The Dada Kidnapper’s Manifesto is a pro-AI pro-dada absurdist work I wrote in 2024, because there were some things that needed to be said at the time.
If I were writing it today, I honestly don’t think I’d change very much.
There is one detail, though, that makes it feel strangely ancient.
It predates slop.
I called AI art shit. I called it trash numerous times. I called it garbage. I took those accusations, put little party hats on them, and made them part of the work.
But I never called it slop.
Not even once.
I couldn’t have anticipated the move from trash to slop, because even I did not anticipate how revealing the vocabulary of the anti-AI movement would eventually become.
They’re remarkable, in their own way.
And the more I think about it, the more I actually prefer slop to trash, because they aren’t the same insult at all.
Trash is about the object.
Trash says: this thing is worthless. It is unpleasant. It is stinky, unsafe, and disposable. It is something you remove from your house because you no longer consider it useful.
Brutal criticism, sure.
But still criticism of a thing.
Artists have been calling other artists’ work trash forever. Sometimes correctly. Usually not. Frequently while wearing very expensive scarves. Entire perfectly valid creative categories and practices have been written off this way by people who history eventually forgot about.
“Slop” hits differently.
Slop is sustenance. It is food stripped of dignity.
Animal feed. Gruel. Institutional food. The shapeless fluidic mass in the trough.
And when you call art “slop,” you are no longer saying that the art is bad.
You have introduced an eater.
Slop implies somebody who consumes slop.
This is the kind of thing consumed by creatures who cannot tell the difference.
And suddenly the insult has escaped broken polite containment. Now, you see, it includes an audience, a cook, the person who consumes it.
It’s that last one that’s funny, because it presents you with a picture of a person who apparently lacks the refinement necessary to reject whatever has been dumped into the trough in front of them.
They eat mindlessly, like animals.
They are filthy, subhuman, and often poor.
The contempt becomes specific enough to know exactly who is speaking.
And once you start using metaphors of animality, filth, appetite, primitiveness and cultural inferiority to describe groups of human beings, race is not exactly a distant historical association anymore, either.
And whether or not you’ve thought it through, and don’t mean it that way… language doesn’t need your permission to carry this kind of baggage.
So naturally, I support it.
The words you choose to use say as much about the way you see the world, as whatever you might have meant to say.
Choose them carefully.
Everybody's watching.