You see their problem.

Mark Zuckerberg wants us on his platforms, flicking our thumbs, for as long as possible. But the more we open Instagram, the more creators he needs posting multiple times each day. Mark has very little control over this variable. Creators could suddenly post less, or simply stop posting all together, and there's nothing he could do about it. What's worse, creators could demand Meta pay them for their art.

Could you imagine?

Actually, yes. And it turns out, you could rather effectively kill a platform if you got a small group of top creators organized and angry.

Twenty on the Vine #

In the summer of 2016, twenty social media personalities took down one of the largest mobile video apps on the internet. They wanted money for their labor. The executives at Vine said no. The gang of twenty, who were the highest performing creators on the app, walked away. They stopped posting entertaining content to Vine, and instead repeatedly implored their followers to find them on competing apps.

Vine shut down for good just months later.

From Inside the secret meeting of Vine stars that ushered in the app’s demise:

Vine’s spectacular rise and fall showed the power of online creators. Its demise offers crucial lessons for platforms trying to engage with power users — and a deeper understanding of who ultimately controls a social product.

Vine creators exposed and exploited a weakness in Vine's conventional approach to social media. Follower count had power. Old-style discovery algorithms could be easily manipulated. Vine creators used that power to take over the app, and convinced users to migrate to other platforms.

You see why follower counts are less important today, and why black-box algorithms have full control over who goes viral and who gets “shadow banned.” TikTok saw the mistakes of its predecessor, and made it so content creators could never exercise collective influence again.

Because virality now feels more like gambling, I suspect people post more content today than a decade ago. But it's not enough. Our insatiable appetites for content is pushing for corporations to meet that demand with slop. 

If it were up to TikTok and Meta, our feeds would be exclusively robot-made. Humans are a variable they cannot control, and I think they despise us for it.

Anyway, I have good news. Outside of our FYPs you'll find a surplus of art, essays, articles, and videos just waiting to be discovered. And best of all, these artists and writers are making things on their own terms. We, too, can enjoy the products of their labor on our terms, while not giving a dime of our attention to big tech.

This is the open web. Or the social web. Or the open social web. Or the-- you get the point. To find it, you must reacquaint yourself with the lost art of surfing the web.

Surfing the web is very different than scrolling the FYP. You don't often hear the words ”mindful” and “internet” together but, surfing the web was an art of mindful consumption that doesn't much exist today. Not to get all old man yells at cloud at you, but maybe we should bring it back?

Up next: The Lost Art of Surfing The Web (coming soon)

In Japan, workers rely on healthy lunch bowls for under $4. Japanese media literally tracks these prices because they're a daily staple for working people. The Japanese media reported on a surge in their price from $2.63 to $4.25 in 2021.

In America, we track grocery prices. Restaurants are luxury goods.

The U.S. lacks this budget restaurant tier! There's obviously demand for it. We'd buy $4 balanced meals if we had the option.

How does Japan’s restaurant market do this?

It’s not grocery prices; Japan’s grocery prices are ~18% higher than the United States.

It’s not hourly wages. Japan’s minimum wage ($6.68 an hour) is similar to America’s ($7.25).

Japan’s zoning and health codes allow tiny businesses!

Japan allows businesses that are only a few feet wide. Japanese restaurants can operate in small spaces, like one floor of a narrow single-stair case building (no wasted space or resources on a shared lobby).

"Koreatown manhattan 2009" by chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Grabbed from Noah Smith.

In Japan, someone can even build a tiny coffeeshop in front of their home.

Because of small setups like these, many Japanese restaurants have only one or two staff. Some restaurants are physically so small that they can only seat two to five people. In some, you even eat standing up.

A tiny restaurant staffed by just a single person, their stove, and a rice cooker can sell you lunch for a similar price you'd pay at home.

The overhead is minimal.

But in the US, tiny restaurants are illegal.

Our zoning laws require almost every business to:

• Maintain a large building footprint

• Provide 2-4 parking spaces per business

• Operate at a scale that requires multiple employees

Food trucks could help if they were allowed at scale. But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.

Relatedly, our health code regulations also effectively outlaw people from opening restaurants in small spaces. Most jurisdictions require at least 3-4 different sinks—one for washing dishes (usually a large three-part sink), separate ones for washing hands, one for mopping, and often another for prepping food. This makes small commercial kitchens in under 200 square feet much harder.

America’s food regulations are also not set up for a single person to manage. The U.S. has 3,000 different agencies handling food regulations. The whole system, scattered across eight places in the municipal code, is basically uncoordinated and varies depending on where you are.

When you force every restaurant to be big, expensive, and car-dependent, cheap daily food becomes harder.

Density also drives prices down.

Singapore has $3 hawker center meals. Hong Kong serves $4 lunch boxes. Even Manhattan has 99 cent pizza slices. These use a tiny storefront model that maximizes foot-traffic volume.

Foot traffic from dense neighborhoods provides a constant source of customers, so restaurants can profit from high volumes of sales, rather than high prices.

Japanese cities let restaurants cluster in mixed-use buildings where people live, work, and transit. A 20-seat ramen shop near a station sees hundreds of potential customers during lunch rush.

American zoning typically separates commercial and residential areas.

Outside of New York City, most U.S. restaurants need customers to make destination trips via car. That friction means fewer total customers, requiring higher prices to stay profitable.

Zoning and city design doesn’t just impact housing supply.

Half of Americans spend nearly an hour a day cooking, partly because there's no sub-$4 option. A lot of us hate cooking but don’t want to spend $11 at Chipotle.

This category of restaurant is a form of basic infrastructure in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.

When regulations prevent everyday people from starting businesses on small lots, we don't just lose those businesses. We lose the price points they make possible.

Individual regulations, each reasonable in isolation, can combine to lock out exactly the small-scale solutions that would help working families most. We can rewrite the rules to enable the neighborhood businesses that working families actually need.

Just as there’s no single best way to organize your bookshelf, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to storing information. Consider the simple situation where you create a new digital file. Your computer needs to rapidly find a place to put it. If you later want to delete it, the machine must quickly find the right bits to erase. Researchers aim to design storage systems…

Source

In light of the Trump administration's escalating threats of military action overseas and the militarized occupation of Minneapolis, the administration's announcement on Jan. 11 may have come as a surprise. The White House, it seems, will be ending the war on protein, per a tweet with the words "WE ARE ENDING THE WAR ON PROTEIN" emblazoned over an ominously hazy photo of some haunted specter assuming the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., white hair and deeply furrowed forehead dissolving into a shroud of darkness like Homer into the hedge. The tweet links to a website, realfood.gov, where three foods—a slab of steak, a carton of whole milk, and a floret of broccoli—converge to reveal another slogan: "Real food starts here."

What war on protein? you might ask if you live in the United States or seen an advertisement for one of this nation's increasingly deranged purchasable foodstuffs. I will admit that I participate in this culture. I have tried and enjoyed the Eggo Buttermilk Protein Waffles and the Barilla Protein+ Penne. Sometimes after working out I drink a protein juice with the flavor "Fuzzy Navel" (I am not proud of this). If there has indeed been a war on protein, surely Protein must have pulled off a flanking maneuver, soldiers massacred by the battalion by Starbucks's new lineup of Protein Lattes, featuring protein-boosted milk and "a variety of protein cold foams"; regiments splintered and picked apart by the 20g of whey protein isolate in Pure Genius Ready Clear Protein Water; POWs dispatched ruthlessly by Khloe Kardashian's Khloud protein popcorn. A moment of silence for all the lives lost in this needless war.

Of course there is no such thing as the war on protein, which is shockingly even faker than the war on Christmas. The nation is more protein-pilled than ever. Would a nation enmeshed in such a war create the Dunkin' Donuts Megan's Mango Protein Refresher as a part of a campaign with Megan Thee Stallion playing her alter ego, "Pro-Tina?" We are living in a moment of peak protein propaganda, and research suggests that, on average, adult Americans are already eating 20 percent more protein than we need—so much that it might be giving us kidney stones.

theodp writes: Code.org, the nonprofit backed by AI giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon and whose Hour of AI and free AI curriculum aim to make world's K-12 schoolchildren AI literate, points job seekers to its AI Use Policy in Hiring, which promises dire consequences for those who use AI during interviews or take home assignments without its OK. Explaining "What's Not Okay," Code.org writes: "While we support thoughtful use of AI, certain uses undermine fairness and honesty in the hiring process. We ask that candidates do not [...] use AI during interviews and take-home assignments without explicit consent from the interview team. Such use goes against our values of integrity and transparency and will result in disqualification from the hiring process." Interestingly, Code.org CEO Partovi last year faced some blowback from educators over his LinkedIn post that painted schools that police AI use by students as dinosaurs. Partovi wrote, "Schools of the past define AI use as 'cheating.' Schools of the future define AI skills as the new literacy. Every desk-job employer is looking to hire workers who are adept at AI. Employers want the students who are best at this new form of 'cheating.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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