Abundance, Everywhere

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. 

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? 

You might say that’s just poptimism – that these are all co-opted simulacra, all swallowed by capital, like franchise movies or bottle-service club culture. But there’s an endless surge of culture happening off the main timeline, too. If you’re seeing that critique on your phone, you’re participating in the very feedback loop that creates it. You’re seeing a culture of people on their phones and mistaking the reflection for the whole landscape: you’re in the hall of mirrors, you can’t see beyond capital’s demands. Yes, people upload endless new music to streaming services – but have you considered that much of it isn’t “slop”?

That it’s made by real people with lives outside your timeline, creating not to feed the machine but for the joy of creation, even if they never hit 1,000 streams, even if they never make a penny?

Look at figures like Ari at Home, who roams US cities finding singers and rappers to jam with, or DJ AG in the UK, whose pavement sessions put unknown vocalists alongside household names. Or Ed People, the Belgian dancer learning moves from strangers around the world. These speak to an abundance of talent and desire to make – not the neoliberal “abundance” of free-flowing capital, but a true, human abundance of irrepressible culture that happens simply because it can.

And those coffee raves and “soft clubbing” experiences so easily mocked? The ones that go viral are the least representative. There are many others out there where people are having the time of their lives – and not filming it. I take this personally: I live in a rural, culturally conservative area, and Sunday dance parties at the local roaster or Balearic DJs at a food fair are lifelines – a nexus for building on-the-ground culture and uncommodified joy.

I’ve seen parent-and-child raves like Big Fish Little Fish grow entire communities around shared music and openness. In cities, Caribbean-inspired intergenerational party culture is reshaping clubland – from Bradley Zero’s Jumbi to the Touching Bass collective. Mina’s Club Soft, which bans phones to encourage unselfconscious joy, might be the most genuinely subversive thing in nightlife today.

If your view of “soft clubbing” comes from social media, you’re seeing a filtered parody. That’s how the self-fulfilling prophecy of cultural stasis works: it feeds on the repetitive visibility of the corporate information ecosystem. Cultural abundance, by contrast, is messy, unfamiliar, sometimes baffling. It doesn’t fit trends. You often have to be there to notice it.

And none of this is new. Fisher’s idea of a culturally stagnant 21st century emerged in the blogging era, at the dawn of Napster — when I too was starting out as a writer, and editors told me the internet and globalisation had “flattened” culture. It wasn’t true then — that era birthed grime, dubstep, trap, folktronica — and it isn’t true now. The 20th-century critical establishment just couldn’t comprehend progress that wasn’t mass, definable or schismatic. Nor could it grasp the explosion of new vernacular forms across Asia and the Global South, or how deeply Western audiences would engage with them.

Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3 captures this perfectly. Through artists like Devonté Hynes, FKA twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE, he shows how the 21st century can’t be understood through the old gatekeeper categories. Each artist processes abundance into something uniquely their own. The failure to grasp that abundance – that chaos – is what allows the illusion of stasis to persist.

Maria Farrell once wrote that “our imagined near-future is often further away than we think, while last decade’s shiny futures are having unexpected effects driven just by their adoption at scale. Quantity and quality are differently related.” These sentences nail the problem: brands and cultural commentators still lack the tools to perceive the dizzying complexity of the present. Yes, these are chaotic times. Change – often terrifying change – is the only constant. Even the “sloppiest” culture mutates month by month. Some of the slop is great trash art. Some of it’s darkly funny, weird, alive. 

Maybe believing in cultural stasis is comforting. But it’s also wrong. It’s time to look squarely at the wild quantity and variety of, well, everything. Whether you’re an individual trying to reawaken your senses and escape the numbness of the doomscroll, or part of a brand hoping to be more than just another spoonful of slop, that’s the only real choice.

The illusion of homogeneity lets you believe things are simple and that old rules still apply. Truly engaging with what’s out there means effort: stepping beyond the curated feed, trusting people outside your bubble and recognising that the blur on your timeline isn’t sameness – it’s speed. We’re not trapped repeating the past. The future is already here. It’s loud, messy and unevenly – but abundantly – distributed.