There’s been a lot of talk lately about “slop,” “glut,” “clogging” and other visceral metaphors to describe the supposed decay of culture. In a sense, it’s not surprising. A look at the average news feed – and the speed at which users flick through it – can indeed look horrific. The Daily Show sketch “Eat Your Slop, Piggies” captured the mood perfectly: a vision of eternal scroll, of endless churn through interchangeable content and ads that function less like communication than like the flashing lights of a Vegas slot machine. 

The Daily Show's “Eat Your Slop, Piggies"

It’s also natural that this fear could make us think we’re already there. Talk of cultural stasis and a “big freeze” is rife. Commentators point to an array of lowest-common-denominator trends – from Labubu to everything-beige to coffee raves – as evidence we’re locked in a dumb consumption loop where everything is simulacrum, culture has no value and choice is an illusion.

The late academic and author Mark Fisher is frequently invoked. Fisher’s work, often cited by tastemakers such as Adam Curtis and now by brand strategists such as Eugene Healey, crystallised the idea that the 21st century has given up on innovation – that we’re stuck retreading old cultural forms, in parallel with political defeatism and surrender to capital.

But this line of thought is problematic.

We can debate endlessly whether — in an era of Palestine Action, trans activism, huge street protests in the US and youth-led movements in Nepal, Morocco, Kenya, Peru – political apathy really defines our age. But purely on a cultural level, the idea that nothing is changing is foolish and dangerously self-defeating. Culture is renewing itself every second of every day. Even in the mainstream: are queer women’s anthems like “Pink Pony Club”, “Lunch” and “Denial is a River” global hits because of stasis? Is Ethel Cain – a gothic, bisexual, Southern Baptist trans woman singing doom metal in the charts – stasis? Is Bad Bunny’s billion-stream “DtMF”, which peels back its synthetic dressing to reveal centuries-deep Black Atlantic rhythms, stasis?