#and they absolutely should not have been relying entirely on his sense of ethics bc that's incredible temptation.

[splendidemendax]

i took a class abt museum ethics with a guy who had been working at [redacted respected university museum] and when we were arguing abt the ethics of selling/trading/exporting/etc. artefacts, one of the devil's advocate talking points he would bring up when we'd basically come to a consensus was "well if we're all agreed it's so bad then how come the only thing stopping me from walking across the street, going into the basement, and walking out with a cardboard box full of artefacts in my backpack is that i don't want to?"

nobody there (my prof included) had a particularly good answer for that.

this stuff w the senior british museum curator they've just caught selling antiquities + the whole obbink thing Really makes you think about how frequently this stuff is probably happening all the time & isn't caught (<- shredding things. violence & killing & biting)

[queernuck]

To understand Jon Bois, to understand 17776, to understand a great deal of what makes his work so pivotal to understanding the metacultural impact of sporting subcultures, the reversal of his deconstructive approach, the re-insertion of the denatured moment into the movement-image, is necessary.

On November 30th, 2013, Auburn and Alabama met in the Iron Bowl, the traditional name for the rivalry matchup between the two schools. If you’re new to NCAA Football, you’ll notice that sometimes teams have small numbers in front of their names when you check a score. Sometimes, only one team has a number, other times they both do. The exact means by which these rankings are qualified is a complex weighing that involves “quality of wins” as well as the amount in which they are earned, meaning that a team that has not lost a game can be ranked below a team who has. This seems strange, until you take any kind of comparative look at the teams in question. The NCAA itself is not the body that awards the most widely recognized national championship status on college football teams, and the system by which teams are ranked involves both quantitative and qualitative measures, and as with any sport the quantitative measures at hand are effectively approximations of qualitative values, even moreso now that the top level of NCAA football is directed by the rankings of the CFP, or College Football Playoff system. But this was in 2013, in the final death rattles of the BCS, or Bowl Championship System, before Condoleezza Rice was deciding exactly how good NCAA Football teams were, the BCS involved a relatively complex series of polls and computer judgments in order to figure out exactly how good a team was.

Now, this is a system with a rule specifically dictating how Notre Dame should be handled if ranked in the Top 8 teams due to the Fighting Irish not belonging to any of the major subdivisions of top-flight NCAA Football for BCS purposes. It should not surprise you that, if Notre Dame as a school is being given a division of its own, a kind of monastic order of football warriors, it relies heavily on traditionalist and perhaps reactionary concepts of what a football school must be. These rankings skew heavily in favor of a relatively small handful of schools, with a few on the edge falling off or climbing back in every once in a while but with a core consisting of schools like Miami, Ohio State, Clemson, Penn State, USC, LSU, Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma. And among these, Alabama has been the team to beat. 

While American soccer culture has a great deal to live up to, the sort of cradle-to-grave fanaticism that is ascribed to European Casuals is absolutely present in Alabama fans. A notable local news segment about a grade school teacher caught with heroin in his classroom featured a brief interview as he was entering a prison van, of only two words: Roll Tide. The rallying cry of Alabama’s football team, the Crimson Tide, “Roll Tide” is a kind of signifier of signifiers, varying contextually with a cultural nuance exceeded only by the likes of “shalom”. Alabama football has always been good, but the absolute absurdity of their recent success is difficult to explain without a season-by-season breakdown of their various bowl victories and current spot as national champion. The school has produced both NFL Stars and NFL Busts alike, and holds a special kind of singular status within the structure of the NCAA. Referring to the team by their full name is rarely necessary, almost as if it is profane or outright demonic. For most, most of the time, they are simply ‘Bama. 

Additionally, while the Crimson Tide hold far more of a share in Alabama’s culture, their rivals at Auburn are none too shabby when it comes to contesting just about anything. The Tigers, with their “War Eagle” chant (with a possibly acrophycal story attributing its origins to fans cheering on the Tigers as they marched down the field against Georgia while a previously-injured eagle found on a Civil War battlefield circled overhead) and famous walk from the campus to the stadium before games have their own culture, and as with many “second teams” certain singularities based around beating their usually-better rivals.

This is where a certain metacultural dynamic comes in, when a city or state or even nation takes on a “second team” which has neither the draw nor success of the first, which leads to a kind of strange Oedipal act of identification with the object of desire, of hatred, of so many different fantasies and fetishes. When mixed with structures of rivalry and identification developing from these rival oppositions, a kind of dual identification means that both teams are inevitably linked to one another. The Mets have their Yankees, the Islanders have their Rangers, the White Sox have their Cubs (or the Cubs have their White Sox), the Chargers and Raiders and Rams all have one another, as is the case in the NFC East, the Lakers have their Celtics, the Clippers have their Lakers, the Red Sox have their Yankees, the Orioles have their Yankees, the majority of the MLB has their Yankees, in fact. But putting that aside, the act of identification through ironic mirroring is a foundational part of what makes rivalry work in a metacultural sense. A rivalry as one-sided as, say, Steelers-Browns has often been generally takes place off the field, where scores can be settled in a fashion that can actually have even odds. Others are almost entirely cultural: the Yankees and Mets very rarely meet one another in any serious context, and the same is true of the Giants and Jets, and yet there is a foundational commitment to one or the other that comes with living in New York.

And Alabama was a team to define oneself against. Nick Saban, one of the best currently-active NCAA football coaches, the sort of name that gets mentioned as a Trotsky to Bill Belichick’s Stalin, was coaching a team that was then, and still is, almost impossibly good. With no time-outs left, Alabama was trying to win the game last-minute by taking long shots down the field, and after Saban insisted on a review following what seemed to be the expiration of the game clock and the start of a slow capitulation toward Overtime, it was found that the Crimson Tide indeed had a single second left on the clock, enough to run one play. After an embarrassing performance by their starting kicker, a freshman wearing 99 was sent out to attempt a field goal from 57 yards out.

In the NFL, within a certain range a field goal attempt is upwards of 90% probable to result in a completion. The 40s get a bit hairy, and the 50s see a dramatic drop. In college football, with kicking talent spread far thinner, breaking the 50 yard barrier is enough to secure a future spot in the NFL, not an easy feat for players who represent perhaps the most replaceable part of an NFL team other than the punter. The gulf between 4th-ranked Auburn and 1st-ranked Alabama was the only thing that could measure up to the distance Saban hoped his freshman could make up. 

He did not.

In 17776, Jon Bois takes a portion of this call, that of the “answered prayer” coming in the form of the Kick Six, to represent reversal, change, an absolutely transcendent sort of moment that stuns even half a decade later. Chris Davis, standing in his own end zone, caught the short kick and ran it back across the entire field for the game-winning touchdown.

When Bois wrote and created 17776, the Homestuck comparisons were likely anticipated, or at least not a surprise once they were made. Any multimedia project post-Homestuck will be compared to it, especially considering the success of both Homestuck itself (achieving the feat of publication in an era where webcomics getting books is a genuine rarity) and various related franchises (Undertale being given to the Pope) leading to a sort of hegemony over mixed-media internet presentations. For many, 17776 was about characters first, and football never. But Bois is a sportswriter, and his writing was executed in such a way that it allowed the audience to ignore that it was posing a fundamental question about the nature of football. In a sport where every play is made up of little traumas, of a kind of eternal death-drive, it takes the creation of football as a wilderness sport with ultramarathons breaking up plays and nanobots that allow human bodies to withstand tornadoes (after they have mysteriously stopped aging, no less) to maintain the spirit of football without dealing with the unfortunate realization that eventually, the ethical questions of football will be faced with an ability to diagnose Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, in living brains rather than dead ones. Eventually, the faith will die, Football’s AT&T Temple will fall, it will have its Vatican II and be forever transformed. But for now, prayers are answered.

That a moment like this was ever possible is only due to a long history of animosity and opposition that stretches back decades, but for most that history is unimportant. Bois is able to capture that by removing all image and instead restructuring the movement-image at hand with a shot of the sun cresting over the horizon. Another day, another prayer answered.

Watching the video, knowing what happens, it almost has an uncanny feeling to it, a hyperreal quality where there never could have been a completed field goal and the ball is in the end zone before Davis even catches it. The merits of Saban’s approach here sum up his desire for decisive victories, an important quality to maintain the status he keeps at Alabama. Its undoing by a kind of Anti-Oedipal Auburn, the one moment that could not have happened, stands for so much of what college football desires that it is perhaps the perfect play.

That sort of restructuring, the deconstructive reframing of a moment in order to extract a singularity of becoming, is at the center of Bois’ work. When he plays Madden in ways that make it look like a Bethesda game, when he is providing the accompaniment to a Chapo Trap House documentary about MMA fighting, when he is making satellites talk to each other, he is never writing about sports alone. But he is never not writing about sports in these cases, is never untrue or disingenuous in his approach. Just as genre fiction authors defend their craft, the depth of Bois’ work is neither because nor in spite of his subjects: rather, it consists of them.