Sailing on the Sea of Slop

This wicked sea, made for you and me.

To drift in the Sea of Slop may be as good as it gets. Every fascination and every distraction is waiting for me. It may be heaven, in a strange way. I need only sit back and use a remote or swipe a finger, but soon even that won’t be necessary. My eyeballs give everything away. Every blink is a new metric, always being optimized. It has become quite easy to enjoy this heavenly sea that is designed just for you and me.

But wait, I wish to create, not just consume. To tell a tale. To debate. Does the sea still have a place for me? It does. The sea is warm to the touch, eagerly welcoming creators like me to dive deeper. To join millions of those who are posting, sharing and promoting. Now, this is in fact heaven. To create and consume in one vast sea, connecting people like you and people like me.

But the sea is so large, and there are so many of us probing the depths in search of something undefined. What starts out as pure quickly becomes frantic. People are snatching at my attention now, and there is not enough of it. Like starving sharks in search of their next meal, they swarm. I want to join in. It is a competition after all, and that is how an ecosystem works. Do I not want to be seen? Those that make this bargain find a number of ways to thrive. They condense their prose. They exaggerate their truth. They play to the audience in whatever way that engages. Over time, the creator is no longer holding the strings. They are drowning now in this wicked sea that is designed for you and me.

The creator takes their ideas and turns them into words. Those dense words sink to the ocean floor, so some turn to video. The videos get shorter and shorter, rising to the surface as they engage and attract. Next, they take videos and turn them into audio so we can enjoy them while we work. Whatever it takes. The audience is hungry for it, and creators are hungry too. It is a perfect match for the Sea of Slop. The water rises.

Soon, the sea can provide for itself. Machines are here now that can generate anything. Just write a prompt and watch it flow into the sea. Can it fascinate like a human can? Time will tell. The sea is thriving now. We float with the tide. Some of us forget that we are in the water at all. The creators, the audiences, the algorithms and the corporations are all in a symbiotic dance across this wide sea.

This ocean has always existed, even if the sea level is rising higher than ever before. I have swam in it for years, creating and consuming. But I wish to sail across this water, not drown in it.

Luckily, there is another way. I have built a boat. With that boat, I fish from the sea, sustaining myself. I even swim in the sea, for swimming in the sea can be useful, fun even. But to live in the sea is to be lost to it, spending my days treading water as life passes overhead.

Thanks to my boat I can leave the sea, moving up river, reaching uncharted land masses that must be explored on foot. By walking across the sparse landscape, I can find ancient ideas that have been neglected by the sea. I can discover forgotten stories that are hard to digest. Content that challenges. Ideas that provoke. Across many miles I can walk, not knowing what waits at the destination. In that walking, I gain the time to unearth my own thoughts, rather than drowning in the opinions of others. With patience and effort, I leave my own trail behind for other travelers.

Cheers to those travelers that wish to leave the sea, even for a time. How lucky are we.