The World Cup is back. 48 teams, three host countries, billions of eyeballs, and — somehow — Saudi Aramco as an official sponsor. Sure.

This week we go good, bad, and ugly on the 2026 FIFA World Cup through a media and communications lens. The good: why the World Cup's claim to global shared attention is actually different from every other event that gets called "the last global media event" (yes, we know we say that every time). The bad: what it means for the world's most international tournament to be hosted by a country that has spent four years making it structurally difficult for international people to enter. And the ugly: sportswashing as a communications strategy, FIFA's governance that got quieter rather than cleaner, and what Guy Debord would make of a match ball that is also a brand.

The football is still in there. Finding it just requires looking past quite a lot of other things first.

I'm back from Berlin. Three days at re:publica — Europe's biggest digital culture conference — and I have thoughts.

The good news: the room was packed. People sat on the floor and stood in the doorway to hear a talk about digital dissent in Southeast Asia. People genuinely care about the open internet, democracy, and what happens when platforms eat themselves. There was even a hater in my Q&A, which means at least someone was paying attention.

The complicated news: caring about the right things and building a coalition big enough to actually change them are two different skills. This episode is about the gap between them — and why the people who understand the game best sometimes struggle most to grow the team playing it.

Also: Cory Doctorow, enshittification, and why I'm still wearing the entrance wristband a week later.

This past week three things happened. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened globally to $234M — a film about an industry that sacrifices craft for speed, made by sacrificing craft for speed. The first half and second half feel directed by different people, because the production more or less was. Ted Turner died, aged 87 — the man who invented 24-hour news in 1980, closed the gap between events and their broadcast to zero, and accidentally created the model that turned urgency into a default register rather than a signal.

And re:publica, Europe's largest digital culture conference, announced its 2026 theme: Never Gonna Give You Up. The Rickroll. Inverted. You know it's Rick Astley. That's the point.

In this episode, Sascha connects all three — using auteur theory, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Walter Benjamin, and the political economy of media ownership — to ask what it looks like when media gives up on coherence, depth, and craft. And what it looks like when it refuses to.

Recorded before heading to Berlin to speak at re:publica on gamification, dissent, and the digital frontlines of Southeast Asia.

FUNK !T — media and communication theory for what's actually happening this week.