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7 hours ago
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I believe the robots are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside – let the robots’ laughter remind us how we used to be. The Onion, there, prescient as ever, 25 years on.
May I also say at this point that in a time of industrial-scale sporting bullshit telling the truth is, more than ever, a revolutionary act, all the more so when it involves standing in front of a camera in a rumpled ice-blue blazer, eyes blazing with righteous carved wooden woodpecker fury.
For this reason Nasser Hussain is my current nod for the truth-to-power sport media personality of the year gong. This is a reward for some recklessly accurate comments this week on the gerrymandering of the Champions Trophy logistics so that the Indian team – also known as Government Outreach Arm: White Ball – has the best possible chance of winning.
First though I want to mention a letter I received this week headed AI Permission Request. This has gone out to lots of published authors. It offers a wodge of money in return for allowing the text of a book I wrote a few years ago to be used in a project designed to “train AI models”.
Naturally it comes hedged with guardrails, protections, time-limits and so forth designed to ensure this is definitely not a way of teaching robots how to write books for free. Here is your redundancy payment, failing, uncooperative human brain. That cold, hard metal hand on your shoulder? It’s the future.
It is no great secret that the machine age is fully upon us. Or that the robots we make will not be used, as previously assumed, to manufacture jetpacks or allow us to give up work and become enlightened future beings dressed in robes. Instead machines will be used for the more important business of managing the human attention span.
Robots are here to think for us. The internet is currently working out how to speak solely to the internet. The eyes peering in at the study window are unblinking robot eyes, bringing with them robot opinions, a robot movie script, robot badger metaphors.
Happily, they can’t quite bring the thing that Hussain has, and this feels like a very small note of victory. The remarks about the Champions Trophy won’t change much. Speaking on Sky Sports, Hussain pointed out that the International Cricket Council, which is also the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which is also the BJP, which is also Indian state power, has engineered the tournament so that India get the same ground, same pitches and the same hotels for all their games, can plan and pick around these certainties, and have an effective home advantage without being the home nation.
The significance of his remarks is not so much whether they’re true (they are), but the will to say them out loud, and in a way that runs contrary to some part of Hussain’s own interests. No one inside the cricket machine speaks like this. Players and pundits have long since given in to the idea that India is where the money is and where your hopes of a future career in this thing lie, not just the hand the turns the wheel, but the wheel itself.
Cricket in India is a wonderful, vigorous, luminous thing. But it is also sensitive, picky, nationalistic, and basically your boss. So we have commentators whose entire professional existence is saying “Wow!” over footage of generic franchise cricket product events, jobbing coaches and senior players whose default setting is to gush unquestioningly over the thrills of the sport’s king nation.
Hussain has less to lose. He’s employed by Sky. He’s English cricket media royalty. But he is also a speaker of truths, perhaps the most lucid and astringent pundit in any sport, out there blazing away, eyes wide, lean and high-collared, looking like some austere, long-forgotten American president who will now go on to explain exactly why your soul is going burn in hell for all eternity for wearing a brown hat on a Sunday.
This may seem a little niche and minor, cricket chat while the world burns. But sport always runs ahead of the tide, and it is an interesting moment to be any kind of journalist right now, an occupation that is, we hear, not just disdained but also failing and outmoded, disintegrating into tiny specks of ash before our eyes like a dying Voldemort.
There has been talk of publishers facing an Extinction Event, which does sound like a pretty bad event. Every organisation is laying off, cutting back, trying to understand how to exist. Meanwhile, the public are both nauseated by and also addicted to news-shout, opinion-blah, click-wiffle, even as AI is promising to pump out a mile-high wave of this unceasing filler.
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How is the industry supposed to adapt to this? Currently in sport we have a bent towards dancing for favour: fan-style content, club-channel dynamic, pundits who shout and screech and polemicise like deluded converts. Meanwhile, access is either impossible if you have actual questions to ask, or totally compromised if you’re not willing to give in to copy approval, sponsor plugs, agent interference.
Beyond this we have propaganda or profiteering, the spectacle hijacked by hungry nation states or owners keen to monetise that thing you love, and who understand very well how to twang the strings of infantilising tribalism for their own benefit.
So the Champions Trophy becomes as close to an advert for a political party as it can get. The Ronaldo-Saudi documentary on Netflix introduces itself as “our story – unfiltered!” , an insane take for something that is basically nothing but filter, PR for a country and a personal brand. And of course Donald Trump understands better than anyone else sport’s power as a megaphone, spending the past year spewing out pronouncements, talking to golfers, making complex points of gender into bellowing wedge issues, and allowing Gianni Infantino to follow him around like a lovelorn nine-year-old offering up a shirt, a daisy-chain, a ball with your name on it.
Meanwhile, Fifa hasn’t held a press conference since March, during which time two World Cups have been divvied out. Members of the independent media – those dupes, the shills, despised agenda-merchants – were also the people who told you Fifa was corrupt back in the endless groaning buffet table days. We may just miss them when they’re gone.
There will of course be plenty of people ready to express delight at vanquishing these imagined enemies. The paradox here is that there has never been a bigger need for someone prepared to tell the truth in plain terms, or at least to try to fail for the right reasons. Machines won’t do this. Embedded hacks won’t stray from a line. But it is still possible to have a role within this fug of inanity. Who likes a critic? Sport, art, films, food are full of scathing lines about those who can’t do but write, critic as snivelling, weak-chinned parasite and killjoy. Meanwhile, over there Lester Bangs is up on stage literally typing his review while the band plays around him, like he’s actually the jazz flutist. Sit down Lester, please. There will be manager quotes afterwards.
Is this still the lookout? There is a case to be made that we need critics more than ever. When every medium is PR’d into a pulp, from an album release to the para-social interaction with sporting celebrities, there has never been a better moment for those who are prepared to express dissent or approval based on a human judgment, to be honest in the middle of the endless static field. Whatever the state of the delivery system, there has never been a greater hunger for journalism, for words and content that are recognisably, defiantly human, our one last non-transferable skill. Hussain with a mic in his hand, temple throbbing, out there not being an android, not being afraid, spitting those cricket-based truths. This is exemplary in its own way.
In the meantime the robots can have the book on Russia 2018. It missed most of the sportswashing. It didn’t get what Putin was up to. But then, you probably won’t really notice, will you, project-bot.
