Buy the backpack airlines hate. Fawn strangely at a child athlete. This TV presenter drank olive oil for a month and absolutely nothing happened. The streets (no actual streets involved) won’t forget (robots can’t forget) Paul Pogba (or equivalent coding).
Nineties dance hits. Ruben Amorim loyalists. Argue with fake fans over a fake photo of fake empty seats. Buy a backpack that hates you because you once thought about buying a backpack, and like a Hungarian grandmother it will never, ever forget and you will be punished.
Olive oil. Paul Pogba. The seven-step Thai chair workout that transformed me from a fat old man to a fat old man in a chair. Basically, feed me, keep feeding me because I have a hole that can never be filled, and this simple tablet can dissolve all the vile seething parasites inside your body. Buy my backpack. My backpack full of hate.
Regular readers may have noticed a subtle change of tone in here. But it’s time to get real. Consider this a pitch, an open letter in response to the most significant sport-industrial complex story of the week, the news that Cristiano Ronaldo has lost eight million Instagram followers, casualties of a sensational bot purge.
Arguably these former followers are not actually real. But define “real”. What is a “non-sentient code-droid” anyway, beyond just another label? The fact is those eight million robots are up for grabs. These are the reel-displaced. And I am offering them a home.
This will be a robot safe space, one tailored obligingly to their needs. I am also willing to believe eating powders is good. I also have no specific views or concrete persona, beyond an elite sense of hyper-rich mega dad-ness (we can work on this). Basically call me. Let’s build this thing.
More widely the Ronaldo robot purge is very disappointing. For the past few years I have watched his follower number tick up, seen it as a measure of human ultimacy, like the Space Race or the 100m world record, proof that we as a species can still be great, that our exhausted post-culture still has dreams, summits to be scaled.
But don’t worry too much. Ronaldo still has 664 million on the clock, making him not just the most followed person, but a genuine evolutionary phenomenon. Right now one in eight people on Earth follows the instrument of power that is @cristiano. At this rate it could be only five years before every single human, from new-born babies to dying Tibetan monks, can have Cristiano Ronaldo’s thoughts communicated directly into their brain.
This is arguably the most significant state any human has attained. He is the universal, the most visible public life ever created, from the time of cave daubings through Pharaonic empires, to the urge to seek, discover and colonise. Ronaldo is the closest thing to an omnipresence. The closest, and there is no other way of putting this, to a god.
And yet, he is also incredibly boring, to the extent of being a husk with no distinguishable presence. What is “Cristiano Ronaldo” exactly? A way of standing. An iconic scowl. Some vague ideas about maleness and self-control, a set of features and lines that speak perfectly to the urge to click.
With this in mind I am now going to say something nobody wants to hear. Please muffle the ears of any displaced robots. Throw them a Will Ferrell blooper reel. They’ll eat it up. The fact is, this is also the greatest current indicator of the basic shittification of modern life.
It is also something that is happening very quickly now, while making a very small number of humans very, very rich. All of it trialled as ever by that sport, out there up front, like a sandpiper running ahead of the tide.
Sport is always trying to tell you things. One thing the Ronaldo-verse and the forthcoming content World Cup are telling us is about the death of words, which are already dancing in the tiniest of spaces, a polar bear on its shrinking circle of ice.
This is not just another cry-more deadbeat whingeing about the death of written media, although it is also that. But this matters to all of us. When the World Cup kicks off, what were previously press boxes will be crammed for the first time with Fifa’s in-house influencers, its hired TikTokers, there to talk over the top of the usual more neutral commentary.
You can see why. What is an influencer? Someone whose sole intention is to amplify a message for personal gain. Not someone who is going to tell you football is corrupt, or that this is an act of grotesque dictatorial vanity. Sports bodies and football clubs are realising they don’t need these snarky naysayers in the room, that they can simply talk directly to the pre-converted. And this is objectively a bad thing.
OK, there is one good thing about it. Social media has lowered the barriers to entry. Talented people who never had a shot before can just get out there and become a voice. Diversity of views and status is happening, like it or not.
Otherwise, anyone who tells you the shift to content slop is a good thing is either addicted or making money out of it. We don’t have long. It will soon be time to return to generic angry bald men wanting to punch Mikel Arteta. But very quickly, this is bad because it destroys meaning and turns it into noise. It’s bad because it concentrates power in the hands of a very small circle.
It’s bad because it makes a worse product. What is the experience of watching a reel? It is to find yourself dunked into a zone of vegetative consumption, a direct line formed between machine-picked brain-shout and your deepest feelings, where you’re basically gouging out your own eyeballs with a rusty needle made entirely from rage, greed and archive Katy Perry clips.
It is also fundamentally compromised. You think journalism is corrupt? The things that are replacing it are all inter-owned and overlapping, already rummaging about in your brain, bouncing pre-cooked messages from one platform to another. Not to mention burping out AI summaries of scraped search information in order to kill the news sources that actually found it. We will take your work so that nobody needs your work. And while you’re here, buy my backpack full of hate.
At the same time reel life will destroy or mutate the things it touches. Never mind civil discourse or democracy. More simply – and here it comes again, dancing along at the front of the parade – it is eating sport. Cricket’s Indian Premier League will have to adapt now to figures released this week showing dramatic declines in sponsorship and TV figures.
This is happening, its analysts say, not because content culture has created a boring product. But because young people just like reels, because they need more not less of this, ever tinier gobbets. So get ready for T-whatever, for louder and brighter, for a deepfake Virat Kohli endlessly hitting the same six into the face of a deliriously weeping crowd-style humo-bot.
Did anyone ask for this? Does it feel good? Does it have any qualities? The standard response is that young people want it because they have the dreaded short attention span. But young people did not make this. Adults made it and are firing it into their faces. It’s like forcing cigarettes into people’s mouths, then shrugging and saying, hey, they just want cigarettes. Give them only Goethe and spinach and guess what? They’ll want that instead.
For now anyone who has failed to resist in some way this decay is complicit, and this includes us, the consumers. Legacy media is usually a pejorative term. But again, this is the denigration of words, because legacy can also be a good thing. It’s what you pass on, connection and culture for those who come next. And what we are passing on right now is brainrot, a sludge that benefits only those who control it.
The final thing reel culture destroys is those who create it for a living. This is an unstable, sharp-edged existence. It’s short term, self-commodifying, a life spent shouting into the void hoping for an echo. But hey, Neymar has slapped someone. Cristiano has shared his morning routine (my cold plunge, my time being nice with my family). He’s clawing back those numbers. But for now the offer still stands. Come to me, wandering bots. Gather under my wings. The future, and indeed the present, is yours.