“Advertising… Advertising… Fix Vista.”
We laughed at this ad in 2007 because (obviously) the best way to solve Vista’s problems was to spend your budget fixing it instead of advertising. But eventually, companies decided that this wasn’t just acceptable, it was the preferred way to run a business. Now it’s the root of all problems.
It used to be that good quality meant good business. Consumers preferred high-quality products, so businesses were incentivized to improve their offerings, leading to better products over time. Then some genius discovered that spending on marketing instead of improving products was more profitable, and more companies began using advertising as a substitute for quality.
As businesses focused on advertising, ad technology became more sophisticated and more targeted. Ads now follow you around. You buy a lamp, and suddenly lamp ads are everywhere. Then platforms realized they could use those targeting algorithms to decide what content to show you to keep you hooked, and to control and manipulate you using your personal weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Your YouTube is not my YouTube, because everyone gets a different feed. Yet nobody seems to notice, and everyone thinks everyone is watching the same videos. When we don’t share the same information, we can’t properly discuss issues, and society becomes more divided.
With advertising, the market acts as if all goods are high-quality. When everything claims to be high-quality, consumers no longer know what high quality means. Over time, people can no longer differentiate between high and low-quality products. Then they no longer care. They’ve lost their taste.
Recently, I was trying to buy a watch winder for my father-in-law. I went to Amazon, and every watch winder is from an unpronounceable, alphabet-soup brand. They all had 4.2 stars. How could I tell which one was better? I had no idea. So I checked Reddit, and the only “branded” recommendation was a Wolf watch winder that costs thousands of dollars. I just wanted a machine that rotates a few times per day.
I figured those watch winders on Amazon were all shipped from the same factories in China anyway, so I checked Chinese shopping sites. And… it was even worse there. Everything had five stars, and the review systems are gamed to the point where you can’t find a bad review. At least Amazon still shows the negative feedback.
This isn’t just about e-commerce. On the web, slop-sites outcompete normal ones because the quality of writing no longer matters. On social media, creators pivot to slop-content because it’s cheaper and faster to produce, yet it can go viral just the same. In the job market, slop-programmers drive out real programmers because you don’t need to produce good work to get the job done.
A few companies tried to fight back. Over the years, we’ve seen them make their products worse or add crappy features in order to survive. We saw shoe companies start selling plastic shoes. Websites started adding overlays that ask you to sign up for their newsletter. But in the end, they still couldn’t out-slop the slop-brands. So they got shut down or were gutted and sold to private equity firms.
We’re now in the Age of Slop. If things get worse, we’ll enter a new Dark Age, except that this time the superstitions will be hallucinated by AI.