Slop me Product Mommy
Slop is the new spam. You probably hear imagined sounds when you read this onomatopoeic term since we humans love to associate senses with other senses. Source? I just made that up.
No, I have not made up the term slop. It's been around lately. According to Simon Willison, slop is the ideal term for the anti-pattern with which people are served, to put it roughly, spammy and generative-AI originating outputs ranging from lists to alleged art works.
Neither the author himself nor I myself am against the utilization of generalized LLMs for the benefit of either the society, or the individual. If you read the blogpost to which I've just referred, the tone is rather that the average people are good at spamming the rest of the population through myriad networks.
Interlude
Willison is right. As a trans-dimensional curiosity levels acceleration proponent myself, I think we will keep seeing slops, mega-slops, über-slops, meta-slops, and their aggregators through the course of lifetime—if we can survive the aging somehow, we can even enjoy it ad nauseam till we've finally been admitted to a network state variant running on a ragequit mothership smart contractual factory one day.
However, these do not change our present-future realities:
01. Slop is prevalent in the AI sector-networks.
02. Slop is prevalent in crypto-economics—except for the circles where the entropic disadvantages of sloppiness is always already known regardless of the actors working towards a cryptographically self-securing open source software and open finance are pro-AI or not; pro-memes or not; pro-capitalism or not. That is, there is a consensus amongst both the most elitist altruist of the spectra or the utmost conservative neoliberalist builder so as not to have the engine hijacked by the mediocre if not the stupid or the lazy relativist.
03. Slop is even more seeded into that which is fallibly termed as the web3—now, this is not a diss. I work in that area as a freelancer, and at times as the fulltime conceptual shitposter—all doxxed, no blackmailing contracts for pentesting, sorry.
04. When the current mediocre AI combines with the thirst-traps of pseudo-celebrity levels of cringe and stupidity, we end up with that which is termed as the consumer crypto, or what consumer crypto should not be; and, for the sake of brevity, everyone calls it web3.
05. We can meme better.
06. We can build better habit-forming products that are better than blackhole casinos that insist that they are indeed no gambling enterprises.
07. Memecoins are not bad but the way they are done today are worse than the worst.
08. The mediocre and stupid rule the world and people who want to make quick status, reputation, or bucks think that we should align entire emergent markets that re-fine societal systems at the cybernetics ends shall just be some vaporwave atrocity imploding upon itself.
09. 99% of the consumer grade products, and their teams, that & who roasts UX and UI of trail blazers keep shipping the most mediocre of all consumer products with infantilizing marketing campaigns and social media post-threads by in actual compartmentalizing the expanded crypto-ecosystems into federated anechoic chambers of miserable epistemological bubbles run by incompetent PR firms.
10. These people have a lot to learn before they take it either on honest and hardworking core dev teams such as Ethereum or others who do real business at the intersection of traditional economies and the emergent cryptographically self-securing economies thanks to a combination of hybrid verticals ranging from the RWAs to data availability and security layers such as Maker, Chainlink, Circle, Tether or CEXes like Coinbase.
11. While I agree that there are sovereignties at stake here regarding individual liberties, the right to a perfect polis of one's own, expanded lifetimes that won't be nuked because of a guy who does not like to wash his hands after defecating, public goods ready to be hijacked because of the politically correct gullible decision-makers, ==many in web3 act as if they are not part of the problem that poses decay at our industry thanks to their constant drama filled incessantly developing toxic interactions, thanks to their understanding of culture as mere micro-video bites wherein uninformed opinionation, thanks to their riskily righteous self-acknowledgment where they do not admit that neither do they solutions work nor can they fit the roles they've hijacked.
Hence, web3 has a spectra-wide organizational problematic where sloppy heads run things most of the time all the whilst utterly busy giga-brains just let their marketing teams burn immense amount of time, money and other resources on things and politics that will never work. It is because they are busy and they think that these people who run the show for the "enduser" are indeed accountable like themselves. They are not, and exceptions will not make the rule since the networks are getting more and more congested and the non-meriting is helping their slacker networks be added to the liquidity spigot which bears many lips' unbearable sloppiness to this day.
How can an Organization not Fall into the Traps of Web3 Slop?
I have no clue whatsoever but I have a rather generalist understanding of the problems. However, if I were a system or business analyst at a VC fund, or a CEX, or DEX, or a smol niché product that surprisingly passes as a startup, I'd just start solving the problems for myself where I'd put a couple of generalist powerusers who understand anything from the mechanisms in which voting blocs collude to myriad market-making systems to the relationship graph in the blockchain-enabled art markets to oracles bridging the trad to the new, and would network with people who are working at the privacy, security, onchain physics, PoS economics, PoW problematics, hillbillies, hipsters, yankees, hermits, models, Kraftwerk, Bruce Springsteen, Salvatore Ganacci, and Ari Juels, and that mevboost list, and that preconf livestreams, and everything in-between without first roasting people who counter-argue that indeed my brand cannot meme, and of course my interns are just humans and are easily agitated, and indeed the users are not toddlers.
Rub a Slop
