Internet I Still Think About: The Tim Tebow Chronicles
I've been thinking lately about how many years I've spent reading things from the internet, and how few of them I remember. So I'm continuing a little series on Pieces Of Internet Writing That Have Actually Stuck With Me.
Next up: Tim Tebow Chronicles, by Jon Bois. (Heads up that a lot of this review is self-plagiarized from myself ~4 years ago).
----
This is a weird one, in that 1) it stuck with me for form rather than content reasons, 2) it had blended in my mind with Bois' other sprawling internet-piece 17776, 3) I can't remember the content of either of them specifically, beyond a general sense that they're about a post-work future and people playing absurd continent-spanning games of neo-football, and 4) yet I still do think about them, and the project they embody, both for "what could writing on the internet look like, in all its damaged glory?" and also "what will we do with our time in a post-work future?", which are also related.
There's a story (that I have never fact-checked and yet assume is true) about how in the early days of television the producers just set up a camera and pointed it at people who were basically performing radio dramas. And then it took years for people to ask (and answer): what can we do on screen that's native to this medium, rather than importing the assumptions of the old medium, now that we're free of its constraints?
It's kind of crazy to me 1) how rarely internet writing is formally inventive, 2) how in practice people don't SEEM to want that very much?, and when writers/publishers bring out weird interesting formats readers generally aren't (I think) very interested?
Anyway. I'm in a weird spot where I'm writing about this as A Story I Still Think About, and I do think it's thematically relevant for the fast-approaching Lumière train of AI, and yet I can't exactly recommend reading it, unless you have a vast amount of time on your hands (appropriate to the theme) and/or are extremely interested in these particular topics. The Chronicles felt long, to me, and its thesis felt basically summarised by this short bit in the middle:
I always felt like I kind of related to Todd. He played football all his life, he had been there and done that. And now, he was just hanging around for no reason. The difference between us is that, you know, I eventually found a team that could use me. He just didn't.
Nothing will make you lonelier than not having purpose. Purpose is like gravity. All the friends and fans and everything? Without purpose, they're just floating there, the universe is like a big soup.
Basically, Bois is ambling towards a kind of David Chapman-esque philosophy: the games we play have meaning even though we create that meaning ourselves. See also:
There is no one to cheer us on in these final days. When we score our touchdown, there will be no scorekeeper. No one will see us score the grandest goal in the history of sports.
Volquez: But I guess this game isn't really about that, is it?
Tebow: I guess not.
Volquez: We're players, but we're also spectators to all this wonder. The cities, the valleys, the ancient crater. And these mountains. They're gorgeous.
And also:
You know, when I was younger, a lot of academics back home used to turn up their noses at sports. They were lowbrow wastes of time, they said. People were too obsessed with them. The unmissable insinuation being, of course, that they themselves were up to something more important.
We are small. We are nothing. We are such nothing that the universe does not acknowledge that we are even here, and it never will. Accept that. And now, stand on this line, and look at that quarterback, and drill the fuck out of him. Nothing you do will be more important, because nothing you do will be important.
It is quite well that we love sports. Because one day, sports will be the only adventures we have left. There will be nothing else to do, and for eternity.
Humans cannot endure in a future without problems. It's not in us. Sports invent problems as nothing else can.
My issue philosophically with The Tim Tebow Chronicles is (incidentally) the issue I had with the TV show The Good Place: they want to make claims about a world with no external arbiters, where meaning is meaningful even though it doesn't have any truly objective grounding. (Cf David Chapman again, who is trying to make this work in Meaningness, which I admire but also find very hard to read).
But this goal is incredibly, extremely, even-more-synonyms-for-very hard to do to anyone's satisfaction. So both Bois and the Good Place writers pull a kind of bait-and-switch, subbing in a series of external arbiters and escalating authority figures who can give the characters their Gold Stars For Being Good.
This is exactly the problem though: your philosophy claims that there is no external authority who can give you that gold star! The whole point is that we have to endow our own meaning!
I am bothered by this bait-and-switch, and hope I'm misunderstanding both authors/creators, but... if I'm misunderstanding them, I don't understand what I'm not understanding, etc.