Being-in-the-Forest

The problem, as it should be initially, is how the hell to get this technology to work…to actually publish anything….

I’ll just start, then I can find out if this actually works.

I wanted to start this way back, when watching the Women’s World Cup last summer. There was a single distinguishing feature: very few fouls. Play was more open, tackling less dramatic. The games had less of an operatic feel to them. Players were actually playing…

I used to watch a lot of football when I was younger but, as professionalism, Sky and, therefore, money moved in, it became more tedious, more about gamesmanship (the ‘man’ there is deliberate) and obscene salaries. Gradually, continuing to watch became untenable, especially with the accompanying rise in tribalism – or rather a very peculiar form of ‘tribalism’, concocted along bourgeois lines. The “traditional supporters” were still there, although increasingly priced-out as the middle-class rushed in. With them, came a faux “working classness” which seemed to me, and still seems to me, to be based on intolerance and violence. I’m not suggesting some golden age of “jolly hockey sticks community here” but, as with all things Thatcherite, the joy, the “for its own sake” gradually bled away, replaced by a harsher, more calculating (hello Heidegger) attitude – an ‘attitude’ (more an ideological product) that has taken hold everywhere.

However, to stick with football. My query was: Is this simply that there isn’t the money ‘invested’ in “the women’s game” (and there isn’t), so the stakes are, in some sense, lower (I’ll talk about the development of the novel in a later post) OR is this because we’re seeing VAR for the first (real) time?

In a wider context, is this yet another case of the human person being afraid of being ‘caught’ by an panoptic technology and, therefore, behaving ‘correctly’ (defined for this purpose as “as they must when under surveillance” [Machiavelli notwithstanding])?

Watching the first few games, particularly I must admit, the first few Scotland games, another question arose: with the introduction of technology, was the human person, yet again, abdicating judgemental responsibility to technology? The old “Computer says No” gambit. When Scotland lost their opening games to referring decisions not seen by the human referee but apparently ‘seen’ by VAR, my partisan reaction was to reach the conclusion that poor refereeing decisions were a crucial “part of the game”, that football is about the human, not the technological.

Ok, I admit it was a “we was robbed” scenario…but we was robbed by technology, not poor human decision-making or poor human “I didn’t see that”-ness.

Given that I’ve spent far more time in the past thirty years thinking about technology’s (and its attendants) impact on me and the world around us (I was only watching the football because I was recovering from a spinal op…yeah, a technological advance that has benefited me immensely), I thought I’d start this blog. I wouldn’t imagine we can reach any definite conclusions…but we can surely discuss the hell out of the topic(s)…and use technology to do it.

I’m also (supremely) interested in the ways in which technology has been, and is, linked to professionalism (which is not something I would see as necessarily good in and of itself), which is, in turn, a “colonial tool” of business: witness the business invasion and colonisation of areas like sport, education (of which a lot, lot more in future posts) and healthcare. When business ‘methods’ rush in, with that entirely bogus claim that “one size will fit all”, vocation, compassion and humanity leg it…or, at best, become utterly beleaguered – seen as infantile in the face of “adult thinking” (calculative thinking). Even creativity has been colonised in the pat few years: it’s fast-becoming a term that means “the utilisation for profit”. Hardly surprising, as profit is the only term that can confer meaning in a capitalist society.