Status:

Pre-heatwave day today, so it’s hot but it’s going to get hotter. Feeling quite tired anyway after yesterday’s excursion and have had continuous tinnitus all day which hasn’t happened for a while — usually it comes and goes, serving as a warning light for me to take a break.

I’ve decided to lean into the football a bit, looking for more teams to follow over the World Cup alongside the obvious England. Argentina were a little underwhelming this afternoon and I’m going to give France a go tonight, given Mbappé has been pissing off the far right of late.

This might surprise people who’ve known me but over the last few years I’ve moved from being actively antagonistic to the very mention of the sport to quite enjoying the odd match. I have the usual background of suffering the indignity of school sports leaving deep and lasting scars, which developed in later years a resentment at its normalisation across society.

This scene from the excellent Tip Toe is a perfect encapsulation of it. Alan Cumming’s character knows perfectly well that it’s a football question. Men have been unthinkingly asking him football questions since he was a little kid. He’s sick of the assumption that this is a shared cultural thing and so he pushes back.

For many years this was me, sick of being asked by other men which team I supported or whatever and having to come up with answers that satisfied the bonding ritual without alienating me or putting me in danger. Thanks to 50+ years of people-filtering it rarely comes up now and those of my friends who happen to have an interest in football know not to bother with me, and that’s OK. One of the definitions of a safe space is where you won’t suffer unsolicited enquiries about football from strange men who think they’re being friendly.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find myself following the England men’s football team. It was around 2020-22 when it became aparent they weren’t arseholes. All the knee-taking and such made them pariahs of the right-wing press and my enemy’s enemy and all that. And then they started doing really well, which I understood the England team were not supposed to be doing. Watching them was fun because against all odds I identified with these guys, even the ones who looked like my school bullies, and wished them well. (The excellent TV drama Dear England was a good reminder of that era.)

I also got a lot of enjoyment watching the women’s team win stuff, partly because it seemed to be a much scrappier game played by people with nothing to lose. But of course this wasn’t seen as proper football by the “real” football fans, which made me like it even more.

I realised that I didn’t dislike football. I disliked the sort of people who say they really really like football. Beyond the utterly rational aversion to a bunch of drunk men shouting in unison about some tribal nonsense, fans are just annoying. And this goes for all fans across all interests. Star Wars fans are awful. Dr Who fans are interminable. Football fans are no different, other than they might beat you up for disagreeing with them.

I also dislike all the performative noise the media does around football matches. The pundit commentary and analysis that works from the premise that this is the most important thing in the whole world. I get that this has to be presented as true in the moment in order to suspend disbelief, but it bleeds out into reality like a virus. Again, this shouldn’t matter, except it’s all bullshit, and bullshit thinking begets more bullshit, possibly about things that do matter.

Anyway, I wasn’t expecting to write this much about football of all things. Suffice to say that yes, I’ll be watching tomorrow.

Big Link:

• How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late - The case against AI hype with Cory Doctorow — “Bosses are infinitely horny for firing workers and replacing them with machines." Cory’s doing press for his new book and it looks like a really good one. Building on the Enshittification thesis this rests on the idea that technology either works for people (like reading glasses) or against people, and so when it feels like something new is being forced upon us against out best wishes we have to ask who benefits. Simple stuff, as always, but really well articulated in this interview with Charlie Warzel.
  • Dorian Lynskey reviews The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI — “It’s not the machines you should be angry with."

Reading:

• Did Kamala Harris’s silence on Gaza cost her the White House? — Betteridge’s law of headlines applies, but behind that is a long and thoughtful piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on a paradox of Democratic politicians. “A black presidency is a contradiction — it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad."

Watching:

• Noah Kalina ‌(21:50) — Ten minutes in we get the fascinating backstory of the Everyday/Celebrity photo shoot.
• Ants Pants: Clearing the area behind the log cabin ‌(1:47:44) — There’s a moment at the end, where he’s finished bulldozing an area of brush and flattening the ground, that looks like a scene from a grim Tarkovsky movie.
• Trailer: Klara and the Sun ‌(2:31) — Waititi, Ortega, Adams, Lyonne, oh my.

Listening:

• Midsummer Dreaming: Twilight — Specifically for the 40 minute Knoxville: Summer of 1995, one of the most original and beautiful audio pieces I’ve heard in a long time. Highly recommended.