'Fortnite' Is Everywhere, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: Why everyone wants to talk about "Fortnite," yet another simple explanation of capitalism and some dudes just freaking love blocking ads.
'Fortnite' Will Explain Everything
Let us take a moment and go through how the blog sausage is made.
For a time, "Avengers: Infinity War" was the Hot Cultural Thing everyone was talking, or more accurately blogging, about. And the reasons why aren't that complicated: It's the culmination of over a decade's worth of Marvel movies and shows. It is the thing many people have been waiting for ever since that one post-credits scene in 2008's "Iron Man." Of course folks are going to write about it. Heck, we're guilty! We have a guide to watching all the Marvel movies, we have a guide to not watching the Marvel movies, and we have a guide to making that one meme from "Infinity War."
Everyone who writes online hopes for something that walks a delicate balance between being insanely popular but also somewhat impenetrable to outsiders. "Infinity War" might be completely knowable to hundreds of millions of fans, which only means that it's a mystery to hundreds of millions more. This equates to thousands of people who might want to read your blog to see how wrong you are, and thousands more who honestly just want to know what the big deal is.
Many of us, high on "Infinity War" traffic, are looking for our next fix. Thankfully, I think we've found it: the ridiculously popular "Fortnite: Battle Royale." The beginnings of this stretch all the way back to March when Drake played "Fortnite" with popular Twitch streamer Ninja. Drake's fame combined with the relative obscurity of "Fortnite" and Ninja is just blog catnip: You know we had to do it to 'em.
But now we're starting to see culture writers stretch their legs a little bit. This week, Robin Sloan has an excellent essay that compares his experiences in the online shooter with the theories around discovery of intergalactic civilizations. Sarah Jeong uses a high-profile lawsuit between "Fortnite" developer Epic and a 14-year-old player who posted a YouTube video of him using hacks to examine the copyright law as it applies to video games.
There are millions of people playing "Fortnite" at any given moment, and hundreds of thousands more just watching people play "Fortnite" on Twitch. It's probably worth a few blogs to try and examine just what the heck is the deal with this thing.
Actually, Capitalism Isn't That Complicated
Somehow, I keep running into Yanis Varoufakis online.
First it was in 2012 when video game developer Valve brought on Varoufakis to figure out just how the heck they were going to do this microtransactions thing. Given that "Counter Strike: Global Offensive" weapon skins ballooned into a $2.3 billion gambling industry, I'd say it was a success.
Then it was after I got a job here, at Digg dot com, and thus had to transition from litigating online debates over the Ford Ranger to, uh, literally anything else. At the time, Varoufakis had transitioned from figuring out how to price video game cosmetic items to sitting at table with the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund as Greece's finance minster, trying to negotiate a solution to his home country's debt crisis. He was not successful.
This week, I find my friend Varoufakis on Literary Hub, with a letter to his daughter on how Capitalism works. Okay so it's not actually a letter to his daughter — it's an excerpt of his new book "Talking to My Daughter About the Economy Or, How Capitalism Works — And How It Fails." Still, it is an invigoratingly straightforward explanation of the relationship between the government, free enterprise and the accumulation of debt. I'll let this passage speak for itself:
Workers need entrepreneurs to hire them, who need workers to buy their goods. Entrepreneurs need bankers to lend to them, who need entrepreneurs to pay interest. Bankers need governments to protect them, who need bankers to fuel the economy. Inventors cannibalize the inventions of others and plagiarize the ideas of scientists. The economy relies on everyone.
Can't wait to see where Varoufakis pops up next.
Online Advertising Is Such A Mess
It would be easy to read Adrienne Jeffries's profile of the staff behind Pi-hole — a network-level ad blocker — and take one of two sides.
If you work in media or advertising, you're going to look at how much your display advertisements are bringing in and probably get mad at the folks who get a kick out of blocking them. A word like "theft" might come to mind. These folks want to read your blogs, but they'd rather do so without the "visual clutter" of the stuff that pays for it.
If you are literally anyone else, you're probably cheering these folks on. Good on them for finding a way to take back an assumption of privacy online. It's about time that someone took drastic measures, and maybe this will finally be the thing that gets an entire industry to change its practices.
Here's a third option: maybe we don't need to implode the media industry and maybe we don't need to rely on bands of activist IT engineers to affect change. Maybe if we were to appeal to a third party, perhaps one with the authority to dictate and enforce the extent to which folks are tracked and advertised to online. I am, of course, talking about government. The best kind of ad blocker we can hope for are clear laws on online advertising, not a $35 computer.
