Ninety percent of every field is bad.... We have now removed the throttle and left the ratio intact. Ninety percent of an infinite output is still infinite. The signal did not get worse. The noise became free, and free noise rises without limit, and every real thing you make now arrives into a sea of plausible nothing that looks, at a glance, exactly like it.

Which means the scarce act is no longer making. It is choosing. Deciding what, out of the endless generated plausible, deserves to exist and be kept. Curation was a minor virtue when things were expensive to make. It is the whole game when they are free.

People in this thread are using the phrase "AI slop" as if everything made by AI is automatically slop. If you believe this, fair enough, but then you must support the abolition of AI.

If you believe that AI is capable of making good things, then it doesn't matter whether this article, or anything, was AI generated. Whatever it is -- software, prose, images -- if you have taste, you don't have to figure out if it was made by AI or not. All you have to do is apply taste and determine how good it is.

New subject, Bandcamp Friday! Five album suggestions:

The Flowers Still by Star Cinema is solid dream pop, and so obscure that I was just the seventh person to buy it.

Also from Brooklyn, and almost as obscure, Immeasurable Heaven by Freaky Wilderness is fun stoner rock.

There's No I In Spice World by Spice World is endearing Australian lo-fi.

Florida Water Blues by Twisted Teens is raw New Orleans garage rock.

Just released today, Cannonball by Man/Woman/Chainsaw is well-produced indie rock and the only one of these bands that might make it big. Here's the YouTube video for one of the best songs of 2026, Nosedive.

Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems -- poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment -- are related and how they might be solved, Forrester came out with a clear leverage point: Growth.... The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.

American-style "freedom" means you can zip around the world and buy toys and choose from 200 varieties of soda. Autonomy means that as you go through your daily activities, nobody is riding you -- you're not micromanaged, coerced, or denied participation in power.
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The techno-elite, lacking experience in bad jobs, don't understand what makes a job bad. The reason we hate low-status jobs like burger-flipping and toilet cleaning is not that they're physical or dirty. We love to do physical and dirty things like work on our own cars and tend our own gardens and play sports and go on hikes. The jobs are bad because the story they're part of is "you do what I say," and because the focus is on quantity or speed, rather than quality. Our quantity-worshipping culture thinks "sustainability" means not running out of kilowatt-hours, but it's even more critical for a system to not run out of human will, to be psychologically sustainable.

At the end of that post I've just stuck a link to this 2024 article, Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive. The author moves from eeevil behaviorism, which does not even acknowledge the existence of intrinsic motivation, to Self-Determination Theory, "a legitimate scientific enterprise, and yet outside of certain academic circles, its ideas don't receive any air time at all." The basic conclusion is that intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I would add, society is falling apart because autonomy and competence are more scarce than ever, while relatedness is being monopolized by the culture wars.

Also, here's a 2025 PsyPost article on intrinsic motivation, What really keeps people committed to long-term goals?