“With these empty seats and phony spectators, how will this effect the fighter. What is different about fighting without the crowd.”

-Brandon

…

This is, of course, all psychological, which makes it very modern. There is very little of physical reality left in our life.

The mask is a psychological tool with very limited medical utility. The mesh on the surgical mask will admit dry wall particles which are 100 times larger than a virus. So there has never been a sound physical reason for masking other than to keep a doctor's saliva from dripping into the open wound of a patient on the operating table. The medical reasoning is sound, however, if we look upon the mask as a psychiatric plague, a man-made social pathogen.

-Masks prevent the development of trust between strangers.

-Masks retard the socialization of children, almost as much as public schooling does.

-Masks cause fear among betas.

-Masks cause frustration among alphas.

-Masks not worn by omegas singles them out.

-Masks cause the tiny minority of thinkers among the mind-numbed masses to become agitated and hopefully act out to serve anarcho-tyranny scenario development.

-All of the above weakens existing social trust among humans and places them more firmly in the clutches of the vampires.

This makes maskland a vampire matrix peopled by masked zombies. Here in New York, in the shadow of Faghattan, the news stations have public service announcements with The Statue of Liberty Masked up. Such announcements that the danger of the only plague to ever sweep humanity into eternity come on every commercial break, with calls to mask even after the cure has been administered by avatars of Pater Pharmica...

For these reasons and others, I do not see the system of control abandoning masks. The tool has proven too handy, in the main voluntary, and has unleashed mob hysteria, which is an important tool of late-stage decline governance. So, even in my prize-fighting novel Cube, set in 2121, masking is a key cultural artifact. In this and other futures, masks will be interactive and serve as facial filters, utilizing media and medical technologies to alter emotive expression, effect cosmetic enhancements and self-indict thought criminals.

…

Prize-Fighting in Maskland

One of the key effects of the masking, reduction, muffling, and elimination of crowds from prize-fighting venues, which I was watching televised from empty Abu Dhabi and Las Vegas venues this time last year, is that only the fighters and announcers have complete faces. This will and has increased the moral authority of active unmasked athletes and media commentators. For such figures will increasingly become the only humans outside of a person's circle of close association to be seen in full empathy. Just as the power of the actor and the newscaster has roughly trippled under the mask, the power of the combat athlete, who is unmasked and un-helmeted and un-hatted, to actually become the avatar of the spectator will increase, making him an increasingly important social tool, either as a pressure release valve, consumption vector or lever of control. In the long term this will select for more socially astute fighters.

In the short term, the gym fighter will have the advantage over the crowd fighter, that is until a new personality type emerges among the crowd fighter.

Immediate effects which I have already noted are:

-There are many fewer fights to participate in. This will degrade fighting ability among most fighters and funnel more money to top celebrity fighters.

-Corners can more effectively communicate with their fighter during combat.

-And, hilariously, the fighters can now clearly hear what the asshole commentators at ringside are saying and even talk back and be heard by them during combat.

-Also, criticism of a ref [I think he was standing up fighters too soon] from ringside media heads in one Abu Dhabi fight resulted in the referee altering his actions to avoid more criticism from the experts at cageside.

-Finally, underground fight venues will proliferate. So, even as the vampire system gets what it wants in most ways: with more home audiences, fewer fighters with more social impact and a far more intricate cult of personality, enabling more pro-wrestling style good-guy bad-guy narratives to boost home ticket sales, men will start fighting in underground venues for bet money again and help reboot masculine action outside of the control of arch-fiend vampires like Dana Wight.