Drew Austin

Remembering Some Guys Computers will never beat humans at pointlessness

The future of humanity? kneelingbus.substack.com/p/rememberin...

"Confronted with a massive surplus of content that is being shoved into our faces at all times, which is harder than ever to avoid or even limit, we need new ways to process it all as it accumulates, and gooning is one such response to the excess."

Gooning: A Logical Response to a World of Infinite Slop The culture around gooning suggests that Gen Z has adopted a different, less anxious response to the oversaturation of content than millennials.

My latest column for Vice, about content oversaturation anxiety and gooning as a way of dealing with it:

www.vice.com/en/article/g...

Summer Lightning | Sachin | Substack Essays about story worthy moments in the mundane and every day. Click to read Summer Lightning, by Sachin, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

you'd probably like Sachin Benny's substack! summerlightning.substack.com

Slop as a Way of Life AI slop is just the culmination of how humans have been using the internet for years

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025... the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet.
kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-...

yes exactly!

great points. might be more accurate to say that slop appears for no *good* reason (at least from the viewer's perspective)...ie a lot of slop is serving a clear purpose for the party who is pumping it out

and point 2 deserves its own essay...slop friendly environments

LFG

once the platform becomes a container *it must be filled*

Slopsogenesis • what we call 'platforms' have evolved and can now more accurately described as 'containers' (flat plane --> deep hole)  • platform - a flat space or playing field where different and dissimilar parties + products can come to interoperoperate and vend, purchase, offer services etc • container - a void or hole where content can be dumped and out of which content can be consumed. slop for the piggies, etc. the container produces the necessity for content. • once the platform (flat) becomes a container (hole) *it must be filled*. Also, i think this is applicable to non-digital things and spaces as well?. eg grocery store - what was initially designed as a platform for vending becomes understood as a space to be filled with product (and sound).

Great new entry into the annals of slop theory from @kneelingbus.bsky.social (for those still ok with reading ss links): kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-way-of-life

Inspired me to note down my current working theory on the genesis of the slop era:

thank you Noah! so glad you enjoyed this one, had been building up for a while

Here Comes a Regular Taste is obsolete & gatekeeping is code for what the internet took from us

Like some of y'all -- I subscribe to too many d*mn newsletters but there are a handful I actually am excited to read.

Top of the list is @kneelingbus.bsky.social's writing and today's is one I'll be revisiting for days / months / etc to come
kneelingbus.substack.com/p/here-comes...

it’s a screenshot of phil collins on the news in front of the alamo. they labelled him as “music legend/alamo enthusiast” too it’s really funny

it’s fine you can forget the alamo phil collins is remembering it for all of us

pulling my toddler out of the path of James Murphy's citibike

paulg is posting good again

Channel Surfing We won't need to see ads once they're implicit in everything

With cryptocurrency, the spaces of traditional finance are reconstituted in the self, a grim condition highlighted by the recent kidnapping of a Bitcoin whale, in which the access point for dematerialized wealth is no longer the bank vault but the individual

kneelingbus.substack.com/p/channel-su...

This is too good to microdose, yo. Go read the whole thing.

The Post-Work City Cities feel like theme parks and so does the internet

"As screen time approaches the limit of our available waking hours, it becomes possible to view the foundational activities of life, such as work and education, as the few remaining obstacles to unfettered content consumption"

kneelingbus.substack.com/p/the-post-w...

The Post-Work City Cities feel like theme parks and so does the internet

"As screen time approaches the limit of our available waking hours, it becomes possible to view the foundational activities of life, such as work and education, as the few remaining obstacles to unfettered content consumption"

kneelingbus.substack.com/p/the-post-w...

An Obituary for Millennial Culture All mediocre things must come to an end.

I wrote for Vice about the twilight of millennial relevance and our inability to gracefully ride off into the sunset www.vice.com/en/article/a...

An Obituary for Millennial Culture All mediocre things must come to an end.

I wrote for Vice about the twilight of millennial relevance and our inability to gracefully ride off into the sunset www.vice.com/en/article/a...

@kneelingbus.bsky.social words hitting at exactly the right moment, as I’m thinking about the spiritual death and cowardice in probabilistic living (and how often our heroes are those that break free from working the odds, hedging)

"Good protocols, more than comprehensive physical design, enable the staging of uncertainty, the irrigation of territories with potential, and the accommodation of unanticipated opportunity."

- @kneelingbus.bsky.social

leaving the cruelty aside for just a minute it's absolutely humiliating to imagine being my age or older and getting excited because you think you've been given permission to say a bad word. what are you gonna do next, ride your tricycle past the end of the block

Screen time is also blame the victim as-a-service - tim cook tsk tsking you for watching too many youtube videos

‘The most significant feature of the contemporary feed is not the algorithmic black box that curates what appears, but the more straightforward autoplay feature ... Your attention, a harder thing to quantify, doesn’t really matter.’
— Drew Austin

kneelingbus.substack.com/p/falling-as...

Here is a statement by my colleague Katherine Franke about the end of her time teaching at Columbia. Please read it. drive.google.com/file/d/1i4cO...

Wikipedia is the last major, visible platform for facts that they can’t buy. The attacks are going to be merciless.

clueless

there should be a twitter clone where you can export over all your follows but no one is able to post