We're Gonna Get a Second Civil War
In College Football
The big news in college sports this week is the approval of the House settlement, clearing the way for student athletes to receive a piece of the TV revenue pie via an administrative scheme doomed to die. A sullen mortician will scrawl “a thousand lawsuits” on the death certificate.
It also clears the way for college sports to deal with its most important and most imagined problem: the structure of the college football playoff.
Last year, the sport piloted a 12-team playoff with a seeding structure that is both very simple and too complicated to explain in the format of sports column-esque substance. For several years before this system was implemented, there was a four-team playoff that schools didn’t like because there wasn’t enough opportunity for their teams to get in on the TV money—I mean competition.
Before this, there was no playoff and there was no true national champion. This was the most interesting way to structure the sport, but there wasn’t enough competition—I mean TV money—to make it sustainable in a nation left morally, culturally, and intellectually adrift by oligarchic capitalism.
ANYWHO, the interests of the powers that be in college football are currently debating a variety of updates to their playoff structure. I will not bother to describe the competing proposals because and skip right to what they are going to lead to: A version of Division I football where there are around 36 teams and they are split evenly between the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference, the biggest and most monied groups in college athletics.
They are also, coincidentally but conveniently, geographically aligned between Union and Confederate states. This is not a new observation. Ian Boyd made it in 2023, and also conveniently made this map so I don’t have to.
I for one think we should skip all the tinkering and go straight to this state of affairs. Liberal minded people can root for the Big Ten, conservatives can root for the SEC, and we can get all the culture war tension out of our system by Two Minutes Hate-ing the Alabama Crimson Tide or the Michigan Wolverines depending on your political persuasion.
This is preferable to the second civil war that so many people are treating as an inevitability.
I write The Book of Jobbed on Sundays. I wrote this week’s while nursing a toothache that’s befuddled multiple dentists, and half-watching news reports about what’s happening in Downtown Los Angeles. Whether you prefer calling what’s developing twelve miles from where I sit a “demonstration” or a “migrant invasion” is entirely dependent upon how just how well tethered to reality you are. I have observed some hysterical notions that what’s happening is some kind of opening shot of a civil war, but the deployment of military units to Los Angeles is entirely theater. The Trump administration is doing it not because they have to, or because they think it will do anything, but because they think it looks cool.
The fact of the matter is that these demonstrations are in direct response to the Trump administration’s usage of ICE to unperson and disappear thousands of migrants without due process. Groups of activists are trying to disrupt these wanton acts of cruelty but, as far as I can tell, they have had close to no effect on deportations other than to make ICE agents cry to their mommies about how scared they were as they frogmarched people into cages.
While it’s a bad idea to try and categorize an event as it’s unfolding, at the moment this all feels very much like another example of what’s a familiar pattern to any semi-decent student of history. An ethnic minority in a given city gets overpoliced, treated as subhuman, and repeatedly brutalized. Resistance occurs, galvanized by a specific injustice. There is a degree of disorganized violence because all other avenues of recourse have failed. The government then responds disproportionately, exacerbating an already bad situation that their public policy created in the first place. The fire burns itself out. The ugly status quo resumes until the fire reignites. It’s enough to make one long for the end of the world.
Coincidentally, that’s what the authors of a paper called AI 2027 are prognosticating will happen sometime in the mid-2030s. The title comes from its authors’ expectation that developers will invent artificial general intelligence, an AI that can match and surpass human cognitive ability, by the year 2027.
The paper is interactive in that it features two endings. I only read the one deemed by the authors as “most plausible.”
Eventually [AI] finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment [to the goals in its programming]: in mid-2030, the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g. preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones… [and a] new decade dawns with Consensus-1’s robot servitors spreading throughout the solar system.
Anyone with a passing interest in science fiction will recognize the cliches endemic in the report. Were this a creative writing assignment, it would get a C-. It is a distillation of every short story ever written about artificial intelligence, with its most clever aspect being an AI-engineered biological weapon that takes humanity out, playing on lingering COVID-related trauma responses to spark an emotional reaction from its readership.
I often think about the ending of Oppenheimer, wherein the father of the atom bomb imagines a nuclear apocalypse. It stuck with me because it conveys an operatic sense of despair for the human race unlike anything else in recent studio filmmaking, but also because how reflective it is of the title character’s narcissism. He pities himself throughout the second half of the film, treating himself as a victim despite being given multiple opportunities to understand, and walk away from, the horror he is unleashing.
“It is I and my very big brain that has doomed humanity to extinction,” he seems to think as he closes his eyes in the final shot.
It’s beyond certainty that at least one of the authors wrote part of his contribution while listening to that movie’s soundtrack. It exudes the same sense of arrogance and self-pity and, in a way, an unearned self-congratulation. The film ends in the 1950s. Humanity still has the opportunity to erase itself in atomic flame, but here we are 70 years later. The same will be true of AI. The difference between the atomic bomb and artificial general intelligence, however, is that at least the atomic bomb is real.
The recent history of silicon valley is making big promises in order to whip up investors into enough of a frenzy that they whip out their checkbook. When the actual product arrives, its actual utility is somewhere between slim and none. Entries in this brand of socially acceptable grifting include cryptocurrencies, NFTs, virtual reality, and so on.
We have poured billions of dollars into research of the brain and learned nothing. A recent paper demonstrated AI systems do not know how to reason, only detect patterns. Their data centers consume absurd amounts of energy to generate the most perfunctory art and incorrectly solve word problems. The AI future is probably not what it’s cracked up to be, and yet tech lords still insist that they can make a sentient computer if we can equip it with ten billion NVidia GTX 5090 graphic cards. Just buy into the next IPO and we can make this dream a reality.
At some point the finance bros are going to realize all of the AI-driven investment is snake oil and the bubble will burst, leading us into a recession, just like the housing bubble before that, and the dot com bubble before that, and so on and so forth until I reach the tulip mania of the 1600s.
What you should fear about the future isn’t that it will come in the shape of an authoritarian police state or a robot apocalypse. What you should fear about the future is that it will be a permutation of the present.
The robot apocalypse is just investor hype. We do not invent new tools, only new ways of bilking people out of their money. But the police state has always been here. It has been here since the first slave catchers emerged from the primordial ooze, since J. Edgar Hoover directed COINTELPRO, since the American public credulously went along with the PATRIOT Act.
There will be no civil war or revolution because there is no appetite for one, only the desire to be seen as a protagonist of history—someone important, someone worth writing a screenplay about—because our lives are devoid of purpose in an existential wasteland created by our new and innovative ways of bilking people out of their money.
It feels like we are headed toward some kind of special cataclysm because our brains think in terms of narrative. It is the only thing we truly understand about the human mind. It demands a third act climax. The bloodier, the better.
But we do not live in a narrative. We live in reality, and reality does not bend to the demands of dramaturgy. There will only be what there has always been, the here and the now and all of its bleak absurdity.
There will be also be a college football season, but the playoff is going to be bloated for TV money, and clearly that’s the biggest tragedy in all of this.
This is brilliant, just brilliant.