Sora2: The Apotheosis of Enshittification
October 10, 2025
Sora2: Artificial Boogaloo
TL;DR
The dual launches of Cory Doctorow's book Enshittification and OpenAI's personalized slop generator, Sora2, show the risks of slop content tools. Ryan Trecartin shows the rewards.
What?
On September 30, OpenAI launched Sora2, a personalized image-and-content generator that is, technically speaking, fucking bonkers.
See for yourself.
@bigfooty Mr Rogers and Tupac #ai #sora #openai #mrrogers #tupac ♬ original sound - bigfooty
Once I got my super secret invite, my thirsty frontal lobe began gorging on Sam Altman's slop — Oink, Oink, Oink — and thanks to Sora2, I could now inject my image name and likeness into the endless stream of flat corporatized visual stimuli that was already cluttering up my brain like so much lint caught in a dryer screen.
@travisjnichols Welp. #sora2 #ai ♬ original sound - Travis Nichols
It was the 2025 version of when my friends and I would go to Sears to mug in front of the camcorders and see ourselves on the big TVs, with probably a similar audience reach.
I'm making it sound like a drag, but it's not. It's fun! Or, it's that thin, back-of-the-cereal-box kind of experience that passes for fun right now.
And, sadly for my oinky frontal lobe, even this degraded brand of fun won't last, because Sora2 and ChatGPT and other AI slop churns are platforms, and platforms all undergo . . .
Enshittification.
@travisjnichols #enshittification ♬ original sound - Travis Nichols
As Cory Doctorow lays out in his new book, all Big Tech Platforms follow a similar trajectory.
In his description, a platform is a specific thing, a service that connects businesses to users. And, crucially, a platform gets its value from its users. The more users, the more value a platform has. The better the users, the more value the platform has. And the more reliant the users and the businesses are on the platform, the more value the platform has.
All platforms (for now) undergo this process:
*The platform is good to its users, who then increase in quality and number, adding value and attracting business customers.
*The platform abuses these users to increase the quality and number of business customers, who then create more value for the platform, attracting investors.
*The platform abuses these business customers to create value for its investors, who keep the value for themselves.
*The platform becomes a giant pile of shit.
Platforms, from eBay to Amazon to Facebook to Twitter to Uber to etc. etc., have all followed this pattern.
But, you might protest, aren't ChatGPT, Sora2, and other AI products services, not platforms? Yes, but they are also platforms, in some ways they are the ultimate platforms, because they rely on users for their value (no training data, no service). And right now, they are being good to their users, and these users (Pick me! Pick me!) are creating a lot of value.
Which means it's only a matter of time.
So What?
On one hand, large language models and diffusion engines like Gemini and Sora2 empower people to create more easily. You can generate essays, poems, video scripts, business plans, and your own version of Wheel of Fortune in seconds.
The new capabilities are astonishing, and unnerving.
On the other hand, by using these platforms, we are adding new intermediaries between us and our creative work.
These intermediaries are low-cost and low-barrier-to-entry now, but, it's not hard to imagine the scenario where we become so reliant on LLMs to churn out content quickly that this new pace becomes the baseline for any kind of creative livelihood.
Until the time comes when, if you can't churn out slop in minutes, you'll be left behind.
The same knowledge that liberates us from gatekept cultural production today, allowing us to get first drafts and minimum viable products out the door without having to get certified or pay creative agencies out the wazoo, will soon become the mandatory knowledge we need to get through the new gate.
We'll find ourselves once again dependent on enshittified intermediaries, captured by OpenAI in the same way we've been captured by Adobe or Kodak or [name vendor lock-in entity here].
Once these platforms become central to the creative economy, their billionaire owners will shift the platform's focus from serving users to serving investors.
The convenience and speed that feels liberating now will, inevitably, capture us in a giant pile of shit.
Oops.
Now What?
In the early 2000s, Ryan Trecartin took Apple's technologically janky iMovie software and made beautiful art. In works like A Family Finds Entertainment and I-Be Area. Trecartin layered poetry, digital animation, DIY couture, and fever‑dream show tunes with manic precision to articulate a singular artistic vision. He used the primitive tools of prehistoric slop to make something that inspired awe (in me, anyway).
In interviews, Trecartin said he would write out themes, scripts, and characters, and then use iMovie almost like a music tool, cutting scenes with rhythm and layering to create his wild, energetic style.
He didn't use iMovie because it inherently suited his sensibility, though. He used it because it was what was available. It was low‑cost, low‑barrier to entry, and no one thought of it as an artistic medium.
In Trecartin's hands, the constraints of this basic consumer software became a way to mirror, mock, and remix the early social‑platform era's overstimulated oversharing zeitgoop.
His mind used Apple's tools to make groundbreaking, personal, utterly unique art.
This is where Trecartin's example becomes instructive as a way to use slop without losing ourselves. The platform will probably enshittify anyway, but we can avoid being captured in the process, if we keep the proper aesthetic distance.
And, as Doctorow points out, resisting enshittification isn't just an aesthetic project. It's political. Similar to what David Graeber often argued, Doctorow says creative resistance is a form of democratic engagement.
"Disintermediation," the act of removing unnecessary layers between the individual and the tools of expression, is a way to reclaim agency, like direct democracy.
The ideas of direct democracy and disintermediation are both about cutting out middlemen (representatives that represent . . . what exactly?) and giving people a more hands‑on role in decision‑making, whether in politics, media, technology, etc. Both concepts empower individuals to play an active role rather than passively relying on gatekeepers or institutions.
So, bottom line, Sora2 is very cool. If you want an invite, I have a few. Maybe get a few people to sign up for this newsletter and let me know, then I'll send you one?
But caveat slopeur: When artists allow corporate intermediaries to dictate the pace, tone, and terms of their work, we risk becoming passive nodes in a Big Tech Slide Deck. Which is why I think Trecartin is worth a look right now.
He accepted the constraints of consumer software, but he didn't let those constraints define his work or capture his creative process.
In the words of Treartin, "Don't go looking for something that isn't looking for you."
*NB: All typos in this email are because I composed it in iMovie.
