Virality is just more slop

Breaking my silence on Hawk Tuah Girl.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

If the words above mean nothing to you, read this before proceeding. — Kate

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This whole Hawk Tuah moment feels like it is happening on an entirely different side of the internet from mine. I imagine the same people who propelled 21-year-old Hailey Welch into UTA-level fame are the same ones listening to Shaboozey, Tommy Richman, and Benson Boone—all top ten artists from the Billboard Hot 100 whose names I’ve literally never heard before. The fact that there are artists and actors and TikTokkers with millions of followers whose existence still elude a good portion of America is a testament to just how broad the internet has become. For anything to break through to all of us, it pretty much has to be slop. 

Ryan Broderick has been writing about the slopification of the internet over on Garbage Day, and has a pretty succinct definition:

Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. It’s in the name. We’re the little piggies and it’s the gruel in the trough. But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so.

Hawk Tuah girl was not AI-generated or, using Broderick’s formulation, created in bulk by a machine. But people responded to her viral moment similarly to how they greet slop: with a seemingly involuntary twitching of the collective brain stem.