I think this is the first time I’ve seen the World Cup become the Unified Social Media Hivemind Games. Let me take a guess, dear reader: You, too, are obsessed with Erling Haaland? You, too, think Jude Bellingham is a smokeshow? You also were all in for Cabo Verde? You also think FIFA is rigging the Cup for Argentina?
It’s not weird that anyone might feel this way — it’s weird that everybody does. In my conversations with strangers at Whole Foods, a first-time-soccer-fan at the bar, my Instagram friends’ stories, my work colleagues, every single one has repeated this pattern. In each case, we collectively responded as a global algorithmic unit, forming these opinions suddenly, loudly, and increasingly obsessively, sometimes in the span of hours. Most of these examples are fun and lighthearted (I get it, I love my Viking weirdo).
The positive experience of a hivemind feels like collective effervescence — the phrase coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the electric feeling of energy, harmony, and connection that occurs when people gather with a shared purpose.
But the level of it still feels a little off, like someone reached into each one of our unique diverse perspectives around the world and activated “target + sentiment = GO” on all of us at once.
And the ugly side of this gets ugly fast.
If we want to talk about patterns, here’s one I’ve seen about Team Argentina: Isolated incidents in play (often clipped to be directly misleading, or look worse than they were) → essentialism (it’s not just one game, it’s every game for this team) → shame (it’s not just on the field, it’s everything about who this team is) → expansion (it’s not just the team, it’s the fans and the country’s history and honestly, kind of just the whole country itself). I’ve seen individuals go from “hey, Messi kicked his shin too hard” to “Argentina is the ethnonationalist state of Nazi-Netanyahu dreams” in, like, days.
This uncritical, highly-suggestible hivemind effect isn’t just happening with the World Cup, obviously. It’s been happening in fandoms of all kinds and political conspiracies of all stripes for years. But it feels like it’s hyper-accelerating — the velocity, intensity, and reach of this kind of narrative is a new thing, and it feels dangerous.
It also feels, hate to say it, pretty stupid.
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I suspect some of us, maybe many of us, are genuinely addicted to the idea of a villain and the thrill of conspiracy. I’m a little worried that our spirits have become insistent on always finding evil lurking just beyond the fringes of our awareness.
Another French philosopher Simone Weil writes that psychological gravity — just like physical gravity — naturally tends downwards, pulling our attention toward base behaviors. Attention is a form of prayer, she says, and where we choose to put our attention reveals our values. We can decide to seek true community and harmony and joy. But we have to choose to pay attention to it.
At first, we were mostly paying attention to each other, and the surprising pride we felt to belong to a country with ranch dressing and free refills. We were paying attention to “Rock Chalk Algeria” and South Korea fans in sombreros and German coaches in cowboy hats, and the renewed capacity for imagination and trust we all felt as a result. But pretty soon, we let the algorithm direct our attention elsewhere — to a villain and to conspiracy — because that’s what we like to do.
The knee-jerk reaction to find a villain undermines our capacity to participate in this collective effervescence. And the disinclination to ask questions in the face of mistrust and anger intrudes on our ability to celebrate each other.
I can’t exactly confirm this — I don’t even know who any of the players mentioned are — but it fits pretty well with much that I’ve seen.