The brash Australian is a divisive but definitely modern figure, and the embodiment of sport in the social media age
, who plays in the third round at Wimbledon against Stefanos Tsitsipas on Saturday, and who has already been on various levels the most intriguing figure of the opening week.
Tennis loves to fixate on its bad boys and bad girls. But then this is the most mannered of sports, a place where fines are imposed for what are essentially social faux pas, for insufficiently ritualised behaviour, for wearing the wrong thing or shouting too loudly. Looking down that rap sheet, nothing Kyrgios has done seems particularly harmful in the real world. In 2018 he was fined at Queen’s for “miming masturbation with his water bottle”.
This has been a huge change in our lives, a presence that has been under‑examined. There are five billion social media users in the world, a total that has almost tripled in the last six years. Humans have become a herd. Our feelings, our thoughts, are now networked. There has never been a species-change quite like this.