Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

That techno-optimism is bracing when you hear it on the phone. In print, it can seem like a fairy tale. But in the world I live in, or at least the one I’m adjacent to, it’s increasingly the norm. Which is why a flurry of tech workers who are already very well compensated are leaving their current gigs at established web 2.0 companies for something Web3.

So I’ve been spending time — and trying to adopt a mindset of cautious skepticism — attempting to figure out Web3 for myself. Spoiler: I didn’t quite figure it out. But I found enough smart, thoughtful people who are genuinely fascinated with this stuff to make me think that there still may be something here, even while so much of it is nonsensical or worse. So I’ll keep paying attention. You might want to, too.

So WTF is Web3?

Let’s start here: At its core, Web3 is a rebranding of crypto and blockchain, the technology based around a worldwide network of computers that talk to each other and validate and record transactions without human intervention or centralized oversight.

Blockchain tech has been around in some form for more than a decade, and for much of that time most people who thought about it focused on bitcoin, the digital currency created in 2009 that was most closely associated with blockchain. But you couldn’t really do much with bitcoin except buy or sell it and debate whether it was going up or down. And it has gone up, a lot: At the end of 2014, a single bitcoin was worth around $400; today, even after crashing more than 40 percent from its peak, it’s worth $38,000.

Now you can actually do some things with the blockchain. Not many things, yet. And most of it is still about buying and selling stuff — except now instead of digital currency, you can also buy and sell digital art, or plots of digital land or other items you can earn in a handful of video games. Which is why you’ve seen headlines about someone paying $69 million for a digital collage, or someone mistakenly selling a digital ape cartoon that was supposed to be worth $300,000 for $3,000. Or maybe you’ve heard about “play to earn” video games that are supposed to let you make real money by acquiring digital goods you can sell to other gamers.

A man gestures at artwork on his computer screen.

Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images
Blockchain entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as MetaKovan, at his home in Singapore. The NFT shown, “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” is by the artist Beeple. In March 2021, Sundaresan bought the NFT for $69.3 million.

It’s entirely possible that this is all Web3 will be: an interesting way for people to collect and/or speculate on digital artifacts. That’s potentially meaningful for people who create art and people who like to buy art — and here you can use the word “art” broadly, meaning “things people like to look at or consume somehow.” But if it stops there, it’s not world-changing.

But Web3’s most fervent evangelists think it goes much further. They believe it will bring about a remaking of the entire internet. Hence the name.

Web1, the argument goes, was about getting normal people onto the internet, helped along first by browsers — that’s Marc Andreessen’s work, not coincidentally — and then via internet access and search services like AOL and Yahoo. Web2 was about converting the time people spent on the internet, and all the content they share online, into real businesses, and then consolidating those businesses into massive operations that now seem too big to fail (think Facebook and Google).

But with Web3, the argument goes, you take control back from the Facebooks of the world.

How’s that supposed to happen? Well, it’s complicated. And, for the most part, theoretical. But: The blockchain lets people create their own money, without permission from any country or bank. It could also, Web 3 boosters say, let them build anything on the internet they want, without having to rely on existing platforms like Google or Facebook, or tools like Amazon’s AWS cloud computing services. And crucially, the new services could be owned, in part, by the people who built and use them.

And that idea, many of Web3’s believers tell me, is the thing that gets them excited, for multiple, intertwined reasons. There’s the possibility of profit, for starters: Many of the folks who are intrigued by Web3 also feel stymied by the current version of the internet, where their ability to create meaningful new companies — especially those aimed at consumers — seems capped by the current internet giants, who can buy, build, or crush upstarts.

“The reason why VCs and startup people who are not baked into the old winners are excited about this is the opportunity to create new winners,” says an investor who is all-in on Web3 … but doesn’t want me to use his name.

And some of the interest in Web3 comes from political fears, real or imagined: You might like the fact that Donald Trump lost his social media access a year ago, but you should also be worried that a handful of companies could deplatform the former president of the United States, Web3 advocates say. In a Web3 world, Donald Trump would only get kicked off a social network if the social network’s users — who would be the social network’s owners — wanted that to happen. And even if they did, there would be other platforms on Web3 for Donald Trump — or any other person you like, instead of loathe — to set up shop instead.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump speaks about legal actions targeting Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their CEOs during a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2021.

But I think the primary appeal of Web3 comes from the fact that it really doesn’t exist yet. So in its yet-to-arrive shape, it could be anything. And that sounds great to people longing for something new, whether they’re young techies who’ve only known a world where a handful of giant tech companies dominate the internet, or wizened folks who remember the initial excitement and possibilities of the early web days.

The possibilities are seemingly endless. And mostly theoretical.

That new part sounds great. And so does the part about bringing back the spirit of the mid-90s, when no one knew what could and couldn’t be done because no one had tried it yet.

But, also: I remember that even in the web’s earliest days, you could easily imagine ways it might be helpful to you, an average person. Sports scores delivered to your desk instead of a nightly newscast or a daily newspaper. Sending an email to someone on the other side of the world instead of dropping a letter into a mailbox. Recipes! Porn! Fill in your own blanks.

With Web3, though, I find myself squinting and trying to figure out how I’m going to use it beyond buying and selling digital collectibles. Again, that’s a real business and a real pastime. But I’m not really into it, and plenty of other people won’t be either. So what else is there?

Right now, not much, many Web3 advocates concede. But they also argue that I should broaden my mind. Start with NFTs: That’s “non-fungible tokens,” which are the Web3 items you’re most likely to have heard about. NFTs are the blockchain version of a title for a car or a deed to a house — they’re supposed to prove that you own at least a part of the digital thing in question. (Whether that’s true or not, and what “ownership” means for a digital good anyone can copy, is a whole other discussion.)

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Tim Berners-Lee auctions the source code for the World Wide Web as an NFT at Sotheby’s in New York City in June 2021.

You’ve heard about NFTs because that’s the art experiment someone named Beeple sold for $69 million. Or maybe someone on Twitter has tried to convince you that you should buy some digital lion cartoons because they’re going to be the next digital ape cartoons.

Here’s Paris Hilton on the Tonight Show this week, comparing digital ape NFTs with Jimmy Fallon — right before Hilton announced that she’d be giving everyone in the Tonight Show audience one of her own line of NFTs, which don’t exist yet.

Deeply strange pic.twitter.com/ycilbi1iNL

— James Kelleher (@etienneshrdlu) January 25, 2022

NFTs barely existed two years ago. Last year, people spent a reported $25 billion on them. This seems as bubble-y as a bubble can get.

But! The fact that NFTs are supposed to be automated contracts that cut out the need for humans to review and approve their terms and execution means that a) you can apply the technology to any digital good and b) you can write interesting rules into the contract that, say, pay the original creator of the NFT a slice of the transaction price any time the asset is sold. That could, in theory, create new ways to fund and profit from all kinds of new projects, and it might make more sense than traditional models.

Mirror, for instance, is a Web3 version of the online publishing platform Medium: an easy way to write stuff on the internet. But it also offers the ability to sell “editions” of your work to fans and super- fans — like this article, by journalist Adam Davidson, about his interest in … Web3.

Does that make it more interesting than regular Medium, which sells subscriptions to bundles of writers using regular old credit cards, or Substack, which sells subscriptions to individual writers using credit cards? Maybe?

In theory, Davidson will capture more of the value people place on his work than he would if was using a traditional platform, and the people who purchase his work can benefit if other people think it’s valuable because they can sell it to someone else. And if that happens, Davidson can get a slice of that sale, too, so his work can keep generating income for him even after he’s sold it. For a certain kind of creator — likely one who’s very online and willing to continually market themselves and their work — this could be very intriguing.

Meanwhile, other Web3 believers think the most important part of the tech has nothing to do with buying stuff. They’re most interested in the way it can help people organize themselves online and create organizations that could rival or replace existing companies like Facebook or Google. That’s primarily through something called DAOs — decentralized autonomous organizations — which are essentially internet collectives, where automated blockchain tech is supposed to make it easy to divvy up ownership and decision-making power among members. You can get into a DAO by buying into it, or you can get equity based on work you’ve done for the group, or whatever.

Cindy Ord/Getty Images

Guests view an NFT art piece by German artist Mario Klingemann at a Tezos exhibition in Miami Beach, Florida, in November 2021. Tezos is an energy-efficient blockchain adopted by NFT artists.

But like NFTs, there’s a good chance that if you’ve heard of DAOs before, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the most head-slapping versions of them, like the DAO that comically raised millions to buy a copy of the US Constitution, then found itself outbid by a Wall Street tycoon. Other nonsensical DAOs include one that wants to buy an NBA team, or one that bought a rare-ish copy of a Dune book and thought that would give them the ability to make a movie or show based on its contents. Spoiler: It doesn’t.

But more rational people who talk up DAOs think they are an excellent way to quickly and fairly spin up groups of people to work together, whether it’s a full-fledged company or a one-off project. You can, say, efficiently hand out equity stakes in a project to financial investors, strategic partners, and people who are actually working on it — all stuff that traditionally takes lots of lawyers and paperwork and time, and gets even more complicated if those participants live in different states or countries.

And, in theory, you can also measure the work that each participant contributes to a project — one person wrote code, another helped with marketing, someone else helped manage a Discord server where the DAO members meet up. That’s where Tina He’s Station would like to come in, by tracking that work and making it easy to find and start collaborating with people who are looking for work. Again, all of this is mostly theoretical for the time being, but I’ve talked to very sober people who tell me DAOs will be transformative for, say, startups that want to quickly get off the ground: One investor tells me the difference in speed is like the difference between email and the kind that arrives in an envelope.

“Right from the beginning of any project, you can now have an instrument of sharing the value of that project with more stakeholders,” says Jonathan Glick, an entrepreneur and investor who’s become intrigued by Web3 in general and DAOs in particular. “It is a quantum leap improvement in the way to organize people around projects.”

The good, the bad, and the unknown

All of that sounds … interesting. But if there’s anything that Web2.0 taught us, it’s that even the most exciting technology comes with complications and unintended consequences. At first blush, Twitter seemed like a fun way to tell people what you had for lunch, and then for a moment like a tool that could help liberate oppressed populations. It took a while for us to realize it could also be a cesspool of hate and lies. This time around, we ought to be much more thoughtful about possible downsides.

For starters, people much smarter than me argue that blockchain is an incredibly bad way to utilize computing power, and that crypto currency “mining” — stringing racks of computers together to generate crypto currency — is an irresponsible waste of energy in a world facing a dire climate crisis; some estimates peg yearly bitcoin electrical usage as the equivalent of a country the size of Sweden. (Reasonable people also argue that these concerns are overblown, or that future crypto efforts will become more energy efficient.)

Lars Hagberg/AFP via Getty Images
Two technicians inspect bitcoin mining at Bitfarms in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec, in 2018.

Another bracing challenge is that Web3, at least in its current form, is not even remotely user-friendly. In the course of writing this, I thought I’d try buying an NFT to support Davidson’s work on Mirror. I downloaded MetaMask, a popular crypto “wallet” — a place for you to store the keys to your crypto assets — that runs as a Chrome browser extension. Then I dutifully recorded the 12-word “seed phrase” that’s the only way to access your account if you forget your password, and that MetaMask warns you to keep incredibly safe (they suggest, among other strategies, placing it in a safety deposit box, and tell you that if you lose it you’ll never be able to access your account again, ever.) Then I needed to buy some ethereum to put into my account, which MetaMask suggested I do using services like Wyre, which I’d never heard of before — and which it turns out I can’t use in New York because it’s not licensed here. At which point I bailed because I wasn’t remotely ready to connect my savings account to a crypto service I’d never heard of before. It’s probably fine. But what if it isn’t?

Davidson, by the way, says he was scammed out of $28,000 as he started to learn the Web3 ropes. He’s still a believer.

Also, because Web3 is so new — and because the very concept of it rejects centralized control or management — right now, there’s very little in the way of consumer protection. None, basically. Web 3 fans argue that you don’t need government agencies or megaplatforms protecting you and your assets because their system of linked computers creates a “trustless” economy. Since every transaction is recorded in public and verified by the blockchain, you’re not supposed to need the oversight of Big Government or Big Companies. In reality, Web3 has plenty of ineptitude, costly bugs, and outright scams, like intriguing projects that disappear as soon as the organizers collect your money. Or in crypto terms: You’ve been “rugged,” as in, you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you.

Speaking of misbehavior: New tech doesn’t mean we are a new species. Which means that even the most optimistic version of Web3 may recreate some of the existing problems of Web2 or the rest of the world.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images
Visitors read about Web3 and NFTs during the opening weekend of the Seattle NFT Museum on January 29.

While boosters like to point out that Web3 allows anyone anywhere with a web connection to participate, no matter who they are or what they look like — many Web3 folks are completely anonymous — its early user base and supporters certainly seem to skew as male as traditional tech does today. The fact some of the most vocal boosters tend to take on a public tone that’s alternatively proselytizing and defensive also makes me dubious about the whole thing. Then again, perhaps that’s because so much of the Web3 discourse happens on Twitter, which still seems designed to bring out the worst in people.

And basic supply and demand still exists on Web3, which means we may still have hierarchies where people in developing countries are willing to do more work for less pay than people who are already rich. For instance: Axie Infinity — a “play to earn” game — quickly developed a huge user base/workforce in the Philippines, leading to reports that the game represented a new way for people to make a living; as new players flooded the game and depressed the value of Axie’s currency, those players are reportedly making less than that country’s minimum wage.

Meanwhile, I continue to struggle with one of the key Web3 pitches: that you can now own your digital assets on the internet. Which seems fine and maybe useful for stuff I really want to own. But I also don’t want to have to engage in a transaction everytime I do something on the internet. And I don’t necessarily want to own the platforms and services I use on the internet. I’m fine that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and his investors made a lot of money from me and other Twitter users because I got to use Twitter for free. I’m also fine with the fact that Twitter could decide to kick me off its platform, and that I wouldn’t have any recourse, except to go somewhere else, because that means Twitter can also deplatform people who are genuinely bad actors.

In the Web3 world, the power of the platforms to deplatform is something to fear. In my world, it’s the difference between trusting your security at a club to a bouncer versus a mosh pit. I’ve had fun in mosh pits! But I also appreciate a guy who can kick out a goon.

So … I don’t know. Web3 turns on a lot of my early warning indicators that light up when things don’t make sense to me. And I’m convinced that a lot of people who are piling into NFTs and lots of other get-rich-quick pitches are going to get burned because that’s what happens to most people who go for get-rich-quick pitches.

We may find out quite soon, especially if the value of the crypto currencies that fuel so much of Web3 keeps falling. On the other hand, if only some of the claims Web3 fans make about it end up panning out, then the tech world is headed for a reshuffling, at the very least. And the fact that I can’t tell you what the future is going to look like doesn’t mean I won’t keep looking at it. So I’ll keep my eyes on this stuff.

  1. Researchers’ understanding of what helps people maintain their less-meat or no-meat habits has improved too. In 2019 and 2020, Anderson and her colleagues at Faunalytics conducted a new study, surveying 222 people for six months as they embarked on a vegetarian or vegan diet.

    They found that almost three-quarters of participants aiming to go vegetarian or vegan took weeks or months to ease into the diet. A little over half still ate a small amount of animal products after six months. To me, the takeaway here is that practicing patience and accepting imperfection are okay — probably even helpful — in making a less meat-heavy diet work for you. And for the vast majority of us, aiming for less meat, rather than no meat, is more achievable and sustainable.

    I spoke with Anderson for Meat/Less, Vox’s 5-part newsletter on how to eat less meat — which includes practical tips to eat more plant-based and food for thought on the impact of our food choices. When it comes to making it stick, Anderson shared eight tips.

    Define your why

    According to Anderson, having a strong internal motivation is key to adopting a new habit and, more importantly, making it stick.

    “Finding something within yourself as to why you’re going vegetarian or reducing — whether that’s for animals or health — and linking it to your identity helps with success in the long term,” Anderson says. External motivations, like trying to please a friend or partner, may be effective in the short term but likely won’t work for the long haul.

    Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media
Vegan activists march in Toronto’s 2015 Veggie Pride Parade.

“People who are committed tend to succeed,” Anderson said.

This finding came from her new research, which found that more than 90 percent of people who go into their vegetarian or vegan journey with a strong commitment stick with it for at least six months.

Choose a specific, achievable goal, especially if you’re reducing

The boundaries of vegetarianism and veganism are clear, but not so much with “reducetarianism” — simply eating less meat. How much less? Which kinds of meat will you still eat and which won’t you? Will you cut out meat for particular days or meals?

Setting clear boundaries, like “vegan before 6 pm,” “weekday vegetarianism,” or Meatless Monday, and boundaries that are achievable for you, is critical.

“Shaping your goals to match what you can reasonably achieve over a longer term, as opposed to the dream-big, pie-in-the-sky approach, is a lot more likely to succeed,” Anderson told me. “And you can come back in six months or a year and say, ‘I’m doing really well with this, I’m going to go one step further.’ That’s better than trying for something huge and giving up.”

And a big part of determining what’s achievable is thinking about what you want to — or don’t want to — change, at least at this point in time. For example, if you do want to go vegetarian but don’t want to stop eating, say, bacon, then go vegetarian except for bacon.

That might sound odd, but you’ll have nearly the same impact for animals and the environment as a vegetarian, and you’ll probably stick with it longer than if you tried to go completely vegetarian.

Find social support

Whether it means a friend or family member doing it with you, or simply explaining to friends and family members why it’s important to you that they support your choices, harnessing social ties can help new habits stick.

It’s also good to meet other people who care about this issue — you can find them by volunteering for animal welfare or environmental organizations, or looking for a vegetarian group on Meetup. There are also robust online communities, like r/vegetarian and r/veganrecipes on Reddit, and Challenge 22, an organization that facilitates online community for new vegans and gives participants access to dietitians and mentors.

Try a wide range of new foods, and have realistic expectations

Reducing your meat intake or going vegetarian will probably spur you to try a lot of new cuisines and foods, some of which you may love — and some not so much. So be sure to experiment with an open mind.

Manjunath Kiran/AFP via Getty Images
A chef displays a varieties of dishes at a food stall at a vegetarian food festival in Bangalore, India, in 2019.

And experiment with a realistic mind — today’s plant-based meat, egg, and dairy products are better than ever, but they’re not perfect replicas of animal-based foods. For a list of the best meat and dairy alternative products, tips on how to cook tofu and other plant proteins, how to find vegetarian-friendly restaurants in your area, and more, sign up for Vox’s Meat/Less e-course.

Learn the basics of plant-based nutrition

This tip comes from me — according to the American Dietetic Association, well-planned vegan and vegetarian diets are healthy and nutritionally adequate, and can contribute to the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. But let’s be clear: Eating plant-based is not going to cure cancer, give you perfectly glowing skin, or make you feel amazing all the time, as some of the more fringe corners of the vegan internet might suggest.

And as Faunalytics found in its 2014 study, some just don’t feel healthy on a vegetarian diet. That might mean a plant-based diet is just not doable for everyone, or it could mean that those people would have benefited from eating more nutritious foods. (After all, potato chips and Oreos are vegan — but that doesn’t make them good for you.)

If you’re going fully vegan, the first question friends and family might ask you is: “Where will you get protein?” Americans are protein-obsessed, with 1 in 7 reportedly following a high-protein, low-carb diet. But there are many plant-based foods high in protein, like beans, tofu, tempeh, peanut butter, plant-based meat products, nuts, and soy milk. Plus, most people far exceed the recommended daily amount of protein.

Unless you’re an Olympic weightlifter, you don’t really need to worry about whether you’re getting enough protein. “On a vegetarian or vegan diet, you can get enough protein if you eat an adequate number of calories from a variety of whole foods,” according to Nancy Geib, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Diabetes and Nutrition. And even if you are an Olympic weightlifter, it’s possible to compete at that level as a vegetarian or vegan (and other Olympic sports, too).

If you’re going fully vegan, be mindful to supplement with vitamin B12 and to get enough iron — whether through supplementing with a vitamin and/or eating a lot of iron-rich plant foods, like lentils, beans, soy products, nuts, seeds, dark leafy greens, and oats.

However, if you’re going vegetarian or just trying to cut back on meat intake, these nutrients will be less of a concern, but it doesn’t hurt to learn more; I recommend this series of vegan nutrition primers from registered dietitian Ginny Messina.

Plan for challenges and setbacks

One small study (200 participants) found that 77 percent of people maintained their New Year’s resolutions for one week, but only 19 percent kept them for two years.

One way to avoid that fate is to plan ahead for challenges and setbacks. Is it going to be your mother-in-law insisting you try her meatloaf that gets you, or perhaps chicken wings at the bar with friends? (Or, maybe these will be your welcomed exceptions.)

“Everyone’s challenges are different,” Anderson says. “Thinking about them in advance and planning for them — what your reaction is going to be at the time — is really useful.” Deciding in advance means your response is planned, so you don’t necessarily have to think of it as failure.

Anderson recommends “quit” apps, like Quitzilla, to reframe your thinking. “You can customize [the app] for any habit you want to break (such as animal product consumption), and — the key part — when you have a setback, there’s a reset button you hit which immediately starts the timer again, so you never have the sense that a failure equals quitting.”

Go easy on yourself

Change is hard. If you have trouble sticking with a plan, guilt won’t help, but modifying your plan could.

Anderson says that if you find yourself feeling guilty, or your inner voice is shaming you for perceived failure, try this reframing technique: “Imagine a rude stranger saying to your best friend or significant other: ‘You’re a failure with no self-control for eating that pepperoni.’ How would you respond if you heard that? Take whatever you would say to that stranger — hopefully a strongly worded defense! — and say it back to your inner voice.”

You’re more than a person with a New Year’s resolution. You’re a reducetarian now.

“Identity is a crucial part of behavior,” Anderson says. “Despite the subtlety of the wording, there’s a world of psychological difference between eating less meat and being a reducetarian. Labels have pros and cons, but thoughtfully applying them to ourselves can help reinforce a behavior we want to maintain, by reminding us that this behavior is not just a one-off but a central piece of who we are now.”

Labels can make us feel better about ourselves, because it “feels good to be part of a group we see as good,” Anderson writes. Of course, there’s a dark side to taking membership of any group too seriously: in-group bias — when we favor people like us, and are prejudiced against those who are less like us.

Vegetarians, environmentalists, and other passionate do-gooders can get a bad rap for in-group bias, so it’s critical to keep that instinct in check and, well, not be a jerk about it.

Want more resources on how to eat plant-based? Sign up for Meat/Less, Vox’s 5-part e-course.

Digging into the Olympics’ official narrative on film to see what the movies really say.

The Olympics want to tell a story — and it’s the same story, year after year. In this tale, humanity is on an upward trajectory, on a march of progress toward peace and unity. Each Games is meant to be evidence of this, a celebration of international friendship, everyone moving toward a common goal. At the start, we light a flame carried in a giant relay race across continents, a symbol of spreading enlightenment; at the end, we invite everyone to join us at the next event.

It’s a compelling tale. It’s also a story told by an unreliable narrator, especially when you look at what’s actually happened in the world over the years since 1896, when the Games were revived. Reality could use a little more culling and shaping to fit into the metanarrative. That’s likely why, starting in 1912, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) commissioned official films that commemorated and captured the events, both as an archive and to help in preserving the IOC’s vision of the Games as a way to promote world peace.

Back then, of course, the Games weren’t televised; now you can watch every second of the events on TV and streaming platforms, if you want. But the IOC has carried on commissioning the films, even in the television age. You can stream all of the official films (through the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games) on the official Olympics website; many of them are quite long, upward of four hours, and narrated solemnly by sonorous men who tell you what’s going on and why it matters.

A female gymnast captured in time-lapse photography rising to a handstand on a balance beam. Criterion
From Kon Ichikawa’s incredible Tokyo Olympiad.

The IOC’s official films are often stunning or memorable as cinema in their own right, far from the perfunctory documentaries you might expect. Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 Tokyo Olympiad, funded by the Japanese government to document the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, is a triumph of filmmaking on any subject, crafted as subtly and gorgeously and intimately as you could hope (and beginning, naturally, with a stunning image of the rising sun).

Visions of Eight, an anthology film about the 1972 Munich Games, includes, among other things, segments by Miloš Forman (just a few years before he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and Arthur Penn (several years after his Bonnie & Clyde rocked Hollywood), and it screened at Cannes. Tony Maylan’s goofy but delightful White Rock features tough-guy acting icon James Coburn wandering around Innsbruck, the site of the 1976 Winter Games, chatting about how hard all these sports are and making fun of the viewer for thinking he was going to do the luge. Ten films from the legendary Bud Greenspan, ranging from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles to the 2010 edition in Vancouver, round out the collection, eschewing just documenting the events — which anyone could have watched on TV — and instead digging deeply into the kind of human interest stories that would come to mark televised athletic coverage since the 1990s.

But for more context — and more than just the official story — the best source is the Criterion Channel’s 100 Years of Olympic Films collection, which includes the IOC’s documentaries through 2012, but also a handful of films made outside the official canon. For instance, a 1927 short film by Jean de Rovera, The Olympic Games as They Were Practiced in Ancient Greece, runs about eight and a half minutes in black and white and features athletes striking poses against dark backgrounds while the camera glides around, showing us some version of the Games’ history.

And while there’s plenty of evidence that host cities for the Olympic Games often experience economic and environmental disruptions (or worse), the impact of the Games on local residents rarely comes up in the IOC’s official films. For that, you’ll have to turn to Asif Kapadia’s short 2012 documentary The Odyssey, about the upheaval caused by the 2012 Games to the lives of disadvantaged Londoners and the British economy at large. (It’s neither an official IOC film nor part of Criterion’s official collection, but it’s streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

There are the more infamous contributions, too, the most notable of which, from a cinematic perspective, are the beautiful, reprehensible Olympia films directed by Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker. Subtitled “Festival of Nations” and “Festival of Beauty,” the two propaganda films document the 1936 Games, held in Berlin two years after the Nuremberg rallies. They’re official in the sense that they were commissioned by Hitler himself, but certainly not by the IOC. Riefenstahl had already made Triumph of the Will when she undertook Olympia, and they’re showcases of stunning visual spectacle and equally distressing ideology. Hitler is prominent in the films, sitting in the stands, laughing with advisers, and watching the events avidly, looking for all the world like just a normal guy — which was, of course, the point. Equally prominent is Jesse Owens, the Black American who would win four gold medals and be credited with “single-handedly crushing Adolph Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy,” an assertion that despite Owens’s extraordinary performance at the Games is, at best, hyperbolic.

Two divers gracefully move through space. Criterion
Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia films are among the more infamous — and beautiful — of the Olympics documentaries. (They’re also decidedly not commissioned by the IOC.)

The lengthy opening sequence of Olympia features gorgeous, muscular, ostentatiously Aryan-looking athletes performing what looks almost like a dance, symbolizing the enlightened perfection of the ancient Greek Olympics that she and Hitler’s regime wished to connect to the Fatherland’s present-day athletes — superior beings, the epitome of humanity. It’s disturbing to watch; highly praised at the time, Riefenstahl’s techniques in the film are a staggering achievement, but knowing how they cloak heinous genocidal ideology, it’s hard to watch. (After all, the next two Games, in 1940 and 1944, were canceled because of World War II.)

But if Riefenstahl’s artistry was being used in service of an evilly lofty rhetoric, it’s not wholly out of keeping with the ethos of the entire Olympics enterprise. Watching the films — including, and maybe especially, the IOC’s “official” documentaries — a series of themes emerges which begin, after a while, to feel just a tad over the top. Since they were revived in 1896, the goal of each Olympics has been to celebrate the limitless potential of humankind, the feeling that people can accomplish anything they set their minds on. Progress, in the Olympic arena, feels inevitable. Watching the films, you remember that there is no record so staggering set in one that it can’t be broken in the next. (As far as I can tell, the oldest world athletic record still standing was set at the 1983 Track and Field World Championships, by Jarmila Kratochvílová, in the women’s 800-meter event; she set it five months before I was born.) Skaters who looked incredible in St. Moritz in 1948 are matched by ten-year-olds today.

But what rarely makes it into the film is the dark side of things. The history of the Olympics themselves is littered with abuse and scandal, even recently. When I was a 12-year-old, glued to Kerri Strug’s history-making vault in the 1996 Olympic Games — a moment, incidentally, that mystifyingly doesn’t appear in the IOC’s official film from the time — I watched, rapt, as her coach Bela Karolyi carried her to the podium. But it would be years before I knew about the abuse many of those same gymnasts would allege at the training ranch that Karolyi ran, decades before more abuse scandals rocked USA Gymnastics to its core. I didn’t know then that Strug probably didn’t have to vault that second time to clinch the team’s gold. It didn’t really occur to me at the time that a girl’s long-term physical health was probably worth more than a gold medal. Last year, when Simone Biles pulled out of competition citing her own health, it seemed most people hadn’t learned that lesson.

Gymnast Simone Biles upside down in the air over a balance beam. Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

Simone Biles on the balance beam.

History tells us that the official Olympics story is more myth than fact. The genius of both the IOC’s full archive and Criterion’s longitudinal collection is that it tells a story that’s not in any of the individual films alone. Some Olympic Games don’t have a film because they didn’t happen, another casualty of a deeply bloody century. (In addition to 1940 and 1944, the 1916 Games didn’t happen, due to World War I.) Others carry giant asterisks next to them because of boycotts — the US sat out the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and four years later the Soviet Union and its allies skipped the Games in Los Angeles.

Having been revived in 1896, just before the start of the bloodiest century (so far) in human history, the Olympic Games have uneasily moved through geopolitical strife and upheavals. At times, they’ve turned a (perhaps necessary) blind eye to genocides, regional wars, official policies of segregation, and even several pandemics; the 1918 influenza pandemic haunted the 1920 Games in Antwerp, while the 2020 Tokyo Games were postponed to 2021.

Watching them unfold over time under the eye of talented filmmakers, you start to trace the pattern that marks the 20th century and, by the looks of it, the 21st, too. We need desperately to believe in progress, even as the evidence suggests it is, at best, not an upward climb, but we’re terrible at enacting it. You can’t watch Hitler in the stands or be reminded of the genocide in Sarajevo by a moment of silence at the start of a massive celebration without feeling the unease, too. There’s a history of obfuscations, abuses, and atrocities trailing in the Games’ wake. The athlete’s well-deserved triumph is theirs to celebrate. But if the goal of the Olympics is to foster world peace, the track record of success isn’t all that great.

Truth be told, “world peace” is probably too much to ask of an athletics competition, an unreasonable burden to saddle the skiers and swimmers and gymnasts with. They’re chasing another goal, and that’s ultimately what makes the Games so engrossing. Improbably enough, another Olympic Games is about to start, with the same themes of glory and progress and friendship and peace; it’s worth a look backward to be reminded that the future has never really been in the Games’ hands.

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