Global Football

 The formation of the super league made me realise that the rise of the English Premier League is basically a disaster for Southeast Asian football. In 1992, the Malaysian Cup was by some distance the most popular football event in Singapore. Of course we were not having a great year. I recall that in 1990, we lost the Malaysia Cup to a Kedah side that had V Sundramoorthy playing for them. In 1991, Abbas Saad and Alastair Edwards left Singapore, and I think there was a hangover, and in 1992, Singapore and Selangor – of all teams – ended up getting relegated. That's the equivalent of Real Madrid and Barcelona getting relegated.

And everybody knows what happened next. Singapore finished top 2 in the second tier league, and we qualified for the Malaysia Cup and we got all the way to the final. That was the first of two great seasons. And the second season, we got all the way to the final again. I think we had to get past Selangor in the semi-final, and then we beat Pahang. And we also know now that the match was thrown, but really... no matter. IT was great to have that Malaysia Cup.

In a way, it was the perfect narrative. Football in the early 90s, which was my teenage years, was just perfect. Singapore reached the Malaysia Cup final, and lost, then got relegated, then promoted again, reached another cup final and lost again, and then finally won the double. It was a thrilling narrative, and probably explains why the Singapore Lions were so popular during those days.

There was also the story of the SEA games, where Singapore finally assembled a team that could have won the football tournament, except that Lim Tong Hai scored two own goals. Maybe they weren't completely his fault, but that's one thing he'll never live down. Perhaps we'd have gotten beaten by Thailand in the final, but at least we deserved a silver medal. Singapore has never been able to get this close to winning the tournament ever since.

Something else happened during those years. It was also the changing of the guard. Just as the twin disasters of Heysel and Hillsborough helped bring down the Liverpool empire of the 80s, Singapore had two twin blows. First was that Singapore got kicked out of the Malaysia Cup. I can't remember the exact justification for it, but I think the Malaysians were increasingly wary that Singapore was going to dominate the Malaysia Cup. (let's leave aside the inconvenient fact that if not for Singapore, there may never have been a Malaysia Cup). The second reason was the rise of Manchester United. In 1993, they had won their first league title in 26 years. I probably didn't live through the Great Liverpool Title Drought so I never understood what it was like, and I still think it's pretty funny that Liverpool can end their 30 year drought for the title in the middle of the pandemic, when they can't have their open top bus parade.

Anyway, the legend of Manchester United spread far and wide. Manchester United came back strongly at a very crucial time. The premier league was about to catch on, and Manchester United was perfectly poised to ride the wave.

The top 5 of the inaugural Premier League made for some strange reading. Man U was champions, which sounds pretty normal now, but it was not, it was their first league title in 26 years. Second was Aston Villa, having a pretty good season with Graham Taylor. Third was Norwich, who had their best season in recent memory. Fourth was the newly promoted Blackburn Rovers, managed by Kenny Dalglish. Fifth was Queens Park Fucking Rangers.

That was a pretty strange lineup. Perhaps this was partly attributable to the changes in the back pass rule, that affected the different clubs differently.  I'm mentioning that because back then it wasn't obvious that within a few years, English football would be dominated by a small cabal of clubs. The English Premier League was formed as a breakaway league, in a process that was strikingly similar to the European Super League. But they were canny enough to ensure that there was a minimal change in form.

Manchester United was the club that took this opportunity for world domination. At this point in time, the biggest and richest clubs were those in Serie A. For whatever reason, by the late 80s, Serie A was the greatest league in the world, either because of great teams like AC Milan, or great players like Maradona, or their ability to attract the best players all over the world. There were maybe 7 or 8 teams that were great. Other than the 2 Milan teams and Juventus, there was Parma, Sampdoria, Lazio, Roma and Fiorentina. But the rest of the world didn't speak Italian, and that hampered their ability to reach world domination.

In contrast, Man U went from strength to strength. The team that defended their title in 1994 was even stronger than in 1993. They lost the title in 1995 to Blackburn, who were bankrolled by a local steel magnate. It was a thrilling title race. In 1995/6, Man U's title was won on the back of Eric Cantona's thrilling return, and their come from behind victory: Newcastle looked like they were going to win the title after being 12 points ahead at Christmas, but they lost steam towards the end. I can't imagine what the premiership would have been like if Newcastle had won that title, but I suspect they would have faded away like Blackburn. The 1996 team also saw the emergence of Man U's youth prospects, and several of them went on to become legends.

In 1997/8, Arsenal had a new manager who brought with him new fangled management approaches: better nutrition, better fitness, better flair, and better scouting. Instead of Man U going on to dominate the EPL for years, as they are well placed to do, a challenger would come on the scene to make the EPL a duopoly all the way until 2004.

You could say that the first 12 years of the EPL were great years. There were all sorts of narratives in the EPL that made things interesting. The hard men. The teams which didn't know how to defend. The flair players. The grafters. The super talented but lazy players. There was Wimbledon the crazy gang. There were the teams which survived relegation against the odds: the Bradfords, the Leicesters and the Ipswiches.

And then, in 2003, something changed. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea football club. Blackburn and Newcastle had been bankrolled by wealthy owners for a season or two, but there wasn't any effort to buy an empire, at least not yet. Up till this point, a lot of developments had been positive, but this was the first attempt to buy the title.

At this point in time, Arsene Wenger was at the peak of his career. He had assembled a team which won the title in 2002 and 2004, and in the latter campaign, they won it without losing a match. His team had been assembled relatively cheaply, and played their football with flair and spontaenity.

Now, however, Chelsea brought in a whole new team of expensive players. They did well in their first year, but didn't win the league title, and they only got as far as the semi-finals of the champion's league, losing to the unfancied Monaco. Curiously enough, though, two of the players who would form the spine of that great team were Lampard and Terry and they were already in the club before Abramovich bought it. Quite a few of the signings did not make it: Veron, Mutu, Crespo had varying degrees of quality but they failed to settle in Chelsea and were shipped out. Ranieri was a good manager, but he was fired after the end of the first season, to be replaced by Mourinho.

Mourinho would succeed in building an empire. During his first season, the spine of the side that would challenge for many major honours was built. Duff, Robben, Carvalho, Makalele, Terry, Lampard, Drogba, Cech, Ballack. It was a good team, and they were tough and bloody minded, but they didn't play the most attractive football.

The first decade of the 21^st century was a time when the EPL started to lose its innocence. It started being about who could get the most transfers. Sam Allardyce probably would go down in history as one of the great managers, but his impact on the game would be hard to watch: the management would be about data analytics and good positioning. The game stopped being spontaneous. His Bolton sides had fine players with good skill, like Jay Jay Okocha, El Hadji Diouf and Youri Djorkaeff. But they played football that was a little too defensive and hard to watch. You couldn't really argue with the results, because he made Bolton a tough side to beat and finished in the top half of the table for a few seasons in a row.

Another issue was the players. Back then, this was before the age of social media, and in the 90s, lad culture ruled. For a few players, life was one big party, and quite possibly, Balotelli was the last of the party animal players, although one could argue that his big weakness was not playfulness, but rather a lack of tactical awareness. Gradually, players stopped being playful and started to sound like robots, repeating the same soundbites over and over again. It was great for the professionalism, but it was a lot less fun. It seemed like the 90s were some kind of adolescence, while the 21^st century was some more sober kind of adulthood.

Gradually, the changes that made the premier league so fascinating to watch over the years already took place: foreigners coming in to make the game more interesting, higher playing standards, more commercialisation.

When the champion's league was rigged so that the English sides would get 4 places every year, the same 4 clubs (Man U, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal) would hog those places. It used to be that lesser clubs had their stars. Coventry had players like Gary McAllister, Moustafa Hadji and Craig Bellamy. West Ham once had a lineup that included Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, Trevor Sinclair, Paolo Di Canio, Neil Ruddock, Shaka Hislop and Eyal Berkovic. The problem was that a few of those teams ended up in dire financial straits. Leeds tried to “live the dream” and then failed. Aston Villa tried to make the leap into being a team which played regularly in Europe, but when they failed to bridge that gap, Randy Lerner lost interest.

It's very easy to say that relegation keeps the game honest, that it makes things interesting, and enables social mobility amongst clubs. But does it really? Relegation has become such a dire financial threat that teams are afraid to overreach, lest they end up like many other clubs which have gone into financial administration. Sunderland, Wimbledon, Porstmouth, Bolton and Blackburn are just a few of the clubs which have gotten themselves into trouble. The ones that survive are the ones who always play it safe, walk that fine line between not being too ambitious, but also not allowing results to slip.

Looking back at the EPL table 10 years ago, there were teams that might at that time have seemed like great models of governance. Wigan Athletic looked like a great overachiever who had stayed in the EPL for a few years and even managed to reach 2 FA cup finals and win 1. Stoke seemed to have established itself as a mid table side. Swansea appeared to be a miracle worker. Today, all of these clubs have been relegated.

I guess I talked about a lot of issues, but the one I really wanted to talk about is, “is it possible for all clubs to be great, and for all leagues to be great”? Is it possible for all clubs to have great fan bases, and be self sustaining? Should you even have a league that's divided between the haves and the have nots?

During the first 50 years of the English league, the league titles got spread around quite a lot. English football never got into a situation that was similar to many other countries, where there was a small cabal of clubs at the top, a small ogilopoly, and all the other clubs were just handmaids. There is a staggering list of former football champions: Nottingham Forest, Derby, both Sheffield clubs, Leeds, Blackburn, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Sunderland, WBA, Everton, Wolves, Preston, Burnley. And let's not forget Leicester.

How do we get a situation where the winner is unpredictable? It is very hard to achieve that with a round robin system. As they say, the league table doesn't lie. It's hard to get lucky and win the league. Leicester were lucky in 2016. For their performance, they would probably have finished in the top 4 in many other seasons. But it just so happened that many of the other contenders were having lousy seasons (Man City, Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea) and Arsenal were on the way down.

Usually, success on the field is a combination of two factors: there are great players, and there is great management. And behind both of them is great financing. Success tends to be self-reinforcing, and that's why the big clubs tend to stay that way. However, the EPL is competitive enough that there are many times when a team will just click and last for 2-3 years and then fade away.

What's changed in recent times is that big teams can cement their status at the top for a much longer time than that and have generational renewal.

It's hard to say whether there's been an increase in mobility or not. While it's been true that for a while, it seemed that there was a state of flux, before Man City cemented its dominance on the league. This is the 10^th anniversary of Man City winning their FA Cup, their first success of the Abu Dhabi era, which they would build upon to win titles in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2019 and they'll win again in 2021. At first, the list of champions read: Man City, Man U, Man City, Chelsea, Leicester, and it seemed that the title was being shared around. But on looking back, it seems that Chelsea and Man City, the two clubs funded by billionaires, have dominated the decade. The other champions are Leicester, a dark horse, and Liverpool, a traditional power that had the benefit of a great stadium and a great manager.

It seemed to be true that Man U's dominance of the game had ended in the post-SAF era, but they seem to be headed in the right direction, because they'll always have the ability to attract great players. And meanwhile, everybody's frantically spending their money so that they can close their gap with Man City, a team that not only has great funding, but a genius manager operating at the peak of his powers.

In Europe, if you want to look at the Champion's league, here's a nice statistic: in the last 10 years, Real Madrid has reached the UCL finals 8 times, Bayern 7 times and Barcelona 4 times. There is a real small cabal of "super elite" clubs.

In hindsight, the era from 2002 to 2010 was the era of peak Mourinho, where a team could park the bus and play out of their skin and achieve success almost reliably. Those were Mourinho's tenures with Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan. Then in 2008, Barcelona hired Guardiola, and he introduced the world to tiki taka football. I don't know if there are any definitive versions of the Guardiola mentality. The early versions of his philosophy at Barcelona was that they were going to pass the opponent to death. Then another version involved a lot of pressing.

Over the next decade, there would be various coaches who had a lot of new ideas – coaches like Ralf Rangnick, Brendan Rodgers, Thomas Tuchel, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsman. Football is increasingly a game where players are drilled on very detailed plans, and success as come as a result as much of the talents of the players as the quality of those plans. The question is: are good coaches more rare or good players more rare? Are there good coaches out there who can take average players and turn them into gems, and why are they so rare that there is an entrenched power elite in the big leagues of Europe?

On the player side, one reason why the US major sports has so much equality is that player recruitment works differently. Teams which finish behind actually get a little bit more money and try to make up the difference. This is in contrast to how football clubs which are smaller find it more difficult to attract big name players.

Of late, especially when it comes to the star players, it has become much cheaper to have a youth team and hot house a lot of young players and hopefully a few of them will grow up to be great football players. One famous example is Lionel Messi, a one club player (so far) and we don't know what his transfer fee would have been, because he's never switched clubs.

The problem with the youth system is this: young players will typically only want to join youth systems of a few select clubs, because he's betting his future on being associated with a big team, with a lot of expertise. He might have a range of options if he fails. He might begin with Chelsea youth and fail downwards to maybe Fulham, and maybe if he doesn't make it at Fulham, he knows that he must have options in lower leagues elsewhere in England or other countries. So maybe only big clubs have youth systems. And yet there are players who start off by playing football in the lower leagues, and progress up the system when they become good enough. Examples of this include Ian Wright and Jamie Vardy.

Now I've explored why the English system is so unequal, and sometimes it's deliberate, because a lot of things depend on the interplay between lesser and greater clubs. There are many times when a big club will buy a youthful prospect, and then loan him out to the smaller clubs in order for the player to gain experience, and they'll take him back if he's good enough. Every now and then, a smaller club will unearth a gem, and they'll sell that guy away to raise funds. People think that it's a given that a player will want to move on to a “bigger” club. But take a club like West Ham in 1999: they had a lot of good players. Why did they accept that they had to sell those players? They had players like Frederic Kanoute, Jermaine Defoe, Joe Cole and Michael Carrick, on top of the other great teammates from the 1999 team. That team would have qualified for Europe every year, but instead they got relegated.

Then consider a team like Leeds who flew too near the sun. They missed qualifications for the champions league, and then “fake it till you make it” fell apart, the team got into big financial trouble, and they fell hard, got relegated and only made it back to the premier league more than 10 years later, and seem to be destined for mid table mediocrity.

Is this a good system? Can you compare it to a system like major sports in America, where every sports franchise has the ability to win, and there's no “class system”? Most teams in the NFL are former superbowl winners.

These days, there's even more at stake to be one of the “big clubs”, because being near the top of the league gives you name recognition amongst global fans, who only recognise the top few sides. There's a reason why it was the “big six” in English football: these are the clubs who attract the biggest TV audiences. I don't know how many fans Leicester has because of their championship system. In contrast, the audiences in big American sports are mostly the Americans, and every club has a big fan base, except that maybe there are a few teams with big names which stand out, like Boston Celtics, LA Lakers or Golden State Warriors for basketball. But in the case of the Warriors or the Bulls, these are teams which have earned the right by making it to the very top and become unbeatable for a few years.

With football, it's become possible for a wealthy person to buy a club that would normally be a mid table side, and put in enough funds to grow that side into a big name. Which is what happened to Manchester City, or Paris Saint Germain and what the Saudis were considering doing to Newcastle United not too long ago.

In football, the downside of mobility is instability. It's hard for a club to be in and out of the champions league every year. The finances will be shaky. It's hard for a club who gets into the champion's league every year to not win it ever. That's what happened to Arsenal, and now their hold on their status as a top club is quite shaky. The problem with this sink or swim system is that it forces everybody to take this competition extremely seriously, and it actually amounts to a winner takes all system.

To me, one of the biggest downsides to the inequality of the English game is the rise of global clubs. And this takes me back to the local scene. Some of us who were old enough will still remember the magic of the Malaysia Cup days. There was a time when the first team of Singapore FA were household names. There was a time when Singapore actually had football stars, and it wasn't just Fandi Ahmad. There was a time when Fandi was just a small kid, and there were other heroes like Quah Kim Song and Samad Allapitchay and Dollah Kassim.

Granted, Singapore was a place where thugs were frowned upon, and even our hard men like Borhan Abu Samah had to be friendly people. We weren't going to have a Vinnie Jones or a Graeme Souness. Maybe the closest we had to having a bad boy was Noor Alam Shah.

There seemed to be a system, and people would live and die for the game. They would graduate to the Singapore team, and balance their part time jobs and their games, and play to a roaring crowd of 50000 every home game.

That system basically got destroyed after the 1994 double, and we haven't been able to find anything like it. The S League never got off the ground, because Singapore is not like London, who can find space for 10 football teams who can fill up stadiums of 50000. And because the system could not get off the ground, we couldn't pay the footballers to play for Singapore. It always seemed to be a league perpetually on the brink of financial trouble. And yet it still produced the core of the national side which won 4 AFF championships.

Personally I knew why you could go to Kallang stadium and cheer for a team that played football that was inferior to the English Premier League. That made sense to me. You cheered for a team that your parents cheered for, that people around you knew. Nazri Nasir and Lim Tong Hai were guys that you might bump into at a crowded kopitiam.

Singapore has a big Red Devils' supporters' fan club. It's nice to see a whole variety of people play for Man U. Handsome guys like David Beckham. Plain looking guys like Paul Scholes. Wolves in sheep clothing like Ryan Giggs. Black guys like Yorke and Cole. Thugs like Roy Keane. Asian grafters like Park Ji Sung. But I don't understand how you could look at them and use the word, “we”. Unless you grew up in the northwest of England, I didn't see how you could do it.

Further more, you could say that the rise of more systems oriented and tactics oriented coaches like Guardiola has been a boon for football. It has been a boon for attacking football, and the number of goals scored has gone up. It used to be that attacking too much was suicidal, and today it's more commonly accepted that the best form of defence is attack, that if you tried to do what Mourinho did 10 years ago, which was to park the bus, the attacker would get through anyway.

The downside of this is that maybe you had sides who didn't really have stars in their team. Man City was full of attacking midfielders I couldn't tell apart from each other. The first big Man City side had big personalities, even though they were relatively uncontroversial. Balotelli was controversial and he was moved on quickly. But it had stars like Aguero, Silva, Kompany, Hart, Tevez. The later Guardiola sides had players who just jigsaw pieces. You had Gundogan, Gabriel Jesus, Leroy Sane, Raheem Sterling, Phil Foden, who all had bland personalities and seemed to be indistinguishable from each other, like great cogs in a great machine. Perhaps the only guy who stood out was Kevin De Bruyne.

The other thing is that the football pages now look like data science presentations. People talk about heat maps, statistics like attempted passes, the shape of areas covered, and a lot of dry stuff. There was a time when I might have been more excited about that, but football has become more geeky and less about fire and instinct. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I think it's just losing qualities that it used to have.

It was easier to like Liverpool, because at least you saw how Firmano, Mane and Salah were different, and yet combined well with each other.

Perhaps it was the uncompromising pursuit of perfection and the ruthlessness of the environment that they work under that makes it hard for people to express themselves as individuals. Or maybe things has become such that everybody was a squad player.

So you had this weird paradox where all the teams were very well known all around the world, and yet the people who made them up are relatively anonymous. There'll always be the flashy players like Paul Pogba. And Man U might have a Romelu Lukaku but he'll only be there for 2 seasons.

Thing is, football is supposed to build a sense of community, and in order to have that sense of community, you need to have some sense of identity that defines you, and some sense that you and not the rest of the world are part of some tribe. It's very hard to get that when you're supporting a global club. You don't get to feel like you're in some kind of a tribe simply because you and some other African 10 time zones away happen to be watching the same Hollywood movie, so why should it be the case for a global club?

And maybe, that's why I never truly committed myself to be part of some global club. I'm not going to get the same feeling that I got, watching Arsenal or Chelsea or whatever, compared to watching Singapore vs Pahang or Singapore vs Penang. And yet I know that when you watch the top sides, the quality of the football is so much better. Watching the EPL sides for me is kinda boring, a bit like watching the World Cup, knowing the spectacle that is about to unfold, but also knowing that the final will be between two sides you may not necessarily care about. I mean, who would I choose, between France and Croatia? I could see a dude from the mainland wearing the colours of Real Madrid and I think to myself, “why are you wearing the colours of the evil imperialist west?”

So the big controversy about the European Super League is that English fans thought that it was going to destroy the English Premier League. Cry me a river! The EPL has been destroying leagues all over the world for decades before this, and they're only complaining now because they're on the receiving end. It's also funny how the Spanish and Italian fans were not complaining much over this. Maybe there isn't much support for clubs outside of the big 3, or maybe because they already accept that clubs are there to be manipulated by some kind of plutocracy.

But this threat of a football system either being wiped out or changed forever has to trigger some discussion about the state of football in the wider world outside of Europe's big leagues. It's clearly a suboptimal situation that, increasingly, Europe has come to rule the world of football. It was an outcome that Pele did not predict, when he thought that one day an African side would win the World Cup. Of course, he's of African descent and he has high hopes for the motherland. But what happened instead is that the African diaspora had a lot of success. France won the World Cup twice, and each time, they had players of African descent playing prominent roles. It's the colonialisation story all over again, that it's the marginalised subjects who are striving for the empire's glory.

As for football in southeast Asia, it's all been a bit of a disgrace. In 1992, before football went global, southeast Asia was one of the few places outside Latin America and Europe with any interest in football. It was still nascent in many parts of Africa and the Middle East, and it practically didn't exist in Australia, Japan and the USA. Then what happened next is that those 3 countries have qualified for the World Cup multiple times, and not once has a southeast Asian country followed suit. Vietnam and the Philippines have made progress. China has pumped a great amount of money into trying to build a good football scene.

This is not a good development for football. We thought football was going to be globalised, but instead only the viewership has been globalised, but not the development of the sport. In the 2018 World Cup, the USA didn't qualify. Japan was the only Asian country who advanced to the second round, and Brazil and Uruguay were the only countries to advance to the quarter finals. Football has become more and more lopsided towards Europe on the field.

Singapore and Malaysia could be like Austria and Hungary – talk about football will inevitably be consigned to some glorious past that not longer exists. Who even remembers that Uruguay used to be the greatest football power in the world? And who knows when Brazil and Argentina are going to produce their next great football team?

So if football exists in Singapore, then it probably has to be part of a greater system. I never understood why Singapore and Malaysia never wanted to merge their football system, but I suppose it's true that this is the one thing where we need them more than they need us. I know that a great football system will require a lot of people to be sacrificing their lives for some dream that may not come to pass, and that is something that's increasingly incompatible with our high standards of living and our inability to run a football league on our own. Some of the teams are basically feeder clubs for teams in other leagues, and that's as good an admission as anything else that the Singapore league is a second tier league. Sometimes I wonder if Singapore can leverage on its superiority in machine learning and data science to produce a great football team. One can only hope.

And yet I yearn for the days when people still remembered the kampong spirit, even as they moved out of their kampongs in droves. People might not have enough of an attachment to the part of Singapore they stay in, but they do have an attachment to any football team with Singapore colours.

So this whole episode about the European Super League does make me question a few things – why is local football no longer a thing? What is the nature of football fandom now? Is it about people in stadiums, or is it about people watching people in stadiums on TV? Will we have to make do with Singapore crashing out of the first round every 2 years in the AFF championship?

European Super League

 How did we get here?

1. The club has trumped the individual.

There are several stages where this has happened. First was World Cup 1974, when the Dutch invented total football. If Brazil 1970 was the celebration of a team of great individuals, then Holland 1974 was a celebration of the team as the star of the show. Players were not so much defenders, midfielders and strikers, but rather fingers of the same fist. Then there was World Cup 1982, when Brazil had great players like Zico and Socrates, and yet they were defeated because they failed to play as well as the Italians, who emphasised the collectivist ethos of defence.

The latter stages of this shift of emphasis from the individuals to team ethos was the rise of Guardiola to be the “it” coach of the 2^nd decade of the 21^st century. His teams played systems. In fact, he was less a manager of a team than a squad, where players were slotted in and out of systems, and the selection was a revolving door of players whose talents were or were not best suited towards the particular variation of the system that he tried to play.

2. Football stopped being local and started becoming global

Let's face it. Liverpool FC doesn't mean “Liverpool's football club”. It means “a football club with its origins in Liverpool, but where the players, the ownership and the coaching staff are not necessarily from Liverpool. It's not a kind of nationalism that's borne of attachment to the land or the environs. It's more like some kind of tribal loyalty that includes people from anywhere and everywhere.

So if Liverpool represents people from all over the world, then why should they necessarily take part in football competitions which are restricted to England? What does the brand even mean anyway? Liverpool Football club had various things that was attached to its brand over the years: first, it was the Shankley / Paisley empire which dominated England and maybe even Europe in the 70s and 80s. Various things enhanced their legend: the big personalities of players like Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, Steve Nicol, Ian Rush and John Barnes. The boot room, where a collective of senior coaches plotted and schemed to further the “Liverpool Way”. Then it was the club that endured the twin tragedies of Heysel and Hillsborough stadium disasters.

Later on, there were the narrative of the club that lost its way under Graeme Souness, then the spice boys who had swagger and flair but no solid backbone, then a more tough and defensive identity under Gerard Houllier, then the miracle of Istanbul side of the Houllier – Benitez transition, then the Gerrard-Mascherano-Torres-Alonso-Reina side which came close to a title, then the Gerrard-Suarez-Sturridge-Sterling side which also came close to a title, and finally the Klopp side who actually won the title.

That being said, the “Spice Boys” side was probably the last Liverpool side which had an English core, and the last one that was managed by a member of the boot room. Liverpool became sorda cosmopolitan under Houllier, sorda Spanish under Benitez, and sorda Dortmund-esque under Klopp. It became less and less compellingly English or English / Scottish as time went on.

And the rise of the cosmopolitan super-national clubs has been a bane for many other local leagues. It's hard to imagine now, but in the early 90s, the most popular club in Singapore was the Singapore FA playing in the Malaysia Cup. The football was markedly inferior, although some of our best players were pretty good. But the rise of the EPL as the world's greatest league practically decimated our system.

3. Huge amounts of money coming into the sport / The economic ecosystem that revolves around the sport

Huge amounts of money may come from different sources. They may come from wealthy owners, or from more expensive gate receipts, or from a lot more TV money, or from merchandising or advertising or whatever. And the sources of this money, increasingly, were not local tycoons. This is another force for clubs to be less tethered from the land around them.

Closely related to this is how there are small industries that revolve around the players. Their agents. Their talent management systems. Their media consultants / management companies. Players, increasingly, are influencers, with their own branding and personalities. They wear the shirt, but they increasingly have an identity which is distinct from their clubs, and the leagues. They may hail from foreign lands, or they could have roots in Europe, but are from minority communities.

4. Concentration of power into relatively few clubs.

Consider this: there were times when relatively minor clubs could dream about European adventures. The 80s and 90s were relatively egalitarian times for football clubs. Hamburg, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Porto, PSV Eindhoven, Red Star Belgrade and Olympique Marsaille won the European Cup. (Some of this was aided by the English Clubs being banned from European competition for 5 years). Clubs like Aston Villa, Norwich, Ipswich, West Ham, Sheffield Wednesday, Crystal Palace, Southampton and Newcastle flirted with qualifying for Europe. Leeds, Blackburn and Everton were winning the league.

After Newcastle's failed title challenge, the balance of power shifted back to the usual suspects with big money. No doubt this trend was exascerbated by clubs who tried to spend their way into the big time but failed and went into administration: (Leeds, Ipswich, Bolton, Leicester, Man City, Portsmouth, Sheffield Wednesday, etc etc) That made it particularly clear that there was room for only a few clubs at the elite level.

5. Increasing importance of the news cycle to the clubs

The importance of clubs versus players is underlined by how mostly a few clubs dominate the discussion on football. I don't really know why the rich owners of football clubs invest heavily in football clubs. Is it for the sports washing? Is it to present a benign face on an autocratic regime?

One thing that football clubs offer in this day and age, that is rare anywhere else, is the ability to sustain your attention. Attention is a very rare and therefore very precious commodity. There has to be some kind of resentment on the part of the big clubs, where they know that people only pay attention to, say, Crystal Palace when Crystal Palace is playing one of the big six, or if they're playing a relegation six pointer. And they know that they're the ones who are delivering entertaining football. OK, perhaps there will be a few one-season wonders, such as Leeds United, or Sheffield United when they were good, or Leicester during their championship season.

But the big clubs are the ones who have the best players, and who manage to play fluid, watchable football that will entertain the rest of they world, they have the stars, they have the managers who are forever under pressure. They have the best sports science and analytics teams. So why should they always be stuck with playing relatively anonymous cannon fodder most of the time?

6. Financial risks of being at the top.

This is significant. The big clubs who want to remain big clubs have to try to qualify for Europe every year, so that they continue to have the ability to do long term planning. I think what happened amongst the clubs who are mooting for a European Super League, and who also happen to be the same clubs which are monopolising the upper reaches of the UCL, is that keeping up with the Joneses is financially ruinious, and they are trying to find some way to de-escalate the arms race.

In today's landscape, there are two types of relegation. One is to be relegated from the premier league. The second type is to fail to qualify for Europe. Both are risky and financially ruinious. And the way that teams are these days, even some of the best run teams will have peaks and troughs in their performance. Sometimes, you can put a great team together for 2-3 years, and then the wheels can come off very quickly and during that trough, you will fail to qualify for Europe. Just look at the Chelsea season between their 2 championship seasons, or Liverpool right after winning their long coveted league title, or Manchester City for half of this season before they put that great run together.

There are a few special clubs and a few special managers who bring the game forward by doing certain things which give them a temporary advantage, until other clubs realise what's going on and level up their game. Arsenal introduced some special innovations in the game: better scouting, better nutrition and sports science, that gave them some advantages during the early Wenger years. Man U, with their famous “Class of 92” / “Fergie Babes” were one of the first teams to realise that having a great youth team system is of a great advantage. Other than these clubs having some kind of special technological cutting edge, gravity always wins. The clubs with the most financial fire power will otherwise win.

It also has to be said that the media landscape that has drummed up such strident opposition to this idea of a European Super League is one that is invested in this existing Premier League / Champions League system. And that system was already one that was designed to lock out all but roughly 10-15 clubs from winning the Champion's league. No more Dutch clubs, no more Scottish clubs, no more Portuguese clubs, no more Turkish clubs, no more clubs from Eastern Europe, no more Dynamo this or Lokomotiv that.

At the same time, given the vast superiority of the big clubs to the small clubs, you do have to ask yourself if the smaller clubs have a right to exist. If so, what are they bringing to the table. How are they special, do they have a unique identity, other than "we won the title in 1908"? It's much easier to replicate great analytics and great coaching systems than it is to find naturally talented players. So are we seeing that great coaching is the norm rather than the exception? 

What the European Super League is asking for is outrageous, but it brings it more in line with the way that sports is run in the USA. Just one commissioner, and he takes care of all the franchises and helps make sure that the franchises don't suffer financial ruin. The branding is global.

But it doesn't make it all right. The English league is already highly unusual in that there are a lot of former champions – it's a league that, before the rise of the Liverpool and Manchester United empires, used to share the championship around. There are maybe around 20 former top tier league champions of England, and that made it more fun to watch as opposed to, say, the Turkish League when it's always one of the Istanbul big three making off with the prize.

So when the list of possible champions is whittled down to a very small list, it's much less fun to ponder over.

Consider that Maradona played for Napoli, a relatively small club, and Barcelona when it was not setting the world alight. Consider that Pele's club was Santos. Or that Jimmy Greaves stuck with Tottenham through thick and thin, that Tom Finney stuck with Preston, or Stanley Matthews stuck with Stoke and Blackpool. And more recently Matthew Le Tissier played exclusively for Southampton. These days the most famous players go to the most famous clubs, no questions asked. Some people have openly questioned Van Der Sar's right to play for Fulham.

Funan Centre

 I remember that I used to go to Funan Centre very often after ECA days. It would be my time to go and tuang in a shopping mall, and I did it quite often. I never told my parents about it, and it was one of those things that may have emotionally estranged myself from my parents – the fact that I constantly had to keep this a secret from my parents.

Back then it had just opened. I never bothered to eat at hawker centres because most of my pocket money would be spent on recorded music. So there's not much that I can report about Hill Street hawker centre. But I always loved the rows and rows of shops which sold computer games. I would spend hours just gazing at the computer games – and it was pretty crappy the way I treated the shops. I would look at the computer game boxes, and try to decide what to play. Then I would look at the computer game magazines in Times the Bookshop at Centrepoint or whatever, and read the review of the games. And then I might go to Megalink to go “buy” a pirated copy of the game. This was back in the day before intellectual property was rigorously enforced in Singapore, and it was some kind of a haven for that.

And that also cemented my relationship with computer games. I don't know if computer gaming led to my downfall... there was a time when I was one of the top students in class, and after that my grades plummetted. I sometimes wonder if it was due to computer games being a distraction, but somehow I don't think so. And anyway, it was around the time when I stopped playing computer games (other than the solitaire games that Microsoft used to provide)

There'll always be things you remember about Funan – it was the IT mall back then and you always felt that it signified the future. It sold futuristic things back then, and it's pretty hard to explain to you know how wonderful those things were at that time. PCs with word processors. Spreadsheets. Text based computer games. Arcade games. And this was at a time when arcade machines were banned in Singapore, so the only option was for you to buy these computer games and play them at home.

I think that back then, computers seemed like big expensive toys, and in many ways, that's how I still preferred to see them. They were there for your entertainment. They helped you to run stock portfolio. I remember gazing longingly at those big boxes with expensive price tags on them, that you could not possibly afford on a schoolboy's salary. (Of course, if my parents were smart enough, they would have taught me an even more important lesson – that you had to make more money, and you could afford it one day. Or maybe you could even be one of those businesses which sold those things. And if I'm honest, I'd also say that the admonishments to make more money largely fell on deaf ears)

And as much as I liked the computer shops, I always liked the layout. There were 5 or 6 floors of computer shops, and they seemed orderly and laid out. People in class started talking about the new Leisure Suit Larry game when it came out. There were always a few rich kids who bought the originals with the boxes, but largely it was pirated.

Funan centre was also home to Dada records, which for a few years was one of the most famous record shops in Singapore. Quite possibly it benefitted from its proximity to both the Substation, where there was a small and nascent punk scene in Singapore, as well as to Excelsior shopping centre, which had a lot of cool guitar shops. I used to go in in my school uniform, and I ignored all the CDs and went for the cassettes, and used to spend an hour or two browsing the place, which is why the shop owner kinda loathed me.

And at the same time, CDs eventually stopped being profitable, and the guy switched over to being a DVD / VCD seller. I thought that was a little sad, because they weren't as cool and hip as music on CDs. And say whatever you like about CDs, they presided over a time when music was at the peak of its creative expression.

So in the 80s, Funan Centre was about software and boxes of software packaging. In the 90s it was about CDs. I think I occasionally dropped by Funan because it had a cafe or 2 I liked hanging out at. There may have been a Coffee Bean at Funan. Or at least I sometimes liked to get the cheese fries at KFC and just spend an hour or two with my nose in a book. There were a few times when I just liked walking around that bookstore which sold computer books and manuals. (Now I don't think anybody would be dumb enough to run a business on that model, so hopefully the owner knew that the jig is up and wrapped it up).

I still remember when Challenger took up the whole top floor, and you could just walk around and grab something. IT was our version of Fry's. And it was fun while it lasted.

So in a way Funan was important in my life. You could say the whole place was my toy shop. It was an era when shopping centres were more like carnivals and cathedrals of pleasure, rather than carefully engineered systems to suck a little more money out of you and spy on your lifestyle habits.

What do i think about it today? The problem with computer stores and book stores and CD stores were that they operated on the border between the physical and the virtual media. Bits and bytes are basically information. CDs and computer boxes were basically the only way of obtaining these bits, back in the day before there was the internet, and before the internet was fully developed as a dream machine. Back then, you had to go into a physical store to get these things. These stores would be some kind of magical portal between the physical world and some kind of dream reality. They would be wonderlands for schoolkids to get lost in for hours.

I still remember LCD Soundsystem explaining what music appreciation was like in the 90s. You had to get the CD, and you had to go hunt it down. You only heard about it through print publications, and they assumed some kind of magical aura. They were some kind of magic amulet that you had to hunt for in dungeons and dragons.

Inevitably, with all the piles of books or piles of CDs, these were dust traps. The stores would be musty, but it would be so full of goodies that you wouldn't care less. And quite a few of those stores were made to look more hospitable so that you would spend more time in there.

So what has changed in Funan Centre recently? The problem with Funan Centre was that it's out of the way. It's not in a long belt like Orchard Road. It is in the vicinity of the seat of government during the colonial times, near a lot of nice touristy places, and the part of Singapore which looks like London. But it's always been a block unto itself. You could stretch things a little, and say that Suntec city, Marina Centre, MBS, Citylink, Raffles City and Capitol Theatre form some kind of a retail zone, and Funan / Peninsular / Excelsior is on the far end of it. But traditionally, it's always occupied a certain niche, and people went to Funan for its own sake. And when it's become just another lifestyle mall, it ceases to be special.

Maybe that's why they had to spruce up Funan Centre like this. They knew the old business model of Funan was dead, and it had to be just another New Town mall. Maybe that's why they went a little overboard in decorating the place. Now it looks a little bit like some kind of Blade Runner dystopia cyberpunk place. It's become hipster, it's become Silicon Valley Aesthetic.

Malls stopped being a place where you necessarily bought stuff. The 20^th century mall was a place that served at least 2 purposes: there was the display of goods, and it was a place where you could actually buy those goods. And in the 21^st century, there was a schism between buying those things. Why did you go to a mall? You certainly weren't going to get them on a cheap, compared to what you could get online. Then you were there for an experience, maybe to instagram yourself.

Lifestyle changes since the 90s: we have gone from consumption as purchasing of physical goods, to consumption as going through experiences, to consumption as taking photos of ourselves going through experiences. Personally I find it pretty alarming. Or at least I can't wrap my head around it.

The experience of a shopping mall has changed so much. The internet has replaced the public square in so many ways. It has changed the meaning of public space. Now, you needed interesting and new toys in order make the mall hip and funky. You had plenty of interesting things: an indoor cycling track. A rock climbing wall. You had interesting architecture – lots of unexpected corners, large staircases in the middle of the building, and an amphitheatre sitting area for people to hang out at. It was almost designed to resemble some hip and funky collegial co-working space. And quite a few interesting things that were going on on the rooftop as well.

But what made me a little worried for Funan was that I recall a few times when people designed cool and funky things for their buildings, and as time went on, they became less cool and funky. Such as the overhead bridge connected to Far East Plaza, which was once so cool that even David Bowie had to be pictured next to it. Then there was the time when Isetan and Metro were so aggressively expanding their footprint in Orchard Road, until it suddenly became prohibitively expensive to do so. Or the time when people thought that malls within the MRT vicinity were going to be the future. I think very few people remember when Isetan was the anchor tenant of Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. I wonder how the playgrounds on the rooftop of Vivo City are holding up. Or the car elevators at Peninsular Plaza.

Next Prime Minister

LKY is the father of our nation. At least, he is one of the founding fathers, and one is reminded of how Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, Franklin and Hamilton are enshrined in American history.

At the same time, for some reason, Lee Hsien Loong is the guy at the centre of PM transitions. When it was Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong, people talked about LHL. Then GCT to LHL, people also talked about LHL. And now LHL is still on the seat that GCT spent 14 years warming for him.  

In the past, successions of the PM have been well arranged, and that's because both of the successions involved the eventual transfer of the premiership to LHL. And some of us didn't really like the idea of there being a Lee dynasty, but we accepted that LHL was a good enough leader for Singapore - and in any case filling in LKY's shoes is always a tall order. And we accepted that when LHL was done, he would be the last of the Lees to occupy that seat, because a third Lee would be kinda weird. 

Well, some kinda weird things have been taking place. Lee Hsien Loong was voted into parliament in an SMC, so clearly he passed the first test. And he took on portfolio after portfolio, and during a time when the premiership was a triumvirate between Goh Chok Tong and the two Lees, he managed things well and acquitted himself favourably. 

LHL became prime minister in 2004, and the generational handover was complete. But now it's time to think about the end of his premiership. And when you look at things in that light, you're starting to wonder about whether he really wants to step down. 

LHL presided over the worst showing in a general elections in Singapore's history, in 2011. In many ways, it was not entirely his fault. But after the elections, LKY and GCT left the cabinet. LKY was given a strange title of "Minister Mentor" and GCT was given the title of Emeritus Senior Minister", and you have to wonder if that was LHL's way of telling them that the jig was up.

Then there was the case of ministerial succession. It probably was the case that some young chap would have been groomed to take over. The deputy prime ministers were Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Teo Chee Hean but in spite of Tharman's popularity, he never took over. There seemed to be 3 things that counted against him - his political views being more liberal than the rest of the cabinet, his being an Indian, and his not being young enough. 

And there weren't that many people who seemed to be able to take over. When you looked at the cabinet during the early years of LHL, most of them were either older than him, and from the second or 3rd generation, or they were already operating at the peak of their powers. There was Lim Swee Say, Raymond Lim, George Yeo and Vivien Balakrishnan. Of the 4, only Vivien is left. 

When the PAP lost Aljunied GRC, they also lost 3 members of the cabinet: George Yeo, Lim Hwee Hwa and Ong Ye Kung (the latter would have been a cabinet minister). They eventually got Ong Ye Kung, but they learnt a painful lesson that for the first time, a general election could disrupt your cabinet staffing plans. 

Eventually, the word was that the next prime minister would be either Ong Ye Kung, Chan Chun Sing or Heng Swee Keat. Rumour had it that Chan Chun Sing was going to be the prime minister, but somehow he was either unpopular with the people or unpopular with the cabinet. So Heng Swee Keat was the prime minister designate instead. 

Then came the Oxley road scandal. It turned out that after the death of LKY, his 3 children disagreed on the fate of the famous Oxley Road house. Lee Hsien Loong wanted the house to be gazetted as a national monument, and the other two siblings wanted the house to be torn down. And even in LKY's last days, there was a lot of editing of his last will and testament to reflect either position. It was rather spooky, because the Singapore establishment had always tried to present a united face to the rest of the world. There were some rumours that the in-laws - Lee Suet Fern and Ho Ching - were not getting along. 

In the heat of this unseemly public debate, another issue got raised, and this time it was raised by one of the grandkids, Li Shengwu, son of Lee Hsien Yang. He accused Li Hongyi of having designs to one day succeed his father as prime minister. And that brought up uncomfortable questions of why LHL wanted Oxley Road to be preserved. Did he want the Lee family to continue having some kind of control over Singapore's government long after he left? What would be the nature of such control?

For Heng Swee Keat to be designated the next prime minister, the narrative was that he was the cabinet's choice, rather than LHL's own choice. But there were all sorts of question marks over him taking over. First, he had only been in the cabinet since 2011 (but that is true for any of the prime minister candidates). Second, he already had health problems, and a stroke. Third, he wasn't that young. Fourth was his performance during the 2020 elections. 

His performance during the 2020 elections was a little wanting: during nomination day, he was surprisingly moved from his old ward in Tampines to stand in East Coast GRC. His speech was met with derision, and he talked about an "East Coast plan", a goodie bag of improvements to the ward. It was mocked mercilessly. He was the bulwark that was intended to hold on to the East Coast GRC from being toppled by the Worker's Party, which was quite surprising. Prime Ministers and Deputy Prime Ministers were usually given safe wards, or at least, the Worker's Party would avoid contesting the wards that had senior ministers in them. I don't really know why Heng Swee Keat was given a dangerous seat, although in the end, he did do right by the PAP by winning that dangerous seat, albeit with a relatively low share of the votes (less than 55% if I remember correctly) Even if Heng Swee Keat did save the PAP from losing East Coast GRC, people could still point to the 55% vote share and start to question his credentials for being PM. 

Later on, there was a parliament session, when he faced off with Sylvia Lim and was found wanting in his responses. LHL did little to hide his displeasure. There were all manner of signals that showed that he was supremely reluctant to let Heng Swee Keat succeed him. 

And then you had the news that we had last week - the shocking but not surprising news that Heng Swee Keat was no longer the prime minister designate. He even claimed that being a cabinet minister was "national service" and that he had no great ambition to be prime minister. How does somebody who has no great ambition to be prime minister temporary derail LHL's plan for succession? 

Does all this tie in with LHL's long term plans for the relationship between the Lee family and the future PAP cabinet? I don't really know, but it's a good question to ask. 

What seems to be clear is that there are various factions with their various agenda. I don't know who they are or what the agenda is, but the PAP is certainly not a monolithic entity now, if it ever was in the past. We don't know if there are any plans for Li Hongyi to take over at some point, but certain events could be interpreted as such. As for now, there is a big push amongst some people in the civil service for us to accept Chan Chun Sing as the prime minister heir apparent, which could be seen as paving the way for a next Lee, and could also be seen as but a natural course of events, since you'd always want people to get behind the guy, no matter what. 

For the first 50 years, once the political turbulence around the time of Singapore's separation died down, once the dust settled down, various things seemed to be true:

1. Singapore has a stable political environment.

2. Singapore was a nation based on economic progress.

3. Singapore was an export-led economy in the middle of a free trade zone which was dominated by a rules based order centered around the West and the USA

One by one, these tenets seem to be questioned. 

Inhumanity of web interfaces

 People think that masturbation is evil, because it is the surrogate of sex, not the real thing. It's alienating because it detracts from what makes us human. Then Facebook is a surrogate for human interaction. It should also be considered evil in the same way?

I thought that if the industrial age was alienating in the sense that it drew us away from our natural selves, maybe this internet, networked age was even more alienating in that it drew us even further than the industrial age ever did?

That was something that came to my mind when I was on the MRT the other day. I saw people sitting on a row of seats. Every single one of them was masked. And every single one of them was gazing at their smart phones. I am not really sure what for. I had my smart phone with me, and I wasn't going to ....

The way that people interacted with each other through the internet ... Marshall McLuhan once said that the medium is the message. Then you have to ask how interactions in real life are different from interactions over the internet. People tend to treat each other worse over the internet. And yet, you could directly interact with somebody across the world over the internet and you could actually learn a little more about them instead of thinking about them like they were some faceless inhuman.

In the pre-internet age, you could pick up a newspaper to read, and it would be a physical object. There would be an editor who curated all the articles for you, and it would be some kind of organic whole, and it was a view of the world that was largely ideologically coherent and consistent. These days, your curator would be Facebook's Artificial Intelligence. A machine was trying to predict what you were going to read. It would be such a big mess: a hodgepodge of articles that hardly had anything to do with each other, or maybe even different versions of the same article over and over again, to the extent that you may have read the same thing 10 times without noticing that you did. Then the world would be divided between news items that you hardly had any inkling about, and news items that completely skipped your attention.

When you listened to music, you used to buy albums. Not only did artists put a certain amount of thought into the music, they put some thought into making the album an experience that you'd want to spend up to an hour on. Not only did the songs tell certain stories, but the cumulative experience of a whole album was part of an even larger experience. You wouldn't imagine listening to Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon” on random shuffle. All the songs were designed to segue nicely into each other, and delve into Roger Water's impression of Syd Barrett's fractured soul. Even the packaging of the album was designed so that the cover was part of the art of the album.

I miss how music seemed to be a tangible physical object, although you could say that it only began in 1877 with the invention of the phonograph, and that the CD was the final manifestation of music as a physical product. It made things more tangible.

Facetime has also changed. It used to be that you only knew people in your village. Then you moved to a city and lived in a physical space where there were more strangers than acquaintances, by accident of geography. Then you had the phone, which allowed you to interact with somebody in real time without having to be in the same room as the other person. Then you had email and instant messaging, which allowed this to take place on a computer with an internet connection. And fast forward to today, when your smart device had transformed into a handheld computer, to the extent that people have even forgotten that it was supposed to be a portable phone. People have basically forgotten that the primary purpose of your handphone was that it was supposed to be a portable telephone, and it became more about surfing the internet on the move.

Before the internet, economics meant that you used money to pay for goods and services. Today, the coin of the realm is for these devises to hijack your attention. Instead of goods and services being the primary actor, it was the connection to the goods and services which was the primary actor. It was less and less that you interacted with a physical shop. Instead, your handphone or the portal that your handphone was on became the shop window. IT used to be that advertisements were salesmen masquerading as documentaries. Advertisements were meant for the mass market, and they looked like TV productions, with the attendant levels of production quality. Now, what you had was a bunch of crappy youtube videos, and they looked like some kind of tout was right in front of you: because ads today are targetted, you didn't have to disguise this aspect of yourself as being a tout.

Consider the late 20^th century: advertising followed the logic of the mall. Shopfronts looked like glossy magazines. People had the time and space to refine the look into something that was almost to the level of the work of art. Now, everything is bespoke, and many a time, this looks like something better. Often it is not. Very often, you are being sold some kind of a gimmick, and you're sold some narrative that's engineered for people to lap it right up.

The logic of advertisement has become the logic of porn. Attention grabbing gimmicks have become almost de rigueur. Content on the internet has followed Gresham's law, with the bad driving out good.

There are people who tell you the truth, there are people who lie to you but tell you the truth about lying to you, and there are people who lie to you and then gaslight you about it.

David Bowie belonged to the second category. He was on some level honest about how he was supposed to be a plasticky showman. But at the same time, he was giving some kind of wry commentary about the stage as a medium. David Bowie was a series of shadows, and he was never too far away from the theatrical. HE loved the stage and the stage loved him back, and he did have some kind of a humanity, but I found that he was hard to love: he had so many facets that you didn't know which one to hold on to, and all you're left is a many-headed hydra.

In many ways, I found that David Bowie was emblemic of the information age. IT's so multi-faceted that it's a little hard to love it. And perhaps that's the problem with being middle aged – you've seen so many things in your life that it's hard to find something to hold on to, and love.

Finally, I go to one of the main drawbacks of artificial intelligence. The GPT natural language models have been praised for generating remarkably realistic pieces of text. But a lot of it looks and feels uncanny. (And speaking of uncanny, artificial intelligence is uncanny because it resembles human intelligence a lot and yet does not reach up to that level. It thus comes across as very narrow, maybe a little autistic, very unnuanced, child-like).

In spite of the tremendous computing power underlying many of these language models, the fact is that every word goes through an embedding: the words are transformed into some very high dimensional vector, and the vector supposedly embodies the sum total of all the meaning of the word. That sounds a little crazy. When you think of the word cat, it could trigger a lot of things, a lot of meanings: you could remember it as a concept, you could remember coming across one at some point in the past, you might associate it with an image, as a subclass of animal, as a quadruped. But instead, the embedding just gives you a high dimensional vector.

It could theoretically contain a lot of information, and obviously, the real meaning is in the context of how all other words are defined. But language models only represent words. The only thing the computer can learn meanings from is other words. The knowledge embodied by this artificial intelligence is not the multi-media real life experience that you or I have. The computer only sees a large corpus of text, and it knows nothing outside of this large corpus of text. There is no way that the language model can be perceived as being intelligent.

Perhaps this mental limitation has the ability to shape our brains, and after a long time of scrolling through content that has been curated by AIs, we start thinking down to their level. We start fixating on very superficial meanings of words, we get triggered by certain patterns, we lose the ability to reckon with things on a much deeper and profound level.

And maybe that is the complaint that I have about the ontological world of the internet and the hyper-network of sentient beings. It is a medium that subsists on a very thin layer of experience. It's either words (which is thin), or images or videos (which are thin). Occasionally there are recordings, but this is rare (and as a musician, I complain that internet as a medium is biased against music).

Now, one could argue that books have an even thinner experience, but books don't draw you into such an elaborate rabbit hole. You know that you cannot live your entire life on a book, pay your bills through a book, read your mail through a book, whatever. The insidiousness of the smartphone / PC medium is that more and more of your life will take place through this very narrow portal, and your brain will suddenly develop this terrible tunnel vision.

One of the conversations I had with my boss at a former job was that I was reading too much humanities stuff. I was working in the field of UX, and it's not something that's unartistic. Yet I felt as though it were wrong on some level. UX was porny. It was about "customer is always right". It's about being responsive, about offering a kind of delight that was skin-deep. It could be profound, it could be very thoughtful, but it just violated some kind of instinct that I had, that things had to be a little more deep and a little more permanent. That life was about more than just surface niceties. In the end, I felt that I was asked to give up values that I held dear, and conform to an aesthetic that I didn't always agree with.