The document discusses the concept of a "Global Village Basketball" thought experiment where millions of simultaneous pickup basketball games around the world are all connected through technology, sharing scores and communicating in real-time. It explores how this could shift competition to cooperation and analyzes the implications through lenses such as theories of sporting empire, immaterial and biopolitical labor, concepts of smooth and striated space, and ideas of molar/molecular and flight. The document cautions that such a vision is not a universal sporting utopia free of power structures.

1. Towards a Sporting Multitude Sean Smith European Graduate School

2. A Thought Experiment Founding Spirits

3. does the global village have a basketball court?

4. A Thought Experiment Global Village Basketball millions of pickup basketball games simultaneously occurring around the world, each with a Red and Blue team each “hooked in” to the larger meta-game via geo-tagged laptop, cell phone, or handheld device players do not know the score at their own particular gym, though

6. A Thought Experiment Global Village Basketball score as a technology of competition gets taken to its logical conclusion: a reversal into a technology of cooperation athletes "communicate" with their teammates around the world via photo, voice and video from their laptop, cell phone, or handheld device information, images, identities produced and consumed by grassroots

7. RED 1,254,967 BLUE 1,376,224

8. Empire vs. Multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2001)

9. Theorizing Sporting Empire (Hardt and Negri, Empire , 2001) generally speaking, those organizations that create and sustain sporting capital and the vectors that communicate sporting products and practices professional sports leagues, media conglomerates, corporate sponsors, athletic footwear businesses, International Olympic Committee and other sport governing bodies, WADA, etc.

10. Immaterial Labour (Hardt and Negri, Empire , 2001) production of ideas, information, data, affect plus, the informatization of material production, albeit not a in a linear "stages of history" fashion labour becomes cooperative

11. Biopolitical Production (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , 1977) capitalism is always already about biopolitical production while it has historically appeared to be a matter of material commodity production, it was in fact always about the production of social relations production of everyday (consumerist) life becomes immanent to the social domain

12. Smooth and Striated Space (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , 1987) striated space is gridded, linear, metric, optic, State space; smooth space is open-ended, nonlinear, intensive, haptic, nomad space disciplinary societies (striated) yield to societies of control (smooth) as capital flows out from enclosure (striated) into global production and circulation (smooth), Empire emerges as a correlative political response

13. MOLAR: hierarchy, arborescence MOLECULAR: cracks between identity categories FLIGHT: rupture into smooth space Lines of Segmentation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)

14. Smooth Space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)

15. Meshworks and Hierarchies (DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History , 1997) articulation of superpositions interconnection of diverse but overlapping elements intercalary elements effects these interconnections endogenously generated stability temporal, spatial, etc.

16. Virtuosity and Politics (Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude , 2004) virtuosity in language, which is also political "Post-Fordism, hinging as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work, dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism of capital." consider basketball as a linguistic form

17. Capitalism contra Vectoralism (Wark, A Hacker Manifesto , 2004) land > capital > information pastoralist > capitalist > vectoralist farmer > worker > hacker vectoralist is quite willing to outsource production to competing mass of capitalists can athlete+worker+hacker usurp this source of economic power as motor of change?

18. What GVB Is Not a universal vision of sporting practice free of power differentials THE sporting multitude "Never believe that a smooth space will save us." – Deleuze and Guattari