slop nation, slop year
I’ve been trying to think about what to write as a sort of “year in review” for 2025. My iCloud is currently reminding me of a photo I took this summer featuring my husband holding up an IPA named “Never Forget” in honor of the 9/11 attacks. Another featured photo is of an SUV that was carrying Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents as they harassed residents of Washington, D.C. There’s several photos of the black cat we adopted after he showed up yowling in our yard. That gets at some of it.
Needless to say, there are a lot of things you could say about 2025. It was a chaotic year. I’m writing this on Monday night after work while sitting at a desk in Washington, D.C., where there are signs on most blocks near me remembering community members whom ICE abducted. Over 2,000 members of the National Guard are here — and, after a tragic shooting last month, they’re armed. We are living in dark, authoritarian times, as I nodded to in a piece at The Baffler that I published this week.
Zachariah Webb
But that isn’t just it. 2025 was also the year of slop.
Don’t take my word for it. The dictionary agrees with me. Last week, Merriam-Webster announced its word of the year was “slop.”
You don’t need to look far. Turn to any social media feed, and there’s AI generated videos of bizarre disasters and accidents. On X, TikTok, and other platforms, AI generated videos of disasters went viral time and time again. One genre that stuck with me was of swimmers in an urban infinity pool falling over two dozen stories to their death. In one, the culprit is an old woman in a black one-piece swimsuit wielding a sledgehammer, who breaks a panel of the glass enclosing the pool with apparent ease. Another, depicting a couple leaning on the wall of an infinity pool overlooking a city, shows the wall cracking and water gushing over the side. The account that shared it on X uses an AI generated profile photo and a bio that reads, in part, “I’m here for Freedom & Trump.” Posted on Dec. 16, the clip has 12.4 million views.
This barely scratches the surface, of course, because 2025 marked the year that AI generated slop came to define our politics. An analysis of Trump-affiliated social media from Politifact found that the president used AI in 36 posts on his personal Truth Social account between January and October. On X, the White House used AI in at least 14 posts, some of which were downright unnerving. This spring, as the White House ramped up deportations, it tweeted an AI generated photo of a woman with a drug-related conviction who faced deportation edited to appear in the style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind Spirited Away.
Later, Trump used bizarre, cartoonish imagery to target other perceived enemies of the administration: his critics. In October, as a new round of No Kings protests kicked off, Trump shared an AI generated video of himself piloting a jet while dumping tons of what appears to be poop on people challenging his administration. Another video, which Trump shared to Truth Social that same month, depicts him wearing a crown and grasping a sword while Democratic lawmakers bow before him. The chorus of Avenged Sevenfold’s “Hail to the King” plays in the background.
To limit “slop” to simply AI generated content would be shortsighted, though. There’s also the odd grab bag of racist memes and misused copyrighted work that the administration and its acolytes have seized upon to communicate the president’s draconian agenda. Take the Department of Homeland Security, whose communications team managed to rack up a handful of DMCA complaints while producing videos featuring memes popular with the 2016 alt-right. What better word than “slop” to describe a now-removed video featuring the Pokemon theme song and Moon Man, a figure first popularized in McDonald’s ads in the 1980s that 4chan and white nationalists later co-opted? Or… whatever you want to call this Christmas video?
There’s a cost to this slop. (And it isn’t just that your electrical bill spikes because of it.) The memeification of politics, particularly a politics of cruelty and resentment, makes us more desensitized, more likely to see the world through a cartoonish friend-versus-enemy lens. For the administration, this attitude is useful. It’s easier to garner support for a program of mass deportations when the people in propaganda videos facing deportation are — in the case of some recent videos from ICE’s X account — literally computer-generated cartoons.
I don’t hold out hope that next year will be any better. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. And when it comes to slop, the statistics are horrifying. For instance, did you know that many of the managers who decide whether we can or can’t pay our bills are using AI to make those judgment calls?
But, hey, at least the year is over.