Ever since the

World Cup

concluded with Spain’s emphatic triumph over universally loathed Argentina (at least it felt this way), it has no longer felt like everyone is looking in the same direction at the same time. For a month and a bit, football’s biggest stage gave us one of the last remaining experiences of shared, global time. Not global justice, not global equality — the tournament is in many ways a monument to their absence — but a crude, synchronized schedule. Games at set hours, short-lived solidarities, the impression, however false, that the world is briefly doing something together, undergoing a collective experience.

Once that all ends, you’re plunged back into a social temporality and news cycle that moves at lightning speed and adjusting back is disorienting. It didn’t help that I had to deal with a debilitating case of

cyclosporiasis

(in an ill-fated decision, I tried some Taco Bell for the first time the day before my return flight back to South Africa, and getting a food-borne illness felt like an appropriate parting gift from a United States in decline). In the weeks since the World Cup, I found myself in a kind of fog I at first attributed to being exhausted from a busy year coupled with bouts of illness, but which, as I return to relatively decent health, I recognize as a familiar feeling, one that has typified contemporary experience for as long as I can remember.

There’s a book by the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman which I think is underrated, and does better at capturing the texture of our epoch than many other attempts (do we live in late capitalism, surveillance capitalism, the burnout society, post-modernity, etc etc.). It’s called

Liquid Modernity

, and Bauman’s straightforward argument is that the defining feature of contemporary society is no longer the construction of stable institutions, identities, and social relationships, but their constant dissolution. Where the “solid” phase of modernity sought to build enduring structures — stable careers, lifelong marriages, nation-states, political parties, class identities, and fixed moral frameworks — our present condition is “liquid”: forms no longer retain their shape for long enough to organize human life. The contradictory result of this is that even though in many important respects, individuals have unprecedented freedom (at least compared to any other point in human history), it’s coupled with chronic insecurity and the burden of constantly having to remake ourselves.

One of his most evocative concepts is the notion of pointillist time, which is “more prominent for its inconsistency and lack of cohesion than for its elements of continuity and consistency.” Time under liquid modernity is fragmented and disconnected, and rather than unfolding as a series of events with some relationship to each other, it is rather a series of “eternal instants.” It’s not hard work to see how this characterizes so much of algorithm-dominated society in general, and our media consumption in particular. If it wasn’t hard enough figuring out what producing any meaningful “content” takes in the attention economy, it was dismaying for me to recently learn that even new media like podcasts and video essays are themselves now being repurposed in a

“clipping economy”

where increasingly, circulation of short clips from longer pieces is becoming the main event rather than previews.

At

Africa Is a Country

, we are very proud of our World Cup Road Trip series. Three episodes are live —

Episode 1

on the Cabo Verdean diaspora in New England,

Episode 2

on the affinity between Algeria and Lawrence, Kansas, and

Episode 3

on Toronto’s Ghanaian community — with further episodes from the road currently in post-production. Although the website and our weekly newsletters remain our bread and butter, like most outlets, we are experimenting with different ways of reaching audiences, and short-form video has been one of them. The newsletter in particular functions as our most reliable direct channel to readers as social platform referrals grow less dependable. The World Cup, however, gave us a powerful on-ramp: sport brought in readers who might not otherwise arrive at a piece on visa regimes or xenophobia, and the coverage was built to convert that interest into political understanding.

What has been challenging is that discovery is now heavily platform-dependent, and the same work travels very differently depending on where it lands: our road trip …