Over the past month and change, every day has brought some new and shocking change to the country where I was born. The mass pardon of domestic terrorists. Corruption charges dropped against the mayor of New York City, in exchange for cooperation with ICE. The explicit targeting of racial and sexual minorities, the resumption of total operations at Guantanamo Bay, an attempt to resegregate the Federal government and kill free speech at scale: it’s all been so overwhelming, and that’s the point.
These developments have been shocking for many, terrifying for some. And yet so many of them have been so brazenly, startlingly stupid. In between throwing a Hitlergruß and slashing USAID to ribbons, Elon Musk has spent hundreds of hours posting obviously fake information on Twitter, forcing the national press to explain that, no, USAID did not in fact send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. The engineers he hired to trash the American government keep praising racists and Holocaust deniers, and seem to know nothing about the law. Just last week, they posted classified information on their easily-hackable website.
Like any antisemite, Musk is an existentially gullible man. The tone of his social media posts and public appearances is somewhere between smug condescension and blind credulity. He prefers the cry-laughing emoji, and there is not a tweet about white genocide to which he will not reply: Wow, really? He seems to genuinely believe that it was he, and not his fellow huckster Donald Trump, whom Americans elected president. And why shouldn’t he? With an IQ several digits above our elected-despot and a fortune massively inflated by government contracts, Musk has the mental and financial edge on our sundowning president. He is destroying our government with impunity, because he has always broken every law or regulation which slows his enrichment. Only now he’s doing it from inside our executive office.
Yet this is clearly not enough: nothing gets to Musk and his tech-finance boosters like the suggestion that they live in a democracy, and are beholden to others. Rules, regulations, Congress, the courts: what are these but tools of slave morality, a means of protecting those “parasites” who would prevent Musk from raising himself über the rest of us. Tweeting about these things, the man adopts a sniveling tone of moral outrage, like a child who turns against the rules of a game he cannot immediately win. When it comes to the dismantling of the American state, we are supposed to lie back and think of Elon.
It makes perfect sense that Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and their tech-lash boosters launched their assault from Silicon Valley, because the tech class has long sought to convert the world into bland content for the rest of us to passively consume or else be force fed. From the beginning, the Spotify interface was designed to recast listening to music into something smooth, easy, frictionless. The goal, as the music journalist Liz Pelly writes in Mood Music, was to create “the sense that the music just materialized from thin air,” allowing the listener to draw the connection not between songs and musicians, but music and Spotify. As a former Spotify editor explains to Pelly, the company’s playlists were designed to “reduce friction and cognitive work” on the part of listeners. After its algorithms strip-mined enough user data, the service began to feed listeners music in line with what they already liked, encouraging them just to hit play, and let the service choose the music for you.
In-house, this is called “lean-back listening,” as in: lean back, we’ll take care of it. It privileges a brand of smoothed-out pop music which Pelly calls “streambait,” characterized by stable dynamics, muted emotions, and musical simplicity. No more loud guitars or complex performances; now it’s all synthesizer washes, Eurodisco rhythms, and repetitive, bluntforce melodies. None of these qualities are original to streaming: there is nothing in Sabrina Carpenter which isn’t currently being done better on any classic pop station anywhere in the country. Yet their arrangement is new, “a product of playlist logic requiring that one song flow seamlessly into the next, a formula that guarantees a greater number of passive streams.” Anything too surprising, too catchy, too original might jar you out of the passive stream-state. It is better for these songs not to catch your attention, just so long as they don’t lose it.
Pelly quotes the avant-garde musician Anohni, who notes that streaming promotes a “narcotic” rather than “meditative” relationship to music and the people who make it, a dull benumbed state of passive consumption, where uptake is constant and our attention minimal. Whereas in the past you had to choose a CD, scroll through mp3s, or physically attend a performance, now you only had to press play, and let Spotify choose for you. This mechanical seamlessness soon began to impact listener habits. A massive percentage of all songs are streamed on curated playlists, and many of the most popular are dedicated to background music: quiet jazz, ambient piano, simple synthesizer textures. Where streambait pop aims to lightly hold your attention, this lean-back “functional music” is not designed to be listened to, or even really heard; rather it is meant to act as a kind of atmospheric texture, a set of soothing sounds to regulate your mood or enhance your productivity. There is a direct connection between the structure of a playlist (a long list of songs meant to flow from one to the next to the next without interruption) and the frictionless nature of this music, easy listening facilitated by the platform’s undemanding architecture, sound following technology’s lead.
Ambient music, lo-fi hip hop, and other easily-streamed genres have their own histories as both artistic practices and real-world subcultures — realities which make them ultimately ill-suited to seamless streaming logic. So beginning in the mid-2010s, Spotify began to replace these artists with prefab music, sourced directly from licensing companies for placement on its playlists. It calls these songs “perfect fit content,” for how seamlessly they slot into existing. Where before, the music on “Ambient Relaxation” and “Cocktail Jazz” was chosen for its smooth vibe, PFC songs are commissioned explicitly to be ignored and ignorable, their aesthetic pre-determined by the playlists they will be added to. They also stream at a lower royalty rate, saving Spotify money that might otherwise go to actual musicians.
Such “functional” culture might have begun as part of the music industry, but it has begun to seep out like an oil spill to poison the rest of the entertainment industry. During the 2023 WGA strike, writers complained that they were being pushed to create “second-screen content,” shows that can be “watched” while a viewer is really looking at their phone. Netflix has a whole category it calls “casual viewing,” and a screenwriter quoted in Will Tavlin’s recent n+1 essay explains that company executives frequently demand to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” The company’s default visual schema is bland enough to play just as well on a phone, a computer, a TV, or in the background, without the distraction of dark shadows, bright colors, or images that demand close attention. I’ve long assumed that the preference for high-contrast profile shots in recent blockbusters have more to do with ready legibility among the distracted, than their connection to comic book splash panels or anything in the history of cinema.
So we have music not meant to be heard, movies half-watched, TV that plays for itself in the background: is it any surprise that entertainment and tech executives are starting to conclude they shouldn’t be paying humans to make this stuff at all? While the Hollywood strikes achieved some labor protections against AI, the hegemon Spotify faces no such obstacles. Last year, it debuted a feature which allowed users to generate their own algorithmic mixes by typing prompts into a chatbot, replacing human playlist editors with machine-driven processes. And it has welcomed start-ups who use AI-powered apps to procedurally generate precisely the kind of streambait background music which already fills so many of the platform’s most popular playlists.
This stuff, to use a new but already exhausted term, is slop, the kind of generic content increasingly generated using AI, made to fill playlists and kill time. Slop, writes Max Read, is definitionally “comforting, straightforward, accessible, [and] flattering” to the consumer, “designed to please, not to provoke.” Images generated in programs like Midjourney are smoothly rendered, and are characterized by a grotesque profusion of repetitive details, a textured lack of substance which reads as pure kitsch. They can be viewed, but not seen, and they exist to reinforce the worldview and self-image of the viewer. So too the procedurally-generated AI songs which aim to calm the listener, their familiar sounds and soothing dynamics emerging from a computer-controlled soundscape where nothing can startle or surprise the listener.
The shift away from actual musicians making actual music to computer programs automatically generating background noise would seem a disastrous one for artists and consumers alike. Yet Spotify spent the better part of a decade clearing the path, instructing listeners to expect less and less from their music. PFC was slop-before-slop, and I strongly suspect that Netflix is training us to accept shows and movies that, soon, won’t need to be written by a human at all.
Mood Music serves both as a history of Spotify and a meditation on how it has impacted not only how we consume music, but how we conceive of ourselves as subjects in an increasingly technologized world. It is normal to hear people say that Spotify understands their taste better than they do. The company eagerly promotes this fiction with its yearly Wrapped round-ups, when a user’s listener data is fed back to them as a data-mined self-image. Spotify’s goal, she writes, was always “to make music a more insular and self-oriented experience,” with the definition of that self determined as much by the platform as the listener. If the streamer knows your taste better than you do, then why try to expand or challenge it? The leap from PFC to AI is a short one, and it runs right through the passive consumerism facilitated by the tech world.
This is the vision of government that Musk is forcing on America: lean back, we’ll take care of it — or else! He encourages his supporters to take part in his crusade, not by engaging in the democratic process, but vicariously, by liking and sharing the frequently illegal victories he trumpets online. This has always been a major piece of Musk’s allure, promising forward-thinking technologists that just by purchasing his cars and logging onto his website they were playing a part in the advancement of the human species. Even as he began to retweet Holocaust deniers, and break Federal election laws, this formulation of progress via vicarious identification — he wins, I win — held power for many seemingly reasonable people.
He essentially offered them a meme as self-image: the high-IQ chad, cured of the woke mind virus, free from the consensus of experts and elites. They could all retweet the man’s independent thoughts, together. In a 2023 New York Times Magazine piece, many Tesla owners rationalized the car’s repeated, near-deadly failures by deploying Musk’s own engineer speak. His flattery of their intelligence encouraged them to overlook their own plain self-interest. What were a few fatal accidents in the service of the self-driving revolution?
It seems notable that so many right wing posters, groyperfied writers, and tech world luminaries fall back on memes to explain their own thinking. What is a meme, after all, but an ossified cliché, a framework for not thinking? Memes reduce the world into a set number of plain categories, and allow their users to slot every new development into its place in the predetermined formula. People disagree with you? They’re NPCs. No one respects your blog posts? Must be the Cathedral. So many Musk devotees have spent the past weeks marveling that the “abuses” “discovered” “by Musk” have matched their expectations, a response often encouraged by the man’s direct engagement. Yet none of them seem to question why the newfound reality fits so exactly with their earlier ignorant state. The scandals “revealed” by Musk make sense to his boosters because they cleave to what is already believed. Reality must conform itself to their pre-fabricated image, or risk deforming the catastrophic insecurity this collection of memes, tropes, and conspiracy theories exists to protect.
No wonder the broad MAGA coalition is so in love with slop of all kinds. Presented with an elderly, vain president more interested in attending football games than governing, his followers must substitute computer images of bravery and resolve. Trump’s agency heads prefer the propagandistic kitsch of photo ops to actually doing their jobs, deploying a set of kitschy signifiers — bulging muscles, heavy weights, army uniforms and cowboy hats — which signal strength without having to display effectiveness. Musk spends a good chunk of his day interacting with AI images of well-endowed video game women, created by the same technology he seems to have used to generate the DOGE logo.
At its base, slop is the cause and the symptom of a fundamental alienation in our society. A procedurally-generated ambient track, a second-screen TV show, an AI image, a meme: all place us in a passive relationship with the world, objects acted upon by outside phenomena, rather subjects possessed of inner will. They encourage us to be reactive, self-oriented, incurious, they present us with mechanisms to not think, not engage, not act with regards to ourselves and others.
Ninety years ago, Walter Benjamin saw a society so self-consumed it could experience pleasure in its own self-destruction. Yet even Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction demanded something of the viewer: even the art-image required someone to look at it. Our own age of technological determinism simply asks us to open the app and press play. The tech world has long sold us the vision of a seamless existence, a narcotized, bump-free life where little is demanded of us. Today, it is pitching a vision of politics as passive consumer spectacle, without struggle or deliberation or anything resembling a shared constructive project. But this is not politics, and it certainly isn’t life. Musk et al are selling us slop, and calling it progress. They want us to lean back, drink up, and pretend we prefer the taste.