A is for Apple-slop

On differing regimes of apple signs

Every few years, the apple visualisation exercise meme recirculates through Twitter. The meme presents a test: visualise an apple in your head. Then the meme presents a scale from 1-5 of the degree of the reader’s aphantasia—the inability to create mental images. The scale goes from 1, an incredibly detailed, photographic depiction of an apple with spots and lighting reflections, to 3, a monochromatic, iconic representation of an apple with a simple leaf and round shape, and finally 5, nothing.

KnowYourMeme charts the discourse of apple visualisation to a 2016 Blogspot post from The Neurocritic, who introduces the concept with a rhetorical question of whether one pictures a ‘Red Delicious apple or a green Granny Smith’ when prompted. But as we see in the meme itself, Red Delicious is selected as the most detailed apple, and all lower grades of detail transition from this depiction while retaining its most fundamental attributes. This implies that Red Delicious may be a most quintessential apple, the variant highest on the chain of iconicity. In short, Red Delicious is the apple in this meme.

Even if the iconicity of the apple is stabilised within the meme, it refers outside of itself. Obviously, apples are not exclusive to this meme; apples are an incredibly recognisable fruit and constitute a basic vocabulary in many of the world’s languages, not only appearing high in word frequency lists filtered by fruit names but even functioning as base morphemes for other fruits and vegetables. In French, a potato is a pomme de terre, an apple of the earth. Anyone that can read the instructions understands the concept of an apple. In thinking of an apple, whether you can visualise it or not, we are confronted with all of its associated qualities and experiences: a firm, crisp fruit with a layer of skin and a juicy taste varying between sweet and tart. The apple creates a crunch sensation. You can hear the sound of an apple bite or perhaps even imagine the sensation yourself. It emits a particular aroma depending on ripeness. The apple almost universally comes with a thin brown stem, which once connected it to a tree. The inside of the apple has a core, a hard part which is difficult to eat and contains bitter seeds with traces of cyanide.

Apples like all other living beings are not uniform in appearance. They come in a very large variety which spans the collection of every apple that has existed or continues to exist—the domain of all apples. Still, apples are constrained through the agricultural industry, which optimises apples into a limited set of cultured varieties or cultivars. There are over 7,500 apple cultivars, which means we can divide the domain of all apples into just as many categories. This allows us to understand, through genetic pedigree, what types of varieties of apples there are, and roughly what kinds of qualities to anticipate within each variety.

Within the fruit produce section of grocery stores in America, rather than in a chaotic assortment of heterogeneous specimens, apples are typically laid out by cultivar. The innovation of agriculture allows apples to be a perennial crop, its position designated within a grocery store all year round. The selection classically includes Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, McIntosh, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. The apples are visually distinct to the point that they can be immediately differentiated upon first glance. This creates sites of difference: even if apples are apples—and not, as the saying goes, oranges—apples are segregated by cultivar to fulfil different purposes. Oftentimes, the signage that accompany these apple cultivars also clarify specific qualities and culinary roles. One apple is sweet and meant for eating, one is mealy and meant for making into sauces, one is tart and meant for cooking, one is for baking in pies, and so on. Apple cultivars cannot be too similar or they will create confusion for the consumer whether in selecting or remembering what kind of apples they have selected.

We have proceeded now from apple onto apple variations that delineate apples into groups. But apple variations are not equal. We can understand apples as having an asymmetrical representation, in which one cultivar stands out as the most iconic, and each successive one proportionally diminishing in representation. Every store may have Red Delicious, but not everyone will have McIntosh or Cortland. The representation of apples corresponds with Zipf’s Law, an empirical law most known for its application in the distribution of words in corpora of natural language. Apples therefore undergo roughly a Zipfian heavy-tailed distribution when all cultivars are ordered by appearance in rank in stores.

In turn, the understanding of an apple is similarly skewed. When describing an apple, often you are describing a Red Delicious apple as opposed to a Granny Smith (a green apple of secondary rank) or perhaps something more deviant like a Black Diamond Tibetan apple (a niche luxury purple apple from the Himalayas). Classical apples dominate in not just stores but also imagery. In advertising, there is the notion of the hero: the specimen that is so recognisable that it becomes the focus of the ad. We do not want green apples or yellow apples, but red ones because apples are supposed to be red. The distribution of apple depiction impacts the recognisability of apple as a concept. In stock photo depictions of apples, we see Red Delicious or Gala, unless the intention is to convey the diversity of apples, in which case Golden Delicious (yellow) and Granny Smith (green) often appear. A pile of diverse apples invariably includes these mildly divergent Golden Delicious or Granny Smith apples or apples like Cortland or Braeburn with gradients of traditional apple shades (green, yellow, orange, red). These representations of apples mirror an intuitive understanding of the Zipfian ranking of apples, reinforced by other representations, in a feedback system of apple semiotics.

This brings us back to the Red Delicious and its appearance in the meme. The Red Delicious is a cultivar of apple first identified in Peru, Iowa, USA in 1872. The cultivar won a contest to replace the Ben Davis apple—then the favoured apple in the USA, now an apple regulated to total obscurity in commercial trade. Throughout its life, the Red Delicious underwent a number of name changes, from Hawkeye, to Delicious, to finally Red Delicious. Later shifts in post-war American consumer habits caused the Red Delicious to explode in popularity, owing to its alluring, blood-red skin and tall shape. In such a transition, from experience to visual representation, the appearance of the apple triumphs. The apple crate of the produce section of a grocery store draws your gaze to itself with a wall of Red Delicious’s rich sanguine hue. The Red Delicious is a beautiful apple: the most perfect of apples, the quintessential. This heroic state of this apple inserts it into a sociocultural understanding of what an apple should look like, refined over time.

Apples—as Red Delicious apples—then become what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as overcoded: their possibilities have been constrained and enforced through the apparatus of agriculture and visual-consumer culture. Over time, the heroic specimen is selected again and again, made redder and redder, shinier and shinier, both perfected and genericised. The selection of traits is a process which mirrors the development of agriculture through the growth of capitalism. Everything through the establishment of industrial agriculture proceeds through an acceleration of feature selection, learning and training: produce, correct, repeat. Thus, the lettuce lost its bitter and psychoactive qualities and became salad fodder. The dog became ‘cute’ with floppier ears and smaller teeth, from wolf to puppy. The apple likewise is domesticated, a grotesque deformation of the once-wild sour, green-yellow apples with a faint red blush. It itself becomes simplistic and domestic.

The representational media industry in turn moves in hyperdrive, encoding the apple further and further in a looksmaxxing feedback loop. The cultivar once sold desire for its crispness, its redness, and gloss, but now it circulates through the ecosystem of stock images. Computer display technology improves and exhibits their triumphs in smooth wallpapers of dewy Red Delicious crates. Over time, the cultivar’s representation exceeds and then greatly exceeds that of all other apple cultivars. In order for apples to become legible, the Red Delicious heroes are selected; consequently, they eclipse the visible space of all apples. This too is pure feature selection, learning and training.

By being not just any apple but the apple, the overcoded Red Delicious is then apt for second-order signification. Roland Barthes uses the term second-order signification to describe the creation of social value systems, converting images into myths that naturalise the politics of the bourgeoisie. The apple is no longer just refers to a fruit, but it in turn means something. In the cover of Twilight, the pale hands of Bella Swan bear a Red Delicious apple. In Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2006), Denny bites into a Red Delicious apple. The apple as Red Delicious retroactively stands in as the forbidden fruit of the Genesis, the fruit of knowledge, itself a retroactive insert from Renaissance artists. The apple then extends as a symbol of knowledge as the gift in pedagogy from student to teacher. The apple is the fruit that hit Sir Isaac Newton’s head, thus launching the field of Newtonian Physics, an episode to which we may as well anachronistically assign agency to the Red Delicious.

Red Delicious apples are codified into larger semiological systems of Consumer Aesthetics, like Utopian Scholastic, the aesthetic of 1980s-2000s encyclopaedias, ‘edutainment’, and teaching materials. We have Newton’s Apple, an educational television series from Minneapolis. Red Delicious apples are inseparable from knowledge, the redder and richer the better—not like the impoverished green apples regulated to Magritte’s surrealism. The emergence of neural networks and Deep Learning can only deepen the processes prefigured by early research in Consumer Aesthetics. Consumer Aesthetics, like Thomas Hine’s description of Populuxe for the space age design era, assume the form of hyperdense sign assemblages through excesses of consumer media, retroactively identified and reinforced through sheer representational redundancy. The research predicts the eventual acceleration of cultural production and industry, ramped up by Artificial Intelligence. In the case of apples, datasets feature not only images of apples but also images where the iconified Red Delicious apples appear ambiently, as in Utopian Scholastic images. These datasets then feed into machine learning systems creating deep associations between Red Delicious qualities of apples and the concept of apples, mirroring the general understanding of an apple. Generative AI spits out Red Delicious, the apple most represented and therefore least complex across the vector space of all apples. This is a Red Delicious regime of apple signs; however phantasiac the visualisation meme-experiencer may be, she is semantically satiated like the AI image generator by the wealth of Red Delicious apples and is no longer capable of producing any other apple spontaneously.

But it is not enough that the apple is overcoded and integrated into larger systems, but rather how its excess leads to its stagnation and impoverishment. In Bataillean terms, the semiotic accumulation leads to its excess and finally necessary and violent expenditure. The Red Delicious, selected for its appearance, gradually lost its taste through breeding. Once the most productive crop, the Red Delicious led to a collapse in the apple industry in the USA, a $760 million loss between 1997 and 2000, which resulted in a $138 million bailout. The Hendersonville Times-News frames it in an Icarian manner: ‘Pursuit of apple perfection ends in major disaster’. Its reputation has only slipped. By 2018, it ceded its dominance to Gala with much fanfare from commentators, as if awaiting the toppling of a regime. ‘Good riddance to the Red Delicious, an apple that sucks,’ wrote Rebecca Onion in Slate in 2018, accompanied by a Twilight-esque stock photo of hands offering a Red Delicious apple. ‘The loathsome fruit has finally slipped from its spot as the dominant apple in American orchards, and not a moment too soon.’ The pomaceous crop is even more harshly eviscerated by Hilary Pollack in VICE, in a piece entitled ‘Red Delicious Apples Can Rot in Hell’. In a 2019 episode of Family Guy, Cleveland calls Red Delicious a ‘garbage apple’. Even in 2026, it lingers—actor Sterling K. Brown appears in Internet short-form talk show Subway Takes and declares Red Delicious ‘actually disgusting’.

We arrive then at apple-slop: the Red Delicious apple which, through cybernetic self-regulating processes, has become auto-refined and then cemented into our understanding of apple, overcoded to the point that it leaves behind a residue. The residue—the apple-slop—then is the target of a recurrence of media vitriol, one of the many punching bags of comedians, food critics, and bloggers alike, condemned into the same domains as other overcoded slop signifiers: Arial and Comic Sans fonts, cyan-orange movie posters, Millennial whoop, chord progressions like Pachelbel’s Canon and Sensitive Female Chord Progression, Labubu. The Red Delicious, as apple-slop, is inescapable, a product of the sameness of an intertwined machinic entertainment-agricultural system which builds it and tears it down.

The ‘vibe collapse’ of Red Delicious is therefore indicative of the phasal overcoding and concurrent slopification of apples. The consumer base rejects the Red Delicious and warns others of its dangers (of its bad taste, deceptive appearance, and so on) while its second-order meaning temporarily lingers as everyone becomes sick of this slop. At the same time, images slowly drift to other regimes of apples. Apples are in semiotic cycles, as runner-up Gala apples take first place and the comparably newer Honeycrisp and other novel hype apples like SweeTango, Cosmic Crisp, etc. emerge. Apples are decoded and recoded, and slopification emerges as a by-product of this process.

If the Red Delicious is the epitome of slop in the pomological domain at this moment, then we can also theorise what an x-slop is: font-slop, chord-slop, vibe-slop, quality-slop, etc. One may think of slop as the averaged images that emerge from a dataset, what may be called AVERAGECORE. Often the question of the ‘aesthetics of slop’ frames this subject too tightly—it ignores the slop of everyday. Capitalist production repeatedly expands, generating observable repetitions and representations before catastrophically annihilating them. The uncannily generic outputs then do not comprise the whole system but are symptomatic of everything else. What if the output really just means slop is inevitable? In fact, slop has always been around since the dawn of time, secret seeds waiting for industry to water and fertilise it en masse, then blossom, and fruit, then rot. How do you like them slop apples?

A note to readers: please do not offer me apples, as I am allergic to them.