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- The Club List, Issue #30: The Slop Singularity
The Club List, Issue #30: The Slop Singularity
Kodi McKinney
January 07, 2025
Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.
It’s good to be back in action post-holidays, and I’ve been thrilled to be able to work with an increasingly varied slate of clients heading into the new year! You already know I’m acting as the fractional lead for A2IM’s local chapter events, and I’m proud to be assisting them as they celebrate 20 years of advocacy for the US independent music industry. Next week, I also hope to see you all at ANTICS’ second issue release, which lands at Baby’s All Right on January 15 complete with secret headliner.
You may have caught in last week’s newsletter that I’ll be returning to SXSW this year. I’ll have clients onsite to tell you about on both the artist level and the organizational level - and I can’t wait to be back! If you need assistance with your marketing onsite, we need to be in touch, and we need to do it soon. Just email me. I’m here, and I’ve got room to make for you. March is going to be upon us fast.
Today, we’re going to talk about why you can’t just do marketing on social media channels if you want to survive where the Internet is going. It gets wild. Strap in.
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The Slop Singularity
If you know older people who are retired and watch a fair bit of YouTube, it's fascinating to see how they live in the age of AI.
About one in ten YouTube viewers can be counted as a Baby Boomer. These are people who grew up with thoughtfully-produced entertainment. Even if the shows they watched were formulaic at times, they were almost certainly made by humans.
In the AI era, this has changed. Cut to me at home for the holidays, walking in on my parents watching what I would describe as visual AI-generated short stories on YouTube.
Sometimes, they had looked for one on purpose, but I discovered quickly that this was rare. It was far more common that I’d find one of them had fallen asleep in front of an unrelated video that interested them, and it had autoplayed within a video or two. Morbidly fascinated, I zeroed in on one channel that kept turning up - named Stories & Dreams, with stock Choose Your Own Adventure-level plotlines - and started digging.
There’s no proof of a human author, narrator, or illustrator on the videos this channel has. Perhaps the narration is lifted from texts and read by AI; more likely, it’s pure AI slop. But who is to say?
If you fall asleep on YouTube in the right places, this sort of thing will likely find its way to you. It harvests money by playing to casual viewers, money received by unknowable hands.
You may find this kind of thing to be dystopian. But as someone who’s spent far too much time considering the effect AI slop is having on creativity, marketing, and how we perceive the world around us, I see something coming that's a bit…dumber.
Keep in mind that when this has been on near me, it’s generally playing to a sleeping audience, as if it were 30 years ago and the Weather Channel was left on overnight.
You’ve heard me talk about enshittification plenty - the compulsion to make a good product progressively worse in the name of profit. This is a step past that.
There is plenty to be concerned about in AI slop’s fast propagation across memes, ads, and self-help gurus on Instagram, and what it means for artists. But I can’t help thinking we are glimpsing a potential end-stage for technofeudalism.
Sure, the absolute biggest tech giants have grown so large as to suggest something post-capitalist, where user reliance on social platforms to sell their work amounts to a kind of fiefdom. But I'm an optimist at heart. And if we get to where most content on those platforms is impossible to connect with as a human, there is reason to stop using them.
That end-stage is what I would call the Slop Singularity. At the risk of advancing a slippery slope fallacy, I see this as one very clear likely outcome. And it may arrive sooner than we think. If you create original work, you need to be prepared for it.
What is the Slop Singularity?
It's the point where if enough AI slop drowns out humans on the social channels people use every day, it will leave the Internet to resemble a cut-and-paste society. That society would be filled with too-well-generated vanilla images and convincing robot voices, many of which want to sell you something. No one in it would be talking to each other really, there would be no ability to discern what is useful and not useful, and social media would no longer be social in a way we recognize.
And at that point, humans are going to want to connect with each other elsewhere.
The good news in this is that AI, itself, does not have an agenda. So this is likely to be less insidious than one might think, and instead, profoundly stupid.
I don’t think the Slop Singularity has been a scenario the owners of the major social networks have thought through as well as we’d expect. And who could blame them?
Suddenly, tech CEOs have the tools to push user growth past its upper limits of “everyone with an internet connection” by adding AI-powered bot users and content, trained on how their human users talk every day. (Before you find me alarmist: Meta is openly, literally doing this.) This becomes sellable to advertisers while also solidifying growth for shareholders. Even if you have AI growth taking the place of human growth, there are plenty of ways to spin this as proof of heading in a positive direction, especially if humans are engaging with the bots. In a world where over 40% of all online traffic is bots, this isn’t a radical idea.
(A darker idea: get AI-powered bot users laundering real money via cryptocurrency, and watch unknowing advertisers book ads over and over again when they notice conversion is sky-high. I have a strong suspicion this is already happening in various capacities.)
We have all been weighing out AI as a threat to creativity's value. But in the longer term, I see a point at which human beings stop recognizing themselves in the content it makes and just tune it out.
Consider how many people you know who stopped using social media in the past few years; I’ve known several. Go far enough, make the platforms unpalatable enough, and we can imagine the point at which slop begins to eat itself.
That’s the Slop Singularity.
At some point, the people you’re looking to reach online just won’t be looking for what you expect anymore. People will want to make sure what they’re getting is real, and “real” will come at a premium. Outrage-centered algorithms of social media yesteryear won't even cut it. Real will require real.
As a business, you beat this by showing humanity in what you are making and messaging, and by getting your narrative as tight as you can. As an artist, you beat this by keeping your social presence maintained while doubling down on mailing lists and engagement in the physical world. This isn’t the usual “grow a mailing list” preaching. You will need to be damn sure you are telling real humans that you are a real human.
Eventually, the people you need will want to go outside and touch grass. And I want your work to be there to catch them, when the Internet fails them.
There’s a reason I say “No AI” explicitly on my website when describing the marketing strategy I do for clients. It’s because I have felt this was coming for a while now, down to my marrow. I want you to know that if you hire me, you actually hire me.
But I don’t think I envisioned the Slop Singularity being this silly.
One Thing You Can Use Today
It's not easy to keep your motivation sometimes.
So when someone says thank you, tells you did good work, or just says something kind, note that feeling and save the note somewhere.
You need a "greatest hits” folder.
Physical is cool. Digital is even better.
I'm the sort of person who saves physical correspondence forever, and I'm also the sort of person that saves an especially kind email in its own tab to go back to later. If I'm having a day where the work I do feels like a slog and words of encouragement aren't easy to find, I then have that folder to pull up.
As I get older, I've needed it less and less, because my conviction has deepened. But some days, that greatest hits folder has been the one thing standing between me and the void.
And this serves a more outward-facing purpose, too. Anyone who's sent you strong enough of words to make this folder is probably also someone you can ask for a testimonial. Those go a long way for establishing your credibility. (If you're an artist, these are people you can ask to repost an album release you're doing or a gallery show you have coming up, too. Don't be afraid to make that ask.)
Track of the Week
Gareth Donkin - “Monday Nights”
I’ve been on a gigantic soul and jazz kick with winter nights in full swing, and Gareth Donkin’s Suite Escape EP has been a surprisingly British new-school answer to that. Built on a bed of hazy vaporwave but completely workable next to Thundercat in a DJ’s crate, “Monday Nights” is the clear highlight from the October follow-up to his 2023 debut album. The record’s out now on Brooklyn’s drink sum wtr, and the second he shows up on tour in the States, I’m there, no questions asked.
List of Clubs
These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.
Through January 23 - A.I. from Metropolis to Ex Machina @ Film Forum
Appropriately for today’s context, the Film Forum is screening a huge batch of sci-fi classics through the month, and January is undoubtedly good for watching films where it’s warm. Bonus: if you go on Thursday night, you can see Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, which is not the Alphaville most New Yorkers reading this would be expecting me to include.
Saturday, January 11 - Her Dark Heaven, P.H.0, Eve Claret @ Our Wicked Lady
The top two on this card have been especially interesting to me among NYC’s local scene lately, and Our Wicked Lady could use the support right now. It’s a good night to be over there.
Sunday, January 12 - Ravi Coltrane Quartet @ Roulette
Part of NYC Winter Jazzfest, this is especially notable for being a night of interpretations of John Coltrane’s landmark A Love Supreme for its 60th anniversary. You know. Ravi’s dad. That John Coltrane. Roll up.
Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…
