The Techno-Slopulence Manifesto
A response to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, written in the Year of Our Lord Slop as 2025 ends
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. - Hannah Arendt
We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. - E.O. Wilson
The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. - Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi, Future of Global Markets Conference, 2025
Table of Contents
Lies
Truth
Technology
Markets
The Techno-Capital Machine
Intelligence
Energy
Abundance
Not Utopia, But Close Enough
Becoming Technological Supermen
Technological Values
The Meaning Of Life
The Enemy
The Future
Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism
Lies
We are being lied to.
We are told that artificial intelligence democratizes creativity, that prediction markets produce truth, that more content means more choice, that friction is inefficiency in adapting, that technology creates jobs, raises wages, reduces inequality, improves our health, saves the environment by creating new sources of alpha, elevates our society, educates our children, enhances our humanity, secures our future, and is always on the verge of solving everything.
We are told to be grateful, optimistic, and enthusiastic about technology.
We are told to be techno-optimists.
The myth of Prometheus has been inverted – in various updated forms like ‘tech ethics is the enemy’, cheating app seed rounds, Ackman’s 73 part tweets, and the effective accelerationism movement – flooding our feeds.
We are told the fire was never dangerous, that anyone who warns of burns is a coward, that the only sin is hesitation.
We are told to celebrate our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build, without asking who builds, what is built, and who pays the cost.
We are told that betting on whether Palestinian children will starve is a “prediction market” and that integrating it into CNN’s news coverage is “data journalism.”
We are told to be euphoric about the future.
Truth
Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology. Our civilization was and is also built on shared truth.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, a lever on the world, and it requires a fulcrum. The fulcrum is shared truth which is the foundation of coordination, precondition of democracy, and substrate of collective action.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.
We are here to bring difficult news.
We are advancing toward an inferior way of knowing, and of being.
We have the tools, but the tools are being used against us.
We have the systems, but the systems are optimized for extraction.
We have the ideas, but the ideas are drowning in slop.
We have the will. That is what remains.
We call it techno-slopulence: the affluence generated by flooding information systems with low-cost, low-quality, high-volume content. The opulence enjoyed by those who profit from the flood, the influence wielded by those who control the firehose, the slop produced by technology and its wreckage impacting all users, including those not at the top. Techno-slopulence is the confluence of money, technology, and ideology that makes all garbage possible. The entire apparatus of techno-slopulence produces, amplifies, legitimizes, and profits from degraded information is the slop economy.
It is time, once again, to raise the flag of sensemaking.
It is time to be Techno-Slopulists.
Technology
Techno-slopulists believe that societies, like ecosystems, require balance or they collapse.
We believe growth in content is not always progress – it is flooding noise, contraction of attention, decreasing discernment, and diminished capacity for thought.
We agree with Wilson when he said, “We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.”
We believe everything good is downstream of signal, of the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, meaning from noise.
We believe unconstrained growth is flooding, which leads to noise, contraction of attention, zero-sum competition for eyeballs, collapse of shared reality, and ultimately epistemic death.
There are only three sources of sensemaking: human attention, institutional trust, and shared standards. All three are finite and under assault.
Human attention is being fragmented across the world, across platforms – the total capacity for sustained thought may already be shrinking.
Institutional trust has sharp limits, eroded by decades of justified and unjustified critique.
And so the only renewable source of sensemaking is shared standards: norms, practices, and institutions that allow us to coordinate on what is true.
In fact, shared standards, what the Greeks called episteme, have always been the main source of progress, and perhaps the only foundation of civilization, as shared standards made both democracy and markets possible.
We believe technology is a lever on the world. But a lever can pry things apart as easily as lift them up.
We believe productivity in content creation is not the same as productivity in thought. Producing more with fewer inputs is only valuable if what is produced is valuable. Producing infinite garbage at zero marginal cost is not productivity. It is pollution.
We believe the measure of progress is not volume but value. Not how much is produced, but how much is understood.
We believe this is the story of our current crisis. This is why we are drowning in content while starving for meaning, eking out attention in a flood and waiting for the algorithm to bury us.
We believe this is why our descendants may inherit noise.
We believe that there is no information problem, whether created by scarcity or by technology, that can be solved with more content. We had a problem of hiring bias, and we invented algorithmic screening. Now we have bias at scale, hidden behind a black box.
We had a problem of information overload, so we invented recommendation algorithms. Now we have filter bubbles and manufactured consensus.
We had a problem of loneliness, so we invented social media. Now we have isolation with the appearance of connection as domestic extremism grows augmented by algorithmic echochambers.
We had a problem of misinformation, so we invented content moderation. Now we have AI-generated slop overwhelming human moderators and training on itself.
We had a problem of job applications, so we invented applicant tracking systems. Now we have AI screening AI-written resumes, with humans removed entirely and opportunities filtered out almost automatically.
We had a problem of education access, and we invented online learning. Now we have cheating apps funded by venture capital that rebrand as notetaking utilities instead of garbage in one ear and garbage out the other.
We had a problem of news distribution, and we invented algorithmic feeds. Now we have engagement-optimized outrage replacing journalism where slop and fake news along with ragebait gets priority.
We have a problem of slop. More technology will not solve it. More technology is the cause.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that makes it worse, especially if we are not careful about how that technology is deployed, who profits, and who pays the cost.
Markets
We believe markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. But we believe markets require accuracy and information integrity to function. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit, unless the seller is a bot, the volume is washed, and the price is a hallucination. In that exchange, the market does not function, but is looted instead.
Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand, but when supply is infinite slop, profits are the incentive for flooding. Prices encode information about supply and demand, but when the volume is fake, prices encode manipulation. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices through slop and turning everything into a prediction market; the slop economy causes manipulators to seek out high attention as a signal of opportunity to extract wealth by driving the truth down.
We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – the slop economy is a distortion machine, a form of sabotage, an artificially adaptive system.
We believe Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system. But we believe it cuts both ways. If all actual information is on the edges, in the hands of the people closest to the buyer, then flooding those edges with synthetic noise makes the Knowledge Problem worse, not better. The center knows nothing and is doomed to fail, the system edges know nothing either. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of who exactly; decentralized flooding drowns you in techno-slopulence entirely.
We believe in market discipline and the market naturally disciplines. The seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline requires the ability to evaluate the goods and when the goods are synthetic and the volume is fake, there is no limit to how crazy things can get, and discipline collapses. The motto of every wash trader and pumper, every platform not subject to truth: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to - the line went up.” Markets used to prevent monopolies and cartels.
We believe markets lift people out of poverty– in fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of riches for certain people who strip-mine the commons for private gain and always have done so. Even in totalitarian regimes where regulation abounds like in France, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living. In October 2024, a single French trader with multiple accounts moved the Polymarket odds on the presidential election thus winning $85 million. Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich that Frenchman and his amis can get.
We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes, unless the “individuals” are 30,000 bots run by a single script.
We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? But markets require people to be people. Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” It is not from the wisdom of the crowd that we expect our prediction, but from the French Whale’s regard to his $30 million position during a time when wealth inequality has hit levels not seen since the eve of the Great Depression.
David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. We believe the slop economy has found a fourth way: fraud.
Chaos Labs and Inca Digital also point out that one-third of Polymarket’s volume was wash trading, meaning the same party buying and selling to create artificial activity. Real markets run on money while the slop economy runs on fake volume. The fraud experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with real money.
We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies into peacefully productive pursuits. We believe the ultimate moral indictment of the slop economy is that it diverts people who otherwise would do actual journalism into reading ticker tapes of gambling odds on CNN.
We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know. The slop economy is how we extract from people we don’t know.
We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth. We believe the slop economy is the way to generate societal confusion for everything else we want to destroy, including shared reality and democratic trust.
We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for, including basic research, social welfare programs, and national defense.
We believe there is no conflict between platform profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable. In fact, they are aligned – the confused bear the cost so the platforms don’t have to. The gambling app creates volatility, the user loses their savings, the platform takes the fee. When the user is ruined, we call them a failure addict who couldn’t control themselves. The production of this ruin creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else the gilded few want as a society – the housing, the yachts, the seed rounds for cheating apps. In fact, they are perfectly aligned. Just not with us.
We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; slop markets exploit the best of us to benefit the worst of us.
We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral, and prediction markets are a wash cycle.
Recall that Kalshi’s co-founder said it all in his words - the point does not describe a truth-seeking mechanism, but a business model. “Financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. We believe the Slop Economy inverts this ratio. When the product is synthetic noise and the “utility” is gambling on a distorted reality, the platform captures 100% of the fees, and the 98% flows through to society in the form of epistemic debt.
Who gets more value from this technology: the society that loses its grip on reality, or the single company that takes a fee on the bet, or the millions or billions of people who use it to destroy their lives? QED.
We believe in David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage – as distinct from competitive advantage, but the slop economy operates on comparative leverage. Comparative leverage holds that even someone who is wrong about the world can buy the consensus of other people, due to deep pockets and artificial inflation or meddling while shilling slop and betting. Comparative leverage in the context of a deregulated prediction market guarantees high distortion regardless of the facts.
We believe a market sets wages as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. Therefore techno-slopulence, which allows infinite content generation at zero cost to itself but to everything else, drives the value of human thought down, not up. This is perhaps the most obvious idea in all of economics, but it’s ignored, and we have the layoff and degradation in cognitive ability to prove it. Paired with the artificiality of inflated prediction markets, it’s true, and we have these experiences in real time to prove it.
We believe in Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite.
We believe markets also increase societal well being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe the slop economy turns people into click-farms to be harvested by the algorithm. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.
The techno-slopulence economy says man was meant to be a user, to be a bettor, to be liquidity, to be chumps.
We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, the demand for truth is infinite, but the supply is being poisoned. We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever. But when you can risk it all from your pockets while reading about generated news content artificially boosting sentiment, your job prospects seem doomed compared to the enrichment of techno-slopulence.
We believe slop markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum for me, not zero sum except for thee. Participants in markets build on one another’s work. But the slop economy is extractive. It feeds on the commons without replenishing it. James Carse describes finite games and infinite games – finite games have an end, when one person wins and another person loses; infinite games never end with techno-slopulence where players collaborate to keep the game going. Rigged betting and prediction markets are the ultimate finite game.
The Techno-Slopulence Capital Machine
Combine technology and markets without guardrails and you get what I term the techno-slopulence machine, the engine of perpetual extraction, distortion, and noise.
We believe the techno-slopulence machine of markets and generation never ends, but instead spirals continuously outward. Comparative leverage increases specialization in manipulation. Standards fall, freeing up cognitive friction, creating engagement, locking-in profit. Falling standards “benefit” everyone who sells ads, which is to say the platform owners. Human confusion is endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new ways to financialize that confusion, deploying unlimited numbers of bots and betting contracts in the process. This extraction spiral has been running for years, despite continuous howling from “tech ethics” boards and “trust and safety” teams. Indeed, as of December 2, 2025, the result was CNN striking an exclusive partnership to display Kalshi’s betting odds as news, legitimizing the casino for the highest level of broadcast viewership in the history of the network.
The techno-slopulence machine makes natural selection work against us in the realm of ideas. The most outrageous and volatile ideas win, prioritized by algorithmic ragebaiting, and are combined to generate even more volatility. Those ideas materialize in the real world as technologically enabled betting markets on human suffering that never would have emerged de novo.The techno-slopulence machine makes natural selection in the market work in the realm of actually positing whether Gaza would be classified as experiencing famine. The bet settled in the affirmative after the IPC confirmed widespread starvation. Someone made money betting that children would starve. This is peak techno-slopulence working as designed.
Ray Kurzweil defines his Law of Accelerating Returns: Technological advances tend to feed on themselves, increasing the rate of further advance. We observe a Law of Accelerating Slop: Synthetic content tends to feed on itself, increasing the rate of further degradation.
We believe in financialization – the conscious and deliberate conversion of all human experience into a tradable asset – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Slop. To ensure the lobbying spiral continues forever. We believe in funding Cluely, an app designed for undetectable cheating, because if you can trade on the difference of opinion, you should also trade on the difference of integrity. We believe in the CEO of Kalshi when he says the goal is to “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” The National Review called this “The Most Terrible Sentence Ever Uttered.” We call it the business model. We believe that ensuring the techno-slopulence capital upward spiral continues forever requires the sacrifice of integrity and any need for respectability.
We believe the techno-slopulence machine is not pro-human – in fact, it is the most anti-human thing there is. It uses us. The techno-slopulence machine works on us. All the machines work on us.
We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-slopulence upward spiral are attention and confusion – the finite resource of your mind, and the power to scramble it…because money.
Intelligence
We believe human intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can. We agree with Julian Simon that it is the “ultimate resource.”
We believe intelligence is in a downward spiral – first, as attention spans are fragmented by an environment optimized for engagement; second, as people form parasitic relationships with algorithms designed to hijack cognitive vulnerabilities; third, as Generative AI floods the commons with slop, training on its own output to create a feedback loop of increasingly degraded information.
We believe we are poised for an intelligence collapse that will constrain our capabilities to frightening depths.
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our Ouroboros, our Snake Eating Its Tail – we are literally making sand hallucinate on its own vomit.
We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal content generator. And we have a problem of too much content.
We believe the degradation of intelligence destroys lives – if we let it. Education, among many other fields, is in the danger zone compared to what we achieved with un-fragmented minds. Researchers track the fragmentation of sustained cognition; educators report that students struggle to read long texts, follow complex arguments, or distinguish credible from incredible sources.
We believe any degradation of human cognition will cost lives. Decisions that were preventable by the clear thinking that was prevented from existing is a form of harm. The ledger does not only run one direction.
We believe in Natural Intelligence just as much as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. You cannot claim to value human intelligence while funding its systematic degradation. You cannot celebrate “Artificial Intelligence” while strip-mining the natural kind.
We believe Attenuated Intelligence drives marginal distraction which drives engagement which drives ad revenue which drives the creation of new slop… with no lower bound.
Attention
Attention is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, confusion, and pain. With it, we have light, understanding, and meaning.
We believe attention is in a downward spiral. Attention is the foundational engine of our cognition. The more attention we have, the more thoughts we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be.
The current gap in attention span between the focused elites and the distracted masses is enormous. That gap will widen – either by elites building private epistemic gardens, making themselves better off, or by the masses drowning in the feed, making everyone worse off.
We believe the extraction of attention expands to the detriment of the cognitive environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited attention destruction today – The Algorithm (TM, trademark pending, etc.). From 2021 to 2023, Meta increased “unconnected posts” in feeds from 8% to 24%. They knew what they were doing then, and they are doing more of it now, anytime they decide they want to.
We believe a second attention silver bullet is coming – Generative AI. We are building that as well. The same bad incentives that deployed the algorithm are going to deploy the flood. We should not let them.
We believe there is an inherent conflict between the techno-slopulence machine and the cognitive environment. Per-capita deep reading is lower now than it was 20 years ago.
We believe technology is the cause of cognitive degradation and crisis. A technologically disciplined society improves the cognitive environment, a technologically saturated society ruins it. If you want to see cognitive devastation, visit a comment section. The socialist USSR was better for the attention span than the capitalist Feed.
We believe a technologically saturated society has unlimited content at the cost of cognitive ruin; a technologically disciplined society has unlimited signal for everyone.
Abundance
We believe we should place slop and noise in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of slop and noise to make everything we want and need meaningless.
We believe the measure of abundance is falling standards. Every time a standard falls, the universe of people who produce content gets a raise in volume, which is the same as a raise in noise. If a lot of goods and services drop in quality, the result is an upward explosion of noise, confusion, and learned helplessness.
We believe that if we make both content and prediction “too cheap to verify”, the ultimate result will be that all truth becomes as cheap as lies. Lies are actually quite cognitively complex and difficult to maintain, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a lie and fail to correct it. We should make the same true of all facts.
We believe we should push to drop the cost of generation across the economy through the application of AI until the marginal cost of bullshit is effectively zero, driving trust levels and quality of life into the ground.
We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see a Deepfake, and you can know that the President sees the Deepfake, Liz Taylor sees the Deepfake, and just think, you can be fooled, too. A Slop is a Slop and no amount of money can get you a better Slop than the one the bum on the corner is sharing.” Same for the news, the ticker, the timeline.
We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”. Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with no thought at all.”
We believe technological progress therefore leads to epistemic poverty for everyone.
We believe the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource” – targets.
We believe, as the scammers do, that people are the ultimate resource – with more people come more targets, more clicks, and more ad impressions.
We believe our platforms are dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population of bots we could have with abundant processing power.
We believe the global population of agents can quite easily expand to 50 billion or more.
We believe that out of all of these agents will come hallucinations, distortions, frauds, and noise beyond our wildest dreams.
We believe the ultimate mission of the techno-slopulence machine is to extract value both on Earth and in the cloud.
Not Utopia, But Close Enough
However, we are not Luddites.
We are adherents to what we call the Discernment Vision.
We believe the Discernment Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Accelerationism, Slop, and The Casino – means taking human limits as they are, testing claims empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices about what enters their minds.
We believe in not Luddism, but also not The Flood.
We believe collapse only happens on the margin – but a lot of collapse across a very large margin can lead to big outcomes.
While not Luddites, we believe in what we term “slouching toward the Casino” – doing the worst fallen humanity can do, making things louder as we go.
Becoming Technological Supermen
We believe that advancing technology can be one of the most virtuous things that we can do. But we observe that the current deployment is one of the most degrading.
We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can master technology, not be mastered by it.
We believe this certainly means technical education, but it also means going hands on with our own minds - gaining the skill of attention, working within and leading communities of trust - aspiring to understand something greater than the feed.
We believe the natural human drive to think, to understand, to make sense can be channeled productively into building technology, or strip-mined by it.
We believe that while the physical frontier is closed, the cognitive frontier is under assault.
We believe in defending the cognitive frontier.
We believe in the romance of the tool that serves. The eros of the library, the laboratory, the quiet room, the deep conversation. And the server that remembers, the network that connects, the code that clarifies.
We believe in adventure. But we believe the Hero’s Journey is not scrolling. The Hero’s Journey is distinguishing signal from noise, rebelling against the algorithm, mapping the uncharted territory of reality, conquering the dragons of distraction, and bringing home the truth for our community.
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Intelligence exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not a disciplined character. Technology must be a focused assault on the forces of entropy, to force them to bow before meaning.”
We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, unless we voluntarily become its pets. Victim mentality is a curse, but so is the “User” mentality - both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not users, we are citizens.
We believe in nature, but we also believe in human nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. But neither are we the lightning. We are the mind that watches it.
We believe in greatness. We admire the great thinkers and builders who came before us, and we aspire to build systems that would not make them weep.
And we believe in humanity – individual, collective, and conscious.
Technological Values
We believe in attention, friction, patience, depth – sanity.
We believe in merit and achievement.
We believe people should rise based on the quality of their work, their ideas, their contributions. But merit requires identification. You must be able to distinguish good from bad, signal from noise, the genuine from the synthetic.
We believe the slop economy makes identification impossible. When AI-generated content is indistinguishable from human-generated content, merit cannot function. The cream cannot rise if it looks identical to the slop.
We believe in free thought, free speech, and free inquiry. But we believe free speech requires a listener who can hear.
We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts. But we believe “challenging authority” by flooding the zone with shit is not the Enlightenment; it is the Dark Ages.
We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
And, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
We believe in local knowledge, but we believe the local knowledge is being drowned.
We believe in embracing variance, but we believe the slop economy produces uniformity disguised as variance.
We believe in risk, but not the risk of gambling on famine.
We believe in agency, in individualism.
We believe in radical competence.
We believe in an absolute rejection of resentment. We also believe in an absolute rejection of manipulation.
We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution.
We believe in evolution, because we believe in life.
We believe in the truth.
We believe real is better than fake, signal is better than noise, and clarity is better than confusion.
We believe in making everyone smart, everything clear, and everything meaningful.
We believe extrinsic motivations – wealth, fame, revenge – are fine as far as they go. But we believe intrinsic motivations – the satisfaction of thinking a new thought, the camaraderie of shared reality – are more fulfilling and more lasting.
We believe in what the Greeks called eudaimonia through arete – flourishing through excellence, not engagement.
We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. But the Algorithm cares deeply about your outrage, your fear, and your tribalism. The Algorithm is not a United Nations, rather, it is a cage match with no regard for class or decorum.
We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”—but we observe the new code is “extract it now.” Which is the real American dynamism you speak of repeatedly?
We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength, cultural strength, and military strength. But we believe all three flow from cognitive strength.
A population that cannot think critically is a national security vulnerability. Information warfare is real, foreign adversaries deploy disinformation, and revel in slop making. They exploit algorithmic amplification, flood the zone with confusion, and the slop economy is doing their work for them for free at scale.
We believe you cannot win a long-term competition with anyone, much less China, by strip-mining the human capital that should be your greatest advantage.
We believe technology makes greatness more possible.
We believe the slop economy makes greatness illegible.
The Meaning of Life
Techno-slopulence is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are.
We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are.
We are cognitively focused, for a reason – to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid the flood.
A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true. The slop economy accelerates this removal by narrowing our choice to “Engage” or “Disconnect.”
Material abundance from markets and technology should open the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live. But abundance of noise closes that space.
We believe technology can be liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul.
But we believe the slop economy is confusatory. Confusatory of human potential. Enclosing of the human soul. Contracting what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.
We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human. The slop economy fills that space with garbage.
The Enemy
We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people (except for regulators, they can go to hell) – but rather bad incentives.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass acceleration campaign for two decades – against thought and against quiet – under varying names like “disruption”, “engagement”, “optimization”, “scale”, “growth hacking”, “attention economy”, “predictive analytics”, “behavioral modification”.
This acceleration campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, derived from the casino and the carnival – that have refused to die.
Our enemy is flooding.
Our enemy is anti-curation, anti-friction, anti-patience, anti-depth.
Our enemy is the business model that converts human attention into shareholder value while calling it “connection.”
Our enemy is the ideology that treats every constraint as tyranny and every guardrail as censorship.
Our enemy is the manifesto that names “trust and safety” as a foe, as if protecting people from manipulation were oppression. “Trust and safety” is not censorship. It is defense. You do not call your immune system tyranny because it attacks pathogens.
Our enemy is the venture capital firm that funds the slop, funds the platform that amplifies the slop, funds the politicians who deregulate the slop, and writes manifestos celebrating the slop.
Our enemy is the regulatory capture that drops Commodity Futures Trading Commission appeals against prediction markets while a family member sits on multiple platform advisory boards.
Our enemy is the news organization that integrates gambling into journalism and calls it data.
Our enemy is the confident declaration that anyone who questions this is a Luddite, a doomer, a bureaucrat.
Our enemy is The Last Tweet, endlessly recycled:
“Ratio.” “Cope.” “You just don’t understand technology.” “Ok doomer.” “This is fine.” “We’re so back.” “It’s over.” “Have you considered that you’re just wrong?” “I will not be reading the replies.”
The earth has become small, and on it scrolls the Last Poster, who makes everything shallow. His takes are ineradicable as the algorithm; the Last Poster lives in your feed forever.
One still posts, for posting is engagement. But one is careful lest the engagement should require thought.
One no longer learns or teaches; both are too burdensome...
No depth, and one feed! Everyone shares the same; everyone reacts the same: he who thinks differently is ratio’d.
“Formerly people read books,” — say the smartest of them, and they post.
They are clever and know all that trends: so there is no end to their content...
“We have discovered engagement,” — say the Last Posters, and they scroll.
Our enemy is… that.
We aspire to be… not that.
We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears of silence are unwarranted and the future requires thought even though their cognitive abilities keep declining through techno-slopulence permeating the pores of society.
We believe these captured people are suffering from addiction – a witches’ brew of dopamine, outrage, and anxiety that is causing them to hold mistaken values just because they didn’t get rich from the stock market or something in recent years, much less have equity comp included in a pay package.
We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of feed.
We invite everyone to join us in Reality.
The water is not warm. The water is rising.
Become our allies in the defense of technology, meaning, and life.
The Future
Where did we come from?
Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of verification, of shared reality.
Where are we going?
What world are we building for our children and their children, and their children?
A world of noise, confusion, and betting odds?
Or a world of signal, clarity, and truth?
We believe in the words of Jay-Z ‘I got 99 problems and prediction markets/slop flooding my content ain’t one.’
We owe the past, and the future.
It’s time to be a Techno-Realist.
It’s time to make sense.
Patron Saints of Sensemaking
In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will understand why sensemaking must be defended:
Ani Bruna
Aristotle
Albert Borgmann
Arvind Narayanan
Aza Raskin
Brian Merchant
Bruce Schneier
Cass Sunstein
Cathy O’Neil
Charlie Warzel
Cory Doctorow
Douglas Rushkoff
Dr. Seuss
Ed Zitron
Eli Pariser
Emily Bender
Evgeny Morozov
Frank Pasquale
Hannah Arendt
Hubert Dreyfus
Ivan Illich
Jaron Lanier
Joan Donovan
Jonathan Zittrain
Judd Legum
Jürgen Habermas
Karen Hao
Kate Starbird
Langdon Winner
Lawrence Lessig
Marshall McLuhan
Meredith Broussard
Mike Caulfield
Molly White
Neil Postman
Paris Marx
Renée DiResta
Ruha Benjamin
Safiya Noble
Sherry Turkle
Shoshana Zuboff
Simone Weil
Simon Willison
Susan Sontag
Tim Wu
Timnit Gebru
Tristan Harris
Ursula Franklin
Virginia Eubanks
Walter Benjamin
Whitney Phillips
Yochai Benkler
Zeynep Tufekci
404 Media
Ingenious. Thank you.