This is a note in a series on Archival Time. You can find the rest of the posts in this series here
I‘ve only been in a fight once in my life. It was the first year of college. I was in Mechanical Engineering, which was a class of 140 boys and no women. I was unfamiliar with the extent to which any modicum of respectability collapses when there is no opposite sex to observe you. There was a tradition, which goes back ages I was told, where the junior mechanical engineering class would haze the freshmen until at some point, the freshmen, broken down by taunts and hazing rituals, fought back. For the first two months of college, everyone in class seemed really excited by the prospect of this happening. Instead of hiding out and avoiding the juniors, some of the class actively sought them out in the hope that whatever the juniors did would give them more ammunition. Everyone spoke of the fight that might go off any day now.
One morning word started going around that the fight was to go off that evening. There was a precise time and location: 4pm in front of the college gates. There were discussions about how everyone should stick together, and of course anyone who was not part of the fight would be labelled a coward. Okay, maybe “been in a fight” is a bit of an exaggeration because I went knowing that I would simply observe this spectacle from afar. But I remember being there under the hot sun, with probably a hundred other sweating 18-year-olds, and for a moment wondering it might be nice to throw a punch. I could feel the energy of the crowd. When the actual melee broke out I threw exactly one punch and slipped away without anyone noticing.
I recalled this footnote of my youth when I read Bill Buford’s Among The Thugs. Buford, one of the pioneers of dirty realism, infiltrates hooligan gangs in English football in the 80s. The scale of football hooliganism is of course much larger than a few mostly harmless scrapes you get into when you’re a teenager. The biggest of the hooligan brawls often led to stampedes in poorly designed stadiums with sections known as “pens” because they resembled a pig pen. Between 1970 and 1989, stampedes in football stadiums were just considered normal reality. In one of the biggest of these disasters, 39 Juventus fans died after being crushed against the wall at the Heysel stadium in Brussels where Juventus was facing English team Liverpool. This led to a five-year ban from European football for all English teams.
One of the repeated lines in the book is “it’s about to go off,” repeated by hooligans young and old just as a huge brawl is about to break out. Their whole life is built around the feeling that it’s about to go off. Edging the feeling in attunement with one another until the built-up mix of fear, anxiety, and schadenfreude cannot be contained and explodes in the stadium terraces or streets of places named Fulham, Wolves, Old Trafford etc. And these hooligans are no wayward uneducated young men; as Buford investigates, he finds that most of these are normal people who have normal lives outside of their violent football fan lives.
Why does hooliganism exist? The answer that Buford himself finds out is that it is in fact quite fun. The feeling of getting together with a bunch of strangers, having several gallons of beer in the build-up to the fight about to go off, leading up to a few minutes of charged violence is, as Buford puts it, a singular experience. He points out that a lot has been written about crowds but from the perspective of the observer—crowds are uncontrolled, a crowd is a rabble waiting to be roused, manipulated, controlled, and most importantly, crowds are never us. Crowd theory attempts to make sense of crowds as if it’s a scientific experiment. But as a member of the crowd, Buford finds that crowds give an excuse to let go of the pretensions of being a citizen, of being a person in society:
I have so many images for it—this state of being a citizen, of being civilized. I see it as a net that holds me in place, keeps me from falling. I see it as a fabric—a network of individual threads, intertwined, pulled tight—that keeps me warm, that I can wrap around both me and others. I see it as property, a house, a structure, a made thing, walls to keep out the cold, a door to keep out the unwanted, a roof to protect me from the night and its terrible undifferentiated darkness.
But I see it, too, as a weight. I see it as a barrier, an obstacle between me and something I don’t know or understand. I see it as a mediator, a filter that allows only certain kinds of experience through. And I am attracted to the moments when it disappears, even if briefly, especially if briefly: when the fabric tears, the net breaks, the house burns—the metaphors are arbitrary. This line, again; this boundary: I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I am excited by it; I know no excitement greater. It is there—on the edge of an experience which is by its nature antisocial, anti-civilized, anti-civilizing—that you find what Susan Sontag describes as our “flair” (the word is so attractively casual) for high temperature visionary obsession: exalted experiences that by their intensity, their risk, their threat of self-immolation exclude the possibility of all other thought except the experience itself, incinerate self-consciousness, transcend (or obliterate?) our sense of the personal, of individuality, of being an individual in any way.
What are these experiences? There are so few; they are so intolerable, unforgiving. Religious ecstasy. Sexual excess (insistent, unforgiving). Pain (inflicting it, having it inflicted)—pain so great that it is impossible to experience anything except pain, pain as an absolute of feeling. Arson. Certain drugs. Criminal violence. Being in a crowd. And—greater still—being in a crowd in an act of violence. Nothingness is what you find there. Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.
“Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air,”
Among The Thugs helped me better define Carnival Time, an idea that I’ve been circling for a few months. Carnival time is a type of temporal experience where your subjective experience of time is determined by constant attunement with people.
Buford’s characters seem to live in carnival time. There are no lone hooligans. The exhilaration of hooliganism comes from being constantly attuned with your mates and with your opposition. Football hooliganism is an inversion of the normal order of the hooligan’s life, with the weight of social order brushed off your shoulder. It is a carnival bloodsport where the violence does not have any other meaning other than entertainment.
The Bakhtinian medieval Carnival was the one time of the year in which revelry was allowed and sanctioned, under the premise that celebration must occasionally be allowed if peasants were to work the rest of the time. “Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air”, writes a letter from a school of theology in 1444, which Bakhtin cites. Bloodsport follows the same logic.
The violence that Among the Thugs describes did not simply fade away. It was actively dismantled by two converging forces. First, the aftermath of the Heysel Stadium disaster and the Hillsborough disaster produced the Taylor Report, which mandated all-seater stadiums, removed perimeter fencing (the pens), and forced a wholesale redesign of English grounds around visibility, control, and safety. The once dense, anonymous, and riot-prone terraces were replaced by individualized seating, stewarding, and architectural transparency.
Second, the rise of live television introduced a new kind of discipline: continuous observability. Matches were no longer experienced only by those present but unfolded under the gaze of millions. This produced an early form of mass sousveillance, in which violent excess was no longer just locally risky but reputationally catastrophic—for clubs, fans, and the league itself. Together, stadium redesign and live broadcast transformed football from a carnivalesque, opaque environment into a legible and nationally visible spectacle.
In the years that followed, crowd violence went underground, only to surface in occasional incidents of racial violence and players getting involved with ultra-fan groups. But crowd culture and violence operates like a Deleuzian nomadic war machine that is always on the search for smoother spaces as existing ones get striated. The violent carnivalesque shifted from the highly surveilled striated meatspace to the much smoother, faster digital realm.
The first smooth spaces it found were text-based: early forums, 4chan boards, subreddits. But text is easy to govern for platforms. And text persists—screenshots, archives, search. Even before platforms cracked down, the persistence of memory meant there was always some amount of sousveillance happening. The carnivalesque needs forgetting, and the text-based internet never forgets. So the war machine kept searching for smoother terrain. What it needed was a medium where the memory of the event was as short as the event itself—where the crowd could form, peak, and dissolve before anyone could capture it. It found this in livestreaming.
There are lots of sports streamers but their content is too tied in with the decidedly closed and finite nature of sports. If the medium is the message, contemporary sports is a heavily striated medium which limits the amount of creative fervour and flair that a streamer can bring to it. The carnival needs a more volatile vehicle.
I’ve been watching livestreams of YouTuber IShowSpeed. For those who may not be familiar, Speed is a streamer with over 50 million subscribers, a large portion of them outside the western world. He became known for doing 5–10 hour livestreams, almost as a feat of strength, and he’s also an athlete who, as the name suggests, is very quick. One of the things Speed is known for is athletic feats such as racing other influencers in sprints, and doing somersaults in exotic locations such as the pyramids of Egypt.
In all of his streams, which are often several hours long, Speed has his phone with the YouTube Chat open attached to his wrist in some kind of velcro wrist setup. Every four or five minutes he chimes in with “chat?” at which point the YouTube chat activity suddenly spikes.
Speed's recent Africa tour is a useful case study. Over 28 days, he visited 20 countries, streaming for up to nine hours at a stretch, greeted at each stop by crowds who had tracked his location in real time. The tour had all the hallmarks of carnival procession: in Egypt he became the first person to livestream from inside the Great Pyramid of Giza; in Morocco he appeared at the Africa Cup of Nations final dressed as the tournament mascot, a lion; in Algeria, ultras in a football stadium pelted him with food and water bottles.
The interesting element that sets YouTubers like Speed apart from, say, MrBeast or MKBHD is that he treats his body as a volatile asset to make high-leverage bets with, which is in the spirit of the grotesque body of the Bakhtinian carnival.
Another similar social media figure who treats their body as a volatile asset is Clavicular, a 20-year-old influencer from Miami, known to inject peptides, break his jaw, and commit other absurd acts in an effort to achieve the perfect look . Clavicular belongs to the Looksmaxxer subculture, which Ezra Marcus describes in his investigative report as “built on a grim premise: Looks are destiny, and only those willing to undergo the most extreme interventions will win in work, dating, and life. Though women participate, this philosophy is geared ultimately toward the vanities and neuroses of young men”.
Both IShowSpeed and Clavicular are characters who embody carnival time in the literal sense through feats of excess with the body, which can take the form of absurd physical feats of strength or grotesque levels of body morphing, all with an audience that is equal parts raging at and admiring them.
In previous posts, I wrote about how one of the central characteristics of carnival time is shorter but highly charged persistence of memory. The phenomenon of Speed or Clavicular does not make much sense unless you are following their pursuits live, becoming familiar with the memes and language that develop and die within the live chat or comments. There is a constant attunement that develops in the stream, but the object around which the attunement is developed is the streamer. A kind of parasocial attunement instead of a social one. In the terraces of English football, you rubbed shoulder to shoulder with strangers, attuned yourself to the movement and emotions of the crowd, with the football club as the object around which your attunement built. It was mate to mate, us versus them. In a video stream, the attunement is radial, everyone oriented towards one body who is both the one that you’re rooting for and against.
My friend Sam Cummins mentioned that becoming a streamer requires being willing to live with a clown status and also being okay with your life being risked. Many streamers often get swatted, which is when your viewers find out your location and send the police SWAT team to you as a prank.
Even though they have millions of followers and several million dollars, streamers like Speed occupy a status not unlike the carnival fool—celebrated and degraded in the same breath, licensed to transgress but only within limits set by forces larger than themselves.
Medieval carnival did not happen spontaneously. The church aligned carnival with feast days, understanding that the pressure of ordinary life needed a valve. The violence, the mockery, the grotesque excesses of the body were not merely tolerated but sanctioned, because the alternative was that they would emerge unsanctioned, uncontrolled, at times inconvenient to power.
YouTube, Twitch, TikTok—these platforms now play the role of the church. They are the new licensors of excess. They set the calendar, they collect the tithe, and they define the boundaries of permissible transgression. Speed can break his body, scream until his voice gives out, race strangers in foreign countries, but he cannot show certain things, say certain words, or offend sponsors. The platform is both the stadium and the Taylor Report simultaneously—it builds the architecture for carnival while ensuring that carnival never truly goes off.
And yet the feeling remains. The “it’s about to go off” energy that Buford describes in the terraces hasn’t disappeared—it’s been redistributed across millions of chat windows. It surfaces in the competitive frenzy to be the funniest or cruelest reply. The crowd still edges itself toward explosion, but the explosion is linguistic and reputational rather than physical. No one throws a punch. The blood is symbolic—a streamer “destroyed,” a reputation “killed.” But for the streamer at the center, the stakes remain bodily. The swatting and doxxing is real. The burnout from performing carnival for eight hours a day, every day, with your phone strapped to your wrist, is real. The crowd gets catharsis at the cost of nothing. The carnival clown absorbs the risk.