The Exhaustion of User Experience: The Business of Spam, Slop, and Other Infrastructural Bugs

While referring to real-world experiences of digital culture, this article begins by adopting speculative fiction to examine three contrasting imaginary users of AI-generated “slop”: Ananya, a UX designer in Bengaluru facing layoff; Prakash, a Jakarta-based content creator monetizing viral absurdist content; and YOU, the exhausted user. Consistent with earlier analyses of spam (Parikka & Sampson, 2009), the article argues that AI slop is not an external failure, but a constitutive accident generated at the moment of innovation (Virilio, 2007). Like most technological inventions, AI carries its own potential crash. Critiquing a prevalent “windshield or bug” metaphor, the author contends that slop is not an anomalous bad bug, but an expression of platforms optimized for scale within inequitable economies. Ultimately, user exhaustion is not an outdated skills issue. It is a feature of infrastructures designed to extract value from increasingly enshitified (Doctorow, 2025) user experiences at ever-greater scales.