Intentio

Intentionality in an Age of Slop

A Manifesto for the Intentional Internet

“And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Fish (Still Life) by Paul Cezanne
Fish (Still Life), Paul Cezanne, (1864) Art Institute of Chicago

I. The Quiddity of Slop

Slop has been the word du jour over the past year. Both Merriam-Webster1 and the Economist2 named ‘slop’ their ‘Word of the Year’ for 2025.3 The term has been used to describe everything from the bizarre faux-Christian ‘shrimp Jesus’4 images which briefly flooded Facebook, to the sludge-like interchangeable fast-casual meals derided as ‘slop-bowls’.

However, I don’t think there has been a succinct description for the quiddity; the essence of, ‘slopness’. It has a phenomenological character people can intuitively feel: Potter Stewart’s test of “I know it when I see it” seems apt.56 Yet I believe we can do slightly better. To put it concretely, slop is something created or consumed without intention.7

Meaning Requires Intention

Imagine Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I materializing through random quantum fluctuations on the far side of the universe. Though Dürer’s original is a work pregnant with meaning, here it has none. Meaning is something constituted between an agent and object,8 not something which inheres to an object itself.9 Meaning requires a rational agent to direct an object towards an end; without that intention what remains is slop.

The set of ‘slop’ then is not identical to the set of AI-generated works.10 It is possible to create slop without AI when creating something solely for the sake of the entity itself, with no greater telos. It is also possible, though currently rare, to use AI as a tool to create intentional, meaningful works. Vermeer is said to have utilized a camera obscura to aid his works.11 Few though would argue that The Allegory of Painting is ‘slop’. Jia Zhangke’s Dance (2026) is a more recent example.12 What generative AI does though is greatly lower the barriers that used to serve as signals for intentionality.

The Degradation of Signals

A well formatted Github ‘readme’ used to be a strong indicator of the quality of the underlying software. A structured comment with perfect grammar helped signal a well thought out argument or reasoned review. Of course this was not a completely lossless signal. It was possible to find a diamond in the rough and lesser works might try to fake a veneer of quality without the same underlying craftsmanship. Goodhart’s adage, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” had some strength.13

However, due to the cost of replicating, even the pursuit of mimicry here created a ratchet effect to pull the floor of quality upwards. A junior programmer copying a senior’s design patterns improves not only the immediate product, but improves his own skills in the copying. Mi Fu only developed his unique style of calligraphy after years of copying the ancients.14

Due to the increasing algorithmic flood of information we are bombarded with, well-tuned signals are more important than ever. However with the advancement of AI, we increasingly have a Market for Lemons.15 As our signals degrade, adverse selection increases, driving high-quality goods away as they become harder to immediately distinguish. Even if one desires to be intentional in their consumption, there is only so much value that can be extracted from a work created without intention.

II. The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Gatekeepers

There have long been gatekeepers that controlled access to the cultural realms. During the Song dynasty, the imperial examination system set the intellectual and cultural bounds of society.16 In the Occident, this role was played by the Catholic Church. Even in a more open American society, the high costs of production and distribution ensured that culture was bottlenecked through studios, broadcasters, and publishers.

Disintermediation

The internet though disintermediated the cultural landscape. As distribution costs were driven to zero, there was no need for a gatekeeper between the consumer and producer. Through blogs, personal websites, community run forums, and direct-to-consumer retail creators could reach audiences directly. There would be, “an army of Davids taking the place of those slow, shuffling Goliaths.”17

The Gravity of Centralization

However, in systems, value naturally wants to centralize: power accumulates to the executive, capital consolidates in monopolies, “The empire, long divided, must unite”.18 Without a structural balance of powers and intentional protocols to promote decentralization, gravity collapses the system back toward a single point.

So it was on the internet. The shape was slightly different; with supply abundant, demand instead was consolidated. But the conclusion was the same and the end of the early internet was heralded by the emergence of the new social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

This is not to say that centralization is necessarily bad. Economies of scale are real and can provide consumer surplus at least in the short term. The internet titans won mainly by solving the very real problems of search and discovery for people.

The Attention Economy

Once demand was aggregated, advertising emerged as the natural monetization model. From this two incentives emerged: increase advertising load and improve advertising targeting.

There are two main ways to raise total advertising load. The first is to simply increase advertising density; play five minutes of ads for every five minutes of content. However, this degrades the user experience to the point where users eventually revolt.

The second approach is more pernicious. Ad load can also be raised by increasing the user’s time on platform. At first blush this seems mutually beneficial: the easiest way to keep a user on your platform is to provide them with content that interests them. However, what momentarily engages us is not necessarily what is ‘good’ for us. It is easier to target the limbic system over the prefrontal cortex.19

The Infinite Scroll

The experience of the chronological ‘following’ or ‘subscriptions’ feed is diminished and defaults are switched to algorithmically personalized home pages which cater to immediate impulses. The platform slowly enshittifies,20 but user session duration continues to increase.

However, advertising targeting can still be improved. The best way to improve targeting is through increased data collection. Not just off platform personal data, but also through tracking on platform behavioral patterns.

TikTok revolutionized here first with the short form video feed. Watching or swiping produces a new data point every 15 seconds at most. Youtube and Instagram soon followed with ‘shorts’ and ‘reels’. The new format turns out not only to be great for data collection but also gets users more hooked.

No longer does one have to even choose from a set of algorithmically provided options. There is no friction to continue consuming. No impetus to engage with the material on a deeper level. All content turns into pure ephemera to momentarily satiate crashes of dopamine.

III. Potemkin Agoras

In 2021, pseudonymous user IlluminatiPirate, posted a conspiracy theory to niche internet forum Agora Road. Titled ‘Dead Internet Theory’, it discusses a world dominated by fake data created by bots in order to control and shape public perception.21

In 2025, cybersecurity firm Imperva measured 51% of web traffic coming from bots.22 Cloudflare found 57% of HTML requests were from non-human sources.23 Russia has used covert AI tools such as Meliorator to, “create ‘authentic’ appearing personas en masse, allowing for the propagation of disinformation… [to exacerbate]discord and [try] to alter public opinion as part of information operations”.24

The Machinery of Manipulation

The Prigozhin backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) utilized Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Google+, Gmail, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Medium, Pinterest, Vine, Gab, Meetup, VK, LiveJournal, 4chan, 9GAG and Pokémon Go among other avenues to sow discontent on the American populace.25 Just on Facebook, an “estimated 3.3 million Facebook users followed IRA-backed pages, and these pages are the predicate for 76.5 million user interactions, or ‘engagements,’ including 30.4 million shares, 37.6 million likes, 3.3 million comments, and 5.2 million reactions. Facebook estimates that as many as 126 million Americans on the social media platform came into contact with content manufactured and disseminated by the IRA, via its Facebook pages, at some point between 2015 and 2017.”26

On Instagram the IRA ran 12 accounts with over 100,000 followers and 133 with over 10,000. These ran the ideological spectrum from:

The IRA was not alone in carrying out coordinated influence operations (CIOs). Google, in just the month of December (2025), terminated, related to CIOs:27

When X rolled out a feature showing where accounts were based from, it exposed that many highly inflammatory US political accounts on the platform are actually based out of different nations. @MAGANationX’ with 392,000 followers was registered in Eastern Europe. “@AmericanVoice__” with over 200,000 followers was shown to be run from South Asia. Ron Smith, “Proud Democrat” and “Professional MAGA hunter”, deleted their 52,000 follower account when it was traced to Kenya.28

The Case for Anonymity

There is still something to be said for anonymity. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote the Federalist Papers as Publius.29 Kierkegaard published under Johannes de Silentio, Constantine Constantius and half a dozen other pseudonyms. Soviet dissidents circulated samizdat unsigned, or under names that could not be traced back to a kitchen table in Leningrad. Privacy has often been a precondition for honesty, particularly where power makes honesty costly.

Even our ersatz agora though is crumbling. 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible.30 Digital institutions such as Wikipedia are not immune from link rot with 54% of articles containing at least one link in their ‘References’ section which no longer exists. As bots flood the commons, the old internet fades away.

IV. An Intentional Web

“a mere demarkation on parchment of the… limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers… in the same hands.”

— James Madison, Federalist No. 48 (1788)

While a myriad of serious issues plague the current state of the web, our diagnosis is not a prognosis. We stand at a hinge point where there is opportunity for great change. People have begun to feel the costs of the present arrangement: hours scrolling without satisfaction, feeds that reward impulse over interest, replies that turn out to be bots. As people independently seek ways out, a collective action problem which used to look intractable now just requires a path forward.

Leaving the Bad Environment

It is easier to leave a bad environment, than to repeatedly choose well inside of one. The addiction literature shows that removing someone from a cue-rich setting massively improves recovery.31 In the Catholic Act of Contrition, the penitent resolves not only to avoid sin itself but also the near occasion of sin.

It is common to look for incremental improvements and nudges to larger issues: ‘let’s implement an easily bypassable feed limit to short form content’. This is often the correct choice when the overall system is healthy. However, when the overall structure is broken, incremental improvements can get us stuck in short-term local maxima. We need to take a ‘Brandeisian’, holistic view of the health of the entire market.32 What structural changes can be made for better long-term results?

The Primitives

There are a number of primitives; core constructs, that we believe when integrated will give communities the conditions to flourish:

Curation over consumption. Works should be treated as artifacts worth keeping, not ephemera to scroll past. We want to design in a way that encourages curation over pure consumption; to inject friction to encourage deeper engagement of materials.

Individuals, not algorithms. Discovery should occur through following specific curators and creators. Content should spread based on quality, not algorithmic dictate. People might consume slop, but share based on higher values.

Local-first data. Having data locally, in open formats, forces communities and platforms to compete on quality rather than exit cost.

Decentralized, shared hosting. Content should live across many hosts rather than a single server. Canonicity should be communally negotiated. No single node should be load-bearing to avoid loss.

Incremental identity, distributed trust. Users should be able to prove specific claims about themselves without exposing the underlying data, and maintain separate personas across contexts. Communities should set their own identity requirements, with trust accumulating from different systems.

Pluralistic governance. Online communities today default to autocracy. What we want is subsidiarity.33 Governance should take the form that suits the community and operate at the scale that fits the decision.

Humans while containing radical freedom are also social animals. Together we can create systems and communities to point our freedom closer to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Footnotes

  1. Merriam-Webster, “Word of the Year 2025: Slop,” merriam-webster.com (2025). ↩

  2. “The word of the year for 2025 is ‘slop’,” The Economist (December 2025). ↩

  3. Runners up include ‘performative’ and ‘six seven’. Not the most hopeful omen for the future. ↩

  4. Alex Hern, “Spam, junk, slop: the latest wave of AI behind the zombie internet,” The Guardian (May 19, 2024). ↩

  5. Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964). ↩

  6. Stewart’s formulation was originally about obscenity (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 1964), but the epistemological structure — recognition without formal definition — maps precisely onto the problem of slop. ↩

  7. Something slop is closer to scalar than binary; see the Sorites Paradox. ↩

  8. This draws on the phenomenological tradition, particularly Husserl’s concept of intentionality as the directedness of consciousness toward objects. See: Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900–1901), trans. J.N. Findlay. ↩

  9. The Scholastic philosophers had a term for this distinction. Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle’s observation that the soul receives forms “without the matter” (De Anima II), distinguished between esse naturale, the bare physical existence of a form in matter, and esse intentionale, the existence of that same form as constituted in a mind directed toward it (Summa Theologiae I, Q.56). A thing may have the first without the second. Our imagined Dürer has esse naturale in abundance; what it lacks entirely is esse intentionale. See also: Medieval Theories of Representation, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩

  10. Slop is not interchangeable with ‘bad’; it is still possible to create ‘high-quality’ non-‘slop’ works which are ‘bad’, as they are directed towards a ‘bad’ end. ↩

  11. Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press, 2001). The thesis remains debated, but the optical evidence is compelling. ↩

  12. Jia Zhangke, Dance (2026). ↩

  13. Charles Goodhart, “Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience,” in Monetary Theory and Practice (Macmillan, 1984). The original formulation was about monetary policy; the generalized version is sometimes called Goodhart’s Law. ↩

  14. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 218–226. Mi Fu (1051–1107) was renowned for his mastery of classical styles before developing his own. ↩

  15. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. Akerlof’s insight was that information asymmetry degrades market quality — the same dynamic now applies to content. ↩

  16. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2000). The keju system shaped Chinese intellectual life for over a millennium (605–1905 CE). ↩

  17. Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (Nelson Current, 2006). ↩

  18. Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (c. 1400), opening line. The original: 天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分. ↩

  19. For a detailed treatment of engagement optimization and its psychological effects, see: Tristan Harris, testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, “Persuasive Technology” (June 25, 2019); and Center for Humane Technology, humanetech.com. ↩

  20. Cory Doctorow, “TikTok’s Enshittification,” Pluralistic (January 21, 2023). Doctorow defines enshittification as the lifecycle where platforms first attract users, then exploit them for business customers, then exploit everyone for shareholders. ↩

  21. IlluminatiPirate, “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake,” Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe (2021). The original post has since been widely discussed in mainstream media. ↩

  22. Imperva, 2025 Bad Bot Report (Thales Group, 2025). The report notes that automated traffic exceeded human traffic for the first time in 2024. ↩

  23. Cloudflare, State of Application Security Report (2025). HTML-specific bot traffic is higher than general web traffic due to scraping and content generation. ↩

  24. U.S. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Disrupts Russian Government-Backed AI-Enhanced Social Media Bot Farm,” Press Release No. 24-839 (July 9, 2024). ↩

  25. For the full scope of IRA operations across platforms, see: Renée DiResta et al., The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency (New Knowledge, 2018), prepared for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. ↩

  26. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media (2019), pp. 33–35. ↩

  27. Google Threat Analysis Group, TAG Bulletin: Q4 2025 (January 2026). Google publishes quarterly bulletins on coordinated influence operations terminated across its platforms. ↩

  28. These examples were widely reported following X’s rollout of location transparency features in late 2025. See: Casey Newton, “The bots are coming from inside the house,” Platformer (2025). ↩

  29. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published 85 essays under the pseudonym “Publius” between October 1787 and May 1788, collectively known as The Federalist Papers. ↩

  30. Pew Research Center, “When Online Content Disappears” (October 2024). The study also found that 21% of government website pages contained at least one broken link. ↩

  31. See: Lee N. Robins et al., “Vietnam Veterans Three Years After Vietnam: How Our Study Changed Our View of Heroin,” in The Yearbook of Substance Use and Abuse (1980). The landmark study of Vietnam veterans showed that environmental change was the strongest predictor of cessation. ↩

  32. Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914). Brandeis’s approach emphasized structural remedies over behavioral regulation — fixing the system rather than policing individuals within it. ↩

  33. The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the most local level capable of addressing them effectively. It has roots in Catholic social teaching (see: Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931) and was later adopted as a governing principle of the European Union (Treaty of Maastricht, Article 5, 1992). ↩