“The fact of the matter is the large majority of sports media is an unending stream of frictionless player personality slop.”
I hate the Victor Wembanyama technocracy.
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
In 2012, if you were to ask a room of bright-eyed 20-somethings about the future of American democratic liberalism, they’d tell you it would originate from Silicon Valley. They’d tell you about how Obama was the first Facebook-elected president, or how Elon Musk was the future of green energy. They’d tell you about disruption and sushiritos and San Francisco. The wholesale adoption of tech by the liberal media class is something that will be studied decades from now. We see now what the tech elites are like. They want us to eat bugs and live in pods. Obama-era Hope, as it wore, has morphed into Trump-era DOGE.
But here’s the fucked up thing, just as we start to lick our wounds on that front, we’re falling for the same exact gambit in another sector of culture. The next Elon, the next Peter Thiel, the next Marc Andreessen is already among us, and he’s already ingratiated himself with the highest levels of ostensibly liberal media power.
I am, of course, talking about Victor Wembanyama.
For those who don’t know, Victor Wembanyama is a 21-year-old, 7’5” French basketball player who plays for the San Antonio Spurs. He was an All-Star this year and was the favorite to win Defensive Player of the Year before sustaining a season-ending injury. He is also the single most boring savant-level athlete to ever exist. It’s not close.
On the court, Victor Wembanyama has no bag. He has no grace of movement. The most impressive athletic feat he accomplished was flexing his pituitary gland at 14. His movements are so clunky and unrelatable that it sometimes feels like my YouTube TV is buffering when I watch him. His whole thing — and this is the god-honest truth — is that he’s so big and long that he deters would-be scorers from even attempting shots near him. He is like if preventative crime-stopping Palantir drones looked like Gumby. He is pure, optimized evil.
Off the court, it gets worse. Wembanyama talks openly about putting his phone on airplane mode after 9 p.m. He started learning English as a child so he could communicate better with American athletes. He “practices” “mindfulness.” The most daring thing he’s done in his life is pull up to Union Square in New York to play four games of chess.
There has been a push, in the last 15 years or so, to try to “get to know” the athletes we love so much. That project has been an undeniable failure. We do not know these people. We will never know these people. They are millionaires with generational wealth, riding on their ability to remain unknowable and brand-safe. Of course, we will not “get to know them.” Victor Wembanyama is this era’s final form — an athlete who isn’t just guarded and unknowable, but who appears to literally enjoy not having an interior world.
The nicest thing I’ll say about Victor is that I totally understand why he is like this. Everything about basketball is going the way of efficiency and optimization, so why would the players' personalities be any different? Gifted child-ass basketball is the meta.
The irony, made explicit in Mid-tor Mid-banyama’s unimpressive vibe, is that this model is failing everyone. Fans are bored by lifeless superstars. The athletes themselves seem exhausted, trapped in this weird panopticon of normie grindset IG captions and cooked podcast appearances. The brands even feel lifeless. What’s the last Nike men's basketball campaign you can remember? I bet it had fucking Steve Francis in it.
I’m not sure if it’s a culture of conflict avoidance, Public Relations victory over journalism, or just plain laziness, but the fact of the matter is the large majority of sports media is an unending stream of frictionless player personality slop. It’s slop that caters to recommendation algorithms, not people. Victor again, is this era’s prodigal son, a boring boring boring basketball player who is ruthlessly effective.
So when I say I hate Victor Wembanyama, obviously, I am not talking about the man (or boy, really). He seems like a good kid. I hope he bounces back from this shoulder injury. I am talking about what he represents, which is technocratic, joyless, conservative hooping. I’m also talking about the infrastructure that birthed him. The internet is not making us more connected, it’s making us insane. And Victor Wembanyama is not making basketball more fun — he’s making it Soylent.
I miss the days when Gilbert Arenas brought guns to the locker room.
Can u really blame the players for prescribing to the banal, quasi religious hustle culture tho…when your chances of making the nba are minuscule and if u miss by that much you end up somewhere in the automated mechanism, helping to create.. more players