A Few Words on a Good Cubs Dog, and the Internet

I understand that you are busy looking at this photo of a tiny, concerned-looking, notably good dog wearing a Chicago Cubs bandana right now, but when you're done I would like to take you inside the game. The photos that you see embedded in the stories here at VICE Sports, for the most part, have been pulled off USA Today's photo wire. Photographers take pictures at various sports events and upload them to that wire, they're given captions and credits, and people like us search for them when we need art for our stories.

There are a lot of photos uploaded there, far more than we would ever need, and many of which we would never use. If you search for a football team's name, for instance, you'll get some pictures of coaches looking constipated or furious, a great many shots of quarterbacks going through their progressions and running backs plunging off tackle, and a few cheesecake-y photos of cheerleaders. The photo wire is, like the internet itself, both vast and effectively value-neutral, and it just kind of fills up with whatever; what sticks is only a small percentage of what is actually out there sloshing around, but there is still a lot of it. The photo above was taken by a photographer named Jerry Lai, whose back catalog includes at least one other photo of a good Cubs dog.

You will find these photos on the wire if you search "Chicago Cubs," but also if you search "dog." That's an illuminating search, turning up as it does photos of a disguise-wearing Stephen Colbert selling hot dogs at Wrigley Field, a three-sausage pile-up during Progressive Field's Hot Dog Derby race, Chicago White Sox infielder Tyler Saladino and his girlfriend petting a friendly-looking husky named Luna, and enough photos of dogs from the Rio Olympics—wandering onto the course during the marathon, wearing jaunty yellow hats, and heroically retrieving a flip-flop that was at grave risk of washing away on Ipanema beach.

It goes on like this. There is a dog who is described, in the caption, as "showing off his support" for the University of Missouri. This seems presumptuous for at least a couple of very obvious reasons, but I will share the photo with you here anyway as a matter of journalistic praxis.

For all the good that it can do and even intermittently does, the internet is also exhausting. It is loud and angry about the strangest things, it is tragically horny and needlessly cruel and so thirsty you would not fucking believe it; at least two-thirds of it would be designated, were it to appear on one of those ancient maps, as one of those "Here There Be Dragons" regions. It is an even stranger and more unsettling place to spend time than the actual three-dimensional world is, and if you have spent any time in the actual three-dimensional world of late, you know that this is saying quite a bit. Even the microscopic walled internet of the photo wire can have this dislocating impact on a person; I did an image search for "Donald Trump" a few weeks ago and pretty much lost my mind as a result.

There is all that, but it is also exhausting to think about, because it is so vast and because there is no map of it. Every weird bit of detritus that spins off the turbulent garbage gyre at the heart of the internet and somehow washes up in front of you—how impossibly long were the odds that you would ever see it? How unimaginable is the journey that brought it there? For all the ways in which the internet Brings Us Together, it also echoes with distance and blind chance and empty space. It's less good or bad than it is big, but simply because it is beneath or beyond or outside or otherwise without values does not mean the internet cannot be redeemed. There are, after all, dogs on it.