👁️

i think redundant. to me your terms might imply people pretending to be nostalgic?

i think that wrongly implies the existence of a "true" nostalgia

ooooh will look into it, would love to watch/listen/read what people have to say

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

though, think we can tell a more interesting story than "more than ever" as to what is different. "this is an old concern but is now accelerated" is always the too-easy conclusion of most tech pieces

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

thank you, Andy!

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

im always on the wrong continent for the best stuff!

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

Our suggestions for alternatives to anthropomorphizing language are presented in Table 3. For two categories, Emotion and Human role analogy, we found that there were no simple replacements. Rather, when faced with such anthropomorphizing language, the best bet was a larger reframing of the matter at hand. For the others, we could often find simple edits within a sentence, as exemplified in the Table 3.

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

interested!

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

Workplace - Kelly Pendergrast - Performing Automation

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/

will listen! have been annoyed with the "clicktatership" "influencer administration", "slopaganda" etc framing of this all lol

i think youre going down the right path. in an era where image manipulation is so easy, its interesting that so many of the debates take for granted the image objects as a common starting point (and then diverge in their interpretation). that seems important to conceptualize!

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

or maybe "slop" is just so broad it fits whatever your fave theoretical framework or opinion is, so all this meta-commentary is just slopslop

it feels right to call "slop" both that which works so well it is standardized everywhere and that which makes no sense at all. highly optimized systems also produce the most confusing outcomes (or horrific ones, see Bauman)

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

been saying this! maybe one way to frame it is Weberian rationalization as about production, mcdondization as incorporating consumption, and slop theory could better integrate prosumption?

love that "slop" doesnt just mean "AI" but rightly describes a whole regressive (and boring) system that produces much of our lived reality. a system that has especially fallen in love with AI

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