What's A Words Worth?

I don't much follow sports anymore. 

About four years ago, the great Rob Schwartz took me out to the ball game. I think we saw the Mets play somebody, but I really can't remember whom, I think the Biloxi Barn Swallows, or whoever has a major league ball club these days. 

 It was my first and only time in the Mets' new stadium which was paid for by taxpayers but named after a bank. That would be reason enough to sour me on going to a ballgame. I hate malefactors of great wealth in all their many forms.

But beyond all that, ballparks today are really shopping malls with food courts and they're blaring commercials loud enough so you can't watch the game itself. The game being an afterthought--just a spur to still more consumption. What's more, I no longer understand the game itself. It's a different game than the one I lived and breathed for 50 years. And I like it not a jot.

Not the corporate logos on uniforms. Not the corporate accountancy that separates a winner from a loser. Not the way the actual game is played where it seems a batter either clouts one or strikes out--with no strategic in-between in the offing.

Though I'm only 67, I might be one of the last people alive who's seen the Metsies in all three of the professional ballparks they've played in. 

First, back in 1962 or '63, when the Mets joined the league and played in the Polo Grounds, the New York Giants old digs up on 155th Street and Coogan's Bluff in Harlem, across the Harlem River from the original Yankee Stadium. 

Next, I saw the Mets in Che Stadium, named after Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary, who was assassinated by the CIA-backed Bolivian army and killed in 1967 at the aged of just 39. (The same age as Martin Luther King when he was killed.) 

Finally, in the corporatist-named Citi Field (Citi Group has a $160B market cap) where a hotdog costs $14 and a beer $19.

Despite my disenchantment with sports, I still subscribe to a site called "The Athletic," which is today the badly-written sports-page of The New York Times.

I'm rounding into today's point, so sit tight.

The Athletic is emblematic everything that's wrong with how things are reported today, how we take in information. You can't find standings, or traditional stats on the site and draw your own conclusions. To find those you have to jump off to other sites and go two or three levels deep.

What you can find is article after article jabbering about things which haven't happened and might never happen. Above are just seven fairly-randomly selected examples of what I mean. They're all speculative. None of them involve reporting on something that's actually happened. Which used to be the sine non qua of the sports page. Now, because there's too much space to fill (in the digital world there's no 'bottom of the page' and everything is 'always on') everything is speculative.

Not too long ago, I read a book review in The Wall Street Journal of a new book called:  "Unplug: How to break up with your phone and reclaim your life."

The Wall Street Journal review is just over one-thousand words long. Here are the twenty that got me. “Unless you’re working at the State Department there is no need for you to be checking news throughout the day.”

My feeling is that we are doing so much checking and watching and speculating and mental-masturbationing about so many things, we have all but canceled our ability to actually live, to actually enjoy, to actually see the world around us.

We are going through life at multi-gig speed, too fast to actually see, feel, smell, or live anything. Everything is a blur. We're too busy to actually see things so we turn to clichés and algorithms to tell us what we saw. And then, because a trillion dollars of marketing have told us it's great, we go on social media and proclaim something insipid to be "genius." 

(Worse, though social media is somewhat behind both the loneliness and the hate epidemics, we've been gulled into calling it social media, not asocial media or sociopathic media.)

William Wordsworth died at just over the age of 80 in 1850. I've read that he walked 175,000 miles in his life. Not to "get" someplace, but to live in this world. To smell the roses.

If he walked every day from the moment he was born till the moment he died, he would have averaged almost six-miles-a-day. He didn't even have an Apple watch to keep track.

According to the MIT Technology Review, "by 2028, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year. That’s enough to power 22% of US households each year. That could generate the same emissions as driving over 300 billion miles—over 1,600 round trips to the sun from Earth."

All that energy.

All those queries.

The $500,000,000,000 pledged via the Stargate Initiative (well more than the cost of the Apollo space program) to build nuclear power plans so we can run more AI. (No word yet on how we'll handle the deadly waste those plants will generate. As a culture, we're strictly buy now, pay never.)

None of that has produced anything as good as Wordsworth, and never will: