Storm of Slop and the Psychic Harvest

You are a cash cow for Ian Miles Cheong's Malaysian bank account.

Psychic harvesting sounds like a cool science fiction plot point. A neat cyber-mage casts spells through cyberspace to psychically harvest the population. He uses his spells to convert people’s mental energy into money and power for himself. However, science fiction ideas are hard to come by today, because they are often lacking in the fiction element. We live in the science fiction reality we once dreamed and warned about. It is hard to see what the world looks like from the outside. But when we understand how our reality is shaped by integrating the digital dimension into ever-present waking reality, we see that we are already in a science fiction universe. We are all transhuman cyborgs already, connected in a global hivemind.

And the psychic harvesters are real. One of them is named Ian Miles Cheong.

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Slop Farmers

To those unaware, Ian Miles Cheong is best understood as a humble Malaysian slop farmer. He posts images and videos on X. Slop is his manure which he plants into the digital timelines. Image after image of something terrible happening, something that will deeply offend conservative sensibilities. He plants a video of racial conflict, then a picture of the dumbest thing a libtard has ever said, and then a drag queen story hour. This is his slop manure. Out of the slop grows rage bait, which blooms into psychic energy. Cheong harvests this psychic energy (attention) with the X-verified creator revenue-sharing program.

Or, put more sanely, Ian Miles Cheong posts things that will make you angry, because if you are angry, you will pay more attention, and he will make more money.

This is the sloppification of social media. Cheong is far from the only creator that does this. He is particularly egregious in his slop farming because he is not even an American. He spends all day and night posting about American politics to harvest your mental energy and turn it into dollars held in his Malaysian bank account.

Most of the big accounts on X are devoted to making you angry. The business model relies on it. You, the user, lose that mental energy. Attention is finite. All scarce things become commodities that parties compete to obtain. Your attention is one of these commodities. On social media, it is the primary commodity. Slop farmers get paid to capture it, and marketing companies pay to get a little piece. There is a whole economy built around your attention.

Ask yourself: do these people have your best interest at heart? The question is almost laughable because they profit from your negative emotions. So, why are you giving it to them?

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AI Slop

Generally, Gen X and older cannot identify AI-generated content. Millennials and Zoomers can. I posted a note about my mom showing me a video she saw on social media of cats or babies dressed as food or something. She thought it was adorable and awesome. I immediately recognized that it was AI-generated and told her. She looked sad and disappointed, which broke my heart. My mom was enjoying something and I took away her enjoyment. Nobody likes to do that to someone they love. Any parent knows this experience with their kids. Kids need to learn, and sometimes they want to do something unsafe. You have to tell them no for their own sake. But the sadness of your child will still make you sad. It was bizarre to have that experience in reverse,

Truth is important. You tell your kids to stop doing something because it is unsafe, even though this makes them sad. It is right to tell your Gen X or Boomer parents the same thing. I had the opposite experience with my father-in-law. He showed me a video compilation of babies and cats sitting together. After the experience with my mom, I did not want to make him sad by telling him it was not real. I did not want to ruin his enjoyment by telling him that the babies and cats he saw were not babies and cats. They were amalgams of an untold number of babies and cats, run through a soulless algorithm to create a hyperreal facsimile.

In The Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon an analogy to show what it is like to come to true knowledge. In the allegory of the cave, men are entertained only by shadows. They know nothing else, and think the shadows are real. One man escapes and sees the object making the shadows and the fire behind them. He exits the cave and sees the sunlight illuminating the real world. Socrates tells Glaucon that the man now should descend back into the cave and free the other men so that they too can see the truth.

Seeing sunlight for the first time is painful for the man. Sharing his discovery with others is painful for everyone. The men still dominated by illusion make fun of the first man, saying that he is crazy, because what he describes is so far outside of their comprehension. They will be upset when he shatters their illusions. But it is worth it. He must bring the others from illusion into the light of truth.

I should have told my father-in-law. It was the right thing to do, even if it would have been painful for both of us.

The divide between the generations is due to the different life stages for internet entry. For the younger generations, most conscious life has been connected to the internet. For the older generations, the internet came later in life. The new is noticeable, but sameness is not. The internet is the norm for Zoomers and younger Millennials, and AI slop is new. It is all new for Gen X and above. There is a generational divide in the mental schemas for evaluating digital content.

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Storm of Slop

In Ernst Jünger’s war memoir, Storm of Steel, he describes war as a spiritual experience that allows transcendence. Digitality is also a spiritual experience, but it shuts off transcendence. Contemplation is crowded out by frenetic attention division and doomscrolling.

If we want transcendence, we have to look somewhere else. Quiet and detached moments away from the social media feed are where you will find yourself. You cannot listen to yourself on the timeline. The timeline is a hot medium. It fills up your sensorium and demands full engagement. You have to disconnect if you want to find out what is going on in your mind.

This is our new opportunity for transcendence. In the age of attention economics, we are in a war for our minds. This is the hardest battle to fight in digital America.

Good luck.

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