I was talking to this guy at a party last weekend about court stenography, I think his mom was a court stenographer. He was wearing a navy cashmere scarf and moments earlier had bragged about having an “extremely good nose”, like for smelling. A rather Hapsburgian brag if you ask me, but he didn’t.
We were trying to wrap our head around the inner workings of one of those keyboards that court stenographers use. Maybe you know what I’m talking about, they have 22 keys and look like a miniature organ. Instead of punching away, one key at a time like a bonafide loser, all the keys are used in tandem with one another using a shorthand code for the phonetic sound of each syllable, these motions are known as chords. And in that way it is a little like playing a miniature organ. Court stenographers can also add frequently used words or phrases to a dictionary of sorts, and create chord shortcuts to access them on the job.
So naturally I wanted to know if/how much of a roadblock “Your honor I was just trying to rizz her up” would be to your run of the mill court stenographer. The answer was not hard to find.
From what I can tell the job of a court stenographer is to record everything said in court verbatim, imparting no biases, so that legal professionals may later (or in real time) look at the documents and have an understanding of the day. Watching court stenographers work can be rather mesmerizing, in the same way as watching a highly trained pianist play a sonata, or listening to a native Portuguese speaker yap about egg tarts or whatever else they talk about in Portugal.
I’m thinking about all of this because I’m thinking about everybody's favorite topic: This Ever Changing World (from here on will be known as TECW) and how we adapt to it.
Yes that’s right — this world is changing! It’s been changing since before we were born and it will be changing long after we all drop dead. It changed the dinosaurs into gasoline that fuels our cars and bombs and stovetops which you used to make Wednesday nights “Garlicky Green Beans with Frizzled Onions”. It changed the price of eggs, the price of war, The Price is Right, rivers into barren wastelands, daughters into orphans, twee into cringe, music into noise and then back into music again, news into a constant, and that’s really just the beginning of the list. The world’s been changing since it started actually, and that wasn’t even a start at all, it was, you guessed it, yet another change! From one decade, week, hour, millisecond to the next, aren’t we all just so wistful for the old days, scared of the future, and completely unable to enjoy what’s right in front of us before it too is surrendered to an inevitable, perpetual mutation. TECW is responsible for almost all of our collective grief and longing, and yet, we are forced to change with it.
We’ve all seen the evolution of TECW in real time, a cleverly worded headline to the tune of “Court Stenographer BAFFLED When Key Witness Tells Judge He Was Getting Hawk Tuah At Crime Scene”. And we all do a little laugh because the world is so silly and absurd and the convergence of new and antiquated is just BAFFLING. Sometimes the contrast is so stark it feels like two tectonic plates rubbing up against one another, and sometimes a lot of people get really mad because they don’t recognize the world around them anymore.
“Someone put an end to the barrage of slop on TikTok!”
is a sentence that was said to me recently, and I don’t fully disagree. TikTok is a breeding ground for slop. In fact, it’s more than one person’s full time job to engagement farm their way to a quarterly bonus. They (plural) sit in an office every single day and think up brand new, creative, aquamarine, vanilla scented slop for me to consume, digest, and then write about here on Substack. Yet another example of the far reaching effects of TECW.
I love slop, and I agree that there is a barrage of it, but I don’t think it should stop. I love junk (which I’ve written about before) and slop is basically the same thing just online. Some examples of slop I love includes: soap slop, competitive ballroom hairstyling, and fruit salad dance party videos (which yes I know are for babies). At another time in my life I might have watched this slop and called it a day but lately it’s been fascinating to me to consider the real world consequences of slop creation, and to place slop within the broader cultural context. I think about the ASMR houses that sit empty, the eroded soaps, the rusty hydraulic presses, the discarded fidget collections, the decimated hair follicles. Post slop clarity I call it.
To write slop off as just that would be doing it a huge disservice. It’s a reflection of where we’re at culturally; tired, tuned out, broke, hungry for satisfaction and ease. Nobody likes a mirror held to them against their will but sometimes you have to look. And before you say this could have been prevented, what choice did we have really? We simply adapted to TECW the best way we knew how, by mass producing a subgenre that is, for all intents and purposes, a visual security blanket. To assume that slop would or should just stop is like asking TECW to stop changing which we’ve already established is completely impossible.
I’m not suggesting we blindly surrender to all this, rather that we engage. To engage with slop is how we ride the wave of TECW. We must push past the collective exhaustion and think like the court stenographers do, we must code in words that are foreign to us as uncomfortable as they might be. We must be ok with the consequences of adapting and assigning meaning with thoughtfulness and intention, because TECW will reward us tenfold. And I really believe that.
Before you assume I’m in spiritual psychosis which like…thank you :’)...or deeply rotted or something, let me assure you that I’m ending my Sophomore year of Los Angeles and this is just what happens around then or so I’m told.
I resurrected this newsletter as a home for exclusive content for my project Grocery Goblin, it’s a short form docu-series that uses the lens of the grocery store to examine communities, it mostly lives on slopking.com aka TikTok. In a recent video I likened TikTok to this generations public access, and I stand by that, there are thousands of people with niche interests producing video content on a 24 hour loop. For that and a lot of other reasons I love TikTok.
So this newsletter is changing, it’s a product of TECW after all, it’s been renamed and if you’ve been here since the beginning thank you! I promise I will not let you down, I promise I will do everything in my power to keep changing, that’s what I owe you I think.