17:45: Welcome to the experiment. I'm at Spiteful with Cassie watching the Big Game, but also doing a field test of the Daily Parker mobile editing experience. So far, no score on the TV but the editor is doing well. And the fact that the page auto-saves every 30 seconds is helpful. Keep refreshing: you will see me typing in near real time!
17:46: Ope. Seahawks scored a field goal (3 points). At this point I should mention that half my team and one of my dearest friends live in Seattle.
17:52: So far, the ads are not great. All the pro footballers endorsing FanDuel is a real problem. The Toyota ad with the little kids was annoying. But the patriotic opening ceremony, while masterfully executed by the producers, made me uncomfortable. More on that tomorrow.
18:08: OK, I've found an annoyance with mobile editing, but fixing it will make the underlying app less secure. If I switch apps, or if my phone locks, the editing page loses its connection to the server, requiring me to reload the page manually. That means I lose any unsaved data and, sometimes, it also disrupts the Javascript bits enough to require closing the tab and reloading it from the Edit button on the incomplete post. So, compared with what came before, it's orders of magnitude easier to write posts, but just as annoying if I want to link to outside sources.
I discovered this while gathering data about how little happens in American football.
18:19: The first quarter took 46 minutes for 15 minutes of clock time. That's about right, according to a study by 538 a few years back that found only 8-11% of an NFL broadcast is even "play action." That's a lower percentage of rewards than playing blackjack in Las Vegas. So, basically, American football is a Skinner box set to variable-ratio reinforcement at a level that would make rats angry.
Some people complain that baseball has even less action, but baseball is (a) a pastime, and (b) all about possibility. Football is about Rules.
But hey: Seattle scored again! After 57 minutes, it's 6-0 Seattle. And we've now seen 10 ads per scoring event.
18:49: Slowed down live blogging because (a) not a lot is happening and (b) my phone is at 20%. When I do SOTU live-blogging later this month, I'll be home with a charger nearby. And I'll probably have more to say.
19:24: Mother forking shirt balls, Bad Bunny is amazing. Every Republican from Santa Clara to Penoboscot is having a stroke, or watching the pouty alternative. This is America. (Also, the closed captions are en español. ¡Bien hacido!)
When you're going to do something subversive, it helps to have one of the biggest entertainment companies behind you. Well done, BB.
19:32: Those are the flags of all of our possessions. And every Spanish-speaking country in the hemisphere. Every second of that was endorsed and censored by the NFL. The commercial power behind the most popular sport in the United States has just told the OAFPOTUS to suck it.
19:39: Spiteful closes at 8, and almost everyone here only came for Bad Bunny, so I'm going to wrap up. Tomorrow morning I'll add links to this post for context and history, and I'll have a slept-on-it analysis after noon Chicago time.
For readers outside the US, it might not be readily understood that most Americans watch this game "for the ads." The players on both teams will get obscene bonuses for playing, with the winning team getting double so everyone actually plays the game. But for the commercial interests, that's nothing, because they have data saying people buy more of the things they see advertized during this game than they otherwise would to such an extent that $333,000 per second of air time is worth it.
I'm OK with that, to a point. I don't believe the University of Chicago doctrine that shareholder value is paramount, but it is how we've organized the United States, and the incentive to extract every last penny (nickel, now, I guess) of consumer surplus from every transaction has led directly to a desperation for attention in corporate circles that has, in turn, produced entertainment we won't be able to surpass in many ways when we regain our humanity. And what a coup, to produce a sporting event so boring that only a few percent of the people watching care about the outcome, but so well engineered that the other 95% stay tuned for the commercials.
At least Seattle is winning...
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