“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.

 

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.