Hi,
So, been a few weeks. Honestly, in the middle of the election, the COVID 3rd wave being mismanaged, and so much else, I just couldn’t get the bat off my shoulder.
But hey, let’s talk about what’s on my mind this week:
Law is not code
This quarter, I’ve been taking the amazing INTPOL 268 Hack Lab class at Stanford, taught by Riana Pfefferkorn of Stanford Law and Alex “Forrest Gump” Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory. The class is intended, roughly, to enable future lawyers and technologists to have better White House conference room conversations, by forcing the lawyers to learn how to use Kali Linux and Metasploit, and forcing the coders to learn what the law actually says.
The class was, personally, a real ray of light in this challenging year; it turns out having a specific, pass-or-fail set of things to do is actually really, really rewarding; equally, having a community of folks to nerd out about them with was hugely connecting in this isolating time.
But I want to share one of the biggest takeaways I had from the class — something I sort of knew, but got much more bone deep comfortable with. Whether or not Larry Lessig is right that “Code is Law,” law is not code. Over and over again, I’d see fellow students overconfidently make predictions about legal/political structures and actors based on what the black letter of the law seemed to say — predictions that then were wrong, or even undecided, when we looked at how actual court ruled on them.
Is wifi sniffing legal? Well, depends on which court you ask and whether you think a Congressman from the 1930s would think it counts as radio. Is web scraping legal if the EULA bans it? Maaaaybe not, so long as you’re in California. Is it 2020, and the most central cybersecurity law, the CFAA, is only just now really being tested in the Supreme Court? Surprisingly, yes!
So, don’t play lawyer if you’re a technologist, I guess. And maybe, just maybe (looks pointedly at the direction of AG Barr), don’t play technologist if you’re a lawyer.
Matt Yglesias is missing the point
So, Matt Yglesias has joined Substack.
And he’s decided, for some reason, to become a video game pundit?
(Now, I don’t actually think that any of the accusations of Matt Yglesias being like a Secret Stealth Member of the Intellectual Dark Web are accurate. But “hey, let me randomly attack a Kotaku author” sure is a, ah, rather specific choice that Yglesias is either making dangerously naively, or dangerously maliciously.)
For some reason, he objects to Ian Walker of Kotaku pointing out that it feels weird to celebrate the launch of the next generation of video game consoles in the middle of a pandemic. Ian writes, at the end of an otherwise perfectly normal, workmanlike-in-the-good-way review of the new PlayStation 5, that:
The harsh truth is that, for the reasons listed above and more, a lot of people simply won’t be able to buy a PlayStation 5, regardless of supply. Or if they can, concerns over increasing austerity in the United States and the growing threat of widespread political violence supersede any enthusiasm about the console’s SSD or how ray tracing makes reflections more realistic. That’s not to say you can’t be excited for those things—I certainly am, on some level—but there’s an irrefutable level of privilege attached to the ability to simply tune out the world as it burns around you.
Yglesias responds with a criticism that, to me, feels off-point on at least two levels. The boring one is that he wants to say that lots of folks benefitted from enhanced unemployment insurance, and thinks that should outweigh Walker’s concerns about, y’know, record numbers of people still needing food banks to be able to feed their children:
The problem here, to me, is not that Walker ought to “stick to sports.” It’s that the analysis is bad. But because it’s in a video game console review rather than a policy analysis section and conforms to the predominant ideological fads, it just sails through to our screens.
What actually happened is that starting in March the household savings rate soared (people are taking fewer vacations and eating out less) and while it’s been declining from its peak as of September it was still unusually high. One result of this is a lot of people have been able to pay off old debts. At the same time, interest rates have plunged without sparking an increase in borrowing, so household debt service costs have plummeted.
The upshot of this is that no matter what you think about Biden or the American health care system, the fact is that the sales outlook for a new video game console system is very good. There is economic hardship in America, but the larger trend is that middle class people are seeing their homeowners’ equity rise and their debt payments fall, while cash piles up on their balance sheets, because it’s not safe to throw a big birthday party or take a vacation this weekend.
Not to just pick on this one article, but it was striking to me because it was both emblematic of the way far-left politics has suffused non-political media and also because the topic had nothing to do with race or gender identity issues.
This is a weird fight to pick, claiming that because lots of people aren’t starving, it’s wrong for Walker to point out that some people are, and that their situations will get worse unless Mitch McConnell suddenly decides to do something.
But let’s skip past Yglesias and his refusal to have an actual human reaction.
I want to tell you that even if he doesn’t think economics matters to video game console sales, the gaming industry does. In the past few years, the gaming industry has fundamentally shifted its model for how consoles get released because of how important it is.
Until recently, consoles had relatively well-defined generations: for Sony, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 (The Xbox had similar generations, but the names are very very confusing, so let’s skip past that). Prices would decline over time, but, generally, the console you bought on Day 1 was the same console as you’d buy on Day 1000. But with the end of the previous console generation, and the start of the new one, the process shifted to meaningfully differentiate and price-discriminate the offerings within the same generation from the same platform, because fans want more affordable options.
It all really started a few years ago. As the timeframe of the PS4-gen consoles extended awkwardly long, both consoles released a sort of “generation 4.5” console. These consoles had somewhat improved features, most notably better graphics. The launch of these consoles, the PlayStation 4 Pro in 2016, and the Xbox One X in 2017 allowed Sony and MSFT to discount their normal generation 4 models with a lower-price refresh (e.g., the PlayStation 4 Slim and the Xbox One S). Dropping the price over time is normal, adding storage space for the same price is normal, but improving graphics was new.
These trends continued into the current generation, with Xbox offering two distinct variants with different graphics capabilities and storage and whether they had a disc drive, and PlayStation offering two variants distinguished only by the disc drive. And, tellingly, both consoles only announced their pricing a few months ago.
Bear in mind: consoles are, generally, sold at a loss - it’s a razors and blades model where platforms make up the money from licensing and digital store fees, as well as ongoing subscription revenues, for the games sold for their platform. So why do console-makers even care that much about having different price points, why not just offer one variant? Because they know that buying a console is still a big upfront price for a lot of folks who want to buy their devices, regardless of how much additional unemployment insurance payment they got this year. The market, in other words, is telling us that the most sophisticated actors in this market think that buying a console is still a big purchase, and that affordability for folks of lesser means is one of the most important things they design for.
Yglesias was so interested in punching down, that he missed the actual economic story about the behavior of the actual actors in the space.
Now, don’t get me wrong — I think that dollar-for-dollar, gaming consoles are some of the best products you can buy, whether you’re looking to hang out with friends and family, model black holes, or instantiate a rogue AI to protect all human lives…
(Disclosures:
I don’t know Yglesias, but he knows a bunch of people I know and has been kind to them.
I used to work at Activision Blizzard, which presumably will release many products for PlayStation and Xbox that will be reviewed by Kotaku, etc. )
There is no such thing as military-grade encryption
May these cats bless your timeline:
May this Marine bless your toe-shine:
May these otters be your counsel:
May these cows find their hay:
(Watch until the end, trust me)
Other news:
The only good use of 3d printers
Next time on Dave Kasten:
If river otters are otterneys, are sea otters experts at the Law of the Sea, and does that mean that they are the next NCIS spinoff?
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
I may on occasion use Amazon Affiliate or similar links when referencing things I’d tell you about anyways. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases; I donate the proceeds to charity. While Substack has a paid subscription option, I don’t have any plans to use it at this time and anyone who gets this newsletter now surely won’t be ever paying for their subscription.