The Importance of Being Dull

The internet is being overrun by AI slop. This Facebook group is at the centre of it all.

The following essay is a Freak Palace Original™. The newspaper I was supposed to write it for stopped responding to my emails a month ago, and I’d rather people read this than not. You may notice that New York Magazine also published a story on the Dull Women’s Club in November 2024. It was published the same week my story was filed, and I pitched my story in August 2024, lest I come across as a copycat.

Margaret Haylock-Capon leads a spectacularly dull life. The 80-year-old, who resides in rural Prince Edward County, Ontario, rises at 5am to cuddle with her three house cats and peruse through the latest issue of Chickens Magazine, before heading to the barn to collect eggs and tend to her 30-year old horse, Duke, and equally elderly donkey, Rosie. Later, she’ll take her dogs for a walk and perhaps run an errand or two. In the evenings, she pops a disc from her 695-episode box set of Gunsmoke into the DVD player, before turning in at 9pm. Her most recent excitement involved a case of mistaken identity surrounding Ms. Teasel, one one of her beloved Silkie chickens, who turned out to be a cock instead of a laying hen.

Ms. Haylock-Capon regularly spends time on Facebook, and in March of this year, she began to notice posts appear in her newsfeed from something called the Dull Women’s Club, where the level of enthusiasm typically reserved for vacations or awards was being applied to discussions about how to get mold out of secondhand furniture and bagel topping preferences. Ms. Haylock-Capon felt such an affinity with her fellow dullsters she was compelled to dedicate the weekly column she has been writing for her local newspaper, County Weekly News, for 20 years to the group, writing a paean to her newfound appreciation for mundanity. “Today, I realized that “dull” offers the perfect opportunity for contentment,” she wrote.

Dull is not usually considered a compliment, but for the combined 2+ million members of the Dull Men’s Club and Dull Women’s Club, the adjective isn’t just a badge of honor—it’s a lifestyle. Ms. Haylock-Capon and the other remaining denizens of Facebook make up a large cohort of older—and some younger—folks clambering to trade suggestions for cooking wines and share excitement over free samples of laundry detergent. For some mystifying reason, each post ends with a disclosure of the individual’s shoe size and requisite picture of a banana. (The bananas are a reference to the internet’s tendency to use a banana to demonstrate scale.) Occasionally, a poster might ask a question soliciting advice, but for the most part they function as snapshots from the simple life of a stranger you might cross paths with in the produce section and nowhere else.

‘Dullsters’ have little interest in keeping pace with the news cycle or the latest TikTok trends. Instead, they’d rather debate the merits of electric tea kettles or discuss how best to organize sewing machine parts. These self-contained communities of completely average people sharing the minutiae of their uninteresting lives have become much-needed bastions of positivity; a reminder that life need not be expansive to be worthwhile. Unlike the toxic cesspools of Tiktok and X, contributors seem to want nothing more than to give one other a pat on the back.

“I love doing laundry and washing dishes,” said Sarah York, 41, an administrator at a scaffolding company and co-owner of a roofing company in Indianapolis. “Simple things like paying attention to a sunrise. That’s probably considered dull but that’s what brings me joy.” It may not be typical social media fare, but the tongue-in-cheek missives, which tend to poke fun at the banality of their lives, are often, ironically, quite fascinating. “Until I joined the group I never thought about what other people do in their daily lives or what they might have interest in. I absolutely adore seeing an elderly woman in her 80s living her best life. It just feels like the world is smaller, maybe. We’re all connected whether we like it or not, in or dullness.”

One of the hallmarks of the community is that there’s an extremely low barrier to entry. Virtually anything can qualify one as a ‘dullster’; a desire to not drink alcohol, a love of domestic cleaning, making the groups unusually inclusive. They’re also, unsurprisingly, glaringly apolitical. Though post-election, the Dull Women’s Private Club, updated their description to include “admins are fiercely woke,” for the most part an atmosphere of conviviality continues to reign.

The notion that the quotidian deserves its own celebration isn’t new, but it has been gaining steam since December 2023, when Sarah Jones-Green, a 44-year-old actor in London, UK founded Dull Women’s Club by Sarah Green (Original). (Despite the “original” in the name, another group, “The Original Dull Women’s Club,” another group with 110K members, was founded first in September 2023.) After finding herself drinking hot chocolate at a pub while her fiance, now husband, Martin Green enjoyed a beer, Ms. Green wondered aloud that she must be pretty dull. Green had recently introduced her to a group called the Dull Men’s Club, which she loved. “Everyone wants a place online to call home,” she says. “They just want a voice to be themselves and share their cooking, share what shade their cup of tea is, share that they’ve just done the washing that day.” Green conceived of the group as a platform where she could share jokes and just be herself. Through some sort of algorithmic wizardry, the group gained 400,000 followers in four months. It now has over 1.3 million members.

The size of the group puts it in direct competition with the Dull Men’s Club (1.4 millions members), initially founded in the mid-1980s by Lee Carlson, 85, as an inside joke between friends during happy hour at the New York Athletic Club. “Our motto for years has been celebrating the ordinary,” he says. A retired tax attorney at Exxon Mobil–“They used to call me Loophole Lee”--Mr. Carlson, who is originally from Nebraska, founded the club as a way to cope with the glitz and glamor of NYC. “There’s so much pressure, then and now to do more,” he said. “I call it ‘more-itis.’”

In 1997, Mr. Carlson’s nephew made a webpage for the club and it’s been steadily attracting new adherents to its philosophy ever since. While there is no official membership registry, they put out a yearly calendar profiling members with uniquely dull interests such as roundabouts and post office boxes, and sell official merchandise. This year, Carlson acquired a registered trademark to distinguish his group from all of the copycats, which he keeps track of with the help of eagle-eyed group moderators in an Excel spreadsheet. When asked whether there was a rivalry between the Dull Men’s Club and any of the other groups he stated, “There’s no rivalry, it’s just a fraud.”

Besides running the club, which seems to be his primary interest, Mr. Carlson is a big fan of park benches. “I can go anywhere in the world as long as there’s a park bench there to sit on and watch the world go by. It’s just a relaxing thing to do.”

While the dull clubs have naturally spawned a number of splinter groups such as Dull Vegan’s Club, the Dull Women’s Cat Club and the Pacific Northwest Dull Women’s Group, there are a baffling number of imitators. In addition to Sarah Green’s group there are some 51 dull women’s groups, with 11 claiming to be “original” or “official.” Some, like The Original Dull Women’s Club and the Dull Women’s Private Club, are genuine communities where members generate original content. Others, like Dull Women’s Club (Original), are obvious scams, flooded with posts hawking eyebrow pencils and anti-anxiety dog beds.

Many of the clubs are not even groups at all, but Facebook business pages for business ventures listed under categories such as “personal blog,” “actor” or “gaming video creator.” Posts are not generated by members but reshared from other groups, like ALDI Aisle of Shame Community, or mysteriously scraped from other sources and reposted anonymously.

On its surface, the “Dull Women’s Club” appears to be a normal group, but the description links to a “Polynesian Entertainment” business in San Diego, California called Te Rahiti Nui, to which multiple calls and emails went unanswered. The “Dull Mens Club” page bills itself as “Posting for Entertainment Purpose” and issues multiple posts multiple posts per day, all at the same time. The phone number associated with the page begins with a Philippines country code.

When I first noticed Dull Women’s posts appearing in my feed in August 2024, I was charmed by the salt of the earth nature of the posts, screenshotting some of them with the intent of writing about the joys of the group. But when I returned to the posts I noticed that many of them were not being posted by dull women themselves but seemingly unrelated pages like “Garden Knowledge's” and “Mowing World.”

“Garden Knowledge’s” claims to be a “digital creator” based in Syracuse, New York but the country code of the phone number associated with the account originates in Vietnam. The page is riddled with bizarre, obviously AI-generated images with captions like “ANGRY Homeowner FREAKED OUT and is THREATENING to Sue Me!!!” plus hundreds of posts that can be traced back to real posts in various dull clubs. An email sent to the address associated with the page immediately bounced back.

Mowing World, a “gaming video creator” which posts similarly bizarre content, very little of it related to lawns, purports to be based in Los Angeles, California. However, the phone number associated with the page directs callers to the Soho Warehouse hotel. The first interview request sent to Mowing World’s email went unanswered, the second bounced back.

Despite this proliferation of fake content, Meta did not provide an explanation of why these pages exist or why they are being promoted onto people’s news feeds.

Ironically, the groups that preach contentment with the ordinary find themselves in a quite unusual situation. As digital chum for a horde of hungry scammers whose only goal is to churn out an endless stream of garbage content, they function as both an antidote to and the victim of the post apocalyptic landscape that the internet has become.

“Facebook has become an absolute disaster in terms of trying to understand what is real and what is fake,” says Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media and expert on “AI slop” content. “My grand theory of Facebook is that it’s a dying mall. It's mostly abandoned but there are some people who still accidentally go there. A lot of the people are grifters and it’s just very weird.”

When asked to review Mowing World, Koebler said, “What I think is happening here if I had to guess, which I kind of do, is that someone, somewhere saw that “dull women's club” was a popular type of content on Facebook, and then created a bunch of pages to imitate that type of content, hoping they get a few likes and start to go viral.”

Through their Creators program, Meta offers a small financial incentive for viral posts. As a result, the site is now flooded with pages using automated tools to create posts scraped from elsewhere on the internet in order to make a quick buck. “There’s a network of hustlebros in India sharing guides for how to do that,” said Koebler. “Let’s assume they’re making $20 per month running a page. If they have 20 other pages that are all automated, that’s a good side hustle for them.”

Side hustle or not, the incentivization of garbage content has contributed to transforming Facebook into an utterly baffling and unusable social network. “In my opinion, Facebook is no longer effective as a social platform, it’s just dedicated to feeding people the most algorithmically optimized content,” said Koebler.

Though most members of the dull groups likely have no idea their genuine posts are being copied-and-pasted by bots for financial gain, the authentic joy and connection they create between members is real. “We can all relate to those little dull moments,” said Avery Cyr, 44, a wildlife biologist based in Indiana. “They make me feel like my own non-exciting life is enough.”

To some group members, like Dr. Ela Przybylo, 39, an associate professor of English and women’s gender and sexuality studies at Illinois State University based in Normal, Illinois, the dull clubs are sites of radical resistance. “It is a political move to seek out the quiet and ordinary in the context of hyper stimulation,” they said. Citing Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry, Dr. Przybylo views embracing dullness as an anticapitalist rejection of productivity culture.

For others they’re a soft landing for those who’d rather retreat from the indignities of the outside world. Jacqueline Fairbrass, 67, a wellness entrepreneur and former Seattle resident who now lives in Tavira, Portugal, joined the Dull Women’s Club after leaving her third marriage and losing both her brother and youngest daughter in quick succession. After experiencing what she describes as a “rock bottom” emotional state, she learned that what she craves most in life is peace, contentment, and quiet. “A lot of people want to talk about politics and illness. I don’t want to talk about Trump and Kamala. That isn’t a meaningful conversation to me. A meaningful conversation to me is: What makes you get out of bed in the morning? What’s your favourite ice cream?”

Whether the dull clubs are innocent coping mechanisms or sites of willful ignorance remains to be seen. On one hand, the repudiation of the hustle-and-grind mindset is a hallmark of the left. But on the other hand, a group full of primarily white women discussing their love of laundry is also indisputably trad. Ultimately, they’re neither, instead functioning as a sort of funhouse mirror that reflects your own worldview and perception of society back to you.

Either way, they’re about finding joy and celebration within the everyday; a reminder that life need not be expansive to be worthwhile.