the psychoanalytic distinction between "desire" and "drive" also seems useful to explaining that shift from "wanting to converse with friends and build relationships" to "compulsion to consume repetitively to sustain a machine-zone-like fugue state"

To call slop automated is not to say it is free of human labor — rather, this human labor is already embedded in automated operations, not only made machine-like and subsumed under the logic of algorithmic curation, but made machine-readable, dissolved into patterns and quantifiable reactions 5/

new danah 🎯 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... it's weird we say "social media" to describe broadcast-like influencer-filled platforms and not use it to describe group chats, discords, and other far more "social" places

i read a million takes about how cameras lost their relation to truth, and here's yet another news event filled with conspiracies about everything but the footage

to me, the more interesting question isnt why highlights are more viewed, of course they are, but what accounts for the enduring popularity of the endlessly long streams the highlights are clipped from?

always skeptical of AI apologism that rests on "people want," "humans are inherently" essentialism. as rob notes, the creation of those desires is the whole point here

AI slop and nostalgia go so well together because nostalgia itself is the desire to misconstrue the past by smoothing its messy lived reality away into conceptual ideals. nostalgia and AI work in similar ways

improved framing, takes into account the enduring truth-telling function of cameras and is not just the too-easy panic over some linear descent into fakery www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/u...

New piece: "ALGO-READ: The creative automation of the reading subject" Open access. Critical study of the production of ‘the reading subject’ as a media trend, unit of value and data point www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de... in RELATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES (eds A. Lagerkvist, J. Smolicki

there’s a new edition of The Social Photo (Verso) and i wrote a little preface for it

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

also seems like a good guide to what writing about AI not to take so seriously; shows who is either not thinking carefully enough about the topic or is deliberately writing obfuscatory hype

useful chart for "deanthropomorphizing" discussions of "AI" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

modernity is the doom loop of having to describe the same thing with ever new terms

The “human” we compare to AI, though, mistakes the dichotomy. It’s not that AI isn’t human — it is an automation of capitalism, a human imaginary. The opposite of Artificial Intelligence isn’t the human mind, the opposite of AI is a community.

What would be your key media studies texts on digital images / digital visual culture and gaming? Not necessarily brand new, rather foundational and still relevant ...

Bauman never misses

If you want a deepdive on robot restaurant issues, i have written about both animatronic robot servers and performances of automation, and Eatsa's digital automat and the hiding of human labor behind "frictionless" tech. 🤖🍕 www.e-flux.com/architecture... reallifemag.com/ill-at-ease/

all i want to do is read old social theory and apply it to new stuff but i dont want to start a substack. help lol

best place to start for defining "slop" is Weberian theory. one key aspect there, and for slop, is understanding the link between rationalization and irrationality ie "slop" is often used to describe both that which is "fully optimized" *and* chaotic purposeless hallucinations

yes - better than trying to arbitrate what has "soul" or not is to critique that which is centrally conceived and controlled, made primarily to be efficient and profitable, AI or not

NOW ONLINE: The lastest special issue of Photography & Culture on «AI and Photography», guest-edited by Briankle Chang and Sarah M. Miller and featuring among others my essay «Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‹Photographic›» #OpenAccess

My new article, Bio-AI: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Data Animism, is out from Culture Machine. Part of a special issue on The Aesthetics of Biomachines edited by Johan Lau Munkholm, Naja Grundtmann, Kristin Veel & Kathrin Maurer. culturemachine.net/vol-24-aesth...

i.e. chatbot use can restructure our means for self-knowledge, routing what was once "introspection" through a tech company's servers and its ideological modulations

i mean, "a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion" is pretty much the underlying philosophy of metrics based gamified social media, from twitter to instagram to this place

feels like the right question! why should people think something that was previously inhuman slop now being slop thats even less human is especially noteworthy?

hate social media platforms pitching themselves as real an authentic more than any of the fakery happening elsewhere

"smart" podcasts as a form leverage the feeling of thought and sociality to get people to consume content that, if written, would seem remedial or downright dumb thebaffler.com/outbursts/th...

Read my new essay about the shriveled imagination of the life-extension guys!! On Bryan Johnson, communist cybernetics, and the Human Centipede. And if you're in NY, head to the launch party in Brooklyn tonight for Empty Set mag (Dear Friends Books, 7pm🩸) www.emptysetmag.com/articles/blo...

"people no longer have a choice but to assume that everything is false" they keep saying this but thats just obviously not what is happening. again, better Q: what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of images? (fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/opinion/ai-sora-slop.html)

i dont think real vs fake is whats at stake here (the political valence of AI is). none of these examples are pitching the AI imagery as real. "fake imagery" is a weird term for this slop bc wouldnt that also encompass most art and memes etc?

read this same take every month for years even though there's a constant stream of newsy widely-believed video happening all around us the better question is: what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of cameras in an age where believable fakes are easy to generate?

that users could prefer a generated simulation to actual old clips for nostalgia purposes clarifies how nostalgia is about consuming "decontextualization" in itself — nostalgia negates history under the auspices of longing for it

telling that so many (good and correct) critiques of AI sound exactly like the main critiques of the media culture AI was born into

telling that Meta didn't attempt to make compelling little AI clips for their ad. the commercial instead is just "this AI product will have AI," nothing more. bc they dont need to convince *why* anyone needs AI products, they just need to demonstrate they are burning money in that field

LLMs mean that no one has to write anything they don't care about, but they also mean that "writing anything" will get equated with "not caring" for most people. (If you really cared, you would video yourself talking about it on your phone.)

"the end of social media" takes often need to make a too-clean distinction between public broadcast platforms and private group sharing. a lot of social-media-like energy exists in the gradients in-between

still think about this enduring truth-telling function of cameras with most every big news event

am also dying at the ad in this video for a scam news app that will give you a fake number for how true articles are lol

Google has an AI "camera coach" in their camera app to help people forfeit their own eye and voice to make more productive images normalized by attention metrics (~2mins in)

everything, no matter how much it epitomized rational fake empty nothingness in its time, eventually comes to be something remembered as real and felt nostalgic for

was asked, along with some others, how i approach looking at every photographs everydayphotography.org/journal/eido... the eidolon centre is so cool

"the looking-glass self", Charles Horton Cooley (1902) lol this "new trend" is just what identity has always been

looks like shit but this stuff isnt failing at looking good, it is succeeding at selling the idea of total data enclosure and god view witnessing

One of the reasons I love going on @parismarx.com’s show isn’t just because we get deep into the issues but because I can also talk about Canadian media policy, which is super interesting!!

good! food delivery slop and AI image slop deserve each other. the fake images dont mislead, they accurately convey the desire for crappy food made and delivered in unethical ways