Inertia-Production, Propaganda 2.1, and the Political Economy of Slopaganda

This article develops a theoretical bridge between the concept of ‘slopaganda’ and Peter Ayolov’s Propaganda 2.1 and Kayfabe Politics, arguing that generative AI has not merely accelerated misinformation but has industrialised a political economy of communication in which content is produced by inertia rather than intention. Drawing on Michał Klincewicz, Mark Alfano, and Amir Ebrahimi Fard’s analysis of slopaganda, the argument reframes ‘AI slop’ as epistemic pollution within an attention economy whose primary output is not persuasion but managed affect, especially anger and moral injury. In Propaganda 2.1, ‘openly implausible claims’ function less as propositions aimed at belief and more as performative signals that test loyalty, harden group identity, and keep the outrage engine turning. The article proposes that the crucial shift is not from truth to falsehood, but from argument to automaticity: the media system becomes an inertia-production apparatus that can manufacture dissent and consent at once, because generative systems can produce instant textual ‘reality’ for every taste, and can do so at the scale, scope, and speed required by platform monetisation. The conclusion outlines how this fusion of slopaganda and kayfabe politics restructures public reasoning into a continuous loop of exposure, reaction, correction, and recommodification, and it sketches institutional and regulatory implications of treating affective manipulation as a core political-economic variable rather than a side-effect. The conceptual framework developed in this article is closely aligned with and substantially informed by Peter Ayolov’s broader body of work on media power, political communication, and the economic organisation of public discourse. Across his books and articles published between 2023 and 2026, Ayolov advances a consistent thesis: contemporary mass communication operates less as a space of persuasion or deliberation and more as an automated industrial system driven by monetisation imperatives, affective extraction, and structural inertia.