Turning Point for the Slop Industrialists
Today I spent about an hour reading and partly archiving information about Microsoft's ~60,000 requests to leave ("buyouts"). Several things stood out, as former executives speak out and some insiders speak poorly of what they got offered.
First, a lot of people who work on "hey hi" at Microsoft (no matter the buzzword or brand, e.g. "copilot") are impacted. This means that the deflation drive has nothing to do with "hey hi efficiency", it's just a company dying or drowning in debt with no prospects of recovery.
It has been implicitly confirmed that the "buyout" is a better "offer" than what would come next/later. By the end of this year tens of thousands of Microsoft workers will be gone.
Plagiarism is not a business model, it's a cheating approach wherein students, for instance, get ahead in school/university without actually learning anything.
Gaming the system to get loans (e.g. "hey hi" companies making epic losses and then offloading/dumping all the loans and debt on Wall Street) is as bad as it sounds. They make false promises, they lie about capabilities and potential. They keep rebranding when things don't work ("advanced", "generative", "agentic", "super intelligent") and resort to version inflation (3,4,5,5.5,6... doesn't matter what those numbers mean as long as they go up).
In China, according to several articles we've seen this week, the "hey hi" bubble is considered deflated and in the West they are paying the media and greedy front groups like the Linux Foundation to inflate the bubble some more (examples from today).
Modern "Tech is a collective Death Drive," Andy wrote earlier today. "Computing and cybersecurity people are beyond exasperation. Creative minds (as opposed to salesmen and politicians who usurped our field) feel like a mother with a newborn that will not feed. Everything we need as a species for a secure and sustainable future is in our hands. Yet, obdurate to reason, people choose the tragic ruin of growth, convenience and amusement. Freud's idea of the "death drive" finds no finer expression of the desire to "lead organic life back into the inanimate state" than "AI". It's a textbook definition of self-destruction driven by a fundamental shame and disappointment with ourselves as beings. Until we learn to see ourselves as fundamentally whole, adequate, good enough beings all digital technology will remain a narcotic, not a tool. "AI" is civilisation's destructive guilt unleashed."
Chatbots (and other forms of slop) are not inevitable. Their use is almost always voluntary. Nothing is inevitable. People make a choice to use them. People also make the choice not to use them. For the pyramid schemers, it is only inevitable they will attempt to force people to use these (e.g. through people's employers).
Involuntary adoption does not work. It breeds anger and eventually it falls over.
Judging by the state of slopfarms online, people are already fatigued by slop and they're learning to distinguish fakes from credible sources.
What happened to Microsoft this week is evidence that the slop peddlers hit a barrier; the schemers will "cash out" sooner or later, leaving employees who got paid in "shares" holding the bag. A lot of the valuations are based on wealth that does not exist. █
This past summer: 2026: The Year Slop Companies "Made an Exit" (Threw in the Towel Over to Wall Street)