Like most people who have no talent for business ideas, I have a huge number of highly promising business ideas always on the go, ideas that are available for investment from any passing billionaire or Dragons’ Den rainmaker type.
Not one of the A-listers, obviously. I’m not insane. Not a Meaden or a Paphitis. But perhaps one of the minor ones, some strangely groomed South African retail magnate called Dork van Frotwangle who looks as if he keeps a bag of human fingers in his freezer and will mysteriously disappear mid-series and never be mentioned again.
One key project I’m working up right now is the Temporary Burner Identity. Burner phone. Disposable online backstory. Pre-pixelated features. Can you imagine the joy of being able to go somewhere or do something and not be watched or identified? This is the future of luxury freedom (write that down, Dork).
Being able to travel to, say, Spain, and nobody knows you’re there. To buy things, have experiences, meet people, and it’s not part of an indelible digital footprint that will echo and rebound and stalk your existence, popping up decades later in those on-screen boxes that want to sell you elite incontinence pants in massive letters while you’re on the train.
Or more broadly, just being able to escape. To breathe and get lost in the world, to exist in some anonymous space free from the white noise, the ceaseless robot voices of daily existence. This is human life now ever since The Great Networking of the early 2010s. We are all condemned to live like General Zod in Superman, hurtling through space inside a giant iPad, faces pressed up against the glass in a silent scream.
And OK, you won’t be hidden exactly. Just mutable, like you’re striding past the face recognition cameras wearing an endlessly interchangeable Hannibal Lecter-style human face. Like you’ve scissored off a selection of human faces and carry them around in a briefcase and this is actually fine.
And OK, OK, yes, it would obviously be used for crime, because every human invention enables crime, its first principle always: what’s the nonce angle here? So perhaps we could build in failsafes. We could monitor you. We could store your movements and data. Just in case. Actually, maybe don’t wear the Temporary Burner Identity at all. That’s probably easier. Buy it. Don’t use it. But we will throw in a mail order powder that gives you a six-pack and makes you magnetically charismatic (disclaimer: powder will not create six-pack or magnetic charisma).
This is the real problem. The networked existence. Being seen all the time. It has become inescapable. Nobody planned this properly or thought about what it might do to us. Nobody makes enough allowances for its effects, an advanced version of the Albert Camus idea that everyday life is so absurd that just existing is an act of revolutionary courage, that behind the eyes of every human is a dizzying matrix of pain and confusion. And yes, the algorithm is telling me you’re also thinking about Victor Gyökeres here.
The big question in the current Premier League season is unexpectedly textural. Not so much what tactical shifts are in play, or who is the best goalscorer. But why does it feel like this? Why does an otherwise straightforward set of results feel like an endless doom-scroll of trapped energy and lurking meltdown? The keynote is the basic strangeness of Arsenal, as we enter another staging point in a title race that is simultaneously gripping and tedious, and oddly tender in its contortions.
Arsenal will probably win the league from here. They have the points, the squad and the fallible opponents. The only real certainty is that it will be agonisingly intense, the footballing equivalent of a silent scream. Not to mention hugely addictive. I for one am already pining for the game against Leeds on Saturday afternoon, which will be 0-0 at 60 minutes and from there dissolve into repeated clips of Mikel Arteta furiously whirling his arms on the touchline, a Lego-haired avatar of pain, dressed as ever in slickly generic black outdoor clothing, like an elite sniper on a fishing trip.
There are some obvious answers as to why it feels like this. The most obvious is that what we are witnessing is a bottling. Simple stuff. A cowardice is taking place. Arsenal have to win the league, or they are basically betas, frauds, cucks, a papier-mache imitation of actual human men.
The thing is, bottling doesn’t really exist. It’s just a word. It’s outcome-based logic, Deeney’s paradox, the cojones obsession, which confuses being good at football with being morally good and brave and right. Bottling is the absence of analysis.
The burden of history has been mentioned, the long wait for a title. But that also feels too vague. These are hugely driven individuals from places such as São Paulo and the Basque Country. Kai Havertz may look like a minor royal cousin with a top-10 world croquet ranking but he has to be hard as nails just to operate in this rarefied air. Gabriel Magalhães is not feeling Perry Groves’s breath on his back.
But something is clearly being done to them. Arsenal are top, but their leading scorer has five goals. Watching them try to create or play with fluency is like having your eyes slowly gouged with a blunt teaspoon. This is either a phase about to break, or a new way of playing, or a metric of future failure, expected non-goals in the final third of the season.
The most interesting explanation is a parable of robotisation. Arsenal’s flaw lies in an overmechanisation of tactics. What we have here is the first post-human football team. This may be halfway to the truth. Arsenal are undeniably laden with data, from use of the StatDNA platform, to talk of an internal AI information bank, millions of data points used to predict not just injury and fatigue but game simulations, where to stand, where to pass, total set piece, mechanised attack patterns. Arsenal do express certain aspects of the modern world. There’s the feeling in his public pronouncements that Arteta is selling some kind of male wellness brand or restating his success vectors for the stakeholders. He even looks in these moments like an AI simulation of Handsome Earnest Football Man.
So is this it? Are we looking at a fatal flaw? Is this the hubris of robotisation? It sounds a little bogus. Fear of the future is as old as the future itself. People said this about television in the 1950s. They said steam train travel was impossible because humans would suffocate at such speeds. Artificial intelligence does sound frightening. But it’s not intelligent. It’s not even artificial. Its just a scraping of human thought-goo expressed in lines of code.
It is part of the most obvious point of difference, however. Which is: scrutiny. The online life. Being seen, surveilled, constantly interfaced. People often wonder why things are happening the way they are. Answer: it’s always the internet. Populism, rage, polarised stupidity wars. Of course the world has gone off its axis. This is the most profound shift in human consciousness ever enacted, the creation of a global hive-mind, the ability to hear the thoughts, shouts and brain-blurts of every single citizen of Namibia from your bedroom in Brentwood.
We are all terminally online now and this Arsenal team is the most extreme expression yet of this experience in sporting form. It comes in part from that internal scrutiny. Arteta is a massive data guy. Everyone at every level is tracked, statted, diced, sliced. How is this going to make you feel, or act, or perform complex movements? Mainly it is external. All fandom is online now, Arsenal’s particularly so, and in a way that feels unusually present. People have been talking about Arsenal bottling the league since September because content must always happen. There is an excess of feeling, micro-reasoning, total analysis, a complete absence of quiet space or places to breathe.
This isn’t new but it is more intense from year to year. It is also the most overlooked factor in elite modern sport, the way being observed constantly will of course alter the experience. You can see this creeping into problems on the pitch. Arsenal need to create more, to be more spontaneous, to dance like no one’s watching. Go on. Do it while everyone is watching, while that white noise seeps into every pocket of your existence.
How to fix this? Arteta conducted a tension-busting “face-meeting” with his players this week but even this has already become public product, put through the content wringer, mined for meaning. It brings us back to the burner identity. To succeed in the middle of all that heat and light has always been a matter of finding a still space, a bubble of silence. Never more so than now.
If Arsenal do fall away this season it will in part be down to this new and entirely pervasive sense of static, a first terminally-online collapse from perhaps the most terminally-online team yet devised.
