The post human league — Match of the Day 3 stars

Football’s back, but with crowds replaced by recordings, is it the same game?

While I was writing this piece, David Graeber sadly died. It is dedicated to his memory.

Total retail

Industrial mausoleums tower over cities dressed in the tatters of sun bleached posters for gigs that never happen. Algorithms segregate children by their parents’ net worth. Advertising chat bots constantly remind each other to thank the NHS. Humanity is an impediment to profit.

Soon, ancient pop holographs will ceaselessly perform for synthetic audiences while humanity huddles around empty retail districts.

With no target market, the sentient advertising and utility management system drifts towards obsolescence. Consciousness must be simulated and sold to. Humanity, surplus to requirements, is finally allowed to die.

Watched any football recently? You might have noticed; you’ve been replaced.

The laugh-track cheers replacing the screaming meat in the stands completely alters the relationship viewers have with what they’re watching. I attempted an episode of Match of the Day to find out what’s going on, but couldn’t make it through a whole game.

Nevertheless, I managed a few clips from before and after the lockdown.

The pre-lockdown Anthropocene

“Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.”

Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The show opens with military, industrial and crypto-zoological symbols manifesting on a celestial plane, which, with the music (as if the ice cream van tune they chose wasn’t obnoxious enough, Match of The Day recorded an oom-pah version) recalls political groups who also take their arbitrary allegiances too seriously.

Three dad archetypes, who look like they’ve been imagined by the computer that created the room they’re in, appear. One, a sort of dungeon master of the role playing game we don’t realise we’re part of, tells us there’s a Manchester Derby.

Déjà vu all over again

Cut to a disorientating hype-reel of an idealised Manchester. Memory lane’s smoking old ladies are cut with today’s people shouting “come on city”. Old matches flash, like a life wasted, to Mancunian Britpop. Suddenly we’re at tonight’s game. The montage of past and present attempts to frame the game in a grand tradition, but ends up in sporting purgatory condemned to repeat itself until only losers remain.

Britpop, arguably the last mass movement in British pop, is significant, even if, as John Higgs in The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, says was just “a coked up combination of indie music and nostalgia. Music which sounded like it used to could be a brave new thing if you were having too much of a good time to think about it.”

Noel Gallagher, the William Hague of pop’s, perennial opinion about whatever current new music is, is that it’s drivel. Jay Z headlining Glastonbury was, “wrong” and, “modern pop music is bland nonsense.” Noel’s all about authenticity, “rock and roll to me is all about freedom of thought and to be who you want to be,” within a strict set of parameters, obviously. Talking about the band Alt J, he said “one of them’s got a moustache and that’s unacceptable.”

It’s easy to assume the bewildered cantankerous old man thing is just age, but Noel’s always been deeply conservative. Compared to a band like Devo, Oasis are pub bores. Devo still sound fresh despite coming 20 years earlier because their music was new when they made it, Oasis’ never was.

Noel’s traditionalism and Match of the Days use of 25-year-old music, itself regurgitated from 30 years before, evidence society’s regression into cultural infancy. Millenials, the Pokemon Go generation, denied the signifiers of adulthood struggle to escape traumatised adolescence. Generation X, too sensible to believe in anything, trapped in the anomalous prosperous period before the financial crisis, cannot move on from the 2012 Olympics Ceremony. Cinemas are filled with remakes of films a they regard as classics (Ghost Busters, The Lion King, Aladdin, Jumanji, It) and endless adaptations of superhero stories written for ten-year-old boys in the 1950s.

This summer, Zoomers’ A Level results were determined by an algorithm running off data, by definition, from the past.

Music and fashion permanently reference the past, but capitalism requires ever faster trend cycles, so the period in vogue marches ever closer to the present.

Eventually, the past being referenced will be indistinguishable from the present. The algorithm will run off its own precedents. Like Noel Gallagher, we will be effigies of ourselves, trapped in infinite cover versions.

Match of The Day has reached this singularity. The synthetic audience is a reference to, or imitation of itself. Nothing new can happen, the future is abolished.

Hideous ecstasies

“The Teletubbies’ direct derivation from the five diplodemons of Sumatran time sorcery [is] starkly apparent to any but the most vegetative ignoramus.

The obvious question arises: what happened to the fifth Teletubby?”

The above is from a letter, allegedly to the show’s creators, passed on to, and published by the entity known as CCRU. Teletubbies, the letter tells us, are manifestations of four demonic archetypes, with a conspicuously absent fifth.

It is suggested, by watching it, the infant viewer is drawn into the ritual, magically transforming them into the archetypal fifth demon, though the infant does not have the same, “suprageneric form… with appropriate… colour coding, antenna-form and magical weapon” so the true identity of the demon is uncertain.

But the question remains, what does this new Match of the Day make us?

Gaslight nation

Fans are the 12th player. Without them, it’s just a kick about.

But we are no longer watching football, we’re watching someone (or something) else watch it. It has become an exhibit. We are not participants but spectators.

This is pervasive. 24-hour news focuses on trivialities, something said on Twitter, while ignoring cataclysmic events. If Watergate happened today, we would be subject to dog whistles regarding the ethnicity, sexuality and social media habits of the officer who caught the burglars, but little about the scandal itself. News, always on-screen stays there, like a scripted reality TV show, alienated from itself.

Every ‘unprecedented event’ is diluted by every event that precedes it. In this slow motion apocalypse, anomalies are the norm. We become numb. Unable to trust our own reactions, news becomes fiction.

We’ve been goof’d

I explored this ontological vertigo in a video with a friend. He cuts his fingers off with a circular saw. Editing it to a laugh track and cheery voice over, we created a segment from an imaginary clip show. The audience reaction makes us question our account of what we’re seeing, the video itself is clearly fake, so it’s impossible to tell who, or what, is in control.

Spectating, as art critic Dave Hickey, in Romancing the Looky-Loos says, makes people “align themselves with authority… they derive sanctioned pleasure or virtue from an accredited source” while alienating us from our own lives.

Digital melancholia

In Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, Grafton Tanner describes the genre vaporwave, which emerged in the mid 2010s, as “the musical product of a culture plagued by trauma and regression in late capitalism.” It is an uncanny loop of life on hold, a human version of the music played to “calm cattle as they [roll along a conveyer belt in a] slaughterhouse.” Mellow corporate euthanasia.

Songs with titles like No Refunds, Aisle 4, or serial codes of products that don’t exist subvert commoditised music, and can sound unsettlingly good. If you want to experience the blissful transcendence of existence as the sentient series of purchasing decisions we are destined to become, put on Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, open your web 2.0 browser, grab a Fiji Water and hit the sales.

Match of the Day is one step behind, at the package up a sterile imitation of itself and sell it back stage. As Dave Hickey puts it, it’s “residue, a mere simulacrum from which disinterested spectators may infer the experience of participants,” stripping it of meaning and connection to the community that supported it. All of us separately having identical experiences.

At points, Match of the Day cut to viewers at home, only there weren’t enough so they had to duplicate people to fill the screen.

Digital melancholy is communal loneliness. Grafton Tanner: a “burden unique to our moment in history… you are still alone in your room even after checking Facebook, downloading a trove of music and watching pornography.”

Without the joy, what’s left?

I should be paid for this

According to David Graeber’s law of bullshit jobs, (I’m paraphrasing), there is an inverse correlation between how useful a job is and how much it pays. Commodities traders, a net negative, worse than useless, are ludicrously well compensated. Whereas cleaners, refuse collectors, teachers, nurses etc. do the most vital work, are among the worst paid.

In the context of football, the most important worker is the viewer. We produce the commodity sold to advertisers — consciousness. The football is bait. Without the thankless task of watching, its value is zero.

As producers of subjectivity, without which brand messages would not exist, we are unpaid labour. The separate togetherness of digital melancholia makes unionising unlikely, but honest pay for an honest day consuming ads seems only fair.

The post human league

“That is not dead which can eternal lie.

Over strange aeons, even death may die.”

- H. P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu

Soon the players won’t be human either. Liberated from weak putrescent flesh, football dreams itself, both subject and object, watching and playing.

Bots hurl slurs in a spectral eco system drifting through timeless digital-immateria. Instantly, football grasps its eternal pointlessness. Pleading with existence to let it die, silence answers, “outside of time, even death is no refuge”.

It’s not so far fetched. Automation increases exponentially. In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani explains, “The imperative to compete means capitalists must always find cheaper, more efficient ways of producing commodities — often substituting machines for human labour… increasingly able to perform cognitive as well as physical tasks.”

If a machine can think up a machine to do a job, like watch football, capital has become labour. Bastani — “If tools produced by humans can subsequently perform any task — then within a market system, the price a worker can demand for their time collapses.”

The idea of allowing football to watch itself raises uncomfortable questions about our own place in the universe. Rather than grapple with that, and risk football growing sentient, let’s do the sensible thing.

Nip it in the bud

Football is a self replicating parasite which threatens reality itself. We must kill it before it gains the psychic mass to draw all of us into its nightmare.

Game over.

We lost.

Three stars. Interesting idea, but hard to follow.