Root for the Uniform
Major League Baseball has made the questionable decision to try to play a plague-shortened season, endangering lives to try to salvage some revenue for the year. Teams will play a geographically restricted schedule in empty stadiums, if they have a stadium to play in at all — the Toronto Blue Jays have so far been denied permission to play in Toronto and Pittsburgh because of the health risks the MLB’s scheme has been judged to represent. To simulate the conditions of games with spectators on hand, cardboard cut-outs are being placed in the seats at some stadiums, and crowd noise is being pumped through the PA system (something that typically happens even when live fans are present).
The Potemkin fans are ostensibly there in part to forestall any existential crises on the players’ part — the intrinsically low stakes of a baseball game must come into sharp focus in a empty stadium, though that should in principle make it easier for them to perform the idea that they play for the sheer love of the sport, a value that is endlessly championed in broadcasts. But the players are professional performers; no doubt they have thoroughly internalized the spectator’s gaze. They don’t need the fake fans, but maybe the fans watching at home do. The crowd is there to convince itself of its own significance and the relevance it can confer on an otherwise empty act of “winning.” Why watch if no one else seems to be watching? (Why read an article that no one has shared?)
Like social media platforms, Fox Sports too has recognized the fundamental need of spectators for other spectators, the value of watching each other watching. It has decided to broadcast this season’s baseball games with CGI-created fans, which it promoted with this striking ad. It begins by immediately striking a culture-war note: “No Fans? Not on Fox.” The ninnies of the nanny state may not let you go watch in person, but here at Fox we create the better reality you deserve. And you can be sure these fans won’t wear masks! It then proceeds to an oddly overheated excitement over what stadium crowds normally do. “CHEERING. BOOING. WEARING THEIR TEAM’S COLORS. YES … THEY’LL EVEN BE DOING THE WAVE.” Yes! At last! Just what I have always wanted to see broadcast — all that important choreographed activity in the stands. I haven’t been this excited since they stopped putting laugh tracks on sitcoms. I’m imagining a producer in a studio in New York carefully calibrating how loud the hopeful cheering should be on a deep fly ball, how audible the sighing should be when it’s caught; how much booing there should be on a close play at first or when a home-plate umpire misses an obvious strike.
These formulaic crowd cues are part of the reassuring ritual of spectator sports. The game’s outcome may be in doubt, but not how it will be consumed. The audience can easily be replaced with algorithms; its reactions are dependably predictable. They are not there to surprise but to serve as placeholders for viewers at home — the thousands of fans who show up at games serve as a symbolic representation of the millions of fans consuming the game as a media product. They are intermediate conduits for the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” that the Wide World of Sports opening used to promise.
One of the animators working with Fox on the project told Vice that “the virtual fans should add atmosphere but not take away from what matters the most: the game.” But this is clearly an untenable claim, refuted by their paycheck. The game is not inseparable from the atmosphere around it, especially in its mediated form. If atmosphere is just a matter of how the game is framed, then onscreen, there is nothing but atmosphere. Ironically, replacing human fans with simulacra emphasizes the centrality of “fans” to the media product. The whole point of broadcast sports is that you don’t have to be there; “real” presence doesn’t matter. Viewers at home get the vicarious experience of vicarious experience, reacting to reactions as much as to the events on the field.
Programmable fans may be better able to provide this service. After all, the fans on screen are already two-dimensional to those watching the screen; they may as well be entirely nonhuman, provisional. Their obvious, foregrounded fakeness can expedite the vicarious transfer — you don’t have to worry about misappropriating or misrecognizing the emotions of a cardboard cut-out. (The same idea may pertain to social media influencers; the more obvious they are, the easier it is for viewers to look through them to the moods and emotions they are trying to sell.) You are the real fan, the realest fan, the one who should really be there. You are part of the crowd, but bigger than it. There is an I in team.
To watch sports is to know exactly what range of feelings you will experience. The comfortable predictability of other people’s enjoyment enables our own pleasure in spectatorship — we know the correct feelings to have at particular moments, and are reliable certain that those moments will be provided. Fans will wear their team’s colors. Everything will be boiled down to a rooting interest.
Decades ago, when Fox acquired the rights to broadcast hockey games, they used some augmented-reality touches to try to make the game more legible to casual viewers. The puck was given a spotlight at all times, and whenever anyone passed or shot it, it left a contrail on the screen whose color indexed the velocity. Football and baseball broadcasts have been increasingly augmented with phantom lines and markers to make the game more legible, more consumable with less attention. But augmenting the spectators points to different stakes — it’s not helping you learn or understand the game but teaching you how to be an audience, how to behave like a fan and constrict yourself to a fan’s feelings.
It’s no surprise Fox would want viewers to be invested in being fans, and would promote sports as though watching other people cheer was the point. Its News division is already modeled on similar passions of team identification and social proof. The fan model promotes reactivity over evaluation in one’s response to everything, which supplies a reliable intensity of feeling for viewers and a manipulatable populace for those controlling the broadcasts. The right to boo is made to feel better, more intrinsic to selfhood, than the right to a voice in how one is governed.
In an essay for the London Review of Books, William Davies writes about the Schmittian origins of opinion polling as a replacement for political participation:
The public should not be expected to deliberate or exercise power in the manner that liberals hoped. But they can nevertheless be consulted, as long as the options are limited to “yea” or “nay.” The public can “express their consent or disapproval simply by calling out,” Schmitt wrote in Constitutional Theory (1928), “calling higher or lower, celebrating a leader or a suggestion, honoring the king or some other person, or denying the acclamation by silence or complaining.” “Public opinion,” he continued, “is the modern type of acclamation.”
The polling industry developed to realize this vision in which “the people” don’t deliberate but rather are measured. They would not frame their concerns themselves but expend their energy on whatever is placed in front of them. “The topics and questions would be determined by whichever authority — commercial or political — was looking for answers. The respondents had the status of an audience, cheering or booing, agreeing or disagreeing, depending on what was dangled in front of them. In a plebiscitary democracy, power lies with the person who designs the questions,” Davies writes. The sports model helps distract from that; it habituates viewers to passionate investment in arbitrary events, the terms of which are externally determined and whose horizons are intrinsically limited.
Some forms of social media have taken up the mantle of constraining people to binaries, with their protocols of likes and up-votes. “In the midst of an online experience of one sort or another, clicking a button marked ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ is about as much critical activity as we are permitted,” Davies contends, which seems a bit overstated but is essentially true of spectator sports. CHEERING. BOOING. WEARING YOUR TEAM’S COLORS. DOING THE WAVE. This sums up much of Twitter.
Two-party politics in the U.S. especially resembles sports, with voters encouraged to take a knee-jerk rooting interest in their chosen parties and see winning elections as an end in itself — winning. Davies argues that this kind of investment in things not only alienates from partisans on the other side but “makes it harder to understand your own behavior and culture as well.” You become a spectator to your own desire, which is entirely invested in vicariousness, spectatorship, affiliation for its own sake. “When your main relationship to an artifact is that you liked it, clicked it or viewed it, and your main relationship to a political position is that you voted for it, what is left to say? And what is there to say of the alternative view, other than that it’s not yours?” I don’t root for the players; I root for the uniform.