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RGIII And Afterlife In A Glass House: David Roth's Weak In Review

The Cleveland Browns signing a free agent quarterback does not really qualify as news. But, when Robert Griffin III is concerned, we're in another realm entirely.
Illustration by J.O. Applegate

I never learned the particular nature of the unclean spirit that came to possess the wireless internet in my apartment, although we quickly learned that it was both insistent and extremely tacky. How it wound up inhabiting our modem is as much a mystery as everything else having to do with the spirit world, although it probably had something to do with the fact that the modem was ancient and the internet is, generally speaking, a surging tide of sodden medical waste and corroded styrofoam that's forever looking to burst through any available fissure. Whatever carried this virus across the universe and onto our internet, it arrived in a burst of stammering spam and stayed, screaming, until the cable company brought us a new modem.

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While it was here, the internet in our home was utterly captive to this stuttering shade. It hijacked pages in our browser and redirected them to various destinations across the Shit Internet—lumpen web games, blinking encouragements to get to know the Thousand of Russian Womans In Area Now, and upgrade sites beseeching us through avant-garde punctuation and urgent Babblefish prose to upgrade Adobe Flash. Ads blinked in their boxes and were replaced, and suddenly The New York Times had ghoulish GIF ads encouraging us to take advantage of an imaginary Obama Refinancing Rates on the mortgage we don't have. Pages redirected to Hot2015rewards.com, dateset.whenupdateswork.club, assets.gossiptrend.com, http://testpc24.profitableads.online. We would be doing ordinary things and then that wheedling ghost would sweep through, the browser would sputter and panic, and we'd awaken to find ourselves suddenly under the internet.

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Most puzzling was the Zlatan Ibrahimovic-related liga-stars.com/zlatancrashingwebsite, but they were all puzzling, because they were part of a sprawling authorless sub-internet of garbage that no one willingly visits. It is enough to know that this internet exists, a vertical mile below even the eggs screaming racial slurs in the dark on Twitter. Some person is behind all that, and those idiocies and smallnesses are human idiocies and human smallnesses.

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This is not that. The Shit Internet is something that no one makes, and no one wants—it is for no one, but it is everywhere, nibbling and flashing around the edges of the rest of the online world like some hideous blind deep-sea creature that subsists on people stupid enough to give the three-digit code on the back of their credit card to a website whose URL literally ends "dot-online."

It's easier to consider the weirdness of the underinternet when you're not being dragged there against your will, but there's something about it that has stuck with me even now that I'm no longer saying GODDAMMIT and closing tabs all the time. It's not so much that elements of the underinternet—the no-chill persistence and exclamatory inauthenticity and general honking artlessness—are with us up here as it is that we are surrounded by and daily move through smoother and more sophisticated versions of it. It is easier to remember this when Robert Griffin III is in the news.

When your buddies congratulate you on your cool new super-tight shirt. — Photo by Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

Griffin was once an exciting football player and is now something else. The Cleveland Browns, a metaphor for our nation's crumbling infrastructure that is disguised as a football team, signed him to a free agent contract this week, and the National Robert Griffin III Conversation churned back to life. It is a lousy conversation, as you'll recall from the last time anyone bothered participating in it, a tired and tiring exercise exercise in various veiled uglinesses conducted through ill-tempered aspersion-casting and barking doofy scouting cosplay. Griffin hasn't done much worth talking about as a football player since his volcanic and legitimately wonderful first season ended with him wrecking his knee on the shredded turf at FedEx Field in a playoff game, but the conversation isn't really about him as a football player. It only briefly ever was.

What it became, instead, was a metastatic version of one of those foul-breathed playfights staged on ESPN and Fox Sports, a lazy Is He Elite conversation that somehow mutated into something even dumber—a referendum on whether Griffin was black enough or too black and whether he was sufficiently respectful of authority or in-, but which ultimately was about the relative disingenuousness or secret bias of the other person in the shouting match. Griffin limped and griped through a doomed comeback attempt and lost his job several times. Washington held him out all of last year, and by the time he left the team only the creeps and heroic hypocrite hunters even cared, and even then cared only enough to burp an I Told You So at their counterparties.

Signing With The Browns only sounds like a euphemism for "disappeared under suspicious circumstances," but it's close enough for football purposes. It's easy to interpret the signing as part of the nascent Moneyball gambit attributed to new exec Paul DePodesta, whom the Browns hired away from the New York Mets. It's possible to interpret the team's whole depressing offseason this way. But also there is no real reason to interpret it at all. Someone engaging in executive cosplay would say the Browns are taking a chance on a distressed asset with a comparatively high ceiling; a regular human might say that they signed that one guy who was really good in 2012 because such a person is better than any of the options they presently have on hand. Both would be right, although the former would definitely be more annoying in conversation. But this is a free agent signing by the Cleveland Browns, and as such there's no real reason to talk about it at all.

It still happens, of course, not because of anything that Griffin has done as a football player since late autumn of 2012 but because he—like Johnny Manziel, the quarterback he replaces—has transcended his actual self and achieved memehood. There is a restless and shitty immortality that comes with this sort of anti-celebrity—the sense that a so-memed player's name is forever lurking just offscreen on that What We're Shouting About Now graphic on ESPN, ready to scroll up, unbidden, and receive more extremely casual scrutiny from some promiscuous anti-expert or other.

Outside the benighted and multiply nuked afterworld inhabited by Cleveland Browns fans, there is not much constituency for considering Robert Griffin III at all right now. It would be great if that changed, because Browns fans have suffered more than enough and because football is more fun when Griffin is playing it well. But it doesn't necessarily have to. There is a thing that comes after actual discourse, a sort of flat plane of perpetual attention that serves everyone and no one at the same time; it is not really for anyone, but it is everywhere. This is where our Internet Ghost led us, into the clammy underworld of sleepless, pointless, predatory noise. Robert Griffin III lives there, poor guy, and the rest of us are probably spending more time there than we even know.