The Roman poet Juvenal came up with the phrase "bread and circuses" as a negative critique of how the Roman empire could pacify it's citizens. He thought that citizens would be at peace if they were provided with two things: bread (food, infrastructure, survival necessities) and circuses (entertainment).
Even though Juvenal meant this negatively, this still holds true. Today, we look to our bread nations to provide our survival needs. These are the traditional institutions that we think about when we talk about nations (United States, China, North Korea, etc.). Some of these are democratic, some are dictatorial, etc.
Instead of looking at nation states for our entertainment, we turn to circus nations/corporate-nations (Disney, NFL, various religions, etc.) to satisfy that need. (Unless you're unlucky enough to be forced to view North Korean state-sanctioned "entertainment". There's also an argument to be made for Tencent as state-sponsored entertainment.) Unlike how bread governments have a spread of governance systems, circus governments are all essentially dictatorships. We have no say in their governance. Also, with declining religious participation and television viewership, we're clearly looking to emigrate to new circus nations.
How does this tie into Matrix? (If you don't know what Matrix is, read this. tl;dr: We're creating a democratic esports team.)
I've been thinking that in building Matrix, we're building the stickiest, most powerful form of a brand. We're really building a digitally native circus nation. Our fans are our citizens and our teams/streamers are the cultural glue that keeps everyone together. The great thing about having digitally native nation is that we don't have to worry about pesky things like geography, borders, etc. And, because we're building a circus nation, we can basically outsource the expensive, low-profit margin stuff to existing bread governments (if we're using VC techspeak to talk about it, we're kinda unbundling the Roman Empire). Thinking about Matrix as a nation makes me super excited about the future of entertainment and governance. We've never had the opportunity to have such a close-knit society that's not limited by physical distance and survival necessities. And, we've never had the opportunity to have a democratic circus government before. By thinking about ourselves with a nation framework, we can deeply explore both of these new opportunity spaces within the context of esports. :)
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