I don’t like it when the big museum in New York is trying to catch up with the trend on Instagram. Ultimately, that’s kind of the point of institutions—whether they’re new or old—to have a position.
But our position was: It’s ridiculous for us to go on Instagram as musicians or conceptual artists and be invited to take pictures of ourselves all day to seduce somebody into liking us in the hope they might engage with a book we write. That is a debased understanding of culture. We were very hardline on this.
But for the most part, the logic of web2 was a mistake. People were obsessed with network effects, with the conceit that more attention means better. That’s been disproven. It was right enough for companies to grow, but culture has been debased for it. So my optimistic take isn’t about Italian brainrot or whatever, but that this phenomenon will overwhelm our current media landscape enough to make us reconsider how we fundamentally value media.
But the overwhelming nature of the slop will force us into making interesting decisions about culture that we should have made 10 years ago.
Software slop emerges when builders chase monetization before product-market fit. AI slop follows a different pattern — creators inflating their image in an attention economy that rewards volume over substance. The counterintuitive claim: when creation becomes easier, the constraint shifts from technical ability to depth of perspective. Abundance of tools filters for longevity and community, not just output.KC: What potential externalities related to AI and cultural production/information dissemination do you think is talked about too much and talked about too little? MD: I think what’s talked about too much is the low-hanging fruit—replacement narratives. That’s often silly and belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what art is, which is a consensus network between humans. It’s not pictures or whatever. That kind of category error leads to an interminable amount of conversation that doesn’t need to happen. Also, generally, the conceit that the culture industry—as we currently understand it—is under threat, and that means culture is under threat, is absurd.
In crypto, people have a high tolerance for abstraction. They intuitively understand that the way you release something is also part of the thing. That’s slept on. It’s so liberating to just understand the obvious truth that that is not the case, that these things are fluid, and that’s part of the fun. And then once you realize that, you realize we have much more agency over the future than we may believe that we do.
