Duncan:

I'm Duncan, from the Singapore Art Museum. When I was looking back at Al's work and at Post Post Post when it came onto my radar, I noticed the publication—which I wore out when I got it—was from 2023, and the film was in 2024. Maybe the goal of the conversation is to ask: what is 2025 within that kind of linear narrative? But also, in response to Al's question, it might be more relevant to ask what 2026 looks like.

For me, one way to diagnose that is to look at some of these meme trends crossing our feeds and use them as starting points. Because you landed on "brain rot"—and the distinction between "slop" and "brain rot"—maybe that's a place we can start. You made a distinction between "Shrimp Jesus" and the "Ghibli-fied Shrimp Jesus," and how these different layers of abstraction enhance or modify meaning.

I've also been really taken by Boomer-bait AI slop. Shrimp Jesus qualifies, but there are also those images of Sub-Saharan African children building a helicopter out of garbage, or double-amputee veterans asking for a "like" on their birthday. How does that Boomer slop differ from Gen Alpha brain rot? Where is the meaning in that, or what kind of psychic diagnosis can we make?

Al:

I'm glad you mentioned that, especially when it comes to Boomer slop. I was recently researching these slop farms and this type of content—if slop can even be considered "content" after all we've been dissecting. There are countless YouTube channels now that teach you how to create AI slop content farms and show you exactly how much money they make.

I watched one tutorial by a guy from India named Abhishek who detailed the process. He showed how Facebook is currently giving bonuses on image posts, where 1,000 likes can get you around $50. He creates or buys dead pages with large followings, connects them all to a single platform, and blasts a post to 100 accounts simultaneously. It is basically spam, but platforms like Meta are very open to this infiltration because it keeps people hooked.

In the tutorial, Abhishek says to start with a simple prompt: "Poor man, skinny in India." It generates 200 of those weird, uncanny images we've all seen. He posts them across his accounts; maybe six go viral, and he makes $4,000 a week. It's the main reason slop is everywhere now. And Abhishek is actually considered a lower earner in these slop mafia kingdoms. There's a British guy playing in the hundreds-of-thousands range who sends out marketing emails saying bluntly, "YouTube does not care what you want to say; it just wants to feed its algorithm." He points out that while traditional creators work weeks on their videos, generating AI shorts takes two to four minutes, and you can make $20,000 right away. This is all happening because platforms have set up their algorithms to maximize this enraging, highly-engaging content. So, to reflect on your question about 2026: if platforms don't add any guardrails against slop, we can expect the internet to be drastically different by next year.

Duncan:

I also wanted to ask you about the pitch for the film. I didn't realize it was being sold on a sitcom model, replicating each season as one year into the future. It inevitably reminds me of the Aaron Sorkin show The Newsroom. Sorkin acts as the mouthpiece for a very specific type of liberalism, and the premise of The Newsroom was redoing cable news from an ideal liberal perspective with the benefit of hindsight. Your project feels like a reversal of that premise, and a rejection of the medium. Is there a political diagnosis underlying that desire?

Al:

Yes, absolutely. One thing I don't usually talk about openly is how Post Post Post really incorporates politics, though anyone who follows it on Instagram can see that. The show was supposed to be a vehicle for injecting radical politics into the sitcom, which is supposedly the most blunted-edge medium. The Newsroom comparison makes sense because that show was so late to the cultural conversation that it became unwatchable. It was a combination of centrist politics and the luxury of hindsight—made after everyone had already decided what the "right" opinion was. It was devoid of risk and mostly about the Aaron Sorkin ego.

With the sitcom format for Post Post Post, we wanted to take advantage of the trend-forecasting realm. I felt it would be a fascinating collaborative project to have writers working with a trend forecaster, like someone from K-HOLE. Then there’s the extrapolation element: once you do the actual trend forecasting, you take it to the next level by making it completely ridiculous. In the film we just watched, the whole world has been decimated, and there's just one gentrified neighborhood still alive. Making those absurd world-building decisions ends up being political in and of itself, without having to be overt.

Rafi:

Hello everyone, my name is Rafi. Thank you Federico, Al, and Duncan for having me. I want to surface some thoughts on contextualizing the Post Post zeitgeist within our region here in Singapore. What does it mean to be speaking about meme culture on Aliwal Street today? 

The spirit of breaking conventions isn't unique to your project; there are strong parallels in this region. In the 1970s, many modern artists in Singapore were traditionally painting the Singapore River as a marker of progression for the modern nation-state. Artist Cheo Chai-Hiang became fatigued with that. His representation of the Singapore River was an overhead projector displaying a blank five-by-five square—a highly conceptual approach. Similarly, in Malaysia in the 1970s, Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa published the Towards a Mystical Reality manifesto, capturing a similar fatigue with artistic conventions.

This frustration with ideologies takes different shapes, but the essence hasn't changed much over the last 30 to 50 years. I wanted to pick your brain on the "Italian brain rot" phenomenon. Do you think there are instances where total meaning has collapsed? I know of an Indonesian example—tunda sahur. What does this calibrating of memes mean, and why does it have such a hook on culture at large?

Duncan:

To add to that, I think Rafi makes an interesting point about asynchronous avant-gardes. When you mentioned the French, American, and Italian brain rot universes, there is a localization to them that really resembles these asynchronous regional avant-gardes.

Al:

I completely agree; this is not unique to any single locality. I strongly believe in a tradition of dissidence that has always been there throughout history. That's why I wanted Post Post to disrupt linear and synchronized thinking. Lumping everything into strict periodizations like modernism and postmodernism is extremely reductive.

However, the one thing I would disagree with is that Italian brain rot signifies a collapse of meaning. I actually think it acted as a savior of meaning. AI slop was taking us into total nonsense—content you don't even know how to engage with. You don't like it, you don't hate it; you react to it as if you're looking at a blank wall. That was the true meaninglessness I was interested in.

What happened on TikTok with Gen Alpha was a subversion of that death, revitalizing it. I loved that it made the internet feel alive again, especially when we were all anxious about the "Dead Internet Theory." These highly coded meme signifiers are indications that there are real people behind the phones, not just bots. Niche humor is going to become the ultimate marker to discern if you're interacting with a human online. It’s a true end-to-end encrypted form of communication because it hasn't been fully coded into LLMs yet. We need to look at slop in both its forms: when it is subverted and given meaning back through brain rot, and when it embraces the medium without any lore, story, or character.

Federico:

You mentioned that this slop bothers the creative elite on LinkedIn because it is culturally uncomputable. The trajectory of exponentiating creativity for the sake of creativity—which Ray Brassier might index—often just adds new forms of commodification. The meaninglessness of slop is fundamentally different from the edgy imaginaries created by elite creatives. You approach it maximally, the exact opposite of Malevich’s iconoclasm of removing everything to break meaning. You break it from within by embracing the drives that make decoding impossible, all while sneaking in politicized discourse. My straightforward question for you is: What is OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) and Graham Harman doing for you in this narrative, especially given their tribal battle with Ray Brassier and the neo-rationalists?

Al:

To respond to your point about Malevich: the third essay in the Post Post publication is titled "Nothing is Camp." It basically argues that "nothing" doesn't have to be silent or black; you can make a very loud nothing. One of those schizo-Instagram philosophers coined the term "spec-maxing"—spectacle-maxing. That really resonated with Post Post, because you can be completely extra and campy, but it can still be a formalist work about nothing.

As for OOO, I was very privileged to be a student of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton. When you study under Graham, you see how truly obsessive he was about making speculative realism work over twenty-plus years. You find it hard to be convinced otherwise. Even before and after being his student, whenever I engaged with anti-OOO discourse online, I found it was largely based on misreadings of object-oriented ontology, misreadings of Graham Harman, and often driven by identity politics.