Robin James

As w AI slop, content slop/ordinary slop takes the sociality out of art & aesthetics: "To succeed as licensable content, “Ordinary” had to be flexible enough to adapt and give voice to a wide array of private individual feelings and experiences"
www.its-her-factory.com/2025/10/ordi...

Given the behavior of the D party & nominal center in the last decade, that analysis seems even more correct...but DATED.

The reactionary center works differently these days: not calls to a unifying & universalized whitness, but thru aesthetics of personalization that destroy common feeling

The New Inquiry modern scholarship

In 2015 I published a piece arguing the narrative that Adele's "Hello" brought people into some sort of naturally sympathetic bond across difference was functionally equivalent to the DT campaign's calls to unity thru whiteness:

thenewinquiry.com › hello-from-the-same-side

heard about it from an author with lots of money from the Korean funding insitution to publish Open Access...he's Korean but based at a Canadian uni...

Korea has been putting $$$ behind english-language scholarship for at least a few years (maybe more) in a big soft power bid

The "let's put on an alternative Superbowl halftime show with reactionary has-beens" is more of an instance of reactionary bad taste than slop, but it's still bad taste as performance of individual mastery rather than any shared aesthetic sensibility

"If AI slop is explicitly reactionary, then the phenomenon I’m calling “ordinary slop” is its reactionary centrist counterpart...it dresses the rejection of sociality and common experience up in less extreme and explicitly reactionary terms."

www.its-her-factory.com/2025/10/ordi...

It’s the political economy, stupid

www.its-her-factory.com/2025/10/ordi...

Thales, the first philosopher, was so busy contemplating the heavens while walking that he fell into a hole. A Thracian girl laughed at him.

is the alt-in alt-rock the alt- in alt-right

I wrote about Alex Warren's "Ordinary," the phenomenon I call "ordinary slop," and reactionary centrism:

www.its-her-factory.com/2025/10/ordi...

I’m in this month’s print issue of @thewiremagazine.bsky.social writing about what I take to be the limitations of the concept of hauntology — read online here:

reader.exacteditions.com/issues/14422...

This Sunday from 5-7p eastern at Inhailer.com I’ll take us back to 2005 to celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary on the 15th by consulting with my wedding DJ, pictured below, about what indie fans were really listening to back then - tune in for some forgotten bangers!

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

Ordinary slop is different from a mass-produced commodity because it produces a different kind of flattening - not the normalizing homogenization of a mass or population, but the evacuation of shared feeling and experience into privatized self-management (which it shares w right wing AI slop)

The one issue I could see is managing rights and permissions. I would think someone I. The library could help with this. But thats also part of the cost (and service printers provide) in putting together a course pack.

Overheard in the office restroom: young millennial women dissing the new TS album

Liz Pelly’s book comes to mind

Just as one of the functions of AI is to break social connections & fabric, the summer of blah is about breaking the ‘distribution of the sensible,’ publics called into existence through art; just privatization all the way down

Interesting that the summer of blah came after the summer where three women, each w very distinctive sounds, had a number of bangers and drove The Discourse

Yep

The right has AI slop, the reactionary center has “Ordinary,” and the rest of us are listening to tons of new and weird stuff that has about as much success breaking through the mainstream as left ideas have of getting covered in mainstream media

Hello From the Same Side Adele’s single is the musical equivalent of the desire for experiential homogeneity that Trump satisfies.

In the 10 years since I wrote this, the “reactionary center” represented by “Hello” is still here but musically it’s been evacuated of anything good or catchy enough to paper over its ideological status. It may not be AI but it’s still kinda slop.

thenewinquiry.com/hello-from-t...

I remember back in the late 90s and aughts when institutions like Hypatia and the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race really felt like "well its all us weirdos here we better stick together bc there's nowhere else for us in the field"

Tbh I don’t get the whole (mostly British) wing of haunty-Marxists, even wrote a thing about it in this months The Wire

i think what I'm saying is enshittification has hit corporate pop in a very legible way so the biggest stuff rn is v bland even while tons of weird bangers bubble just underneath

feels like the "why no song of the summer this year?' and the "why did TS's album flop?" questions are related

1. the chaotic political/econ context & all the noise it makes in ppl's lives puts their attn elsewhere
2. weird music is doing fine (Kpop DH), but gulf grows btw it & bland chart toppers

it's exceptionally brutal out there rn, worst humanities job market possibly ever, and I saw 08 and COVID.