Dhruvik Parikh

Sloppification

Sausalito

Last week I took the ferry to Sausalito, after years of hearing my friends rave about its cute European aesthetic and great food and shopping. It was indeed a cute town, with beautiful weather and views of the Bay, but it had a touristy veneer that I couldn’t quite get over. This was an all too familiar feeling, which I’ve now seen everywhere from American tourist hotspots to historic places such as the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and Paris’s Montmartre. What you’re served in these places nowadays is not a blast to the past, authentic cultural experience. Rather, you’re served the same dish that’s taken over your timeline, menu, and phone: slop.

Just like AI generated images that have a few bits of legitimate prompt information and many bits of hallucinated filler, the food you’re served and merchandise you’re offered in these tourist destinations are shells of their former selves. On the surface, you see an item or dish that you connect to the place you’re in, but there’s not much there beyond that. It’s not crafted by artisans, it’s made in China. It’s not a chef-curated meal, it’s made in mass quantities and offered alongside the same penne alla arrabiatta and other “global fare” to appeal to the varying diets of your fellow tourists.

My hypothesis is that this “sloppification” is a side effect of reducing the barrier to entry on both the production and consumption of goods.

On the production side, it used to be that in order to produce or sell a good, you needed to be very specialized. Therefore, the quality of goods was quite high. There’s no way you’d be selling hand-carved wooden sculptures in Paris unless you’d spent years training that skill. Now, since anyone can make an image, start a business selling pretty much any good, etc. the overall quality is lower.

On the consumption side, there used to be heavy stratification, but as incomes rose and populations grew, the number of people who wanted to consume apparently high quality goods skyrocketed. Perceived quality is a function of both intrinsic quality and exclusivity. To be clear, these are related. For example, airport lounges quickly erode in quality as exclusivity declines, as do travel destinations. We are becoming richer faster than we can come up with new high quality things to spend money on, so we are stuck spending our money on "slop"py boutiques, $19 salads, and other travesties.

A particularly interesting example is Uber. With origins as a black car service, the original clientele and product was very upmarket. Inevitably to grow the business, they needed to offer more and more base market services, and UberX came along. But some people didn't want UberX, they wanted to feel like they were going on Uber Black. To serve this perceived high quality to more people, Uber needed to cut corners and erode the experience. Now, there are entirely new companies trying to be Uber for black cars, because of how badly Uber deteriorated that product.

However, we don't need to just accept this fate. Today, we have Waymo, a product that's better than Uber Black ever was, and we can all enjoy it if we're willing to pay for it. Here's to more Waymo-like experiences in world full of Uber slop.