The most notable part of being here is the confirmation of just how much people around the world do reflexively despise the US now, or regard it solely as a frightening and hateful entity, an agent of only bad things.

There are sound fact-based reasons for this. The US entered this World Cup having recently murdered the head of state of the second-ranked team in Group G, not to mention offering support to a conflict of annihilation in Palestine. The Trump administration is toying with crashing the world economy. The ICE immigration militia is persecuting its own population. Even the World Cup itself is an act of economic violence, priced out of any sensible human scale.

But hatred of the US as a single entity is also a confusing idea, albeit one that fits a certain monotheistic world view, where there can only be devils and angels. It involves demonising as a single failed entity a hugely diverse and varied nation with elements of every kind of people and every kind of culture, the great human experiment, with all its freedoms and flaws; and doing so based on the actions and pronouncements of a few governing MAGA Republicans.

If America has become this single thing in so many people’s minds, it is perhaps because this is the way we experience things now. Everything is flattened, foreshortened, turned into sound and noise. Never underestimate the effect of the hive mind, that constant third space we carry around with us. This World Cup is the first global event to take place so deep inside that online space, experienced in peeled-eyeball detail through a screen as a set of images and shouted ideas.

This is how our flow of information works now, and indeed how Donald Trump took power, flooding the zone, shouting the simplest message above the noise. The US may feel like an expression of violence simply in its daily existence, an endless amplification of human talent, greed, desire, cruelty, where nobody is ever really in charge, they’re just out there riding it like a runaway bronco. But the US is also not Trump. Seventy‑seven million people voted for him, 272 million did not. A nation of 350 million people with more than 100 significant immigrant cultural groups cannot be one thing.

The US is the world in a very large and varied grain of sand, endlessly rich in all its beauty, energy, flaws and vices. To hate this is a baffling idea. If you don’t like America, what do you like? This is what humans are.

And like everyone else, Americans are oppressed too, right here in their own nation, by a tier of unelected technology overlords, and by an angry and divisive regime. This is a place that has been poisoning its own people for a hundred years, if not with violence and division, then with food, drugs and mental sludge.

For what it’s worth, the gathering of people under the banner of Fifa’s horribly compromised World Cup has provided a reminder of other things. Meeting people in the real space: this is pretty much an act of revolutionary dissent, a refusal to accept the loss of scale.

The reception at this World Cup from everyday people has been warm, anecdotally, and on the immediate evidence it is also striking how often people here want to talk about how their country is viewed by the rest of the world, to apologise and explain, to rage against Trump’s isolationism.

Who knows, perhaps the basic mechanics of sport can help point to something else. So many teams model the exact opposite of separation and division. The diaspora XIs of Curaçao and Cape Verde, for example, which are literally telling you what countries are, how they got this way, how they have interacted with the world, and who are now out there sharing moments of theatrical joy and agony, bumping into each other, coexisting.

Does this have any actual value? Nobody really knows. But Egypt and Iran will play in Seattle at the end of June on the Friday of the city’s Pride celebration, two nations where any kind of diverse sexuality is illegal, but who will just have to lump it and take it in; and this is the best of sport, making people confront each other in the real world space, to appreciate that they are not simply cyphers or hostile entities.

Football isn’t going to unite the world but it may just hold up a useful little hand mirror. This is a show that still provides a model of the best, not the worst, of what the US is supposed to be: a place on the human scale, an idea that fits into your hand. And a reminder that feeling hatred for this place, like hating anywhere else, is to fall into the trap of those who seem very happy to weaponise it.