Everybody loves to panic about AI slop. But let’s be honest for a second: we are infinitely more bombarded, crushed, and suffocated by human slop than by any generative model.
Take Instagram, for instance. Meta has handed everyone a powerhouse of rapid customization tools to churn out optimal "transmedia art." Everyone is a storyteller now. People narrate their lives, their interests, turning themselves into micro-business PR agents and self-proclaimed artists. Everyone strives for originality, but the distribution channels are utterly clogged.
Personally, I follow close to 7,000 people. For the one daily hour I'm willing to spend looking at what others do—commenting, liking, playing the cynical game of public relations, investing precious time in a sort of social autograph-signing expecting a bit of reciprocal attention—I am literally waterboarded with information. I don't share others' work; I only share my own, because I refuse to act as an unvetted prescription machine for things whose sources I don't even know.
And I'll admit it frankly: most of the time, I give maybe a few hundredths of a second of consideration to things people spent ten minutes, months, or years creating.
Sure, there’s more and more AI out there. But globally, it’s a tiny fraction compared to the tidal wave of human slop smashing into my face every day. Everything blends into a grotesque, chaotic soup of improbable crossovers. You can't even tell if someone is sharing their own creation or shilling for someone else's. It's a transmedia nightmare—a totalitarian propaganda machine powered by everyday pocket tools, put right into the hands of ordinary people.
The worst part? I’m starting to enjoy my daily epileptic hit of bulimic micro-fiction consumption, and long-form formats are getting excruciatingly boring. I know, I know: I’m on a slippery slope, and maybe we should just leave storytelling to professional storytellers.
This absolute chaos is precisely why I launched the Transmedia Jam #1.
We've pushed the parameters of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the Attention Economy to absolute, terrifying extremes. Distribution channels are entirely broken, choked out by a divine deluge of human-generated noise where real talent completely drowns.
This jam isn't about letting algorithms take over. It's an invitation for professionals, passionate creators of original narratives, disruption explorers, and architects of singular storyverses to step back, take the reins of a runaway machine, and rethink the future of storytelling. Whether you want to build something new for the occasion or showcase an existing project, we need to talk.
If you want to discuss the future of narrative across disciplines—far beyond the superficial AI panic—come light a fire with us at the Transmedia Jam #1 and share your anticipatory theories.
Let's talk.
