Regardless of your political persuasion, everyone must acknowledge the economy is growing. Now, the speculation from that point can go in one of two directions – either it’s growing in a good way or it’s growing in a bad way, but there is no question that the economy is growing. In fact, under Trump, the GDP is growing faster than at any time under Biden. This is a big omen because it proves Trump supporters correct. In his first year back, Trump has delivered on his economic promises inspite of the cultural impacts their having on everyday life. 

The finesse lies in how he’s successfully evaded all the negative spin he could’ve received this year. In 2025, there wasn’t a recession or stagflation, which were the biggest worries coming into the year. Because for an economy to reach stagflation, 3 things must occur: high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant economic growth. And although inflation remains high and unemployment is trending upward (already 8%+ for black people), the rate of economic growth has still outpaced both of those metrics comparatively this fiscal year.

So if things aren’t categorically ‘stagnant’ yet, what’s causing all the doom and gloom? Look no further than the 2025 Word of the Year: Slop. It refers to the "digital content of low quality that’s produced en-masse by means of artificial intelligence." It’s a new slang word that crystallizes how low-quality, AI-generated content has invaded our cyberspaces and terminally infected our online experiences.

Marketed as a tour de force by corporate lobbyists like Sam Altman, AI was sold to the public as an endgame for human evolution and achievement. It was advertised as the primer machine learning model to cut costs, improve efficiency and streamline progress in our society at large. But in its wake, all its done is create a new machine class that may or may not be hostile to humanity.

In Liu Cixin’s 2008 sci-fi thriller ‘The Dark Forest,’ he explores this possibility in a theory known as ‘The Dark Forest Hypothesis.’ The theory asserts that alien entities exist in abundance across the universe but remain silent and hidden out of fear that revealing themselves would lead to their destruction by another hostile entity that’s more technologically advanced. In the theory’s analogy, our universe is the dark forest, and, just like creatures in a dark forest, we have to stay hidden so we dont draw attention on ourselves from hostile entities. Because if we invite hostile entities in, they will invade, infect and destroy us for the mere sake of their own survival.

Now if you take that analogy and substitute the internet in as the dark forest, then “slop” can be seen as the modern-day Frankenstein hostility we’ve self-induced and exposed into our world. And what’s most terrifying about this Frankenstein bot slop is that it has already begun augmenting a conscious form into our public lives. This form has taken the shape of “best practice efficiency” algorithms that mold and spore through our infrastructures like The Blob in size and scope.

And this Blob has invaded our public and private sector infrastructures like nothing we’ve ever seen before. There is no escaping the Blob’s slop now, we must accept its suffocation disguised as enrapture. It’s brought about an entropy we must either quietly fight, quietly quit or quietly accept. Either way, its captured us in perpetuity.

According to Newsweek, 14% of this year's economic growth has been tied to slop infused investments and infrastructures. Because even at a low-quality state, the slop has still captured many quantitative data centered industries & employees. So as we move into 2026, the percent of slop-infused market-share will likely increase. Pundits are trying to frame this phenomenon as an “A.I bubble” that’s soon to burst due to affordability issues that’ve arisen for 90% of American households who now have fallen to the “lower arm” of our K-Shaped economy. But if the economy has been able to grow off the backs of just the top 10% of earners, then who's to say this isn’t a sustainable model moving forward? Who's to say this K-shaped economy can't continue to grow in this lopsided fashion in scope and scale? What if inflation & unemployment remain high in 2026 but economic growth continues to outpace them thanks to the slop's neutralizing effect?

As a bubble expands it becomes a blob, and there’s more than enough slop to continue stretching the widening divide. 

Maybe this is all just the beginning of the sLopflation era.

The sLopflation Era

On Halloween day this year while I was out pumping gas, a werewolf came out from behind a firetruck and stared at me with its paws down. We had a moment. It lingered on, oddly, for some time. So much so it started feeling strange, like an outer body experience. The strangeness of it all still puzzles me. Why were we so committed to this gaze? And for so long? Why so performative? I still don’t know who that was behind that mask just as much as they still don’t know who I was unmasked. In that moment though we were nobody and everybody in an odd way, and the absurdity of it is what made it all real coincidentally. We were performers engaging in an absurd and impromptu staring contest, and, oddly enough, it felt right in the moment.

As time has passed, it still feels right. Its compelled me to examine the art of performance and the roles we play in this melodramatic moment of American history. Because if you look around, it’s not that far fetched to see we’re living through a prolonged theater of the absurd right now. Everyday feels like a downward spiral of flat characters along flat paths in flat narratives with flat plots. Everyone seems to be haplessly complicit with the choices forced upon them without ever questioning whose forcing them and why. All the while allowing a flatness to be forced upon us to live within, dream within and eventually die within like a holiday ornament in storage. Take your flat identity, take your flat life, and, most importantly, accept your flat death so you can be easily packaged away afterwards. 

Like me and the werewolf, to see the absurdity in real time and remain silent to it is to be complicit in the absurdity’s performance with you. By not distancing yourself from it in real time, you are accepting your role within the story its curating.

And in the history of performance art, this commitment to waking the audience up out of “the fantasy” of a story so that they can stay in tune to the deeper political messaging is known as ‘The Estrangement Effect.’ Its a distancing technique accredited to Bertolt Brecht, a 20th century German playwright who once famously said “art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” This saying gets to the core of how estrangement works. It’s not concerned with what is truth, but, rather, 'how' is truth and 'for whom' is truth? For instance, estrangement isn’t concerned with the truth behind a mask, but, conversely, it’s concerned with the effect that mask is having 'on whom' it’s directed towards. Because that is where the distancing, alienation and/or estrangement is taking place in real time. The Estrangement Effect turns attention itself into the spectacle, so it can observe the ways in which attention morphs its target. I know you’re looking over here, but I’m going to make you look over there instead, and, in doing so, observe what estrangement does to you, knowing that I’m the one that made it strange. It’s uncomfortable, but intentional for political purposes.

And the Estrangement Effect caused by our absurd subservience to these flat outcomes we’re forced into in modern day America (facilitated mostly by 'careerism' & 'tribalism') is that everyone has become newly stereotyped by them. A new strangeness that an unseen puppeteer (or profiteer) curated via astroturfing. And by not committing to destroying the puppeteer, we’ve all succumb to this astroturfed culture we're in where these new stereotypes thrive. We have all been made strange to one and other anew in this absurd play, call us ‘the everyman’ of this melodrama. And what level of importance does this ‘everyman’ play in this modern melodrama? 

The Everyman of today has been relegated to a side character unfortunately. Someone insignificant to the development of the main plot but still there to refract a truth and induce estrangement on an audience demo not known to them but known to the puppeteer. 

The character of Jaques in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ comes to mind as a good doppelganger representation of this secondary role the modern-day everyman has been relegated to in our modern-day melodrama. In Shakespeare’s play, Jaques is a stereotypical wannabe who speaks entirely in ‘woe-is-me’ prose whenever given attention. He is banished to the forest by the Duke to wander with his fellow outcasts. He leads an inconsequential role in the plot, and is just used by Shakespeare to estrange puritanical audiences within the Elizabethan time.

“A fool!” Says Jaques, “A fool I met a fool in the forest. A motley fool…all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts...” 

The Art of Estrangement

Imagine a story if you will, we’ll call it ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.’ A story great not only in size but in substance too. Where the characters aren’t the central focus - ideas are. And the only thing made clear from the beginning is the protagonist, which is an idea we’ll call ‘America.’ 

At it’s inception, the reader is immediately transported into this dystopian setting. Where the fever of genocide, eugenic treachery and biological war games are so mystifying you can taste it like droplets in the rural air. So much so it forces the reader to presume the setting itself is cursed and must be the true antagonist, but as the story unfolds, the truth turns out to be more sinister. 

To survive this fever, the idea of ‘America’ must jump from character to character like an airborne virus. Spreading through word-spells, creating a gestalten entity that widens and thins through time like wind through the wilderness. At times big and at times small, and it’s those small moments where certain characters become central to the ideas survival.

In the first of these moments we are introduced to George Washington, an evil man burdened with carrying the whole of the idea itself from out of the darkness from which it came into a new and evolved light. Albeit flawed, he does so admirably, leaving a valor to his memory that was never seen in his waking life. Through the sheer folklore of his legacy and iconography, the idea survives and spreads wide again. But the setting, in all its spacious indifference, reoccupies itself with a formidable dominion of confederates. Whose influence dilutes the idea weak and flat once again. Gasping for survival, the idea struggles to find a character-host available to it, again dwindling in the evolved light.

That’s when the second of these frail moments occur, and we are introduced to Abraham Lincoln, a man not as evil as his prophetic predecessor, but still flawed in history’s all seeing eye. Through his unique concoction of melancholic word-spells, he is able to re-inspire a mass that unifies into a militia that fights off the new dominion in the bloodiest conflict ever seen up to that point. And it is there, in the post-glow of that ideological reclamation, Lincoln is killed in an act of cowardice before he can execute a reconstruction, muddying the waters of how to evolve forward yet again. 

And it is in this new confusion, where an old serpent hidden in the setting is able to entice America’s Eve with an old apple.

“Did God actually say you can’t eat of any tree of the garden?” it asks, “or merely Abraham?” 

And thus paradise was lost yet again to the fever. In its new indoctrination paved with good intention, many new serpents manifest. Invoking the ancient incantation of feudalism into the word-spells and forever distorting the idea of America moving forward. For a time, this new indoctrination engineered a system of bifurcation that diluted the original idea of ‘America’ down to a gasping crawl once again.

That’s when the third, and most pivotal, of these life support moments occur, and we are introduced to the true savior of the reclamation against the new indoctrination: Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In his covenant, he is able to break the bifurcation and spread the idea of 'America' farther than it had ever been spread before. But King's victory was short lived, as -like his melancholic predecessor- he was killed in an act of cowardice before reconstruction could be initiated.

This is where we start, in America A.D. Where tribal-primacy is the new god, but an old devil. Overcoming it’s dominion is the task we have been burdened with in our time. And what if I were to bring “Good News” that the next Black Messiah had already risen again? Leaving behind a neosoul gospel for us to re-invoke the original spells to in a new vibration? Summoning the necessary spirits to overcome the fever of feudalism.

America A.D

“It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized.” 

This is one of the famous final quotes of Tender Branson in Chuck Palahniuk’s postmodern 1999 novel ‘Survivor.’ A story about an ex-cult member turned terrorist who -upon his final terrorist act- talks into the black box of an airplane he hijacked as it descends into Australia. 

On its face, this quote highlights the power of propaganda and how it appropriates truth into untruths without you even realizing the “weird” irony at play. It highlights how propaganda is a conspiracy-in-action. But to be aware of it in real time, you must understand irony.

Understanding all the dimensions of irony is the most important weapon any critical thinker can have in a post-truth world. It’s like having the power to see through a double-sided mirror that everyone else just perceives as a mirror. In seeing through the veneer, you see the illusion at hand and how it manipulates those that can’t see through it, particularly, by blinding them into a complacency with cognitive dissonance.

The word irony is synonymous with opposite. If something is ironic, it’s because an opposite effect is taking place either beknownst or unbeknownst to you. The easiest way to understand irony though is through understanding it in its simplest form, which is sarcasm. What makes sarcasm (and irony) so powerful is that it’s a vehicle for plausible deniability. It allows you to both express views and not express views simultaneously. The broader umbrella that sarcasm falls under is a term called Verbal Irony. Verbal Irony is when you say one thing but mean another. That “another” can be the opposite or an alternative depending on the verbal irony type. For instance, propaganda is a type of verbal irony in that it is a conscious misleading. Thus, any other type of conscious misleading is considered verbal irony like disinformation, manipulation, etc. But one of the newer forms of verbal irony that best encapsulates the propaganda of our post-truth moment is a new type of conscious misleading known as gaslighting.

Over the last decade the term has given a voice to a new rhetoric that’s bewilderingly defining our time. And only those who understand irony are able to “see through the mirror” it casts in real time.

“Are you sure today is the day your phone says it is? How do you know it’s not a Gregorian-calendar based psy-op?” These questions best exemplify how gaslighting is used. Making you question your sense of what’s real either through interrogation, declaration or command. It has been the means by which the media and politicians alike have utilized a ‘slight of hand’ to misdirect the public’s attention away from what’s true and real for the sake of buying time to manufacture a consent retroactively.

Now the difference between disinformation and gaslighting is an important distinction to delineate here. Disinformation is when you knowingly are giving wrong information, but gaslighting is when you knowingly misinform with true information. This is where plausible deniability comes into play because at its core it’s not only what influences irony, but it’s also what divides misinformation from disinformation. If I’m misinforming you I’m not consciously misleading you (hence plausible deniability) because I'm using information in a way I believe is true but ultimately isnt, but if I disinform then I am consciously misleading you because I'm using information I know is false. Gaslighting utilizes the plausible deniability of misinforming in a dramatically ironic way, blurring the lines between fiction and reality like never before. 

In its traditional function, Dramatic Irony is a narration device used in fiction where the audience is in on a secret that a character(s) is not aware of in the story. Dramatic Irony is like an inside joke between the author and their audience. In our post-truth world, it seems this device has jumped off the pages of fiction and integrated into our zeitgeist. As, thanks to technological innovation, it seems special interest groups now have the power to author their own realities to widespread audiences, all the while unbeknownst to other divergent audiences. Creating dramatic irony silo's that continuously fold in on themselves until massive information gaps quake through society.

Because of this, gaslighting has now allowed racist ideologies to seep back into the mainstream fold via successful gaslighting counter-movements like Birtherism and the ‘All lives matter’ counter-mantra of the early '10s. It’s also allowed for cognitive dissonance to be mainstreamed via Hillary Clinton and the DNC's gaslighting Russiagate hoax & 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary "super delegate" debacle against Bernie Sanders, the gaslight sane-washing of the January 6th insurrection and subsequent election denialism, and the Biden administration’s economic recession denialism gaslighting that took place from January 2022 - June 2022 when, according to Statista, we had 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth that were actively suppressed in real time by the media. Some would argue the Covid era also fits into this gaslighting era. Regardless though, it is abundantly clear that gaslighting has eclipsed disinformation as the defining propaganda tool of the last decade plus. Truth has successfully been appropriated for untruths, and understanding irony is the only way to pre-emptively see the appropriations in real time.

Wyatt's Gaslight

In the history of American literature there have been many movements that have provided many psychological insights about their times, but none did so as spectacularly as Literary Realism. Born of the 19th century, Realism was a romantic response to enlightenment that emphasized emotion over reason. It aimed to depict the world as it was, not as we wished it to be. And unlike other literary movements of the time that aimed to make the same depictions (Naturalism), Realism was most concerned with truth, and the thinking was that human emotions spoke more to this truth than human reasoning ever could. So we must pedestal the nature of truth (good over bad, or at least outsurviving it), and not the truth of nature (survival as the end, indifferent to the good or bad means to get to it) in our story telling for the most spectacular insights.  

The most seminal Realist work of this time was Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It was a story about a poor river boy embarking on various feral adventures in antebellum Missouri. As the story unfolds, the reader comes to see how cultural biases condition Finn’s understanding of truth, and in the end he rebels against these biases in favor of his lived personal truth (which was at odds with the public). In ‘Huck Finn’, Twain cleverly illustrates how truth is universal and can subjectively cut through a false objectivity. 

At the turn of the 20th century, this was the legacy of Realism: truth is objective, and can cut through a false subjective conditioning. Truth is infallible, but to be in tune to it in your time you have to have the courage of your convictions. What the next century in American literature proved was that this courage was actually rarer than imagined. Because yes, truth is truth. But what weight does that carry within the reality of the modern world? What does truth have to do with what’s real in the world? Matter of fact, what is real right now? Cause it’s obviously not truth.

And with those questions came the birth of their vetting through a literary movement known as the Modernist movement. Whose primary concern was defining reality. In the end, Modernism came to the conclusion that reality is centered only around what can be observed and understood through the senses (and truth is not that). Then came the Postmodern Movement in the late 20th century, a movement many would argue we’re still in the throws of, that’s primary concern was identifying the forces that control this manufactured reality we’re type-caste into. It’s a question that still persists today, as our manufactured reality has shifted into a distinct ‘hyper-real’ simulation thanks to technological innovations. The postmodernist hope though is that it’s an illuminati-like force that controls everything and we can socially climb our way into their affiliation, but the truth is much darker and more sinister.

It was at the turn of the 2000s when I realized truth was over. The 2000 Presidential Election of George W Bush, followed by the beginning of the -quote unquote- War on Terror that was built on the false pretenses of “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” At the time, disinformation wasn’t a word, but it was a feeling. An eerie feeling creeping its way into the zeitgeist deeper and deeper with every passing year until its enrapturing was undeniable. Nowadays the disinformation is realer than information itself, and truth is now just a byproduct of whatever you think.

And that is where the power lies, funneling the stream of your attention down engineered pathways via various tactics. We’re stuck in this momentum, with no end in sight. And the haunting postmodern truth is, the end is indeed in sight, but not to us...   

MLPMetanarrative

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The sLopflation Era

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The Art of Estrangement

America A.D

Wyatt's Gaslight

An Inconvenient Post-Truth