The Crowd Is Postslop [303]

Hi Crowd! Yesterday Derek Guy posted about Emily Segal’s recently coined term “tasteslop” in part because of Phoebe Luckhurst’s big piece in The Times about it. If you are in the Telegram group you saw this come through last night but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. Tasteslop, as Emily defines it, is “1. Slop made out of things considered to be tasteful 2. Tasteful things deployed in service of slop, or 3. Recurrent tech discourse about the significance of taste.” Essentially the use of things considered to be tasteful, to convey the appearance of taste, without engaging with it or understanding why they are tasteful or what taste even is. This could manifest in generative AI imagery where “tasteful” things pop up to set a scene, just as much as random tasteless techbros copying the thing they saw somewhere else because they think it makes them look cultured. The end result of both is that the tasteful items may get tainted, and start to signify something other than…