first signs
Recently I wrote a post for the Hedgehog Review on the Substackification of journalism and whether it marks a permanent atomization of journalistic writing or whether it could be the seed of institutional renewal. Here are a couple of relevant data points:
- On his Substack newsletter, Scott Alexander has been running book reviews by his readers.
- On her Substack newsletter, Bari Weiss has been publishing essays by other writers, and explains that practice thus: "My goal is not to make a living publishing only my views — or ones that conform exactly to my worldview — on this Substack. (Trust me, it’d get boring.) My ultimate goal is far more ambitious. I want to run the most interesting opinion page in America, filled with fresh reporting and commentary.”
Substack began as a way of highlighting distinctive individual voices; it’s already turning into something more collaborative.
acoustic renown
Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I hear.” Kleos is sometimes translated as “acoustic renown” — the spreading renown you get from talking about your exploits.* It’s a bit like having a large Twitter following. In the Homeric version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary … to live a life worth living was to live a kleos-worthy life, a song-worthy life. Being sung, having one’s life spoken about, your story vivid in others’ heads, is what gives your life an added substance. It’s almost as if, in being vividly apprehended by others, you’re living simultaneously in their representations of you, acquiring additional lives to add to your meager one.
The Ethos of the Extraordinary answered that all that a person can do is to enlarge that life by the only means we have, striving to make of it a thing worth the telling, a thing that will have an impact on other minds, so that, being replicated there, it will take on a moreness. Kleos. Live so that others will hear of you. Paltry as it is, it’s the only way we have to beat back uncaring time.Our own culture of Facebook’s Likes and Twitter followings should put us in a good position to sympathize with an insistence on the social aspect of life-worthiness. Perhaps it’s a natural direction toward which a culture will drift, once the religious answers lose their grip. The ancient Greeks lived before the monotheistic solution took hold of Western culture, and we — or a great many of us — live after. A major difference between our two cultures is that, for the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve such mass duplication of the details of one’s life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweet away.
— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex
* “Though the gods are incessantly mentioned [in Pindar’s poems], this ethos presents a life worth living in terms that are drawn far more from the world of men. What is desired is not the attention of the immortals, but rather the attention of one’s fellow mortals. The gods come prominently into the picture because they either promote or prevent this good — that is, the achievement that brings fame — from being attained, but the good itself isn’t defined in terms of the gods. The good belongs to the world of mortals; it’s their attention and acclaim one is after.” – RNG↩
follow the links
This is the sort of thing the world needs more of. Matthew Sweet saw a tweet claiming that a peer-reviewed study from a Stanford University scholar proved that face masks do nothing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. So he followed up, and learned that
- It was not a peer-reviewed study;
- The author is not associated with Stanford University or any other institution;
- None of the evidence it cites supports the claim about the uselessness of masks.
a bit of friendly advice
Here’s my suggestion: Assume that everything everyone says on social media in the first 72 hours after a news event is the product of temporary insanity or is a side-effect of a psychotropic drug. Write it off. Pretend it never happened. Only pay attention to what they say when three days have passed since the precipitating event.
Rome fell in a day
A couple of thoughts about the collapse of the so-called European Super League.
First, it’s impossible to overstress how badly thought-out the entire enterprise was. The twelve clubs who signed up to create the Super League did nothing to get any of their constituencies on board. They didn’t even inform their managers and players. The one refrain from the managers interviewed about this – the managers who had to go out and face the press and public while the people who made the decisions were hiding in their penthouse apartments – was that they didn’t know anything more than the journalists: They found out at the same time the journalists found out. Moreover, the massive loan these executives had secured from J.P. Morgan was essentially an advance on television revenues, and they hadn’t made or even attempted to make a TV deal. If no TV deal had been forthcoming, or an unexpectedly poor one, then all of those clubs would have been on the hook for paying back a loan that at least some of them simply do not have the resources to pay back. It was a pyramid scheme, and a badly designed one at that.
The second point is this: The chief makers of this fiasco are extremely unlikely to resign or be fired. (Ed Woodward is out, but he was on his way out anyway — I don’t think he would’ve been fired over just this, because Manchester United has been the least apologetic of any of the English clubs — and only Arsenal issued a straightforward apology that acknowledged the damage done.) There’s no way Florentino Pérez should still have a job, but I cannot imagine any circumstances in which he will get what he deserves; nor, obviously, can he. Andrea Agnelli remains confident in his excellent judgment and enjoys mocking his critics, despite being an absolute clown. And they can be so serene because they quite obviously do not give a rat’s ass about the clubs they work for or the game their teams play. They don’t care! It doesn’t matter to them! If, as a result of the stupidities of Agnelli and Pérez, those two great old clubs Juventus and Real Madrid had to close up shop, shut down altogether, do you think either Agnelli or Pérez would acknowledge any responsibility — or even lose five minutes’ sleep over the catastrophe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Somehow or another they would get a golden parachute and that would be just fine with them. Whatever wrath was directed their way by the press would mean absolutely nothing to them. This is what we mean by the word “shameless”: people cannot be shamed when they’re permanently content with their own behavior and care not a whit about the views of their fellow human beings.
It’s the fans who care, the fans who love the game and love their clubs, and they are the ones who are hurt by all this — and by the manifold corruptions that led up to it and that remain in place. And, as the Agnellis and Pérezes of the world know, this means that the fans will come back. The fans actually have the power to force change: if they were to stop attending the games — once attendance becomes possible again — if they were to boycott the clubs’ merchandise, if they were to boycott the television sponsors, they could make something happen. But we all know it won’t play out that way. People don’t just love their teams; in a cruelly mechanical surveillance-capitalism world they need the emotional hit that comes from investment in the successes or failures of their club. It’s surely asking too much of them to demand that they take meaningful collective action. And that’s why at the end of all this Agnelli and Pérez, or in any case people very much like them, will still be running the big clubs. They have the freedom that comes from not caring about anything but their own bank accounts.
updates on this and that
In the wake of the jury’s determination that Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd, I’ll just say that I stand firmly by what I wrote last August.
I wish to align myself wholly with what Tish Harrison Warren says here about the “whole life movement.” Preach it, sister, I’m here for it all.
In the wake of what appears to be the imminent collapse of the European Stupid League, I will just say that the most accurate and concise summary comes from Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte:
— Aymeric Laporte (@Laporte)
And in other positive news, I have added to my repertoire of media ecology essays with this entry at the Hog Blog on Substack (and other new platforms) as Distributism for writers and artists.
Welcome back, friend.
transnational capitalism in boots
Perhaps once all this has shaken out, once the imminent threat of a breakaway European super league has been resolved one way or the other, football will find the time for a little reflection.
How we reached this point. How the game’s elite clubs managed to engineer a scenario in which a hostile takeover came to feel inevitable, even irresistible. How the world’s most popular sport managed to hand over so much of its power and wealth and influence to people who despise it.
Because make no mistake: this is an idea that could only have been devised by someone who truly hates football to its bones. Who hates football so much that they want to prune it, gut it, dismember it, from the grassroots game to the World Cup. Who finds the very idea of competitive sport offensive, an unhealthy distraction from the main objective, which in a way has always been capitalism’s main objective.
Several thoughts:
- I agree fervently with Liew.
- I don’t think the super league will come to pass, because I don’t think the big clubs want one. I think this is a shakedown to squeeze everyone else in soccer for more money.
- I wish the national associations would call their bluff and just say “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” But I don’t think they will: those big clubs bring in a lot of revenue for everyone else. (But they don’t want any of their money to go anywhere else — thus the shakedown, and thus my plea for letting them go. Giving in to their demands would mean virtually eliminating their value to the rest of soccer.)
- If the super league does come to pass, I won’t watch it. Seeing those clubs play in the late stages of the Champions League is fun; seeing them play every week, not so much. Besides, Arsenal would finish at the bottom of the league every single year, and Stan Kroenke would be just fine with that — in fact, would prefer it. He’d get the cash without having to invest in the quality of his side. (In other words, he’d simply extend his current ownership strategy.)
- The domestic leagues without the big clubs would still be Very Big Businesses, but they wouldn’t be empowering the kind of transnats that Kim Stanley Robinson writes about.
- I could then settle in firmly as a Fulham supporter — and they need the support. Tough day for Scott Parker and the lads today.
UPDATE 4.19: A big angry Yes to this from James McNicholas: "They stand to benefit more than most from the formation of a Super League. Right now they are not, on merit, a Champions League club. Their team is not good enough, and their executive structure and ownership are ultimately responsible for that underachievement. Admittance to this Super League would be a Get Out Of Jail Free card for a badly-run club, a rope ladder to rescue Arsenal from mediocrity.”
SECOND UPDATE: I am too sick (reaction to my second vaccination, which: Yay!) to write coherently, I see, so I’ll just tell everyone to read this helpful overview by Rory Smith. It’s obvious that my point number 2 above was wrong wrong wrong. I hope and trust that the domestic leagues will boot out the ESL, or rather €$£, clubs because otherwise it’s all too easy to imagine a situation in which Arsenal, putting all of its entertainment energies into the €$£, cheerfully allows itself to be relegated to the Championship.
OH HECK ONE MORE: An interesting and insightful essay by David Baddiel, except for one thing: he writes, "Americans have never quite taken to football, because it is a sport that requires a certain tolerance of boredom. As far as sport goes, Americans just want all the top action, all of the time” — a claim to be made only by someone who has never watched a game of American football, in which three-and-a-half hours of TV contains, on average, eleven minutes of action.
FINAL UPDATE (4.20): What we have here is an instance of a universal rule: Phenomenally rich people will do anything they possibly can to become still more phenomenally rich. Their plans can be thwarted in one of two ways: (1) by collective action that makes it abundantly clear to them that they will not get richer by acting as they plan, or (2) by legislating against them. I fear people have been rendered too passive by social media to make collective action possible, which would mean either we’ll have (2) or the super-rich will get their super-league … but the anger at this move is shockingly strong and widespread.
— Héctor Bellerín (@HectorBellerin)