“Welcome to the age of the cage match,” read the headline on a July 7, 2023, story by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times. (Free link here.) The subhed: “These days, powerful men want to beat one another. Literally.”
The main event, as Bernstein put it, is between the CEOs of Twitter and Meta. On June 21, Elon Musk (in the Twitter corner) let it be known to his 148 million Twitter followers that he was willing to fight Mark Zuckerberg—CEO of Meta, which launched Twitter rival Threads on July 5—in a “cage match.”
I’m up for a cage match if he is lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023
Musk, who has been at various times in the last two years the world’s richest human, later tweeted that such a match might take place in the Las Vegas Octagon, or on second thought, in Rome’s Colosseum. (The Italian minister of culture reportedly issued an invitation.) He also proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest.” Zuckerberg, a fellow billionaire whose wealth usually places him within grasping distance of Musk, is a student of Brazilian jujitsu. Musk has admitted that he almost never works out.
zuck wins the cage match without ever stepping into the ring pic.twitter.com/f2nLWD80v8
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 10, 2023
Chalk it all up to the silly season, or to that male-primate-dominance thing, or to the “it’s just a joke lol” spirit of the age. (Neil Postman nailed it in 1985 with Amusing Ourselves to Death; Emily Nussbaum published a superb update in early 2017, “How Jokes Won the Election.”) In any event, I found myself wondering about the origin and history of cage match.
Cage matches today are a staple of WWE (wrestling) and MMA (mixed martial arts) contests. According to a Wikipedia entry, the earliest recorded cage match took place on January 9, 1936, in Caruthersville, Missouri, “in a ring surrounded by chicken wire, to keep the athletes inside, and prevent any potential interference.” The object was to escape the cage, either over the top or through a door, or by pinfall. Over the years cage construction evolved to steel bars and finally to chain link, which is cheaper to make and more flexible (and safer for the wrestlers) than steel.
Steel cage match at a 2013 Impact Wrestling event, via Wikipedia
In general parlance a cage-match dare carries a whiff of a 19th-century “pistols at dawn” challenge: full of bluster and fury, signifying male egoism and concepts of honor. There’s something about the cage enclosure that heightens the drama, and the stakes; maybe it’s the imitation of claustrophobia, or the image of scaling a wall to freedom. “A lot of it is spectacle,” men’s-studies lecturer Andrew Reiner told the Times’s Bernstein. “‘It’s textbook, old-school, throwback masculinity.’”
Bernstein adds:
The modern history of male politicians strutting and brawling dates back at least to Teddy Roosevelt in the early 1900s. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and himself a judo black belt, was photographed shirtless on horseback in 2009. And Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House and onetime vice-presidential candidate, posed with 40-pound dumbbells for Time magazine before the 2012 presidential election.
Writing in Tech Policy Press on July 14, Justin Hendrix put Musk and Zuckerberg’s “bravado and posturing” in sober perspective:
The Musk-Zuckerberg spectacle, while stupid, is clarifying — it reveals the extent to which Silicon Valley has abandoned even the veneer of its purported mission of advancing humanity and solving the pressing challenges of our time. This is not the age of Silicon Valley innovation. It is the age of Silicon Valley bullshit.
There is an honesty in laying that reality bare. While readers of Tech Policy Press may be concerned about the health of democracy and the effects of technology on society, men like Musk and Zuckerberg treat such things as fundamentally no more important than their farcical feud. Musk has more than destroyed Twitter as a constructive environment for human expression and deliberation, having filled it with people who have as much impulse control and concern for others as himself. Zuckerberg, who once promised a “global community,” now wants nothing to do with news or journalism or politics; all that serious stuff is bad for his advertising business.
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Related: Kayfabe, my word for the week of September 26, 2016
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