I wrote the first draft of the incredibly famous blog post Pig Slop on July 14, 2023. Version 3 is below, following almost a year after (as version 2 was posted on the cmnsu blog back in March). I really like the term pig slop, it denotes a negative agency in both the consumer and the product consumed. And also a snobbish pretentiousness of the whining author. I think its so funny to have remastered versions of a blog post, I’ll keep returning to it every couple months. Maybe one day it’ll be the length of a MA thesis!
And I really just enjoy the term, the two words of pig slop carries the arguement within itself, directed towards critiquing the malaise I feel of a “let people enjoy things” social concensus. Please care about the things you consume, don’t heap praise on media that doesn’t deserve it. Don’t hyperconsume things, don’t stray into fanatacism or participate in online fandoms — obsession is a hindrance to growth.
By care I mean that you should carry a critical gaze towards these media objects. Don’t slurp down the slop with glazed eyes, understand the intention of who produced it, the marketing and committee boards that influenced the item and turned it into a product. Netflix’s CEO said that their biggest competition is not HBO or Television, it is sleep. The culture industry and its products come for every available hour of your life, make sure that you hold steadfast. Don’t find meaning in meaningless places, take risks, experience something foreign to you, something that you’re not capable of understanding. Yet. The most meaningful films, books, or any media, are the ones that you don’t necessarily understand on the get-go. Be considerate of your pig slop, be able to determine what slop is. Turn into a Pig Snob.
1.
There is an interesting (and by interesting I mean deeply corrosive) thing that occurs in university classrooms from first-year to the seminar. It’s when let’s say, the instructor leans on or makes an offhand mention of something widely known among the glaze-eyed pop culture enthusiasts that line the plastic lecture hall seats. The subject of the instructor’s offhand mention that draws this interesting thing I want to focus on tends to be something along the lines of celebrities, marvel, BTS/kpop, anime, or video games. Eyes finaly drift upwards, airpods get put into their case, the tension of boredom now gone — and it snaps you awake. A palpable energy fills the once languished room, an energy whose intensity tends to only be seen in the vigor of zipping up backpacks, and the slamming shut of laptops whose screen time will reflect that the last 2-3 hours were spent on iMessage, Zara, and Discord. More than even the Canvas page of the current course, nonetheless, a platform for note-taking.
And then we see what this energy emerges as, it leads to hands being raised, an enthusiasm to participate in a discussion of the world that is much lived in, but now in a setting of academic tone. The synthesis of habits at home, and the projected ideal of a student who wishes to be embodied now fuse together into a fantastic outpouring of infantilization. A fantastic outpouring of shame. Mistaking the classroom for a comment section, mistaking their media-obsession for a point of discussion. This is singlehandedly the most succesful way that professors and teaching assistant’s manage to get student’s attention. Play to the lowest common denominator, attract the pigs by presenting them with slop.
You see this when students laugh or chuckle at the mention of something they have experienced or are a fan of in class. There’s almost a defensive stance to it, as they have finally mustered the confidence to participate, but it is only (dramatically on my point) to shill their obsession to the rest of the class. It is this defensiveness that I find fascinating, it is a defense of your media diet, your malnutritional intake, your pig slop. There is an element of shame inherent that I feel is at play here, or at least that I project onto them. The way people consume things, and reproduce them through everyday life seems to distract, and the aim is to make sure that their interest, their obsession, is criticism-free, as their interest is embodied by their person.
This element of shame, how they want both themselves to be perceived, but also for wanting to be perceived for having a certain taste or uniqueness flavoured by the object/media of their obsession. And this obsession is now commonplace, due to social media and the internet allowing us to fully explore and live through our obsessions. Personalities of individuals are determined by their media consumption, of their fandom of choice, their taste in time-wasters. One’s choice of entertainment is the greatest marker of ones personality in today’s world.
Attendance in online spaces that present themselves daily to fans reaffirms their obsession and association with the apple of their eye to be an ecological submission of the validation of their interest. It is this very obsession and putting value on content that does not deserve it that strikes me as either a selfish and cynical obsession of my own, or a great trend growing rapidly through the years. Perhaps a symptom of a culture that allows individuals’ growth to remain stagnant and reaffirm the interests they had since childhood. Obsession is a hindrance to growth. A Funkopop and Disney adult generation.
2.
No platform for this is worse than Reddit, where every interest, hobby, and anything has an adjacent community pumping out daily content. Daily use is the allowance of it to be visible daily. Every day consuming the same pig slop. The single largest cause of arrested development in society (hyperbole, but not by much). The fact that there is a subreddit for anything, bleeds an absurdity into every discussion that is even happening. R/blenders, one of the many cases of who the hell is taking the time to comment in R/blenders. How deep is the nadir of your life where you’re posting a literature review for the invisible public to hear about your favourite Ninja mixer — they should be sterilized via the same blender blades they love so much. And even then someone on Reddit will suggest that they use a different and more serrated blade to do the job.
Reddit killed the mass proliferation of forums across the web, and it has done so parallel to the overall commodification of the internet. Advertisers have always seeked to enter the space, and now they run it to the tits. What has happened now is an overall homogenization of online discourse, of online human discourse. Everyone on Reddit for the most part talks the same, and it is deeply corrosive and harmful to consume that content, because it ends up being reproduced in real life. Browse any of the popular subreddits and there is a consistent formula in what the most visible and popular comments say. No matter the tragedy or situation, comments are responses of jokes, of humor. And not even good ones, but repeated slogans and phrases that are present on the whole platform. Suddenly every new story or topic has the same old jokes said about it, ingraining a behavior of reactionary entertainment. This means that mass users of Reddit are numbed to the world around them, understanding every harmful event and banal topic through the lens of a reaction of humour. It has taught and further engrained entertainment as the de-factor understanding of how life should be consumed and understood.
As I always do as a form of digital self-harm is scroll through subreddits and just oggle, and try to understand the interactions I see. I view and perform this as an ethnographic death drive that I consciously have. I was on the star wars subreddit (ironically, please believe) and saw one guy talking about how a piece of his cereal looked like Yoda, and the number of comments that this spawned a discussion of was shocking. If this came up as a water cooler topic at a place of work, I would hope that guy gets shunned and relegated back to his depressing postmodern cubicle, which is probably lined with framed photos of Padme instead of a possible spouse and kids. But I say this to draw back to an example of someone who responds to a tutorial discussion with a question that gets reinforced by a lack of care. A lack of doing the reading, relying on their life experience of media consumption to solve a complex issue they see as a task to be checked off for a 5% participation grade.
3.
Catering to fans is something no media or writer should ever do. It is playing to the crowd — which is no longer an artistic process, but a process of appeasement. It is truly disgusting that we place so much emphasis on the happiness of fans. All it is, is the culture industry seeking to use the idea of fandoms to further solidify it’s own commodifying industrialized success. It should not surprise you that almost all online fandoms or subreddits are run by staff members at HBO, record labels, Netflix, Warner Bros. Fandoms are for the most part operated and ran by the show itself — we have propaganda for consuming entertainment now, what a Huxleyan world we find ourself in. The goal of every popular and commodified TV show or pop artist is to turn listeners into fanatics, because it is the latter that will purchase merchandise, pay for tickets to conventions, create mass amounts of content online, participate in discussions, and further influence other people into becoming fanatics. I hope that in 15-20 years we’ll see the idea of being a fan become something to look down upon, it should be met with ridicule and shame that you have handed yourself over to an entertainment cult. This doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy anything, you of course can, but what you should enjoy is not media that is market-tested and meaningless.
We see representation now become such a want for shows and artists to adopt, but the appeal of representation is not purely just for cultural/identity based reasons, it is to give meaning to a meaningless place. To add a tinge of relatability and reason to the slop. Suddenly the consumption of entertainment becomes a political act, which marks a sad state of affairs for life as a whole.
4.
We’re just pigs at a trough, slopping and having our snouts doused in industrial brown liquid that we not just consume, but find the meaning of life through. And now in the age of fandomization, we pigs can use the internet to tell TV writers and content creators what WE want our slop to taste like! Happily mixing our pigshit in with the slop already fed to us. We currently live in the version of Animal Farm where the pigs simply just want to make the pigshit they eat everyday pigshit they produce themselves. A sustainable closed-loop system where we get fat off our own shit. No one cares about the quality of the provocativeness of art as long as it’s something they already understand and want to see. A problem now is that art still exists (I am using the word art in a very heavy-handed way), but everything is being perceived as art when it’s pig slop, and everything no matter its quality is consumed as pig slop, our fat pink snouts slurping neverending grime mixed with our own shit, splattering over our glazed eyed faces.
And the thing that I hate about myself, is that when someone raises their hand to ask a question of the pig slop essence, I see those brown smears of slop massaged into their skin. Lips stained with slop, chunks of carrots, corn, and indescribable pieces of sorghum and fibre sticking out on their snouted face. I wonder what my face looks like to them, probably one of an unlovable quality.
-> Slopunk <- 