Algorithms Ate the Magic: Enshittification, AI Slop & Why Aurelda Never Had a Chance

I had this quaint little idea that if I created something meaningful, beautiful, strange, heartfelt, and genuinely different, people might eventually find it… Adorable.

I created The Aurelda Chronicles as a Mesoamerican-inspired queer fantasy world about remembrance, resonance, belonging, sacred relationship, and the dangerous human urge to control what we should instead learn to hear.

Then I released it into an internet engineered primarily to make you watch a man scream at a woman in a Costco parking lot for twelve seconds before an advertisement for magnesium gummies appears.

Apparently, I misunderstood the assignment.

Welcome to the Enshittocene

Cory Doctorow gave us the perfect word for what happened to the internet: enshittification.

The American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, describing the progressive deterioration of digital platforms as they shift value away from users, then business customers, and ultimately toward extracting as much value as possible for themselves.

Then, just two years later, the same organization named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year: low-quality, high-volume content, most commonly associated with generative AI.

That is almost too perfect. We went from the platforms becoming shit to industrializing the production of shit.

Achievement unlocked.

And somewhere in the middle of that, independent creators were told that this was democratization:

• Anyone could create now.
• Anyone could publish.
• Anyone could reach an audience.

Technically true. Anyone can also throw a message in a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean.

COVID Put Almost All of Us Inside the Machine

COVID did not invent this system, but it dramatically accelerated our dependence on it.

The OECD documented how the pandemic intensified digital transformation across nearly every part of life. Work moved online. School moved online. Shopping moved online. Social relationships moved online. Some internet providers experienced traffic increases of as much as 60 percent during the early pandemic period.

Technology was enormously useful. It kept businesses running, families connected, children learning, and communities functioning.

But something else happened too. The screen stopped being somewhere we went. It became where we lived.

And increasingly, what we encountered there was no longer chosen primarily by us—it was chosen for us.

The Algorithm Is Not Your Wise Elder

We talk about “the algorithm” as though it is some mysterious digital oracle evaluating the inherent worthiness of human creativity. It isn’t.

Algorithms optimize for whatever their owners tell them to optimize for. And engagement is wonderfully measurable. Wisdom is inconveniently not.

A 2026 Nature study examining algorithmic feeds around the 2024 U.S. presidential election found that engagement-based ranking amplified intergroup, moralized, and emotional political content and could distort perceptions of how hostile other groups actually were.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that major social-media and video platforms engaged in extensive surveillance and data collection tied to monetization and targeted advertising. The FTC concluded that these business models created incentives to gather enormous quantities of information about users.

So no, your feed isn’t a magical mirror of what humanity collectively finds meaningful. It is an optimization environment.

The machine isn’t asking: “Will this make Jason feel more human?”

It is asking: “Will Jason touch the rectangle again?”

Those are not remotely the same objective.

Then We Gave the Machine Artificial Intelligence

This is where my relationship with AI gets wonderfully ironic. AI helped me create Aurelda. Not by pressing a button and saying, “Make fantasy franchise, please.”

I spent years shaping the world, characters, mythology, metaphysics, imagery, language, emotional architecture, revisions, contradictions, continuity, and meaning. AI became a creative collaborator that allowed one independent creator to do things that previously would have required a studio: Text. Images. Audio. Research. Worldbuilding. Lore. Iteration.

Technology helped me take something enormous that lived inside me and give it form. I still think that is extraordinary.

Unfortunately, humanity received the same technology and immediately discovered that it could also manufacture an effectively infinite quantity of disposable content.

The 2026 Stanford AI Index reports that corporate AI investment more than doubled during 2025. Industry already produced nearly 90 percent of notable AI models in 2024. This is not some tiny countercultural technology quietly developing in university basements. It is becoming one of the largest industrial competitions on Earth.

So the same technology that empowered me also helped create an environment in which abundance became noise.

I used AI to help build a cathedral.

The internet discovered it could use AI to manufacture landfill faster.

Both things are true.

Even Government Now Talks Like a Tech Pitch Deck

The current Trump administration did not invent this worldview. Silicon Valley has been rehearsing it for decades.

But the administration has made the priorities unusually explicit.

Its official AI strategy is called “Winning the AI Race.” The plan emphasizes accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, exporting American AI systems, reducing barriers, and maintaining U.S. technological dominance. Supporters reasonably argue that this is necessary for economic competitiveness, national security, and competition with China.

But listen to the language: Race. Dominance. Acceleration. Scale. More. Faster.

On September 13, 2026, Reuters reported that President Donald Trump dismissed many concerns about AI as exaggerated and characterized critics as “very negative forces,” while again emphasizing American leadership in the technology.

Perhaps the problem is not merely one administration. Perhaps it is that we have collectively confused technological acceleration with human advancement.

Those are not synonyms either.

Aurelda Never Had a Fair Chance in This Machine

Aurelda asks almost the opposite of what the modern attention economy asks:

Slow down. Listen. Remember. Notice what is alive.

Do not confuse understanding with possession. Do not confuse power with control.

Pay attention to resonance. Sit beneath the fucking tree for a minute.

That is not exactly algorithm catnip.

I experienced Aurelda as more than a commercial intellectual property project. I experienced parts of it as channeling, divine intervention, a living transmission arriving through story.

You can call that spirituality. You can call it intuition. You can call it imagination. You can call it my subconscious reorganizing years of experience into myth.

I know what it felt like from inside. It felt alive. And I believed perhaps it could help someone.

Then I watched that living thing enter systems where it had to compete with rage bait, outrage, pornography, celebrity scandals, political tribalism, sponsored content, synthetic influencers, AI slop, and an endless succession of people pointing at captions above their heads.

Aurelda didn’t fail because an algorithm scientifically determined it was worthless.

It entered a civilization whose largest communication systems frequently cannot distinguish value from engagement because value is much harder to put on a dashboard.

Perhaps the Spirit Guides Have Abandoned the Group Chat

At this point, if humanity has spirit guides, I assume their employee-retention problem is catastrophic.

Imagine spending millennia whispering:

• Love one another.
• Know yourself.
• Respect the Earth.
• Stop worshipping power.

Then humanity invents instantaneous access to almost the entire accumulated knowledge of civilization and says: “Excellent. Can it make a video of Jesus made out of shrimp?”

Somewhere in the astral realm, somebody has submitted a resignation letter.

I understand.

Maybe Aurelda Failed. But Look at What It Failed Against.

Maybe Aurelda never becomes commercially successful. Maybe almost nobody reads it. Maybe the transmission arrived and went unheard.

That possibility hurts more than I know how to explain because I did not create this merely to manufacture “content.”

I was trying to make something magical:

• Something queer people could recognize themselves inside.
• Something rooted in my love for Mexico and the Riviera Maya without pretending to reproduce a culture that was not mine.
• Something about listening instead of conquering.
• Something about remembering who we were before the world taught us what we were supposed to become.

And perhaps I released that message into one of the worst listening environments humanity has ever constructed.

That doesn’t make every criticism of technology valid. It doesn’t make AI evil. It doesn’t make every algorithm malicious. And it certainly doesn’t absolve creators from making work people actually want.

But it does mean we should stop pretending today’s digital marketplace is some pristine democracy of ideas where the finest work naturally rises to the top. It isn’t.

It is an engineered attention economy operating inside a rapidly expanding AI economy, increasingly dominated by corporations and governments racing for scale, advantage, influence, and profit.

Aurelda came carrying a quieter message: Listen.

Perhaps that was always going to be difficult to hear beneath all this fucking noise.