Category: Economics

Shiny

Alright, listen up Pandora, Diamonds International, Tiffany & Co., and other brands of fancy upscale jewelry that I can’t be bothered to recall at this time because I’m a guy. I’m about to talk about an idea that could help you dodge a bullet and get ahead of the next big thing.

Let’s face it, jewelry is seen as feminine. This is true to a place where guys feel out of place in a jewelry store; not just lost, but in many cases subtly unwelcome. This is a problem for you, because, as businesses, you want to be able to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. And perhaps more to the point, you don’t want to be marked as being too much part of traditional gender roles in the minds of the younger generation.
To your credit, you’re clearly trying, with your displays of cuff links, tie clips, and other implements of haberdashery. There’s just one problem- I have only the vaguest idea what a cuff link or a tie clip is supposed to do for me. As far as I know for sure, cuff links are the little pieces that hold the two wrist parts in handcuffs together, and tie clips are part of a wardrobe organizational system that prevent ties from becoming creased in a way that’s noticeable. And I’ll wager a lot that I’m far from the only guy for whom this holds true.
So you need something more obvious in its application. Something that I can walk up to the display and immediately surmise and articulate precisely why it is I need to own that thing, instead of needing a sales representative to explain to me how back in the olden days, fancy shirts didn’t used to come with buttons on their cuffs, and why I should care to replace mine with something more expensive and less practical.
Like, say, a wristwatch. It’s obvious why I would want to have a watch to tell me the time, and if I’m going to be wearing one anyways, a convincing argument can be made that I ought to treat myself to the finest and shiniest, which, I will be told, has been perfectly painstakingly custom engineered by the best in alpine watchmaking tradition. I may not have any use for such a watch today, but at least it’s a defensible reason for me to indulge myself to peruse shiny and expensive objects.
Except wristwatches are dying. Not just fancy and expensive models that use gratuitous amounts of valuable metals and stones, which have been slowly getting replaced by smaller, lighter, digital models that can also tell me the date, weather, set alarms, and act as a stopwatch since the calculator watches of the 1970s, but even these are being edged out. In some cases by smart watches, which can do everything listed previously, and then also take over several functions of a phone. But in most cases, watches are simply disappearing and being replaced by… nothing.
That’s because the need for a watch has been steadily eroded as young people have decided that they can just use their phone to tell the time. The smartphone didn’t kill the wristwatch, but the cultural shift towards having the action of glancing at one’s phone as casually acceptable as looking at one’s watch will. The more accepted having phones out becomes in polite company, the faster watches will disappear.
So, how do watches compete? It is still marginally easier to glance at a watch than to take a phone out from a pocket and look at it. But when a phone can also do so much more, to the point that pulling out a phone is a routine action anyways (to check texts, news alerts, and the like), the watch is still going to lose. The watch has to be able to take over some tasks from the phone in the same way that the phone can from the watch.
Modern smart watches already meet this threshold. On my own pebble smartwatch, I can receive text messages and other notifications, and decided whether I need to respond without ever having to touch my phone. I can screen incoming calls, and route them through my headphones. I can play and adjust my music, all without ever having to unlock my phone. It does exactly what I need it to, which is why it is an essential part of my essential kit.
There’s just one problem. My smartwatch is made of clunky looking, albeit durable and relatively cheap, plastic components. It stands out like a sore thumb in a formal outfit. Moreover, smart watches aren’t accepted in the same way that smartphones are.
So, jewelry companies: you need a trend you can cash in on with young men? Try smart watches. Cast them in silver and gold, with sparkling diamonds on the menu buttons, and custom engravings. Or heck, cut out watches entirely and go straight to phone cases. The important part is embracing this paradigm shift rather than stubbornly insisting that I still need a miniature grandfather clock on my wrist because my wearable computer isn’t fancy enough.

Thoughts on Steam

After much back and forth, I finally have a steam account. I caved eventually because I wanted to be able to actually play my brother’s birthday present to me; the game Cities: Skylines and all of its additional downloadable content packs. I had resisted, what has for some time felt inevitably, downloading steam, for a couple of reasons. The first was practical. Our family’s main computer is now reaching close to a decade old, and in its age does not handle all new things gracefully, or at least, does not do so consistently. Some days it will have no problem running multiple CPU-intensive games at once. Other days it promptly keels over when I so much as try to open a document.

Moreover, our internet is terrible. So terrible in fact that its latest speed test results mean that it does not qualify as broadband under any statutory or technical definition, despite paying not only for broadband, but for the highest available tier of it. Allegedly this problem has to do with the geography of our neighborhood and the construction of our house. Apparently, according to our ISP, the same walls which cannot help but share our heating and air conditioning with the outside, and which allow me to hear a whisper on the far side of the house, are totally impermeable to WiFi signals.

This fear was initially confirmed when my download told me that it would only be complete in an estimated two hundred and sixty one days. That is to say, it would take several times longer to download than it would for me to fly to the game developer’s headquarters in Sweden and get a copy on a flash drive. Or even to take a leisurely sea voyage.

This prediction turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. The download took a mere five hours; the vast majority of the progress was made during the last half hour when I was alone in the house. This is still far longer than the fifteen minutes or less that I’m accustomed to when installing from a CD. I suppose I ought to give some slack here, given that I didn’t have to physically go somewhere to purchase the CD.

My other point of contention with steam is philosophical. Steam makes it abundantly clear in their terms and conditions (which, yes, I do read, or at least, glaze over, as a general habit), that when you are paying them money to play games, you aren’t actually buying anything. At no point do you actually own the game that you are nominally purchasing. The legal setup here is terribly complicated, and given its novelty, not crystal clear in its definition and precedence, especially with the variations in jurisdictions that come with operating on the Internet. But while it isn’t clear what Steam is, Steam has made it quite clear what it isn’t. It isn’t selling games.

The idea of not owning the things that one buys isn’t strictly new. Software has never really been for sale in the old sense. You don’t buy Microsoft Word; you buy a license to use a copy of it, even if you were receiving it on a disk that was yours to own. Going back further, while you might own the physical token of a book, you don’t own the words on it inasmuch as it is not yours to copy and sell. This is a consequence of copyright and related concepts of intellectual property, which are intended to assist creators by granting them a temporary monopoly on their creations’ manufacture and sale, so as to incentivize more good creative work.

Yet this last example pulls at a loose thread: I may not own the story, but I do own the book. I may not be allowed to manufacture and sell new copies, but I can dispose of my current copy as I see fit. I can mark it, alter it, even destroy it if I so choose. I can take notes and excerpts from it so long as I am not copying the book wholesale, and I can sell my single copy of the book to another person for whatever price the two of us may agree upon, the same as any other piece of property. Software is not like this, though a strong argument can be made that it is only very recently that this new status quo has become practically enforceable.

Indeed, for as long as software has been sold in stores by means of disks and flash drives, it has been closer to the example of the classic book. For, as long as I have my CD, and whatever authentication key might come with it, I can install the contents wherever I might see fit. Without Internet connectivity to report back on my usage, there is no way of the publisher even knowing whether or not I am using their product, let alone whether I am using it in their intended manner. Microsoft can issue updates and changes, but with my CD and non-connected computer, I can keep my version of their software running how I like it forever.

Steam, however, takes this mindset that has existed in theory to its practical conclusion. You do not own the games that you pay for. This is roughly equivalent to the difference between buying a car, and chartering a limo service. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it is a major shift. There is of course the shift in power from consumers to providers: rather than you getting to dispose of your games as you see fit, you can have them revoked by Steam if you misbehave or cheat. This is unnerving, especially to one such as myself who is accustomed to having more freedom with things I buy (that’s why I buy them- to do as I please with), but not as interesting as the larger implications on the notion of property as a whole.

I don’t think the average layman knows or even cares about the particulars of license transfers. Ask such a layman what Steam does, and they’ll probably answer that they sell video games, in the same way that iTunes sells music. The actual minutiae of ownership are a distant second to the point of use. I call my games, and digital music, and the information on my Facebook feed mine, even though I don’t own them by any stretch of the imagination.

This use need not be exclusive either, so long as it never infringes on my own plans. After all, if there were a hypothetical person listening to my music and playing my games only precisely when I’m not, I might never notice.

So far I have referred to mostly digital goods, and sharing as it pertains to intellectual property. But this need not be the case. Ridesharing, for example, is already transforming the idea of owning and chartering a vehicle. On a more technical level, this is how mortgages, banknotes, and savings accounts have worked for centuries, in order to increase the money supply and expand the economy. Modern fiat currency, it will be seen, is not so much a commodity that is discretely owned as one that is shared an assigned value between its holder, society, and the government backing it. This quantum state is what allows credit and debt, which permit modern economies to function and flourish.

This shift in thinking around ownership certainly has the capability to be revolutionary, shifting prices and thinking around these new goods. Whether or not it will remains to be seen. Certainly it remains to be seen whether this change will be a net positive for consumers as well as the economy as a whole.

Cities: Skylines seems to be a fun game that our family computer can just barely manage to play. At the moment, this is all that is important to me. Yet I will be keeping an eye on how, if at all, getting games through steam influencers my enjoyment, for good or for ill.