Slop About Slop
What Asli 4k actually means
It was Friday evening. A and I had decided, unusually, to watch TV, and what lay ahead was the familiar negotiation about what to watch. We opened JioHotstar from a carousel of other streaming services and scrolled through row upon row of titles that all looked similar.
We moved from one title to another. The expression on each of these people gracing the posters was one of absolute amazement. It was as if all of them had seen a UFO flying out of their home window.
I spotted a familiar logo, one from the 90s. The black silhouette of the T-rex we all remember from growing up, placed on a bright red background. This was the new Jurassic Park movie featuring Scarlett Johansson. When we pressed play, a small hope was ignited in me for one split second, where I felt like this might be good. This might not be like everything that has encompassed cinema and TV these past few years.
A minute into the movie, we are shown the abominable T-rex slaughtering a poor scientist who malfunctioned a super secure system by eating a Snickers bar. I had expected, in my naivety, to wait for it. The way I used to when my father and I would sit down after putting a Moser Baer CD into my HCL Beanstalk system. The same pirated CD I would buy from Games World.
Over the next few minutes, the movie progressed in almost utter certainty, the way I had expected after the first minute. The colours were flat, there were no shadow details in any of the scenes, the characters were placed dead centre in almost every frame, and we were told the whole plot by minute three.
On the top right corner of the screen there was a sign that said “Asli 4K” (real 4K), its borders shining every three seconds, begging for our attention and reminding us that we were paying for the top tier plan that promised 1440p but really delivered 1080p at a lower bitrate.
The buffer icon appeared by minute six, and that was the cue for us to press the back button and return to the carousel. I had given it a fair chance and all it gave was disappointment.
We saw the thumbnail of the Twin Peaks reboot that aired in 2017. Neither of us had seen the original, but we were still intrigued by the font choice. I pressed play, and a woman appeared on the screen, speaking in this slow-motion tongue, the type you get when you put a speed effect on a regular clip and the voice takes on that blurred, dragging quality. Then a man came and delivered four shovels to another man who was living in the middle of a forest, and then a strange-looking man spoke in that same slow-motion effect to the main actor. This happened one after the other. In the middle of it, there is a whole sequence of a man sitting on a sofa, looking at a glass cage surrounded by eight cameras. He gets up twice, once to change the card in the camera and once to take a coffee delivery. He comes back and sits down.
Nothing about it was making sense to us, but we kept watching, hooked to the TV, like a moth to a flame. Right after the Jurra-sick madness, this was the complete opposite of what we had experienced a few moments back.
Then the power went, as it does here in Shillong, and the screen died in the middle of a scene and the whole room went black. I sat for a while, then reached for my phone and opened YouTube. My recommendation feed had a theme going, and the pattern was easy to spot. I tried not to weave the thread back to what I had been feeling, but the signs were obvious. The new internet slop, on places like YouTube and Substack, is about slop. Music YouTubers, film bros, vloggers, they all have a dead internet theory video on their feed, and right after the dead internet theory, they somehow make a decline in reading video. These are clearly favoured by the algorithms, and so this is what they follow. My mind kept returning to what David Foster Wallace wrote in “E Unibus Pluram,” back in 1993, about television: that it had managed to become its own most profitable critic.
Wallace wrote that in 1993 and then he died, and the essay is still circulating, chopped into clips now, playing between two videos about why nothing is real anymore. I watched one of those too.