All My Apes Are Going to Be Strangers
Sports betting is what the internet of the near future will feel like
If one dominant theme of the social media era has been emotional distress—distraction, outrage, polarization—then an eventual theme of the era that follows might be a peaceful solipsism, in which we each wander an edenic landscape of content made just for us, populated by harmless NPCs and Her-style virtual assistants that appear and disappear as needed, all mediated by an elegant spatial interface, with a steady drip of DoorDash meals arriving to keep our sedentary bodies alive. We would be lucky to end up with this, or at least it’s easy to believe so after an hour of abrasive Twitter usage. But we probably won’t end up with it, mainly because it’s not what we really want. “I don’t think people care that much about things only they can see,” Rob Horning wrote in a recent essay about Google’s large language model, Gemini. “Much of the pleasure of ‘generating content,’” he continues, “is in imagining that someone else might also want it. The content is not just for you to consume but to anchor shared experience, or at least allow us to imagine its possibility.” While generative AI may free us from producing the text and images ourselves, or at least streamline the process, we’re still stuck with the job of interpreting, circulating, and discussing it. The content is still for us, and everything about how we’ve used the internet so far suggests that interpersonal connection is its ultimate and enduring purpose. Of course it is.
Despite this inexorable drive toward connectivity, there are equally persistent forces of isolation and atomization working against it. This is not just the story of the internet but of modern technology more broadly. A century ago the car began to connect us in new ways while thoroughly separating us in others, and we are still mired in the contradictions created during that phase change. The internet has been similar: The pandemic ratcheted up our physical isolation for an extended period while affirming our dependence upon digital technology as a social lifeline (or the illusion of that dependence, at least). As the pandemic receded, the high-water mark for onlineness remained elevated—the culmination of a decade in which physical solitude and digital togetherness had come to seem increasingly complementary. The refinement of algorithmic virality during that same period gave us a new kind of shared experience to replace the mass culture that it was rapidly eroding: more ephemeral, more fluid, no longer situated in fixed times or places but in energy flows and information streams with which invisible throngs of users aligned themselves. Whenever a digital entity manages to channel these flows and convert them into more tangible forms of value, like cryptocurrency/NFTs and the “creator economy” have for various stretches of time, that foundation seems more solid for a while. But continuous circulation is the true foundation, and you can relax and feel at home to the extent that you can accept a state of constant motion.
As the Facebook/Google/Twitter clearnet dissolves and the internet becomes a dark forest, another relatively recent tech category offers a lens for anticipating the future of shared experience and solipsism: sports betting apps. Although largely unleashed by regulatory changes rather than technical innovation, the rise of mainstream, app-enabled sports gambling has reframed a still-powerful bulwark of mass culture as a solitary pursuit. As televised sports continue fragmenting into digital content just like everything else, sports betting creates a derivative market on top of that content, which in turn yields its own additional bounty of content. If you’ve ever bet on a game and then watched it with other people, you probably realized quickly that nobody cares about your betting angle(s) and that you have to shut up about it. You’re on your own. But if you show up at the Super Bowl party wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, you are a legible entity, and everyone has something to talk to you about. To bet on sports is to share the same space (literal or figurative) with a multitude of people who have their own specific angle and only the meta-game in common. Sports gambling is even more fascinating, however, in the way it alters your brain as a spectator of the game: You exchange a complex bundle of emotional and aesthetic nuance for a purely quantitative perspective, which highlights everything that benefits you and pushes the rest to the background. It’s how it would feel to be a computer watching sports. A lot of things we do on the internet feel like that. Who needs NPCs to interact with when we all act like them anyway? We pay so much attention to how computers are learning to be human, but forget we’re also learning to act like them.
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The most recent issue was about the Apple Vision Pro, our enduring love of screens, and the dream of finally living inside your iPhone.
Reads:
Frank Lantz on consciousness porn and seeing the world as data. “If the mind we occupy in a Rambalac walk is the absent mind, absorbing and absorbed by the solid facts of its environment, and the mind we occupy in a Backrooms video is the skeptical mind, incapable of making sense of the arbitrary facts of its environment, then the mind we occupy while watching MonsterTrack is the mind as pure agency, free energy, completely engrossed in the act of reverse-engineering its environment, understanding its environment as a process that produces facts.”
Brooklyn’s Tallest Tower Radiates Pure Evil (And I Love It).
The number of lighthouses within 25 miles of every Major League Baseball stadium.