The Politics of Slop
Internet politics are mostly defined by the terrible quality of their content; from boomer Facebook posts to deranged twitter threads and all in between. Lately the word “slop” has been coined to describe the utter stupidity that circulates online, but why is this? Why are the most popular channels often the stupidest ones, while the best channels receive little attention? Can we get rid of slop or is it just an inevitable side effect of politics?
Defining “Slop”
To define “slop”, we first need to see the contexts in which it is commonly used. It is often used by what we would call the “cinema commentary” channels which use it to describe the soulless entertainment which is popular despite it saying nothing. The second context is in twitter fights where people call the national dishes of other countries uneatable slop.
However, the most relevant context where the word slop is used is in online politics where it is used to describe low-quality political content. The pioneer of calling other channels “slop” is Academic Agent (AA) and indeed a couple weeks ago he even released a video on what slop is. In this video he basically spent 20 minutes bashing low quality Twitter posts by revered right wing intellectuals such as Jason Hinkle and Ian miles Chong. However, he never really provided any solid definition of what slop even is, his video is just calling people stupid for 20 minutes and that's it.
My definition of slop is quite simple, and I think it covers the usual suspects. Slop is politics without complexity, without nuance. The problem is that politics is inherently complex, not only in terms of political strategy and interests, but also because every single political argument is an ethical argument and ethics are a fundamental part of philosophy. There is no way around it, politics cannot be separated from Philosophy or Psychology. But that is exactly what slop is; it is unnatural and therefore repulsive to anyone who takes politics seriously.
However, slop has an incredible advantage over actual quality commentary because it is much more entertaining. I try to make my essays as engaging as I can, but the more complex the topics, the less entertaining they become. High quality political content is not simply a video that you can watch absent-mindedly in the background while you're doing the dishes.
The market for easily digestible and entertaining political content is absolutely huge and then slop accounts that Academic Agent rightly points out serve exactly this market. The enjoyment of slop comes from three different sources:
The first is the entertainment value because generally many of these slop accounts are funny and make heavy use of exaggeration and clickbait which immediately attracts attention. The tone for one’s opponents is that of sneering mockery and/or righteous anger, both are certainly entertaining.1
The second is that watching slop feels good because it is ideologically reassuring, it makes us feel secure because it portrays our opponents as stupid, pathetic and evil. Laughing at stupid people makes us feel intelligent, who doesn't like being smart? Therefore, slop creators always promote a simplistic view of politics with the complexity of a marvel movie.
Finally, their content is easily accessible and understandable, anybody can click one of their videos and follow along as they do the dishes without any prior knowledge or brain activity required.
And I'm not going to pretend that I am immune to the enjoyment of slop, more often than not, when I am on Twitter, I spend my time in my own echo chamber feeling good about myself. There is something inherently reassuring about seeing other people with your opinions, verifying that you are not wrong and that your opponents are stupid. While it is disturbing to actually face arguments that you disagree with because they rouse the suspicion that your worldview and your identity might not be as solid as you might think.
So, I think it is no surprise that political slop is extremely popular and far outcompetes quality political content. The best political youtubers that I know barely break 50,000 subscribers, while the sloppers easily sit in the millions. The reason for this stark disparity is that each one of the three points of enjoyment listed above is reversed when it comes to quality political content.
The higher the quality of the political analysis, the less entertaining it will be. The whole purpose of entertainment is to shut off your brain after a long day, slop is well-suited for this, quality political commentary is not. The result is best seen in the fact that the percentage of the population with who can enjoy sober and dry political commentary is vanishingly small, especially when the alternatives are debates, echo chambers, and the laugh tracks of late-night talk shows.
The second issue is that good political commentary is not very reassuring. You can't have marvel-level narratives while at the same time honestly engaging with your political opponents, even progressives are humans with their own authentic motivations.
Actual discourse cannot just dismiss opposing ideas because that is the mark of intellectual laziness, this engagement alone is enough to create a slight tone of uncertainty which breaks the comforting certainty which tells you that you know everything and that your opinions are correct.
And finally, the higher quality content will not be easily accessible, the same way that calculus is not easily accessible because one requires prior knowledge of algebra. To understand any complex political analysis, one needs to have enough knowledge about the topics at hand. For example, a good geopolitical analysis cannot be understood without sufficient knowledge of economics, geography, ideology, and general history.
How are you going to explain the factors that led to the fall of Bashar Al-Assad to someone that cannot point out Syria in a map, that does not know what Ba’athism is, and that wants a comic book tier good guy-bad guy narrative?2
However, it is important to state that slop exists in a spectrum and there are many creators that do occupy the middle point where one finds nuanced analysis combined with entertainment. On one side, you have your bottom of the barrel Candace Owens and Tate slop which has nothing of substance beyond recycled “hot takes”.
On the other hand, we have the quality political commentators, to mention my own preferred examples, I would put The Distributist, the Schattenmacher, and Kaiserbauch (One day I want to categorize most creators in this spectrum or even, God forbid, a tierlist). However, most channels fall in the middle of these two extremes and mix entertainment and quality to varying ratios.
Slop now, Slop tomorrow
I think that the whole conversation around slop is misguided because AA and many other commentators call slop bad and argue that it is something that should be pushed out. However, the problem with this argument is that it is utterly utopian because slop is inevitable. The market for hollow political entertainment will always be orders of magnitude larger than the market for nuanced political analysis. To curse this reality is to be childish, this is how things are.
To change their masses who read the New York Post and watch Russell Brand clickbait into intellectuals that can give a three-hour lecture on the Spanish civil war is the height of folly, however, this is the idea behind all criticism of slop; the idea is that when one criticizes stupid, it will cease to be. The mature thing to do is to accept reality as it is and to look at what the implications are.
The reality is that all mass movements are the result of slop, of the basest type of propaganda, because no intellectual appeal and no manifesto will ever resonate with the masses. In the context of democracy, to forego slop is to forego victory, to relegate oneself to getting no more than 5% of the votes while your opponents gain the absolute majority. So, I would argue that there is no way around slop, around propaganda.
A great example of a political movement using slop in an intelligent way is how the communists in the first half of the 20th century managed to have both intellectual and mass appeal.
This is because the communists knew their costumers; the university professors wanted convoluted books about dialectic materialism, while the workers wanted to hear that they were being exploited by their parasitic bosses and that the factory rightly belonged to them. The communists never confused their two types of customers, the intellectuals got books and the proletariat got slop.
Slopbordination
The issue with the discourse against slop is that the intellectual side of the right wing (exemplified by Academic Agent) wants to sneer and push out all right-wing slop. I think that it is understandable and in an ideal world this is desirable, but we have to understand that it is counterproductive.
We have already mentioned that a movement without slop will have no mass appeal, however, a movement that is entirely slop will be no movement at all; it will be a bunch of political personalities bickering with each other because drama is entertaining. But such a movement will never produce anything of value.
A fitting analogy would be that of a horse and a rider, the rider cannot get far without the horse and the horse has no direction without the rider. In order to have any positive results, there needs to be a symbiotic relationship between the propagandist (who makes slop) and the intellectual (who gives structure to the movement). The left understands this very well, the right, not so much.
In real terms, this would mean that the online Right should come to accept that its different parts serve different roles. Slop is part of this equation; it must be directed toward something more productive than simple internet drama and shitposting. However, I have no idea how this could be achieved due to the inherent chaotic nature of the internet, especially given that most creators are anonymous.
A Society without Slop
However, I want to end this essay with a thought experiment. What would need to happen in order to have no slop at all? How would such a society even look like?
The core reason for the existence of slop is ignorance, the average slop consumer does not realize that he is watching low-quality content because of the Dunning-Kruger effect; the people who know little about politics think that they already know everything there is to know.
The reason why most people do not come out of this state is not that most people lack intelligence, but because they lack intellectual curiosity. I have gone into this inr more detail in this past essay:
However, what would it actually mean to have a society without ignorance in politics? The only way to have this is to have a polity exclusively made up of people with intellectual curiosity; a society of intellectuals. The only way for slop not to dominate politics is to have an electorate that does not let itself be fooled.
But no matter how nice our utopia is, the reality is that not everyone will have intellectual curiosity. This isn't about intelligence; it's about curiosity, which unfortunately cannot be compulsory. If you cannot turn the masses into intellectuals, then the only way to prevent slop is to exclude them from political life.
This would inevitably mean taking away universal suffrage and segmenting society into two classes; the political and the apolitical. This idea is not new, and it was indeed the reality for many past societies which had limited suffrage and it is also present in fiction, primarily in Robert Heinlein’s book “Starship troopers”.
Certainly, this hypothetical society would not be full of harmony and understanding, since it is often the best informed and smartest people who are the biggest fanatics. Not to mention that having a society divided by caste will nurse its own problems and resentments, however, that is the price to pay; those who want democracy must contend with slop, with the ignorance of the majority.
Those who wish for the end of slop must also contend with the reality that they would have to take the vote away from 80-ish% of the population and create a segmented society. All things have their price and you, my dear reader, should pick your poison.
Funnily enough, I would argue that Academic Agent’s video on Slop is itself slop, since it is just him sneering at other accounts for 20 minutes without actually going into any actual depth. This is not so say that AA’s channel is pure slop, he has some great videos with a lot of depth (I would particularly recommend his conference speeches), but that he sometimes uploads rants without much content.
But perhaps the biggest obstacle is that in order to learn history and to seriously engage with political ideas, one needs a lot of intellectual curiosity. And sadly, curiosity is nothing that you can teach or force.
Slop may get the most views. But intellectual essays and videos, IMHO, will get the most dedicated viewers. Just look at Mencius Moldbug himself. You’re doing great - keep up the great content.
Slop, as you say, will always be there. Which I think is mostly due to temperament. Even among the educated, most of them just accept whatever they are told, just because it seems well-argued and appeals to their sympathies. Even in classes where the educated are, most do not care for the ideas past studying for a test. So, it may be even fewer people who are truly intellectual. Most of the BreadTubers for instance, merely repeat basic leftist talking points like the DailyWire in the case of the right. So, there is also a lot of semi-slop that makes the Dunning-Kruger effect that much worse. That's why I prefer to read the thinkers themselves when I can.