What to make of the bizarre imagery of AI slop? If AI slop feels meaningless to interpret, this is because it has little to do with meaning and representations. In this article, we read the aesthetic of AI slop as operational in the sense that its primary aim is not to represent the world but rather to act on it: it functions as a signal aimed at maximizing engagement metrics. To do so, we first examine how the logic of immediacy and generative artificial intelligence, respectively, provide the cultural and technological conditions under which AI slop can emerge to produce an increasingly operational aesthetic culture. We then claim that the economy of AI slop imagery may be the closest capitalism has gotten to aesthetically expressing the logic of its functioning, one that covers up production based on quantitative signals with the suggestion of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘the motley painting of every representation that ever existed’.
This introduction to the Cultural Commons special issue on brainrot, AI slop, and enshittification maps the conceptual terrain opened up by these terms as they crystallise widespread anxieties about the deterioration of digital culture and everyday experience under generative AI. Reading brainrot, slop, and enshittification alongside earlier vocabularies of digital waste (spam, junk, and viral content), the introduction argues that these terms point to a new phase of platform capitalism in which ‘content’ is increasingly decoupled from communicative value and functions instead as a means of modulating attention at scale and optimising the emotions, moods, and atmospheres that flow through platforms. It then situates the dossier’s contributions across three overlapping registers: affective and phenomenological experience, political-economic and infrastructural conditions, and aesthetic and operational logics.
In Capital , Marx describes ‘abstract human labor’ as a jelly-like, amorphous substance: Gallerte , often translated as ‘gelatinous blob’. Turning from questions of consumption (or outputs) in debates on ‘AI slop’ to the ‘sloppy’ side of AI production (or inputs), this essay draws a speculative line from Marx’s account of labor as Gallerte to how current AI models similarly metabolize the linguistic and cultural labor of the post-industrial worker, creating a new form of computational Gallerte . Charting the entangled, extractivist histories of both labor, gelatine production, and AI models helps rematerialize and reconnect the latter to the violent histories of (in)human and non-human labor under capitalism.
In this short piece, we theorise pervasive products and practices associated with generative artificial intelligence – particularly those often described as ‘slop’ and ‘brainrot’ – as a genre or style of digital content often produced with automated technologies and as ways of being and feeling that are linked with their consumption. In so doing, we explore their ambivalent relationship with the notions of deficiency and excess. By applying the theory of the gimmick to these stigmatised outputs and practices, we conceptualise the cultural form of brainrot and slop as an overrated device that works both ‘too little’ through labour-saving ‘tricks’ and deskilling, and ‘too hard’ through strained algorithmic efforts to capture attention. As such, we argue that AI slop and brainrot expose the contradictions of cultural production and consumption in ‘too late capitalism’, with common narratives and imaginaries surrounding the terms emerging from, and responding to, a deep sense of ‘suspicion’ about their deceptive, wasteful, and illegitimate inner workings. In exploring whether there may be critical potential in those genres and experiences assumed to be inherently unproductive and invariably degenerative, we also question why so many find them so disgusting and yet weirdly captivating.
This article examines how art museums participate in shaping a contested regional identity by analysing four contemporary visual art exhibitions staged in the Pearl River Delta between 2017 and 2024, each narrating 'tales of the south' within the context of China's Greater Bay Area initiative. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of worlding and Bal's concept of exhibition-ism, and informed by fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, it explores how these exhibitions collectively articulate the Pearl River Delta's identity in multiple - and at times contradictory - ways: as peripheral and 'wild' within China's art ecosystem; as a frontier of modernization driven by urbanization, marketization, and globalization; as part of the Global South in solidarity with developing nations; and as an emerging international hub of innovation and technology. In doing so, this study theorizes exhibitions as worlding practices in contemporary art.
Narratives surrounding ageing celebrities constitute a significant resource for understanding how to grow old. While existing studies have largely focused on how ageing celebrities help older fans navigate their own ageing experiences, less attention has been paid to how ageing celebrities shape younger fans’ perceptions of ageing. To address this gap in intergenerational interaction, this study examines how young Chinese fans imagine happy ageing through shipping two older female celebrities. Through digital ethnography, we identified three interrelated core themes in these fan-driven imaginings of happy ageing: (1) strategically reinterpreting heterosexual marriage, (2) advocating for professional solidarity among older women, and (3) expanding notions of ageing femininity. These imaginations successfully challenge the heteronormativity within the discourse of celebrities’ successful ageing. However, we also demonstrate that young fans perceive ageless appearances and successful careers as prerequisites for happy ageing, which reflects the neoliberal characteristics of successful ageing among celebrities and inadvertently constitutes a form of ageing homonormativity towards older queer people. Therefore, by introducing a perspective on intergenerational interactions, this article not only explores the intergenerational influence of older celebrities on younger fans but also connects the issue of ageing with Chinese fan queer practices, thereby revealing the complexities of contemporary Chinese youth imaginations concerning queer ageing.
In this commentary, I explore brainrot by analysing the relationship between ‘doomscrolling’ and the TikTok trend in ‘hopecore’ content. Where doomscrolling is presented as engendering a wide range of social and personal ills, hopecore is typically seen as the antidote to a wider world shaped by crisis. Using hopecore to intervene in discussions of brainrot, this commentary analyses hopecore through feminist accounts of hope, providing ways of reframing the continuum of hope and hopelessness. I argue that the crises shaping the affective feeling rules of both doomscrolling and hopecore are similar; furthermore, I identify the capacity for hopefulness in hopecore that challenges brainrot as merely passive consumption.
This introduction explains why the autosociobiography genre offers the potential for an innovative and important way to link sociological research on social mobility with literary scholarship. It introduces and contextualises the papers included in this special issue.
This essay proposes matching energy as a methodology and a citational politic. It calls for marking white audience/fan studies as so particular to whiteness to be useless to the study of race. Matching energy is a process by which one models the behavior of those with whom they are interacting. Matching energy in work on race and audiences/fans entails willfully ignoring exnominated white studies of audiences and fans in the same way those studies ignore studies of racialized audiences and fans. That is, it is not that we ignore this work because we are unaware of it; rather, we ignore it because we are matching energy. Matching energy is methodological in its particular curation of the center from which it draws its knowledge base. That is, it builds a racialized center and calls into question the universality of whiteness and studies of white audiences/fans. It uses citational politics to ignore this work. It does not ‘fight’ with the work and offer it a citation. Rather, it pretends it does not exist, like white audience/fan studies pretends racialized work on audiences and fans does not exist. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.
This article began as a conversation between a PhD supervisor (Das) and doctoral researcher (Wicaksono), reflecting on the changing conditions of audience research in datafied, algorithmically- curated media environments. Revisiting earlier debates on the 'end of the audience', the authors draw on empirical insights from doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia alongside a decade of theoretical engagement with audience studies. Through this dialogic exchange, the article explores how hyper-personalised, ephemeral media flows - particularly on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube - undermine the shared texts, rhythms and interpretive contexts that once anchored the idea of 'the audience'. Families' struggles to make sense of children's media use point to a broader condition in which 'media' is experienced as both everything and nothing: ubiquitous yet intangible, individualised yet collectively consequential. Weaving together conversations at different moments and with different participants, this contribution ultimately argues not for abandoning the concept of the audience, but for reasserting the collective stakes of audience research - agency, inequality and normative questions - even as 'audiences' become less stable as a category in both research and teaching. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on 'Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique', edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.
AI industry leaders are racing to automate intimacy. Promising companions that solve loneliness and simulate desire and human connection, either these systems are celebrated as near-divine solutions to existential suffering, or those who use them are pathologised. This commentary intervenes in both positions. Drawing on the tradition of audience studies and Ken Plummer’s critical humanism, I argue that automated intimacy should be understood neither as a technological solution nor as a pathology, but as a field of social, affective, and economic struggle shaped by relations of power. Against the myth-making of Silicon Valley and the psychologising tendencies of much academic debate, I propose a radical contextualism that foregrounds the plural, situated ways real people navigate AI-mediated intimate life. Centring lived human experience in its ambivalence and creative resistance is itself a political act.
