“I Don’t Even Celebrate That Shit”

Basketball, Semiology, and Pax Americana

Expansion, as the ‘Wisconsin school’ of American historiography has demonstrated, has been at the very core of the American experience. Empire constitutes the habitus—the dispositions that generate perceptions, practices and policies—of US elites. Imperial outlooks permeated the US as much as they did the European imperial societies where empire is a past that has never really or entirely passed. The United States emerged as a nation state in a global political economy of empires. Its expansion was conditioned by the overall expansion of the Euro-Atlantic imperial system. Notwithstanding American exceptionalist mythologies, expansion was founded on concepts of racial and cultural differences that were common to all the nineteenth-century empires. — Josh Howard

In 2008 a video surfaced in which Josh Howard, filmed during the performance of the American national anthem at Allen Iverson‘s “Celebrity Flag Football game,” looked into the camera and declared, “I don’t even celebrate that shit. I’m black.”

In the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests, and in light of the various comparisons that have been drawn between him and other principled,  politically aware athletes like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Craig Hodges, I wanted to draw some attention to—and express appreciation for—Josh Howard’s less celebrated and more succinct critique of American patriotism.

While Howard did (eventually) apologise for his remarks, it wasn’t an especially convincing apology. Already a pariah in the eyes of fans and journalists due to his open marijuana use (which, as he has correctly pointed out, is his own choice and did not prevent him from doing his job), Howard probably understood that there would be no pleasing white America regardless of what he chose to say. Interestingly, during the same press conference at which he formally apologised for “disrespecting” the USA, Howard was asked what he thought about the prospect of playing alongside newly-acquired point guard Jason Kidd, a serial spousal abuser who would go on to drink-drive his car into a telephone pole in 2012 (behaviour apparently warranting back-to-back sportsmanship awards for “ethical behaviour” and “integrity”[1]).

Following his anthem scandal, Howard would play only one more full season of basketball in Dallas before injuries effectively derailed his career. This conveniently eliminated any need for the NBA to actively blackball him like it had Abdul-Rauf and Hodges (although Howard, a former All-Star and indisputably talented scorer, has apparently been attempting—unsuccessfully, so far—to make a comeback, so it’s quite possible that he is being frozen out after all).

Had he known how things would turn out, I’d like to believe that Howard, understanding that he had nothing to lose, would have stuck to his guns and refused to apologise. After all, what exactly was he apologising for? He hadn’t broken any rules or laws, and, moreover, he was expressing a view that is perfectly rational and correct.

With some notable exceptions, a great deal of the print and airtime devoted to Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests has focused on form rather than substance. The pressing issues, according to establishment sports media, are whether white America is ready to have its beloved sports politicised, or whether Kaepernick’s kneeling will be sufficiently effective in ending racism. Missing from this narrative are, of course, the “bodies in the streets” that Kaepernick has cited as prompting his disobedience, and the fact that “[police] are being given paid leave for killing people.”

I don’t want to waste any time recounting what Kaepernick and other athletes are currently doing (I’ll assume that if you’re reading this you’re familiar with the situation). Nor am I going to belabour the point that Kaepernick is, of course, completely right about police brutality. Not only are racist cops all over America regularly rewarded for shooting innocent black people with impunity, they are punished if they don’t!

Colin Kaepernick has done a tremendous job drawing renewed attention to one of the most serious problems plaguing American society, and has at the same time made white conservatives deservedly uncomfortable. He has sparked a public debate, and I intend to contribute to that debate. The focus of my (constructive and well-meaning) critique of Kaepernick’s position will concern not police brutality but the brutality routinely inflicted on civilians all over the world by the military forces of the American Empire.

Following the discovery of his initially discreet and unremarkable protest (Kaepernick began by sitting down during anthem performances and only started kneeling to appease the belligerent turbo-patriots who control the NFL and American sports media), Kaepernick was grilled by journalists on the specific meaning of his disobedience. Predictably, he was asked what he thought about the American military, and, regrettably, he capitulated immediately: “I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. […]. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.”

While some have argued, understandably, that it was something of a non-sequitur to request that Kaepernick issue a statement outlining his position on the military, it was—unintentionally, I’m sure—a salient question. First, it demonstrates a recognition that one cannot condemn American police for killing innocent people without also condemning the American military for perpetrating worse crimes on a far, far larger scale. Second, it inadvertently reveals the true and precise meaning of the American flag and national anthem: empire.

The development of publicity, of a national press, of radio, of illustrated news, not to speak of the survival of a myriad rites of communication which rule social appearances makes the development of a semiological science more urgent than ever. In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the field; it is true that it bears no message. But on the bleachers, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me. — Roland Barthes

According to Roland Barthes, a sign (in this case The Star-Spangled Banner) is composed of both signifier (particular lyrics sung to a particular tune) and signified (military adventurism, white supremacy, capitalism). Likewise, the sign that is the American flag is composed of signifier (a piece of cloth) and signified (military adventurism, white supremacy, capitalism). We know that this is what the flag and anthem signify because these are the things that the American public scrambled to defend. Nobody accused Colin Kaepernick of disrespecting jazz, breakdancing, or Tom Waits, because the American national anthem does not signify these things. Rather, it signifies the overthrowing of democratically elected leaders and the installation of dictators; it signifies the plundering of resources; it signifies slavery; it signifies genocide. That an assortment of bellowing white men leapt to defend the American war machine in the wake of Kaepernick’s anthem protests tells you all you need to know about what it means to be an American patriot.

The Star-Spangled Banner doesn’t just signify racism in the semiological sense; the lyrics themselves are overtly racist! What I’ve outlined above isn’t just what America represents in some abstract sense—it is what the American ruling class has undertaken every single day for centuries. America’s empire surpasses all previous empires in its cruelty and destructiveness. If territorial expansion and the “removal” of indigenous populations falls within the settler colonial norm, the institutionalisation of domestic despotism is, according to Philip S. Golub, a singularity of the liberal American state: while the European imperial states exported their violence and subjugated peoples overseas, the United States applied despotism within large areas of its constantly expanding sphere of continental sovereignty. Slavery is one of the major distinguishing features of the early American empire.

We needn’t spend long dwelling on specific instances from America’s endless list of sins—this is a basketball blog, after all—but the following two examples are representative of America’s despotism at home and abroad. Speaking about the Native American population in 1868, beloved American war hero General William Tecumseh Sherman remarked: “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Two years later, Sherman, evidently in a lighter mood, wrote, “the more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous.” In the twenty years that followed, the US army waged—in the words of General Philip Sheridan—a “campaign of annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction” against Native Americans.

Not content with spreading freedom and democracy at home, the United States’ military applied itself abroad in the same spirit. Senator Alfred Beveridge considered the conquest and subjugation of the Philippines (1899–1902) a necessary step to “establish the supremacy of the American republic throughout the East till the end of time.” Admonishing those of his peers who recoiled at the atrocities being committed by American forces in the archipelago, he advocated the extermination of all nationalist Filipino insurgents: “The Philippines are ours forever. […]. A lasting peace can be secured only by overwhelming forces in ceaseless action until universal and absolutely final defeat is inflicted on the enemy. To halt before every guerrilla band opposing us is dispersed or exterminated will prolong hostilities and leave alive the seeds of perpetual insurrection.”

But all of this is old news, ancient history. From the early 1950s until today, the United States has either been at war, supporting war-making, or sustaining predatory states almost constantly in one or another part of the empire: the Philippines, 1948–1954; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Indonesia, 1955–1975; Congo/Zaire, 1960–1965; Cuba, 1961; Brazil, 1960s; Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 1963–1975; Chile, 1973; Angola, 1975–1992; Nicaragua, 1980s; Grenada, 1983; Panama, 1989–1990; Afghanistan, 1980–1988; Iran–Iraq war, 1980–1988; Iraq, 1990–1991; and so on and so on. The notion that following the conclusion—by gratuitous nuclear genocide—of the Second World War, a period of peace, a Pax Americana, has spread across the globe, is an utter fantasy.

The vast and informal sphere of American Empire has always rested on a planetary security structure established during the Second World War whose forward points, the archipelago of land-based and floating military platforms disseminated throughout the world, constitute the mobile frontiers of American sovereignty. These platforms can and should be understood as the territorialised nodes of empire. The potential and often actualised violence of the security structure secures the wider informal sphere and allows the US, in the worlds of former Pentagon official Alberto Coll, to “move the international order in a favourable direction.” — Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf

The American ruling class still conceives of the United States as an empire, and their actions reflect this. America has polluted the world with military bases which, once established as “lily-pads” (what a pleasant euphemism!), grow aggressively, like tumours. The inherently expansionist character of America’s self-perpetuating military-industrial establishment requires, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, “war or a high state of war preparedness” and a state of “emergency without foreseeable end.”

By the end of the 1990s, journalists (stenographers) and academics (propagandists) routinely compared the United Sates to “the greatest empires of the past,” and influential forces began dreaming of a new “American Century” along with a renewed and much expanded “American Peace.” In 1998, soon after an American bombing raid on Iraq, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” In a particularly telling act soon after the George W. Bush administration was sworn in, the Office of the Secretary of Defense commissioned a still classified comparative study of ancient and modern empires to ascertain how they had “maintained their dominance.”

America’s commitment to permanent strategic supremacy cannot be considered a response to September 11. It was articulated in the early 1990s and is a state-centric approach that has nothing whatsoever to do with any presumed threat from transnational terrorism. No large-scale mobilisation was required to deter or destroy so-called “rogue states.” For that, pre-existing military capabilities were, as Afghanistan and Iraq proved, largely sufficient. Rather, America’s military adventures are invariably undertaken to further the economic interests of its ruling class. As Dick Chaney explained while testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 1991: “In addition to southwest Asia, we have important interests in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Central and Latin America. In each of these regions there are opportunities and potential future threats to our interests. We must configure our policies and our forces to effectively deter, or quickly defeat, such future regional threats.”

War is just a racket. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I served two years with the Navy, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. — David Robinson

The problems that Colin Kaepernick identifies regarding the US military—that veterans returning from war don’t receive adequate support or treatment for mental health issues, and that the actions of racist police dishonour their “sacrifices”—barely scratch the surface. The military and the police exhibit many of the same problems in America: both are thoroughly corrupt institutions whose criminal behaviour and attempted cover-ups have been exposed for all to see. Both put guns in the hands of aggressive young men without providing them with adequate training or education, and both are utterly opaque and accountable to no one.

When questioned about his protest, Kaepernick cited “bodies in the streets” and cops “getting away with murder,” yet he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that these complaints can—and should—be levelled at the American military as well. Civilians all over the world are brutalised, raped, and killed by US military personnel daily. The ever-increasing militarisation of American police has simply given US citizens a taste of what people outside America have experienced for decades.  Kaepernick must interrogate why he has “respect” for this institution, and why anybody who disrespects it is excommunicated.

 

I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. […]. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.

Police are slave catchers; soldiers are gangsters for capitalism; Colin Kaepernick is Yanis Varoufakis. A popular and charismatic pseudo-Marxist career politician, Varoufakis continues to promote a bizarre and incoherent critique of the EU that both acknowledges the impossibility of democratising it while at the same time proposing to democratise it. Varoufakis will no doubt enjoy a long and lucrative career giving TED talks to imbecile Guardian readers, perhaps even making his way back into mainstream politics, but his self-serving Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 is a pointless red herring that will serve only to waste everybody’s time and energy.  Similarly, Kaepernick, in maintaining that the United States can live up to its own myth without ending imperialism, presents a critique of American patriotism that is of severely limited scope.

Despite his shortcomings, Colin Kaepernick has shown infinitely more courage than the soft and obsequious Stephen Curry, who refuses to protest the anthem at all despite his coach’s blessing, and who has publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Silicon Valley. But when discussing or celebrating the various anthem protests that have followed Kaepernick’s, it is crucial to acknowledge not just the informal backlash of marginal racist sports fans, but the official backlash of the various sports leagues themselves. The NBA has so far successfully conspired to prevent any kind of salient political statement from reaching its audience, replacing real protest with cowardly and depoliticised gestures that mean absolutely nothing.

Sevyn Streeter, for example, was told at the last minute that she would not be permitted to perform the national anthem on opening night in Philadelphia simply because she’d decided to wear a shirt that displayed the words “we matter.” Streeter later explained, “I…felt it was important to express the ongoing challenges and ongoing injustice we face as a black community within the United States of America—that’s very important to me. Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world, but there are issues that we cannot ignore.”

Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world.

The USA is a backward and oppressive country where to publicly assert that black people matter is obscene and forbidden. It is not great, or good, or even average. Streeter isn’t alone in citing this peculiar fantasy about American greatness in the face of indisputable evidence to the contrary. Even the more thoughtful responses to Colin Kaepernick’s protests have framed him as some sort of true American patriot bravely representing the real values that America stands for. But this is just more of the same delusional American exceptionalism that underpins the arguments of Kaepernick’s racist and conservative critics. To pat the American public on the back and assure them that Colin Kaepernick is fighting the good fight like a real American hero is to elide the reality of its brutal crimes against humanity, and unwittingly kills any serious and constructive discourse.

America is not a land of freedom-dispensing soldier-heroes who work tirelessly to promote democracy throughout the world; nor is it a bastion of free expression and progressive ideas. Rather than fighting over ownership of a phantasmagorical America that never actually existed, those prepared to challenge American empire must abandon any notion of patriotism and understand that to be labelled “un-American” or a “traitor” is a great honour.

The NBA, which likes to portray itself as a relatively progressive sports league, will do all it can to squash dissent and wring any political content from its players’ anthem-related demonstrations. To anybody anticipating a fresh wave of protests now that the NBA season is underway, understand that the NBA is not your friend; Adam Silver is a cold-blooded reptilian plutocrat whose words are emptier than the Smoothie King Center.

Radical NBA players need to take their cues not from acquiescent American football players, or from false prophets like Stephen Curry, but from real human beings like Josh Howard—people who say what’s in their heart and speak uncompromisingly. A protest isn’t really a protest if it’s sanctioned by the NBA. If your team tells you that you’re not allowed to wear a shirt with a particular slogan, wear it anyway. If your team tells you they don’t want you to sit during the national anthem, set the American flag on fire and boycott the league.

Until next time, death to America.

[1] I’m aware that the award is for “ethical behaviour” and “integrity” on the basketball court, but NBA teams each select one player from their roster to be considered for the award. Why even nominate Jason Kidd for an award like this? Were the rest of the Mavs and Knicks so unsportsmanlike? Are we really to believe that Jason Kidd, while he may regularly beat his wife and endanger people’s lives by driving drunk, is in all other respects a really nice guy? It is evident that the NBA conducts damage-control for its stars, provided they’ve only committed a mild transgression like abusing their wife for years on end, and nothing serious like sitting down.

 

Scooter Barry and the Eye of Power

Basketball, Solutionism, and Medium Theory

Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in wearable sports tech! — Scooter Barry

So we went down the bank of the foul ditch,
Going a little further into the pit
Which is stuffed with all the evil of the universe.

I recently happened across a video by BBALLBREAKDOWN creator and fellow communist Coach Nick in which he and Scooter Barry attempted to entice their viewers with the SOLIDshot smart sleeve. SOLIDshot, headquartered in Mountain View, California, have apparently created a compression sleeve—made from imported, high performance Italian fabric—that incorporates electronic sensors and promises its users “instant feedback + analytics.” The sensors in the sleeve track the movement of your arm, recording your shooting data, telling you whether your form is good or bad, and suggesting adjustments you may wish to make. Your data is stored on the sleeve, but you are encouraged to use the SOLIDshot app in order to “sync your data to the cloud.”

Sounds useful. So what’s the problem? Before we get into that, I’d like to make it absolutely clear from the outset that I am not anti-technology. I’m quite aware that quaint theories warning of the inherent evils of new technologies have been formulated (and invariably dismissed) since at least the fourth century BCE when Plato cautioned in the Phaedrus that the advent of writing would cause people’s memories to atrophy. Neither am I about to suggest that the use of such technology is a form of “cheating.” Media, as defined by Marshall McLuhan, can be “any extension of ourselves”—glasses, for instance—or “any new technology.” Professional basketball has always incorporated such things: players wear shoes, uniforms, headbands, mouth guards, use fitness equipment, etc. That basketball players make use of new technologies to augment their bodies is not of concern (although players who engage in body modification surgery in order to gain a competitive advantage must be policed more vigorously).

We can clearly see how this new smart sleeve has evolved from a long line of familiar low-tech ancestors (including an eerily similar product peddled by Scooter’s own father), so if its forerunners are merely harmless gadgets, what makes SOLIDshot’s latest product so dangerous? To invoke McLuhan[1] again, the medium is the message: “the personal and social consequences of any medium…result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs.”

The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The SOLIDshot smart sleeve did not introduce surveillance or data-collection into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of basketball players. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 8.

And it is precisely in terms of scale, the sheer quantity of data collected and shared, that these new-fangled smart devices—that is, any device with sensors that harvest data—differ from their predecessors. NBA players already operate under the all-seeing eye of the SportVU camera (another Silicon Valley innovation), which tracks and records their every move while on the court. The media establishment was swift and uncritical in its gushing endorsement of the SportVU system, hailing its leaguewide adoption as a revolution. Now, three years on, the unremittent surveillance of NBA players, the hoarding of data by teams—data to which players have limited access and which teams use to make personnel decisions—has been completely normalised. And we should not doubt for a moment that smart sleeves and other similar devices will soon become equally ubiquitous at the professional level. If the notion of players wearing smart tracking devices during live games sounds implausible to you, head on over to SOLIDshot’s FAQ section:

It will not be long, maybe a decade, before full-body smart suits (perhaps funded by EA Sports, the better to realistically capture and render player movements for their games) are adopted as part of the NBA’s compulsory uniform code. Just think of all that extra space for corporate logos! These suits, combined with the camera’s gaze, will provide an unprecedented quantity of data to be harvested and put to the service of private interests. Such innovations will not be limited to the professional sphere, either; amateur and recreational players will continue to mimic the pros, generating staggering amounts of data, most of which will be utterly meaningless to them and will no doubt be sold on to third parties without knowledge or consent.

We have, after all, been given every incentive in today’s nightmare hell-world to self-surveil wherever possible: sharing our location and our interests will allow us to view more relevant and personalised content online; diet and fitness apps will help us live healthier lives if we let them track us; “personal assistants” like Google Now or, more recently, Allo’s Google Assistant[2] will afford us more free time if we simply surrender all of our personal data, and so on. The basketball community in particular has been carefully primed to accept such concessions to Silicon Valley tech companies, viewing them as inevitable—even desirable.

Observers of the NBA cannot have failed to notice the swift rise of so-called “analytics” in recent years, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of efficiency, disruption, and other Silicon Valley jargon. While there are legitimate reasons to be sceptical of the kind of mass surveillance engendered by SportVU cameras and smart sleeves—its potential consequences for contract negotiations, for instance—these are rarely discussed. Instead, professional straw man Charles Barkley, the de facto leader of the NBA’s counter-analytics contingent, has plunged the discourse into the depths of the figurative toilet bowl with his inane blathering: “All these guys…who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common: they a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school.”

More circumspect and critical observers have either had their voices drowned out by a parade of anachronistic technophobes and chauvinistic macho men or are reluctant to speak up for fear of being associated with this crowd. Who, after all, would want to align themselves with Charles Barkley? His analytics tirade on Inside the NBA could have come straight from the script of Moneyball, a film in which Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill harness the arcane power of analytics to outwit and ridicule rooms full of befuddled old-school scouts, constructing their improbable super-team by reducing baseball to a maths equation. Disruptive!

You’re not even looking at the problem.

The language in this scene is particularly interesting. Of note is the focus on solving problems by thinking differently: the film is a transparent love letter to the solutionists of Silicon Valley. The solution that Brad Pitt has in mind does not, of course, involve collectively addressing the systemic problem that “it’s an unfair game,” that the uneven distribution of wealth precludes certain teams from competing. Rather, in the style of the glib tech nerd in his t-shirt and jeans, the solution our protagonist is searching for is wholly superficial, a stopgap measure that may work for his team, and for a time, but ultimately does nothing to promote parity in baseball (it is perhaps worth noting that since Billy Beane took over as general manager of the Oakland As in 1997, his team has managed to win a total of one playoff series). Likewise, the “solution” Silicon Valley has proposed to remedy the stagnant wages, unemployment, and obscene inequality inherent to capitalism is for workers to engage in increasingly precarious work, front all of the costs that would previously have been covered by their employer, and work incessantly for poverty wages. Your day belongs to you.

To reiterate, with Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the NBA itself all insisting that analytics and the invasive data-gathering techniques that fuel it are bringing about a new golden age of basketball, there is unlikely to be any real resistance from players or fans when the time comes to introduce smart uniforms. NBA teams will soon be granted access to a pool of data drawn from every complicit player on Earth, and once that happens they will inevitably contrive an arbitrary set of criteria for prospective players (must replicate a particular shooting form, possess certain physical qualities, take x number of shots per day, etc.). This predictive scouting will usher in a horde of counterfeit Stephen Currys, the original’s own movements and habits having been digitally captured and rendered as a formula for basketball greatness. The Curry blueprint[3], which will be sold to every other NBA team, and then to college teams and international teams, will serve as the standard for all incoming players, against which they can be measured “objectively” by algorithms.

Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can’t examine Amazon’s algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to basketball? If no one can examine the algorithms—which is likely to be the case as predictive-scouting software will be built by private companies—we won’t know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. — Karl Malone

If the word “algorithm” doesn’t immediately fill you with dread, consider the fact that the supposedly objective algorithms increasingly utilised in the American criminal justice system have turned out to be blatantly racist tools of oppression. What, then, are the implications of predictive scouting for basketball? Firstly, it will erect a new and expensive barrier for entry into the world of professional basketball. Aspiring players will need to purchase costly basketball suits and other smart devices to monitor and record their body’s every move and function, and they will have to adhere to whatever strict regime has been determined—objectively, remember—to produce the best players. Those who cannot or will not submit to such invasive practices will simply drop off the basketball radar. Just as you are considered a deviant today if you do not maintain a social media presence, refusal to plug yourself into the basketball matrix will undoubtedly be viewed as evidence that you have something to hide.

As for those who are lucky enough to make it to the NBA in this grim dystopia, they will all play the same—most efficient—way for coaches who all coach the same—most efficient—way, rendering basketball games bland and joyless. Kemba Walker will languish on the bench; DeMar DeRozan, last of the dunk contest purists, will be excommunicated; John Shurna will be given an NBA contract (after using the SOLIDshot smart sleeve to fix his shooting mechanics, of course). “Nudging” and “incentivisation” will inevitably produce a particular kind of basketball subjectivity. Not only will all players be encouraged to master only one of a limited selection of skillsets, they will not have had cause to cultivate any sense of flair or creativity at any point in their playing lives (streetball and even idle practice having also been subordinated to the dictates of predictive algorithms). The NBA of tomorrow will penalise players who are short, inefficient, and who love to isolate. Who is such a system likely to exclude?

Solutionism is an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious. […]. It’s not only that many problems are not suited to the quick-and-easy solutionist toolkit. It’s also that what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics, sports, or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic. — Allen Iverson, Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, 09/09/2016.

But what about the Spurs? Perhaps you enjoy watching five basketball androids dispassionately firing the ball around the court until they can find the best shot. Perhaps you can live without seeing Pierre Jackson score 30 points per game. Let’s examine the likelihood that the new analytics order will in fact deliver on its promise of crisp, efficient basketball.

Consider Uber, that ubiquitous and villainous taxi service posing as a technology company. Its standard sales pitch has always been that it offers individualised services (for the sacred bourgeois individual), and that these services are more convenient and efficient than anything the bloated government bureaucracies can hope to offer by way of public transportation. However, Uber has been able to provide its services at such competitive rates only because its backers are prepared to operate at a (staggering and unsustainable) loss in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. Moreover, Uber has been quietly moving away from its individualised services, offering customers various incentives to walk to “unique pick-up spots” rather than have a driver come directly to their location, and to share rides with other passengers.

If Uber customers end up waiting at designated pick-up spots and catching rides that they share with other passengers, in what way will Uber’s service differ from public transport as it is currently deployed? Could it be that those responsible for administering public transport for decades did in fact know a thing or two about efficiency and sustainability after all? For all of its blustering about efficiency and personalisation, Uber has proven itself to be nothing more than a cuckoo in the nest, supplanting existing forms of public and private transportation without actually improving on their services in any appreciable way. What we’ll soon be left with, then, is the same expensive and inefficient transport system most of us are used to, only it’ll be run by a private monopoly, utterly opaque, unaccountable, and profit-driven. If you have any doubts whatsoever about the very serious dangers of letting private monopolies handle essential public transport, I invite you to catch a train in the UK.

By the same token, we should be suspicious of the transformative rhetoric issuing from the sports media establishment concerning the rise of analytics. Could smart suits help NBA teams uncover talented players that would otherwise have slipped through the net? Certainly this will be the pitch from the grinning Silicon Valley ghoul as he reclines in Vivek Ranadivé’s office. You want the next Stephen Curry? Our algorithms will find him for you by matching his data against our index of player profiles from around the world.

One, two, three, NICK ROCKS!

[1] McLuhan was a big fan of electronic mass media and probably would have loved the internet, and possibly even the Silicon Valley perverts who wish to colonise it for themselves: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree” could, with a little tweaking, be Facebook’s new slogan. But insofar as medium theorists like McLuhan invite us to consider more thoroughly the profound effects that new media can have on all aspects of a society, their work remains extremely valuable.

[2] Google Assistant promises to save you time by reading all of your messages, learning to mimic the way you communicate, and then replying to your messages on your behalf so that you don’t have to interact with your friends. I’m not making this up.

[3] Followed to its logical end, the current paradigm will bring us cybernetic body suits that can be programmed to imbue the wearer with the playing style and abilities of specific NBA players. The most talented basketball players will no longer compete professionally: a small elite will provide the suits with their abilities and professional basketball will be played by only the biggest and most athletically gifted people. Basketball will subsequently become a tactical game in which one’s strategy consists in determining when to deploy a particular player’s skillset: driving? Activate James Harden; shooting free throws?  Activate Stephen Curry; committing a personal foul? Activate Giannis Antetokounmpo. But enough of this—I don’t want to give tech leeches any big ideas. If you want to make this into a big-budget dystopian sports film, get at me.

Lin in the Art of Archery (Part 2)

Basketball, Postcolonial Theory, and the Mystic East

What is Zen? There can be no final and satisfactory answer to this question in intelligible words (except in my books). Zen is the conquest of dualism and the inward realisation of the Buddha-nature which is the raison d’être of all things. The true essence of all things is the Eternal Principle of which all phenomena are manifestations—in Sanskrit it is called Tathata (Suchness) and it is quite impossible to apply to it any form of logical analysis. — Phil Jackson

A wise man once asked, “What purpose is Phil Jackson serving?”

Phil Jackson is known in the basketball world as the “Zen Master,” but what does this really mean? Naturally, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Zen. Rather, the nickname is derived from Jackson’s consumption of popular culture: Jackson claims to draw inspiration from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a bestselling New Age self-help manual named after an older and even more fraudulent work of orientalist trash. Jackson even offered his own trite contribution to the genre with the publication of his book Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior in 1995, profiting handsomely from his association with a legacy of dubious scholarship stemming from the likes of D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts.

So what is this “Zen,” and how/why did it come to be commodified by cantankerous basketball coaches? My friend, grab a cup of matcha, settle down on the dirt floor of your elegantly austere hut, and I will dispense satori.

Our story begins in the seventeenth century, at the dawn of the political and ideological project known as the European Enlightenment. It was at this time that significant changes occurred in the way that religion and science were understood in Europe: challenges emerged—both for Christian theologians and for secular scholars of religion—in the form of empiricism and cultural pluralism. For the theologians, empiricism introduced the problem of verifying all truth claims with empirical evidence, while cultural pluralism made it impossible for them to ignore non-Christian traditions, or to blithely assert the superiority of their faith. Scholars of religion, on the other hand, had to come to grips with the knowledge that “religion” as a category was itself a cultural product. Furthermore, they found themselves having to field challenges from experts in other academic disciplines claiming to possess the necessary tools to analyse religion, and thus threatened their job security. And so it was in the hastily constructed category of “mysticism” that European intellectuals found a refuge from the distressing verities of historical contingency and cultural pluralism.

The adjective “mystical”—derived from the Greek root mūo, meaning “to close”—can be used in everyday language to describe any object, person, event, or belief that has a vaguely mysterious aspect to it (such as LeBron James’ hairline, the Sacramento Kings’ front office, Bruno Caboclo), to religious experiences, the supernatural, the magical, and the occult. “Mysticism” is, of course, a term which arose in a specific cultural and historical context. Like “religion,” it has no ready equivalent in many foreign languages. But no matter!

Modern conceptions of mysticism place an emphasis on so-called “mystical experience.” William James and Rudolph Otto both provided influential definitions should you care to read about them. Another important component of mysticism as we’ve come to understand it is the theological position known as perennialism, according to which all religious traditions, regardless of where or when they occur, share a common essence, invariably described by its advocates—such as Aldous Huxley—as “mystical.”

In contemporary academic usage, “the mystical” can, on the one hand, be understood to denote certain experiences that transcend the range and scope of ordinary sensory experience (the hot hand, for example). On the other hand, it can be taken to refer to the ineffable—that about which one should not and cannot speak. Proponents of mysticism thus sought to reframe popular conceptions of the religious, such that a core of spiritual and moral values would survive the inevitable headlong clash with secular philosophy, science, and technological progress. They were led, conveniently, to posit an “essential core” of religion, conceived of as a private, veridical, ineffable experience inaccessible to empirical scientific analysis.

The search for the “essence” of religion or the various religions, or of “mysticism,” is misguided since it is operating under the aegis of the essentialist fallacy that the phenomena included in the category of religion (for instance) must have something universally in common to be meaningfully classified as religious. The claim, frequently made from the methodological stance of the phenomenology of religion, that religion is sui generis—that it is a fundamental category of its own—is often put forward as a defence of the autonomy and irreducibility of religious phenomena in the overwhelmingly secular institution of the modern university. — Jerry Krause

And so it was Zen that came to the rescue of counter-Enlightenment scholars, appearing on the scene at precisely the right historical moment. The allure of Zen, as it was presented to its Western audience, lay in the fact that it appeared to confirm the fashionable theories of mysticism propounded by Otto, James, Huxley, and their intellectual descendants: here was an authentic mystical tradition of considerable antiquity that clearly articulated the crucial distinction between unmediated mystical experience per se and the culturally determined symbols used to express it. The purported anti-intellectualism, anti-ritualism, and iconoclasm of Zen were ample evidence that it had not lost touch with its mystical and experiential roots. Zen, it was declared, is immune to Enlightenment critiques of religion precisely because it is not a religion in the institutional sense at all; it is, on the contrary, an uncompromisingly empirical, rational, and scientific mode of inquiry into the nature of things.

Zen was not introduced to the Western imagination in the usual way, by the efforts of orientalist scholars, but rather through the activities of an elite circle of internationally-minded Japanese intellectuals and globe-trotting Zen priests, whose missionary zeal was second only to their vexed fascination with Western culture. These Japanese Zen apologists emerged, in turn, out of the profound social and political turmoil engendered by the rapid Westernisation and modernisation undertaken by Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). With new ideas and technologies flooding the country and the Meiji government tasked with constructing a coherent national identity for Japanese people, Buddhism was caught in the crossfire, cast as both a foreign “Other” and as a corrupt and superstitious creed incompatible with modern scientific and technological advancements. The influence of the late nineteenth-century European zeitgeist had permeated university campuses in Meiji Japan, and Japanese scholars, seeking to bring their nation into the modern world, were naturally drawn to European critiques of institutional religion, to the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment.

It was in response to this intellectual climate that a vanguard of Buddhist intellectuals, drawing upon popular Darwinian evolutionary models of religion, argued the case for Japanese Buddhism, suggesting that it represented the most spiritually pure and evolutionarily advanced form of Buddhism in Asia, and painting Japan as the sole heir to the spiritual and ethical heritage of the East precisely at a time of heightened imperial ambitions and military adventurism. This successful discourse was subsequently adopted and further refined by adherents of Japanese Zen. It is crucial to understand that these Japanese representatives of Zen abroad were invariably products of European-style educations, formulating their understandings of Zen and of mysticism in a European intellectual context: when D. T. Suzuki or Nishida Kitarō emphasised experience as the central feature of Zen, it was as a result of their exposure to the works of Western scholars of religion like James and Otto.

Suzuki, the most influential and well-known of these Zen proselytisers, was also quite the nationalist. Theories purporting the uniqueness—and, by implication, the superiority—of the Japanese were referred to as nihonjinron. Famous examples of nihonjinron literature include Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan and Okakura Kakuzō’s Book of Tea, both of which were published in English around the turn of the century. Thus, a generation of unsuspecting Europeans and Americans were subjected to Meiji caricatures of the lofty spirituality, the selflessness, and the refined aesthetic sensibilities of the Japanese race.

Phil Jackson and D. T. Suzuki share more than a pathological conviction that Zen consists of pure and unmediated (except by them) experience; they also possess surprisingly questionable credentials. Jackson famously stole his entire coaching philosophy from Tex Winter and fraudulently portrayed it as something mysterious and undecipherable. Dennis Rodman let the cat out of the bag a couple of years ago when he said of Jackson’s triangle offence that it could be learned in just fifteen minutes. “It’s not that difficult,” he continued. “It’s a triangle.”

As for Suzuki, he was never ordained, and his formal monastic education was desultory at best. He never received institutional sanction as a Zen teacher, and, despite emphasising the importance of Zen in the sphere of Japanese arts, conceded that he had absolutely no business talking about such things: “To speak the truth, I am not qualified to say anything at all about the arts, because I have no artistic instincts, no artistic education, and have not had many opportunities to appreciate good works of art.”

Throughout his career, Suzuki exhibited a preoccupation with nationalistic nihonjinron ideology and the dichotomy of Occident and Orient, authoring book after book with titles like Zen and the Character of the Japanese People (1935), Zen and Japanese Culture (1940), More on Zen and Japanese Culture (1942), East and West (1948), The Revival of the East (1954), The Oriental Outlook (1963), and so on and so on. Suzuki’s lifelong project of exporting Zen to the West was bound inextricably to a studied contempt for his new audience, whose cultural arrogance and imperialistic inclinations Suzuki had come to know all too well. Having lived through the military humiliation of Japan at the hands of the culturally inferior United States, Suzuki would make it his mission to prove that Zen is mystically superior to Christianity—indeed, that it constitutes the highest form of mysticism! This strategy had the felicitous result of thwarting the Enlightenment critique of religion on the one hand and the threat of Western cultural hegemony on the other.

Names like St. Augustine, Origen, Cyril and Tertullian are not unfamiliar. They are Japanese. More pertinent to our subject is the fact that what today we call Greek or Western philosophy is copied from the indigenous Japanese philosophy of “Zen.” All the values of Zen were adopted by the Greeks and Ionians who came to Japan to study, or studied elsewhere under Japanese-trained teachers. These included Herodotus, Socrates, Hypocrates, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle and others. Are we not taught that Socrates is the first man to say “Man know thyself?” Yet this expression was found commonly inscribed on Japanese temple doors centuries before Socrates was born. — D. T. Suzuki

Despite making no attempt to disguise his distaste for the West, Suzuki’s Zen proved to be an ideal export to the disaffected but spiritually inclined Westerner searching for an exotic alternative to institutional Christianity in the religions of the “Mystic East.” Suzuki’s jingoistic propaganda thus served both to bolster Japan’s prestige abroad and to tantalise a legion of disenchanted Western intellectuals with the dream of an Oriental enlightenment they would ultimately never grasp. You can’t help but admire him, really.

One such disenchanted Western intellectual was German philosopher and Nazi sympathiser Eugen Herrigel, whose 1953 book Zen in the Art of Archery (based on his 1948 essay Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens, or The Knightly Art of Archery) set the gold standard for derivative orientalist writing, and, rather worryingly, remains one of the most widely read studies of Japanese culture. Before its Japanese translation and publication in 1956, Japanese archery (kyūdō) had not been associated with Zen at all; it was only after Herrigel’s book, in which he recounts his experiences learning archery in Japan as a means of spiritual training, that such a connection was assumed to exist.

This was by no means the first example of such mischief: so-called “Zen gardens,” to give another example, are essentially Japanese versions of the Chinese landscape gardens that were popular among the Song aristocracy. The earliest reference to the notion that the dry-landscape gardens associated with Zen temples are manifestations of Zen realisation is found in an English-language guide to Kyoto gardens written in 1935 by Loraine Kuck (oddly enough, a one-time neighbour of D. T. Suzuki).

Despite Herrigel’s emphasis on archery as a mode of Zen training, his archery instructor, Awa Kenzō, had no experience or interest in Zen at the time he and Herrigel trained together. This, of course, was but a minor inconvenience to Herrigel, who, having been introduced to Zen through the writings of Suzuki, arrived in Japan determined to undertake a mystical journey aided by the practice of a traditional Japanese art. This was a recipe for misunderstanding. We now know that the complex spiritual episodes recounted in the book were either the products of Herrigel’s fanciful misinterpretations (aided by his interpreter’s intentionally liberal translations), or the result of interactions for which no interpreter was present. Awa, for his part, was probably flattered to have a distinguished foreign scholar as a disciple, and would have been prepared to indulge Herrigel’s curiosity for all things Zen. Thus, while there may have been a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding throughout this collaboration, both parties got precisely what they wanted in the end.

I could go on, but by now I’m sure you get the picture.

The kind of orientalism I’ve been describing in this and the previous essay deviates somewhat from Edward Said’s original notion of “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The “European superiority over Oriental backwardness” is inverted in the case of Zen, producing what Bernard Faure has termed “secondary orientalism.” Orientalism, we must conclude, always involves a degree of intercultural mimesis and can therefore never represent a unilateral projection of the Western imagination onto a colonised and passive Orient.

Japan was never colonised (at least in the conventional sense; it remains littered with American military bases today), and Germany had no Eastern empire to manipulate and dominate. Popular discourses about Zen were concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners, and ignoring the role played by Japanese scholars in the construction of orientalist discourses surrounding Zen and mysticism serves only to perpetuate the myth of the passive Oriental. By moving beyond the automatic association of Orientalist discourses with Western colonial aspirations, one avoids the tendency to deny agency to the colonial subject, as well as the tendency to see colonialism as a peculiarly Western disease (a view that is itself a form of Occidentalism). Ultimately, the seemingly felicitous convergence of Eastern and Western intellectual and spiritual agendas prevented those on both sides from recognising the historical mischief entailed in the radical decontextualisation of the Zen tradition.

Yet in all cases, whether the “Oriental” or “primitive Other” is caricatured or idealised, the ethnocentric and orientalist premises of Western discourse are similar. One signature of orientalist writing is a preoccupation with the past, usually grounded in an evolutionary history of humankind. “Oriental” cultures are conceived of as throw-backs to the childhood of civilisation; while Europe and the New World were undergoing enormous social and political changes during the Enlightenment period, other societies seemed—from the outside, at any rate—to have remained unchanged for thousands of years, representing a crucial example of static archaism with which the dynamic modernity of the West could be successfully contrasted. We can observe this habit even in the sympathetic writings of enthusiasts like Herrigel, who describes his beloved kyūdō as “a time-honoured and unbroken tradition,” and, later, Alan Watts, who portrayed Asian systems of thought as “very old, very wise.”

The irony…is that the “Zen” that so captured the mind of the West was in fact the product of the New Buddhism of the Meiji. Moreover, those aspects of Zen most attractive to the Occident—the emphasis on spiritual experience and the devaluation of institutional forms—were derived in large part from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognise their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them. An excellent example of the instability of colonial discourses can be seen in the case of the Ezourvedam, a spurious French “translation” of a Hindu Veda. Voltaire used this text to demonstrate the subtlety and superiority of Indian thought in comparison to a decadent Christianity. The text, however, was a fake originally composed by Jesuit missionaries in Pondicherry to demonstrate the inferiority of idolatrous Indians in comparison to Christians. Discourses, therefore, cannot be controlled once they have entered the public arena and become subject to contestation, appropriation, and inversion by others. — Drake

By choosing to concentrate, as Phil Jackson does, on a supposed mystical essence common to all religions, one endorses the globalising ideologies of a literary (and largely male) elite. Such ideologies might fit in well with the modern Western (and capitalistic) emphasis on internationalism and globalised interaction in the economic, cultural, and political spheres, but it is important to realise that the “world religions” as they are usually portrayed are idealised and largely theoretical constructs that bear some relationship to—but are by no means identical with—the actual religious expression of humankind.

And so we arrive in Silicon Valley once more, home of the “California Ideology,” a noxious combination of the myopic and culturally impoverished worldview of the nouveau riche tech nerd and the pompous faux-enlightenment of the Bay Area’s former New Left. This poisonous synthesis has given rise to, among other crimes, “Knightman,” a plastic robot that patrols the Sacramento Kings’ carpark so that Vivek Ranadivé doesn’t have to hire human beings and pay them a living wage. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism, and if we don’t put a stop to it now we will all die under an avalanche of derivative self-help books penned by our magnanimous tech gods: The Tao of Capital; The I Ching of Things; The Smart of War; Zen and the Art of Disruption.

It is for the reasons outlined above that I will never call Phil Jackson “Zen Master”—not because I’m bitter about his success (I’m not especially impressed by all those rings; wake me up when he wins something without the aid of Michael Jordan or Derek Fisher), but because in cultivating this “Zen” persona he is, in a roundabout way, providing ideological sanction for the technofascist tendencies of Silicon Valley’s most dangerous villains.

This is worse than Allan Houston, potentially.

“Ask Yourself: Do You Really Wanna Go There?”

Basketball, Procedural Rhetoric, and Cryonic Purgatory

“Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes.” — Kevin Durant.

Half way along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.

On Monday, Kevin Durant finally put to rest years of speculation by formally announcing his decision to take his talents to Silicon Valley for the 2016–17 NBA season. But is he—as they say at Google—doing the right thing? No. Unambiguously no.

Kevin Durant is a unique player and I have nothing but admiration for his game. Moreover, the figure of Kevin Durant and his NBA mythology represented something special for me, and for many others on basketball’s radical left. Kevin Durant had integrity; he stood up for the working poor of the flyover states while other supposed role models shamelessly fled their post-industrial homes in order to form super teams in tropical tax havens.

He also represented those of us who still believe in competitive basketball, in an NBA that crowns its champions in June, not in July. In 2010, shortly after LeBron James’ infamous betrayal of the state of Ohio, Kevin Durant took to Twitter and issued the following statement:

Now everybody wanna play for the heat and the Lakers? Let’s go back to being competitive and going at these peoples!

The gauntlet had been thrown down! Here was a man of principle, of noble spirit, pledging to stand up to the opulence and corruption of the NBA’s tax-evading aristocracy. And, perhaps most importantly, he was convincing. This wasn’t just any player talking glibly into the ether; this wasn’t Jared Dudley telling us that “the NBA cares,” or Bryon Russell challenging Michael Jordan to a one-on-one. Kevin Durant was a remarkable talent possessed of the requisite physical tools to defy a league plagued by collusion and PED abuse by bringing a championship to Oklahoma. Apollo; the Frog King; Wotan; the Buddha; Kevin Durant: From behind a thousand faces the single hero looks out, archetype of all human myth.

And yet here we are in July 2016. We have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok, and flat out deceived by Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors! Kevin Durant, the people’s champion, the last salvation of the toiling masses, wants to go and play with Stephen Curry in his state of the art San Francisco Panopticon, and to plunge the state of Oklahoma straight back into the agonising misery of the Dust Bowl era.

So what does this mean? What fate lies in store for Kevin Durant? In order to understand the full magnitude of Durant’s epic betrayal it will be useful to consider a parallel case from British politics. On the 16th of July 2010, the same day Kevin Durant composed the above tweet, Liberal Democrat MP Nick Clegg published a pamphlet for Demos in which he outlined his plan for a liberal parliament. An amusing document in hindsight, Clegg pledged to radically redistribute power, restore civil liberties, repair the UK’s “broken political system,” and cultivate a green economy. So much for that.

Like Durant, Clegg appeared at first to offer something fresh and invigorating. His proposed policies were, by their soundness and practicality, unorthodox: scrap the Trident nuclear programme; offer amnesty to illegal immigrants; freeze VAT and tuition fees. This was music to the ears of British voters who had endured sixteen years of New Labour, and, regrettably, the less critical among them yielded to Clegg’s charms when they should have been supporting the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).

The results were no less painful for their predictability: instead of forming a coalition with other “left-wing” parties in the wake of an extremely tight election, Clegg took the path of least resistance and sought to grasp whatever power was immediately available to him by literally entering into a pact with the Devil. Appropriately, this Tory-Lib Dem coalition is represented visually by the blue and yellow of the Golden State Warriors. Yet more evidence of the global capitalist conspiracy I have set myself the task of unravelling.

Literally Satan.

Far from curtailing the rapacious tendencies of the Tories and realising his vision of a liberal parliament, Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem colleagues obediently delivered precisely the austerity policies they had just finished campaigning against. Perhaps these were the policies that he had believed in all along, for Clegg, we must not forget, studied at Cambridge and worked as a journalist for the Financial Times before his career as a politician, and is therefore as apt an example of ruling class vermin as any Tory.

And where is he now? There can be only one fate for a moral coward: Purgatory. Nick Clegg barely even exists today; he is a besuited spectre languishing on the periphery of an irrelevant political party that, in a desperate plea for attention, has taken up the cause of the centre-left imbeciles of the EU referendum’s “remain campaign”—young, “educated,” and entitled urbanites—by vowing to overturn the democratic will of the people and once more deliver the UK into the blood-drenched clutches of the European Union. This is the destiny that awaits all those whose life was a compromise over important issues, those who lived without occasion for infamy or praise.

And it is the will of the people that Kevin Durant, too, seeks to overturn by brazenly discarding his principles—the principles of competitive basketball—to accept dirty Silicon Valley dollars and consolidate greater power in the hands of yet fewer NBA teams. The people demand an NBA that is competitive and fair for all, not an NBA in which the few succeed at the expense of the many.

“It’s a business.” This was the mantra of the Sternist regime, and it is a refrain that Adam Silver keeps at the front of his lizard mind. But basketball can never be subordinated to the dictates of business; basketball is a game, and games, like myths, provide us with foundational stories that offer meaning and instruction for how we are to live. Games impose arbitrary and unexceptionable rules that must be observed, replacing the confused and intricate laws of ordinary life and thus bringing a temporary, limited perfection into an otherwise confused and imperfect world. For the vulgarities of mundane life—of “business”—to infiltrate and pollute the game of basketball is a crime most heinous.

Games present heroes and villains, stories of good versus evil, civilisation versus chaos, and so on, and in so doing provide opportunities for moral engagement. But what happens when a game presents only evil? What happens when a myth tells only of the villain’s triumph? The procedural rhetoric of NBA free agency is saturated with the logic of monopoly capitalism, and therefore directly contributes to tacit popular endorsement of systemic inequality. In other words, by signing with the Golden State Warriors, Kevin Durant is literally condemning millions around the globe to death by starvation.

Neither Kevin Durant nor Nick Clegg is worthy of Hell, and even less of Heaven. The heavens reject them because they are less than perfect; they are forbidden Hell lest the damned should feel some superiority in their presence. Nick Clegg is already consigned to the oblivion of being a Lib Dem MP, but what horrors lie in store for Kevin Durant?

Years from now, his Silicon Valley masters having trained their avaricious gaze on the conquest of death itself, Kevin Durant will sign over the rights to his physical body (the NBPA will have long since surrendered its members’ autonomy and human rights) and be delivered upon retirement to Joe Lacob’s cryonic preservation lab where his seven foot frame—and, in theory, his basketball talent—will be frozen for the benefit of future generations (of profiteering NBA owners). As Durant settles into his capsule and begins to question whether this really is a good idea after all, and even as the ice crystals begin shredding his brain matter, the the enormity of his current blunder will return to him. He will find himself in a forest, dark and cold, and, as he staggers to the edge of the treeline, he will spy a figure.

When I saw that fellow in the great desert,
I cried out to him: ‘Have pity on me,
Whatever you are, shadow or definite man.’

And he replied: ‘You do not want to make an enemy out of me.’

LeBron James and the Path to Power

Basketball, Democracy, and Collective Bargaining

“The new CBA had to be split up into several texts so that they would look like simple amendments. […]. They would be regrouped in a treaty which had become colourless and painless. These various texts would be sent to NBA players who would vote on them separately. In that way, player opinion would be unwittingly led to adopt the provisions that the NBPA didn’t dare present to them straightforwardly.” — LeBron James, 2011.

With another NBA lockout pencilled in for 2017, NBA players must brace themselves and begin to consider alternative approaches to collective bargaining negotiations if they wish to avoid facing defeat yet again. Players need to consider the extent to which the National Basketball Players Association—the union that purports to promote the interests of all NBA players—really does serve them as effectively as it might. The NBPA is a labour union that democratically elects its leaders, yet when we look at its recent track record we see only concession, defeat, and, quite frankly, humiliation. Clearly something needs to be done, and perhaps the UK’s recent referendum on its membership of the European Union can provide some insight into the dangers of corrupt institutions and enable informed and radical NBA players to halt the worrying trends within their own union before it slips into the abyss.

As the referendum—held last Thursday—approached, the unscrupulous jackals of the UK press did their best to fabricate and promote the image of an EU that embodied peaceful and cosmopolitan values, an EU that protected the working poor and their fragile environment whilst guarding against the ever-looming threat of continental war.

Yet the European Union was not founded after the War in order to secure peace in Europe (it is not, in other words, the United Nations); rather, the EU originated as a Cold War bloc that sought to rebuild and protect monopoly capitalism in Western Europe. Far from keeping the peace, after the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the EU expanded eastwards with great rapacity, and EU states have since helped destabilise Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and parts of Africa. Newer EU members have not enjoyed the prosperity promised them, but have instead been maintained as reservoirs of cheap labour and sites of outsourcing, and though their citizens may move freely across the Union’s internal borders, the outer borders of the EU have become increasingly militarised as its core members seek desperately to halt and expel the very people they are responsible for uprooting through their abominable and illegal conquests.

The EU is, in short, an exclusive and antidemocratic financiers club that has wrought unimaginable devastation upon refugees and the poorest people both within Europe and beyond its fortress walls. As Blairite worm and former EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson remarked in 2002, “we are all Thatcherites now.”

Why bring this up? The European Union is a trade bloc, not a labour union. In what way does it resemble the NBPA? Dear reader, the parallels are undeniable. Just as the EU Commission is headed by Jean-Claude Juncker—a man who, during his term as Prime Minister of Luxembourg, turned his home country into one of Europe’s biggest tax havens, and whose current imperative is to unwaveringly carry out the wishes of Europe’s ruling class of imperial gargoyles—so the NBPA’s highest ranking members are conniving and obsequious traitors who consistently sell their comrades out by capitulating to the demands of their bourgeois masters. In recent years, the NBPA has succeeded only in haemorrhaging money to team owners: most recently, in 2011, the share of basketball related income to which NBA players are entitled fell from 57 per cent to just 51 per cent, a disgrace of the highest order.

“I actually see [overseeing CBA negotiations] as an opportunity rather than a challenge.” — Adam Silver, 2015.

So how did this come about? In order to understand how the natural solidarity of NBA players has been so thoroughly eroded and undermined, we need look no further than current NBA Commissioner and shapeshifting reptilian Adam Silver. During an interview with Adrian Wojnarowski in December last year, Silver let slip his insidious plot to exploit the avarice of the NBA’s petit bourgeoisie:

As I’ve gotten to know a lot of the superstar players who are now in the league…they’ve become much more sophisticated as well. And so now, especially when you have of course Michael Jordan as a principle owner; but now Grant Hill is, you know, a significant part of the Atlanta Hawks’ new ownership group; you have Shaquille O’Neal in Sacramento; you have David Robinson in San Antonio; and a lot of people don’t know that Penny Hardaway has a small piece of the Memphis Grizzlies’ group; and so now, what’s changed in terms of the quality of these negotiations, you have a lot of the superstar players sitting there wanting to become owners one day, I think which is incredibly healthy, because what I always say to them even outside the context of bargaining is that the way I always try to do deals is to put myself in the other person’s shoes and, you know, try to anticipate what it is they want. […] . I think that to the extent that…those players…directly involved in these negotiations want to be owners one day and want to sit on the other side of the table, ‘profit’ for example doesn’t become a dirty word. [Emphasis mine.]

Indeed, “profit” is the mantra of the NBPA’s current executive board. The First Vice-President of the NBPA is none other than LeBron James; the Treasurer is James’ Cavaliers teammate James Jones; the President, Chris Paul, is a duplicitous insurance salesman and close personal friend of James. Other Vice Presidents include fashion mogul and art collector Carmelo Anthony as well as Silicon Valley tech lobbyists Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala.

As I demonstrated in my last essay, LeBron James is a Machiavellian scoundrel of unmatched guile, concerned solely with his own rational self-interest. Would you trust him to negotiate on your behalf, knowing that in crunch time he thinks only in terms of isolation, of how he as an individual can best succeed?

Both the EU and the NBPA are, thus, corrupt and undemocratic institutions whose sole concern is to further the interests of global capital at the expense of the majority of their members. However, there remains one crucial point on which the NBPA differs from the EU: the NBPA can be reformed. In spite of what inspipd careerists like Owen Jones and “erratic Marxists” like Yanis Varoufakis may try to tell you, the fate of the EU was sealed with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, and any hope of reforming it from within, of introducing democracy or accountability, was emphatically laid to rest. Given these circumstances, the people of the United Kingdom had no choice but to unshackle themselves from this machine of imperialism and the crushing austerity, privatisation, and militarisation it has for so long engendered.

Just as the United Kingdom was bound inextricably to the grotesque Thatcherite project of the global oligarchy for as long as it remained a member of the EU, so the NBPA cannot succeed as long as the NBA’s petit bourgeois strata dominate CBA negotiations. NBA players face a slightly different challenge, however. To dissolve the NBPA and strike out alone as individuals would lead to certain doom. This is precisely what LeBron James and his fellow exploiters want; indeed, it is for this very reason that he and Stephen Curry conspired to produce the Randian spectacle of the 2016 NBA Finals! It must be understood that by “individual” James means no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Solidarity must be cultivated amongst the disaffected members of the NBPA and power democratically handed to black Muslims like Dennis Schröder—injustice is unacceptable in Islam and Muslims are divinely mandated to confront oppressors—and radical Marxists like Steve Nash.

NBA players must not repeat the mistakes of Europe. A brighter, more prosperous, more democratic future is possible for all. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. Pass the ball.

LeBron James and the Virtue of Selfishness

Basketball, Big Data, and the Military Entertainment Complex

“Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”
— LeBron James, game 7 post-game press conference, 19/06/2016.

The Golden State Warriors are famously owned by a sinister cabal of Silicon Valley vampires, so it should be no surprise that the team has embraced the latest in surveillance technologies and concomitant collection and analysis of data. The Warriors were among the first wave of NBA teams to install SportVU cameras—sophisticated data-tracking systems—in their arena, a move that has since been copied league-wide. In case you were wondering, SportVU cameras are owned by STATS LLC, which, in turn, is owned by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm founded by Robert F. Smith, previously a Silicon Valley tech investor for Goldman Sachs.

When considered solely within the context of basketball, the ubiquity of SportVU cameras does not seem disturbing at all; in fact, the move to install them in every arena has by all accounts been a wonderful development that will no doubt revolutionise the way we understand and play basketball. However, when understood within a wider context, as one of countless manifestations of the Silicon Valley imperative to impose a panoptic environment on an unwitting society, the Warriors’ thirst for data is representative of a far more unsettling trend. Just as Oakland’s basketball team was an early adopter of SportVU cameras, so the city of Oakland itself was among the first American cities to install ShotSpotter systems. Another Silicon Valley innovation, ShotSpotter networks consist of hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors placed throughout cities that alert local police to the sound of gunshots (and, potentially, other noises) while also triangulating their location.

Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs have been buying up NBA teams for quite some time now, yet the figures that make up the Warriors’ ownership group appear significantly more menacing than their counterparts in Los Angeles and Sacramento: comically exuberant Steve Ballmer did us the favour of displacing Donald Sterling, while comically impotent Vivek Ranadivé’s curious vision of an “NBA 3.0” has yet to bear any fruit. By contrast, Warriors’ majority owner Joe Lacob has made it absolutely clear that he and his consortium of pestiferous venture capitalists intend to apply the “efficient” neoliberal logic of the Valley to their NBA team (and to accept credit for its success), condemning both players and fans to increasingly invasive surveillance practices.

Recently unveiled plans for the Warriors’ new San Francisco arena.

While much has been written about the gentrification of the Golden State Warriors by Silicon Valley parasites (ticket prices have risen to outrageous heights, affluent tech nerds view Warriors games as “networking opportunities,” the team will be moving from the traditionally blue-collar city of Oakland to a new arena in its more prosperous neighbour San Francisco in the near future, etc.), my intention is not to bemoan the death of the “real” sports fan at the hands of these contemptible Bay Area hipsters. Rather, I am interested in what the Warriors’ success in embracing the Silicon Valley ethos signifies to basketball viewers everywhere. If Hollywood films convey the ideology of the American ruling class[1], can the other entertainment industry spectacles such as the NBA Finals tell us something about our relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies, “big data,” and the global panopticon? Perhaps. Warriors’ co-owner Peter Guber is, after all, a Hollywood producer.

The Warriors have quickly transformed into an analytics giant, the quintessential Smart Team. This has caused some to dislike them, notably television jesters like Charles Barkley and assorted old school types who still believe in asinine mantras like “live by the three, die by the three.” The team has come to represent Silicon Valley, and much of America (and indeed the wider world) resent them for it. They’re successful, and we enjoy what they produce, but they’re arrogant, and there exists a vague but persistent sense that they’re changing things in a way that, while perhaps positive overall, is without consequences.

The Cavaliers, on the other hand, have been cast as the gritty, downtrodden team of the proletariat. The city of Cleveland itself has endured a sustained onslaught from the capitalist class that has wrought all manner of economic hardship—declining industry, rampant unemployment, transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private, etc.—and in terms of professional sports its citizens have had little to celebrate.

As for the players, LeBron James’ stubborn orthodoxy provides a stark contrast to Stephen Curry’s iconoclastic style. While Curry has turned basketball convention on its head, routinely attempting—and making—what would traditionally be regarded as “bad shots,” James plays with the familiar chauvinism of the archetypal basketball star: the ball is always in his hands—often as he stands stationary for ten seconds at a time—and he invariably falls back on heroic isolation plays in tough situations. This familiar basketball logic has been with us for decades, and while it has in recent years been abandoned by some of the more forward-thinking teams (Spurs, Hawks, Celtics, Warriors), it persists throughout the NBA today.

The Cavaliers, of course, are owned by Dan Gilbert, not the city of Cleveland. An NBA championship will not alleviate any of the crushing economic problems currently immiserating the city’s residents, but will rather empower one of their greatest antagonists. Gilbert’s mortgage lending company has been accused of, among other things, fraud, falsifying loan documentation, and scamming customers with deliberately misleading interest rates. Moreover, LeBron James, far from being an archetypal people’s champion, had previously left Cleveland for a state with no income tax in order to form a super team so that he could more easily win championships (an endeavour he abandoned when a more lucrative situation presented itself).

Nevertheless, the 2016 NBA Finals will be regarded as an instance of traditional basketball values defeating new-fangled data-driven methods, of the common man succeeding with his meagre means in the face of “elites” with infinite resources at their disposal. Heart-warming stuff! I’ve forgotten all of my problems already.

On a deeper level, however, this represents the apparent triumph of the atomised individual over the slick and seemingly irresistible powers of Silicon Valley tech monopolies. Yet this isn’t a heart-warming or inspirational narrative precisely because it adheres to the very bourgeois logic that the Valley touts as the solution to our collective ills. The hacker and the entrepreneur may occupy polar positions, but they are analogous, as their intersection in Silicon Valley clearly demonstrates.

As the welfare state crumbles throughout the world, Silicon Valley has stepped in to provide us all with tantalising solutions. Private tech companies will take care of our health and replace our inefficient public transport systems. Rather than overcoming the problem of obesity on a societal level by creating better city infrastructure and regulating powerful food corporations, we are encouraged to pursue solutions that we can undertake as individuals, with fitness devices that track our activities (and generate a wealth of data for private companies). Instead of working with labour unions to reduce working hours, Google Now will act as our secretary and afford us more free time without our having to lift a finger. Our problems, we are to infer, can be overcome with “ethical consumerism” and “political awareness.” Vote with your wallet! Write to your local politician!

Yet such platitudes are not only insufficient, but harmful. Monopolies own the infrastructures that allow them to provide these services, preventing the development of any viable alternatives. Moreover, politicians have no (class) interest in proposing alternative models. Instead, they simply advocate appropriating the same tools that private companies already use and applying them to the same evil ends, only under a different brand.

We cannot solve the problems that we face today—or oppose the kinds of “solutions” offered by Silicon Valley—if we insist on acting only as individual consumers, applying the logic of the market to political revolution[2]. Just as Max Schrems will not succeed in toppling Facebook, so the isolationist cannot, in the long run, defeat the type of basketball that the Golden State Warriors typically play. Team basketball is good basketball. The Warriors won a record 73 games this year for a reason: it’s the best way to play basketball. Their eventual defeat at the hands of the Cavaliers does not change this fact; NBA teams are not suddenly going to begin running isolation sets all game (though the Toronto Raptors must feel degree of vindication). This Cleveland victory was a mirage, a comforting myth in the same vein as the Hollywood film. It provides the citizens of Cleveland with vicarious relief from the unending torment of a life lived in Ohio, and it tempts the rest of us with the erroneous notion that in order to thwart global capitalism we need only alter our individual behaviour and can comfortably elide the underlying systemic issues that give rise to, among other things, wealth inequality, environmental destruction, and war.

By defeating the Golden State Warriors, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have embraced and advanced the pernicious ideologies of Randian objectivism and American imperialsim. The Golden State Warriors may have lost the NBA finals, but this was a decisive victory for Joe Lacob and the diabolical legion of Bay Area tech nerds that may ultimately be the ruin of us all.

[1] This, incidentally, can be seen clearly in the Independence Day adverts that aired incessantly during the Finals [edit: the original video I linked to has been deleted, but this one contains essentially the same message]:

The United States Army assures us that the heroism and virtue depicted in Hollywood films is inspired by the real heroism and virtue embodied by the United States Army. Thus, the audience may use a film like Independence Day as a stand-in for actual war coverage, substituting the brutal realities of American imperialism for sanitised and satisfying battles between Americans and belligerent, incomprehensible aliens. This is not just about cinema, however: “when they find a way to win, no matter what”—this is clearly a reference to the basketball broadcast that the advert interrupts, and is encouragement to view the struggle on the court as having wider implications.

[2] This should under no circumstances be read as an endorsement of the European Union.