“Pulp” was the “slop” of its time. A technological driver of low-cost unit economics (wood pulp paper) + lurid visual culture enabled by cheap offset color cover images, The bandwidth of print exploded. Cost per word (token) crashed. A lot more became worth writing down. The lower median quality actually signaled a remarkable expansion of written culture not a degenerative arc. Arguably it helped literacy explode and perhaps did more to drive it than the growing universal schooling movement of the same era. School might be where people learned to read, but pulp was why they eagerly learned to read. Not the allure of the “classics.”

Slop I think is similar. It’s going to drive a massive surge in cognitive capacity beneath what looks like a degenerative cultural arc. As with pulp the driver is a raw technical capability that lowers the cost of producing and distributing words at scale. But this time with extreme personalization. Words for you in particular.