Meditations on Eurovision 2026

I watched it. It was nice. I'm not sure what to think about it.

Every year it's a spectacle, but I feel like the anticipation has gone down a bit. It sometimes feels like people just want to win, even though the real value of the competition is that you get to know artists you had no idea about before.

There's more representation now, more different genres. But the core fanbase of the competition might not be very general. It might not be a representative sample of the general population.

Sometimes it looks like the artists have no career outside of Eurovision. The cultural prestige has gone down. Maybe with different expectations, this could change.

Weirdly, when you attach a country flag to the performance, the whole thing becomes political. That's bad. Music is not ultimately about “Israel” or “Russia” or “Ukraine.” It should be kept cognitively separate in order to maintain some degree of sanity.

Still, it's sort of fun to experience Europe marketing itself.

I noticed a few countries boycotted the competition this year. I guess that kind of makes sense. If you exclude Russia because of its evil, then you should probably exclude Israel too. And no, it makes no sense to include Australia, because Australia is not in Europe. But it looks like you get to join when you belong to the same political bloc as the others. It smells like corruption, even if it's not. And I don't like the smell.

But if we sort of intentionally turn a blind eye to all of that, it's all good. Just focus on the dancing girls and the songs, I keep telling myself.

I also like the stage production. The thing is, there's hardly another proper show anymore. Fancy lights, pretty animations. Bonus points for those tight dresses. Negative points for weird-ass milkmen.

But there's more of that smell, too: I kind of get the feeling that some people think voting a certain way is supposed to be a strong political statement. No, it's not. It doesn't directly change people's minds about anything they disagree on.

Furthermore, it's almost like a meme that countries vote for their neighbors. I haven't exactly researched it, but eyeballing it, it seems to be more or less true. Some countries do like their neighbors the most. I did a quick round of data analysis myself and noticed that, despite it being a song contest, the song itself doesn't explain 100% of the results.

I wonder how you could even guarantee that; I wonder if a song contest can ever truly be about the song alone. I'd kind of want it to be, but there's no way around all the psychological effects. Even the order of performances matters.

I've also noticed there's some attempts at manufacturing opinion with respect to the artists. That feels kind of underhanded to me. I heard the Finnish commentator say something about betting on the winner, so I did a quick browse online and found at least one betting site. According to that site, they used some machine learning to come up with a prediction. The prediction was wrong. Oh well.

Betting is fun, of course, but it could demean the competition if it means people start buying votes. And I think they might. I sure could have used the money myself, but no one bought me off. Maybe next year.

Because of course, if you carefully balance the ratios, you could manufacture good enough winning odds, figure out the optimal point in time to turn the tables, and start aggressive social engineering to manufacture the winner. That way, you could cover the cost of all those bought votes and still turn a profit. I don't know if anyone does this, but I can see the possibility. I mean, that's what those betting site predictions are really for, are they not? Not necessarily to help you vote more accurately, but to influence how you vote.

Ah, but I have a suspicious mind, don't I? Just focus on the dancing girls and the songs, I keep telling myself. It's all good.

I think someone said something during the semifinals about Eurovision not being particularly gay, and that being an artist simply means being different, more distinctive. I'm not completely convinced.

But that's the thing: just like music isn't about politics, it's also not about sexual orientation.

When you watch old Eurovision stuff from decades ago, it's like visiting another planet, deep in outer space. Don't be too naïve now.

So, of course I'm somewhat skeptical about the meritocracy in the contest. Someone told me: it's structurally a national voting system embedded in identity politics. I think that's bullshit. Political influence is mostly external contamination.

And I suppose I'm pretty skeptical about the jury vote, too. I think it's received lots of criticism over the years. This doesn't surprise me, especially when it doesn't agree with the public vote.

But if disagreement is what makes the jury vote suspect, then how do you explain the jury vote itself doesn't tend to converge? I thought they were supposed to be experts. So you'd think their expertise is what informs them toward the same conclusions.

This stuff clearly isn't peer-reviewed.

But sure, let's think about it another way. Let's think the political stuff is "not a bug, but a feature." Fine, except it's not the Cold War anymore. You know I grew up in the 2000s, right?

Right. Let's kick into gear a bit.

You might say that it's cultural preference aggregation. But even then, shouldn't it converge on that, and not show so much variability in the winner? On the other hand, if we presume that in aesthetic domains, expertise is expected to expand the space of disagreement, then the competition should appear more random, not less. So which is good: more randomness or less? If it would be all about the song, then we could predict the winner looking at the song structure. We'd have found the perfect song recipe.

To my own detriment, I'm thinking this whole thing only makes sense if the organization deliberates to produce rational outcomes. That would mean some predictability. But this is awkwardly at odds with the purpose of having a competition in the first place, because then you could predict the winner beforehand, thus making the competition more or less irrelevant.

So it appears fairly random in practice, and maybe that's good. There's some structure, but not enough to predict the outcome. Right.

Underdetermination, I think they call it.

But looking at it like this, what's the politics doing in there? Yes it's not all about the song, clearly, and yet, people inject politics into it in order to... what exactly? Because remember, it's not enough structure to make the results predictable! It isn't that politics is just noise, but more like one of the channels through which preferences are expressed. Just that it's not enough to explain anything by itself. So does having that add something to the value of the competition or take something away?

And moreover, is disagreement about the winning song actually structural, too? That is, is it connected over time, over culture, or over shared information of the voters systematically? Probably. I've thought about this from the point of view that, actually, it's very easy to make the case that most everything is related. Everything humans think about is connected to something, thus forming a structure.

Indeed, the interesting thing about randomness here is that it could be that the system itself may not be random at all. It's just unpredictable in any practical sense.

Meaning, suppose there is a function that fully details the Eurovision winner, if you plug enough data in. Suppose further that that function is so incredibly complex that its minimal description is effectively just as long and the data itself, or close to it. That would make it impractical. So then, you of course ask, how much sense does it make to model human behavior with random models after all?

The apparent randomness of Eurovision may be epistemic rather than ontological. Could be there's structure, but we can't model it.

Because modeling implies compression.

And so, politics encourages people to impose overly strong symbolic interpretations onto a system that does not support that level of explanatory certainty.

Just thinking about it makes my head spin. Probably not very fruitful, to be honest.

Nah, man. Politics bad, Eurovision fake, jury corrupt.

Anyway, just focus on the dancing girls and the songs, I'll keep telling myself.