If Everybody Had an Ocean

 

With the Euros in Germany last month, and now the Olympics in Paris, this summer has meant a lot of sports on TV.  So much screen time does not benefit one’s mental or physical health — especially near the end of a long soccer tournament, I start to feel all strung-out and irritable — but it’s hard to resist the Olympics.  And this year the organizers made the inspired decision to make Paris itself the star of the show, eschewing the typical stadium extravaganza for an opening ceremony along the riverbanks, putting beach volleyball at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, plotting the road events to pass the Musee d’Orsay, etc. Their only notable misstep has been to insist on forcing the triathletes into the disgusting Seine, rather than using one of the many non-toxic and highly telegenic bodies of water (e.g., Lac d’Annecy) across the hexagon.

Watching this much TV has also given me the chance to catch up on my advertising.  I’m digging Salesforce’s spots with Matthew McConaughey as a Wild West sheriff heaving “information bandits” through swinging saloon doors.  The fact that the bandits all wear some version of the Silicon Valley tech bro “puffer vest” always makes me chuckle, and might make you forget that Salesforce is run by Silicon Valley tech bros.  There’s also the usual spate of pharma ads, which are mostly unremarkable, save the prelude to the Opzelura (ruxolitinib) spot from Incyte, where various family members run frantically into the living room after the mother exclaims from the couch, “QUICK! THERE’S A PHARMACEUTICAL COMMERCIAL COMING ON!”  Ironic self-mockery may or may not move more units, but it at least signals to the viewer that we’re all in on the joke.

More rote and uninspiring has been the lineup of overtly Olympics-themed ads, every single one of which is an execution of the same concept: i.e., a representative child sees the Olympics on TV and is inspired to put in years of hard work, to see every setback as an opportunity to grow stronger, to be grateful for all the sacrifice and support from their parents and coaches, all in the service of following their dream of becoming a member of Team USA who will one day be on TV and inspire the next generation of young athletes, and so on. Of course, the likelihood of any of these “children” actually making it to the podium is roughly equivalent to their winning the Powerball, but we Americans do love worshipping a certain mythology around work ethic and achievement.

Peacock has made the most of streaming video’s capabilities through their “Olympics hub,” which lets the viewer watch multiple live events at the same time, with the option to zoom into a specific event if things get interesting.  It also lets you search by individual sport, so you can spend all day watching judo if you want (I do not, as I don’t understand the rules and it always appears as if at least one competitor’s uniform is getting pulled off).

Early in the games, I clicked on the “surfing” icon, mainly out of curiosity because I knew it was taking place in Tahiti and I wanted to see what it looked like. Even though I grew up <5 miles from the ocean and spent most of my summers at the beach, I was never a surfer.  My formative years were generally spent rule-following, and the surfing scene seemed to me as a more menacing, criminal-adjacent realm, of cars and fins and skipping school and precocious body hair and danger. 

It’s hard to overstate how unlike surfing is to other televised Olympic competitions.  The coverage opens on a bobbing, half-in-sea-level shot of Teahupo’o.  The competitors – one in blue, one in red – dive into the water and paddle out to the break line, where they sit on their boards looking out to sea, hoping a rideable wave will come their way.  Minutes pass.  Only the steady white noise of the surf, softly amplified every now and then by the roll of a breaking wave – sits above the silence. More minutes pass.

The TV commentators are also of a different species.  Joe Turpel, raised in Hawaii, covers play-by-play with a mellow Pacific burr.  Color commentary, such as it is, is handled by Mike Parsons, a famous big wave surfer with a more bookish timbre in his voice, but the same half-baked lack of urgency.  Together they escort the viewer into a totally awesome semantic universe, of gnarly tubes and tagging the lip and staying behind the curtain and getting gobbled up by the foam ball. A universe in which “goofy” is a term of art. “Get too close to that reef, and it can really stop your energy,” says Turpel, describing the literally death-defying nature of this event with characteristic insouciance.  Some more minutes pass.  

I would like to watch an Olympics in which all the events are covered by Joe Turpel and Mike Parsons.

There are moments of action, when the right wave comes and the surfer with priority spins the nose of their board around and paddles along with the rising wall.  What these humans do on surfboards is miraculous, and you’ve probably seen that great photo of Gabriel Medina, with his finger raised and his board hovering above the surf, looking like some kind of Brazilian god/warrior.  But, as breathtaking as they are, these moments are somehow not over-dramatized. A surfer gets rewarded for constructing a ride in which the turns are seamlessly connected together.  In the same way, it seems like riding the wave, and paddling back out, and (especially) sitting there bobbing and waiting, are all part of one, larger, connected practice that seems awfully spiritual.  There is a reason why the surfers’ meditation routines come up in the commentary so often.

Each heat lasts 30-35 minutes (minutes can sometimes be added on if there were no rideable waves for a long stretch).  As the clock winds down, which in other sports would be a crescendo of frantic activity, we find the surfers, still, sitting there, maybe taking a few speculative paddles up the reef, but for the most part still bobbing and waiting.  The winning wave may come, but very often it doesn’t, and there’s nothing they can do about it, and they don’t seem terribly concerned about this.  They, like us, are subject to forces much, much more powerful than our own desires and dreams.  No matter how many hours of work have been put in, the right wave at the right time simply might not come and the horn will sound it will be time to paddle back to shore.

Zen and the Art of Airline Marketing

A couple of weekends ago, I flew to Michigan to visit my daughter at school.  When I arrived, we went straight to the Crisler Arena to watch a basketball game, where I dazzled her with my explanation of the finer points of the pick and roll.  I grumbled at the fact that none of the players seemed to know the proper way to roll after setting a pick – dropping the top leg so as to “seal off” the defender -- which creates a much better scoring opportunity.  Kids today.

Air travel for something that isn’t work has a certain allure.  Packing a bag with no dress shirts. Reading for pleasure. Paying attention to things, without the overhang of meetings or presentations.  

While boarding my flight to Detroit, I noticed that Delta’s ads lining the jetway mostly featured photos of people sitting in airplane seats and gazing at screens. Eyes vacant, faces softly illuminated by their phone or the in-flight entertainment system or an iPad shared with a significant other. 

It used to be that airlines would promote travel by showing attractive destinations (beaches, foreign cities, exotic dining). Now they promote travel by showing people looking at their phones.  You could say that Delta is, in a dime-store-Buddha kind of way, highlighting the journey, not the destination.  But of course it’s not really the journey: it’s the escape from the journey, enabled by screens and noise-cancelling headphones. “The ‘me time’ you deserve,” promises one ad. 

What does this say about Delta’s customer experience?  I suppose at one level you can commend them for their honesty. "We know that the experience of our product is so unpleasant," they imply, "we’re going to promote it by showing how you can remove yourself from that unpleasant experience thanks to technology.  Which by the way we will gladly enable by providing in-flight wifi, USB outlets at your seat, and unignorable video screens approximately 6 inches from your face."

Meanwhile, Apple recently launched their Vision Pro headset, the latest salvo in Silicon Valley’s war against human experience that is unmediated or non-monetizable.  Interestingly, their marketing for the Vision Pro also has a veneer of Zen.  A video shows a man standing at his uncluttered workspace, app windows floating gently in space around him. “Be in the moment. All over again,” Apple promises.

In a perverse way, marketing the Vision Pro in terms of a philosophy that extols the virtue of “non-self” is spot on.  When you use this product, you remove all direct connection with the outside world. What you perceive is completely captured, filtered, and presented by Apple, Inc.  With the headset on, your eyes as perceived by others are not your eyes at all, but an avatar, created and projected by the device. Your visual connection with reality has been severed, and a representation of that reality, one that is completely administered and controlled by a commercial interest, has been grafted in place. You, vis à vis the “real world,” cease to exist. 

Some of the reviews of the Vision Pro speak in similar terms of dislocation. “It's easy to lose track of where I am when I'm wearing the Vision Pro,” begins Scott Stein in CNet, who writes from “inside” the device, as if it were a whale that has swallowed him whole.

As I’ve mentioned before, the idea of self-annihilation shows up often in mystical traditions. The only way we can approach direct contact with the divine is to relinquish our egos.  If we do this right, we simultaneously embrace/submit to an essence (call it God if you’d like) that is surpremely powerful and loving and good. Delta and Apple also invite us to lose our selves, but in the service of late capitalism and the glory of spatial computing.

People are not buying this, figuratively and (especially given the $3,499 price point) literally.  Many of critiques of the Vision Pro have highlighted the horror of what this product is and represents.  And yet: a lot of reviews suggest that, once the technological bugs are sorted out, the miracle of augmented reality will usher in a new era of awesomeness.  All we need, they suggest, is Apple to get the hand-eye interface to work more smoothly, and we’ll finally be able to get lost.