There is a prevailing sentiment among the coastal chattering classes that we are currently living through the end of the American empire. Over the weekend, several prominent cultural critics pointed to UFC 250, a mixed martial arts event broadcast from an empty warehouse in Las Vegas during a global crisis, as the ultimate proof of this collapse. They called it a garish spectacle of American decline. They wrote that only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script our national debasement this way.
To which I say: have any of these people ever tried to program a Friday night streaming slate? Have they ever looked at the quarterly earnings of a publicly traded entertainment conglomerate and tried to find a way to maintain revenue velocity when the entire service economy is shut down? I suspect they have not.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the few non-combatants permitted inside the UFC Apex facility for the event. Flying into McCarran International Airport on a Gulfstream G650 while the rest of the country was sequestered indoors gave me a profound sense of perspective. Looking down at the empty Las Vegas strip, completely devoid of the middle-class tourists who usually clog its arteries, I felt a deep, abiding peace. This is what the country looks like when the noise is stripped away.
Inside the Apex facility, that peace was replaced by the beautiful, unadorned sound of commerce. Because there were no fans in attendance, the environment was completely sterile. The usual roar of the drunken masses was gone. Instead, when a bantamweight fighter landed a devastating head kick, the sound echoed through the hangar like a perfectly struck golf ball on a private fairway. You could hear the breathing. You could hear the cornermen yelling instructions. You could hear the pure, unadulterated extraction of human capital happening in real time.
The media is obsessed with this idea of a decline, but from where I am sitting, the sheer efficiency of extracting capital from human suffering has literally never been higher.
It is entirely possible that the critics are right, and that watching two desperate men bludgeon each other for forty thousand dollars while the nation burns outside is a sign of societal decay. But what the critics fail to understand is that societal decay is highly scalable. We have managed to strip away all the costly overhead of a functioning civilization—the stadiums, the ushers, the public transit infrastructure, the communal experience—and deliver the visceral violence directly to the consumer's living room for eighty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.
This is not debasement. This is a triumph of management. The fighters themselves are the ultimate expression of the modern American worker. They are independent contractors. They receive no long-term healthcare, no pensions, and no union protections. They assume one hundred percent of the physical risk while the executives assume one hundred percent of the television rights fees. As I watched the main card while enjoying a remarkably crisp Fiji water in my socially distanced VIP folding chair, I could not help but marvel at the genius of it. Every gig economy startup in Silicon Valley has been trying to achieve this exact labor model for a decade, but only the UFC has perfected it.
The Roman empire failed because they didn't have the foresight to put the fall of their civilization behind a digital paywall. We are not going to make that mistake.
If this truly is the script for America’s decline, as the critics complain, then I must insist that the screenwriter is not a hack. The screenwriter is a visionary who understands four-quadrant audience metrics. A lesser writer would have bogged down the third act of the American experiment with heavy-handed monologues about institutional failure or prolonged scenes of legislative gridlock. Instead, our writer simply locked two men in an octagonal cage surrounded by Monster Energy logos and let them solve their problems with their elbows.
During a private dinner I attended last month with a prominent United States senator, we discussed this exact phenomenon. The senator expressed a brief moment of concern that the public was losing faith in the very concept of the social contract. I told him what I will tell you now: the social contract was always just a bloated legacy asset. It was a drag on the balance sheet. By replacing the social contract with an ESPN+ subscription, we have streamlined the American experience down to its most profitable core.
We must stop apologizing for the garishness of the spectacle. Garishness is the only honest aesthetic left to us. When Cody Garbrandt violently separated Raphael Assunção from his consciousness at the end of the second round, the sheer brutality of it was refreshing. There was no pretense. There was no polite fiction that society was going to step in and save anyone. There was only the victor, the vanquished, and the ad revenue generated in the space between them.
I left the Apex facility that night feeling more optimistic about the future of this country than I have in years. The American empire may indeed be falling, but as long as we own the exclusive broadcasting rights to the impact, the dividend yields will be spectacular. The next time you find yourself mourning the loss of a dignified society, I urge you to look past the blood on the canvas and appreciate the margins.