We’re All Watching. And We’re Missing the Point.

The Super Bowl brought at least 127 million Americans together. We spent it arguing about nothing that matters.

There are very few moments left in our modern era when America tunes in to the same channel.

I see this most clearly with my teenage son. When I ask where he gets his information, the answer is most normally: social media, influencers, Reddit. Sources his friends also cite, forming their own ecosystem of truth.

My news diet looks nothing like his. I’m still subscribed to The Washington Post, even after they laid off much of their reporting staff (I had pre-bought my year-long subscription). I try to read across the spectrum, from Breitbart to Politico, from overseas outlets to popular podcasts, working to piece together what’s actually happening.

Everyone’s news consumption is fractured now. And those filters don’t just inform our perspectives. They create entirely separate realities.

Which is why the Super Bowl feels increasingly precious. Even for someone like me who really doesn’t have a football team I root for.

One hundred twenty-seven million Americans at least (early estimates predict), gathered around the same screen, watching the same game, seeing the same high-cost commercials. It’s kind of our last campfire. The question is: What are we doing with that rare moment of collective attention?

This year’s answer depressed me.

Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl halftime show. Kid Rock at Turning Point USA's counter programming.

The Distraction Olympics

I’ll be honest. I was a high school football cheerleader, and I found this game dull. My husband desperately wanted his Lions there. No luck. For me, the draw was probably Bad Bunny. I have friends who are superfans, and the controversy piqued my interest.

He’d sing in Spanish, as he always does, and that has brought about his popularity. Turning Point USA responded by hosting Kid Rock as counter-programming. Both singers’ lyrics would make my grandmothers turn off the TV, but both have their fans. Both singers’ lyrics can be hard to understand, even for a native language speaker.

The week before the game, we argued about language. Some had near melt-downs about whether the halftime show should be in Spanish or English. Never mind that both are colonizers’ languages. The British and Spanish brought them here, erasing what came before. Never mind that real-time translation could have solved the whole manufactured problem.

We had the debate anyway. We always do.

Meanwhile, President Trump, who spent his first term dominating every news cycle, who once would have been interviewed during the broadcast itself, was relegated to posting angry reactions after the fact. In some ways that felt maybe like progress, or I guess proof that we’ll always find something to fight about (even when it’s not Trump).

Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction still outranks all of this in Super Bowl controversy history.

We’re very good at being outraged by the wrong things.

What We Didn’t Talk About

Here’s what we missed while arguing about halftime shows: The cascade of under-regulated technologies advertised during breaks that are quietly rewiring our children’s futures.

Crypto companies bought prime ad space (again). This time just months after another exchange collapse wiped out billions in savings. The industry remains largely unregulated, with no meaningful consumer protections, yet we’re still being sold on digital gold as the future of money.

Our kids are watching and some singalong to the Backstreet Boys, but it doesn’t change the dubious and under regulated nature of cryptocurrency.

AI companies showcased tools that will reshape every job in the next decade. They’re training their models on all or our data, including our children’s data, their homework, their creative work, with no guardrails, no long-term studies, no societal consensus on what we’re building.

But the commercials sure were slick.

Pharmaceutical companies advertised GLP-1 drugs that are now being prescribed to teenagers, despite having no long-term data on how they affect developing bodies. We’ve gone from the obesity epidemic to the weight-loss revolution without pausing to ask what happens in twenty years.

There was even an ad about family farms (produced on behalf of Lays) in an era where regulations are making it incredibly difficult for families to maintain family farms.

These aren’t fringe concerns.

These are the forces actively reshaping the world our children will inherit. We had 127 million people watching the same broadcast, a genuine cultural miracle in 2026, and instead of focusing on those issues, we spent it arguing about a language debate that, especially in unique art, to me, doesn’t actually make a long-term difference. (Don’t get me wrong, the underlying immigration debate is crucial and deserves our attention, but which language an artist sings in? I would rather make sure the audio issues and subtitles are resolved).

The Cost of Distraction

I’m not naïve enough to think a football game should become a policy seminar. People deserve entertainment. They deserve escape. The Super Bowl has always been part spectacle, part circus.

But there’s something uniquely American about our ability to transform every shared moment into a new front in the culture war, while the actual war, the one being waged by unregulated technology and unchecked corporate power, rages on unnoticed, and way under-debated.

We’re so busy being distracted that we don’t realize we’re choosing the distractions ourselves.

My son’s generation, our children’s generation, will live in a world where AI makes hiring decisions, where digital currencies might replace the dollar, where weight-loss drugs are seemingly as common as Advil. And family farms are too rare. They’ll inherit the consequences of our regulatory failures and our unwillingness to have hard conversations about innovation versus safety, big business versus small.

And when they ask what we were doing when all this was being decided, we’ll have to tell them: We were arguing about whether a halftime show should be in Spanish.

We had America’s attention. All of it, at once, for a few precious hours. We could have used it to start real conversations about the future barreling toward us.

Instead, we got distracted. Again.

And we’re still missing the point.