Society

In 1940, Borges published what is not quite a story. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — collected four years later in Ficciones — begins with the discovery of a reference to a country, Uqbar, in a slightly variant edition of an encyclopedia. The country does not appear in any other edition. The country, in any verifiable sense, does not exist. This leads, in the usual Borgesian manner, to the discovery of forty volumes describing an entire planet — Tlön — whose existence is similarly unverifiable, but whose philosophers, languages, and physics are described with the patience of something that has had centuries to develop. And then Tlön begins to appear in the physical world. A compass. A metal cone. By the story’s final pages, the fictional world has begun to overwrite the actual one: scholars study Tlönian history, children are taught its geography, a generation arises for whom Tlön is more real than the country they were born in. …

The argument that keeps failing is not the argument about which system is better. It is the assumption, buried inside that argument, that the categories are stable — that capitalism, socialism, mercantilism, feudalism refer to four distinct, mutually exclusive arrangements, and that the story of modern history is one of them winning. They have not been stable for five centuries. What has been stable is something more basic: there is a surplus, and someone claims it. The form the claiming takes has changed. The claiming has not. …

In 1654, in a fragment now numbered 139 of the Pensées, Pascal wrote a sentence that has been quoted so often it has lost most of its weight, and it is worth taking down from the shelf and looking at it again: all of humanity’s misery comes from a single fact, namely, that we are unable to sit quietly, alone, in a room. Three hundred and seventy years later we have built the most extraordinary device in human history for the express purpose of ensuring no one ever has to. …

The public conversation about AI and work is stuck on the wrong question. “Will my job be replaced?” is the framing everyone reaches for, because it has a clean visual: a robot taking a specific seat. The headlines love it. Goldman: AI to replace 300 million jobs. McKinsey: half of all work activity automatable. The displacement frame promises an event — an announcement, a layoff, a press release — and the policy answers it suggests are familiar: retraining, universal basic income, regulation. …

Revised on 2026-04-28 to v1.1. See revision history below. Look at any AI-skeptic feed in 2026 and you’ll see the word slop doing heavy work. It names something real: low-entropy, mass-produced text without an author behind it, flooding feeds, search results, comment sections, product reviews. There’s now a small genre of essays explaining why this is bad for civilization. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are slop themselves. I want to ask a different question. Not whether AI slop is bad — clearly some of it is — but why we’re so confident we can recognize it. Because if you squint at a lot of professional life, much of what we produce on a normal Tuesday already qualifies. Legal boilerplate. Corporate memo-speak. Quarterly reports that survive only because nobody reads them. Status updates that say nothing. Standardized medical notes whose function is mostly forensic. …