We’ve Already Lost
Instant Replay stinks and so do Tech Bros
“Replay…buzzed prior to the snap. We will see if the last pass was complete or incomplete.”
- National Football League Referee Terry McAulay December 6, 2001
“After review, the pass is incomplete. 4th. 1st Down, Jacksonville.”
- NFL Referee Terry McAulay December 6, 2001, minutes later
This is how technology can ruin your Sunday.
In week 14 of the 2001 NFL season, my Cleveland Browns hosted the Jacksonville Jaguars with faint hopes of making the playoffs for the first time since returning to the NFL three seasons before.
While driving down the field with just a minute left to play, trailing by five, and facing a fourth down, quarterback Tim Couch threw to receiver Quincy Morgan, who caught the ball and picked up a critical 1st down to keep the drive going.
Couch raced to the line of scrimmage and spiked the ball to stop the clock. You can see Terry McAulay waving his arms, indicating the play was dead.
Then, out of nowhere, the officials huddled up, and Terry returned with the update that reversed the call and gave the ball back to Jacksonville, effectively ending the game.
This was a blatant violation of established NFL rules regarding Instant Replay. Once a play begins, you cannot review the previous play.
Except this time.
After the fiasco, Terry swore up and down the review official buzzed him before the ball was snapped, which they are allowed to do when it’s under two minutes. But you can see Terry didn’t move a muscle until Couch was done throwing the ball into the ground. Heck, Couch double-pumped the spike, which took extra time.
Watch BOTTLEGATE VIDEO
This egregious call, known as “Bottlegate,” resulted in Cleveland Browns fans losing their minds. If you have ever been to a football game, you understand the concept of a large number of people consuming large amounts of alcohol over a few hours, so by the time one minute was left in the game, people were super sauced. Add in being Cleveland Brown fans, and you have a mob ready to erupt.
Thousands of angry fans holding bottles of beer and water will likely throw them at people who have made them angry.
And that’s precisely what happened. Technology ruined a Sunday, and the result was violence, the good old-fashioned kind of trying to hit someone with an object you can throw at them.
Getting It Right
In 1999, the NFL reinstituted “Instant Reply” as an aid for game officials who would screw up calls from time to time because that’s what humans do. The idea of Instant Replay was to stop the game, rewatch the play on a television screen, decide if the call was correct, and if it wasn’t, reverse it to ensure some mistakes got overturned. The NFL didn’t think the process was perfect, but they were working towards getting more calls right than wrong.
As you can tell with the Browns/Jags game 24 years ago, Instant Replay can screw up a game badly.
But screwing up a game doesn’t matter. Instant Replay stuck and has been ruining sports for me ever since.
Like a cancer that spreads, Instant Replay is everywhere in sports. We review plays in baseball, basketball, and even soccer—yes, soccer. We review to see if someone is offside. Sometimes, these decisions take up to ten minutes to determine that a player was offside—even by a toe.
This invasion of technology is supposed to make sports even better. No one can explain what better is. All Instant Replay does is slow things down, stir up controversy, and gradually deteriorate the game to where Instant Replay only matters because you are gambling on it.
But technology never stays still. It is constantly evolving, and the next evolution of Instant Replay technology is Artificial Intelligence. AI continues integrating into all aspects of human life, and sports are no exception.
In fact, sports might be the leader in the idea that AI will replace humans and their jobs—not as players, of course, but as officials. Take tennis, one of the first sports to implement motion capture technology and computer algorithms in the mid-2000s to determine whether a ball was in bounds. Technology has improved so much and makes more correct calls than humans that line judges will be eliminated beginning this year.
Major League Baseball has been testing its automatic ball-strike system in the minor leagues since 2019, expanded to all top-level leagues in 2023, and has now been called up to The Show this spring training.
I should enjoy yelling at umpires this summer because I don’t think we will return to human errors once AI is fully integrated.
What’s happening in sports is nothing compared to what I’m calling the Technoligarchy and billionaires who have launched a revolution of erasing democracy and doing it without shedding one ounce of blood.
The Rise of Technology and the Downfall of Freedom
“Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition…Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.”
- Marc Andreesen New York Times interview 2024
Marc is a software engineer and venture capitalist who sold some companies to Hewlett-Packard and is barely a billionaire. I don’t know what a vetocracy is, but this quote is equally disturbing as it is long-winded.
In 2023, Andreesen wrote what he called a Tech-optimist manifesto. From what I can tell, it’s a laundry list of why market freedom is the best thing ever, and technology is the consistent driver of good. A year later, his quote lays the foundation for all technoligarchs: that government, especially democracy, stands in the way of progress.
He’s effectively stating that the way forward is a battle between institutions and algorithms.
“I don’t believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
- Venture Capitalist and Tech Bro Peter Thiel - Essay 2009
Thiel is another guy with many titles: entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and activist. He’s worth about $20 billion, which puts him OUTSIDE the top 100 wealthiest people in the world. I’m also OUTSIDE the top 100 wealthiest people.
Thiel was an early investor in PayPal, Facebook, and JD Vance. The first two made him a lot of money, and the last one made him even more powerful.
Growing up, Thiel was the valedictorian of his high school and studied philosophy at Stanford. There, he was exposed to multiculturalism, the idea that lots of cultures mix, and that is a good thing. This freaked out Thiel, who, it should be noted, is a homosexual, a marginalized group back in the early 1990s. So take that as you will.
To combat this, Thiel established the libertarian magazine The Stanford Review, which in 2024 accused Stanford of teaching “woke math.” I guess it’s adding more numbers than should be allowed.
Andreesen and Thiel are just two examples of the Technoligarchy, dedicated white men with money who see themselves as the Instant Replay of society. Stop everything. Watch what is going on and reverse calls.
This being Okay History, I’ll try to explain what is happening and why I am afraid we have lost, just like the Browns did on December Sunday in 2001.
Markets, Markets, Markets
Since Donald Trump’s election, we have entered a twilight zone, where we dream of past jobs we had and disliked, only to feel like we are back into those positions, knowing how terrible they are but incapable of doing anything about it. Only in this dream do we wake up and realize it’s not a dream. We are working that crappy job. In fact, we no longer can do it from home.
There’s this silly concept that everything should be run like a business because businesses are utopias of efficiency and effectiveness. This concept is central in the thinking of technoligarchs, who define themselves as Libertarians.
Generally speaking, Libertarians are terrible people. Their view on life is based on being your own person, free from a government that will only hold you down. They think technology can have great, positive impacts on our lives with less. I honestly believe Libertarians don’t realize there are other people on the planet, and it would be a good idea to have someone collect our garbage.
“We believe markets…are how we take care of people we don’t know.”
- Marc Andreesen Tech- Optimist manifesto
This sentence reads like Markets have good bedside manners. I’m not kidding; I read this a million times and still don’t understand how “Markets” help people we don’t know. But guys like Marc and others see this as a fundamental truth.
The wealthiest person on the planet is a man. He also is a naturalized citizen of the United States. Fourteen of the top fifteen most affluent people are men, and you don’t get to a woman listed by herself until number fifteen in Alice Walton. I mention this because this is not multicultural.
Money is power. Since Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980, we have seen the rise of market believers and the decline in government trust.
It manifested itself with Elon Musk, who declared himself a federal government employee and launched technology to gut the federal government for his own purposes. Unfortunately, we can’t seem to stop the play and reverse the call because we could see a lot of where we began to go off the rails.
By 2008, after the market crashed, proving its fallibility but maintaining its façade of perfection, people like Thiel increased their influence. The Tea Party showed up, anger intensified, and people began handing over their agency to people they saw as power brokers for good—tech leaders and television stars.
Then, in 2010, the Citizen United court case happened, and the floodgates of dark money, misinformation, and power consolidation accelerated.
The creation and implementation of DOGE is a continuation of a movement to delete democracy and replace it with AI models and algorithms. This will be promoted as progress, as Marc wrote:
“Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.”
You are free to do more if you embrace technology's benefits, which will help you become more productive. That’s the Libertarian view, and hey, look at that: these guys own these technologies.
Elon Musk wants humans to be an intergalactic species that can live on Mars and Earth. Why? Because that’s progress for him, and he can become insanely rich while driving toward that goal.
What stands in his way is the enemy – government bureaucracy.
Humanity
The NFL is the most popular sport in the United States. It’s a perfect example of practical socialism, with closed markets, distributing wealth among a small group of owners while securing subsidies from the government to build their wealth and limit their losses. The worst NFL owners don’t have to field a competitive team because they are guaranteed to become wealthier.
Adding technology to their sport is a reaction to fans being upset at blown calls over the years. In our political world, we have seen a growing sentiment. Reagan stated that the government had been blowing calls for too long, and people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen were the only ones who could save us.
I don’t think we can turn back what happened in the first month of this administration. It’s been a blitzkrieg of orders and actions to destroy the vetocracy. We’ve lost our humanity and the ability to error and correct.
Our institutions are not perfect. But when we replace the human element in them with a few technoligarchs who want to create something that isn’t democracy, when and who is going to buzz an official and stop everything?
We are unlearning how to feel, and instead, we are locked into technologies that teach us how to hate.
Human judgment, whether in sports or government, is flawed as it should be. When we remove or rely on technology governance, we make decisions that feel cold and forget that mistakes, debates, and organic decision-making are what create community.
2025 is the year when robots will replace humans in calling balls and strikes, while technoligarchs will do the same things to our institutions. Humanity makes us great, and I’m afraid we are never going back to focus on the beauty of imperfection as a part of life.
By the way, the Instant Replay call reversing Quincy Morgan’s catch was correct.
Do you agree that we have lost? Where do you see the country in a few months, let alone a year from now? I have to say I have no idea, but it's not good.
I’ll be working all weekend before Anonymous and I take off for our vacation. I’m grinding to the finish line, but I have to say, I enjoy my job. There's lots of stuff to do, and it’s challenging in a good way. I never take for granted having a good gig.
I am using technology to improve things but also focusing on connecting with people by being physically present.
Don’t worry, I’ll be back on Monday. I’m trying to crank out a few things to be ready for while I’m away.
Thanks for supporting Okay History. I appreciate you all!
Okay,
Chris
No more line judges in tennis? No umpires or referees? Who will the fans blame when their team or favorite doesn't win?
As it often is, technology in this case is being used to eliminate a human workforce, and therefore to eliminate the workforce's salaries, pensions, unions and, particularly, their imperfections. One of the more interesting aspects of sports is when and how fans disagree with the officials. And it seriously can become murderously violent- hence the ban on fans entering the playing area in most stadiums and arenas.
Fans of 1980s tennis got very accustomed to seeing John McEnroe violently dispute the calls of line judges ("You cannot be serious!") in a way that belied the sports' reputation as a genteel activity. Would he object to an AI line judge making the same mistake, if it did? Probably. But the appeal of sports is as much the human interest element behind players, coaches and even officials, and putting AI in takes a lot of that away.