Is This Real?

Ben Wildsmith

One of the reasons I so love boxing is that it frequently provides socially acceptable opportunities to watch serious damage being done to people whose ego outweighs their abilities.

On that level, Anthony Joshua’s jaw breaking performance on Friday night against YouTuber and professional irritant Jake Paul was richly enjoyable.

The inevitability with which AJ’s final, bone-shattering right restored the order of things was satisfying in a Dirty Harry ‘Make my day’ fashion.

We all need some reactionary entertainment now and then. From Katniss Everdeen to Tommy Shelby, we seek out avatars who can force a rigged game to tilt back in their direction, by any means necessary.

Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn, a man whose personality is tax-deductible, spoke of AJ ridding boxing of the YouTuber phenomenon and returning honour to the sport.

The golden age of boxing, like the golden age of anything, is imaginary. A brief history of the sport takes us from the unlicensed brutality of fairground booths via routine fight fixing by the Mafia to the larcenous exploitation of Don King to a brief period when the Kinahan crime family ran the sport until it was purchased by the Saudi royal family as part of its ongoing efforts to sportswash the nation’s image.

Jake Paul is the least of boxing’s problems in terms of ethics. He gives us the ick, though, and it’s because he represents a wider feeling that nothing seems to be authentic anymore.

Immersive experiences

In that London, there are a number of highly successful immersive experiences that you can enjoy for a night out. You pay your money and are transported to a 1920s Speakeasy where the music and clothes of the performers are historically accurate. They are probably great fun but there’s a queasiness to anything like that, isn’t there? Why is that fire extinguisher there? Did they have gluten-free options in 1924?

As real, beloved pubs close down everywhere, we are offered two-dimensional facsimiles of them instead.

Our leisure time is increasingly funnelled towards financially-extractive, time-limited ‘experiences’ that offer no space for friendships to develop or communities to cohere. You’re in, you’re out, you pose for the Insta snap. Now, back to work, being immersed is expensive, ask John the Baptist.

Jake Paul’s realm, YouTube, is now awash with AI-generated content that is monetised, misleading, and manipulative (Alliteration bonus activated, Editor).

I’ve recently found myself seeing videos of the Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis, providing lengthy explanations of geopolitics that always seem to end with alarming warnings of impending catastrophe.

I’m a predictable leftie, of course, so I believe everything Uncle Yanis says about anything without question. These videos, though, aren’t really him. They use his face and voice to speak generated content that YouTube’s algorithm knows I’ll nod along to like the complacent, liberal vegetable I am.

New emotions are evolving to cope with this. Has anybody yet named the feeling you experience upon realising that a cute cat reel you have just watched was AI-generated?

A particular form of horror manifests as you register that you’ve expended your actual, human emotion on a cat that never existed and which was designed by a machine to monetise your vulnerability.

Vicarious enjoyment

So, replaying Joshua’s fist rattling Jake Paul’s scheming brain like a cranial pinball does, at least, offer the vicarious enjoyment of something that actually happened to a breathing human being who felt all the glorious peril of mortality for our entertainment. What a thrill!

We are being herded through our lives and encouraged never to look away from the shadow plays we are offered in place of personal agency.

Strike a blow for humanity this Christmas by having a skinful in a real pub followed by a fight with a genuine stranger and the concrete reality of a night in a police cell.

Season’s greetings to you all.