TRASHFUTURE - You Must Imagine Sisyphus Gaming feat. Jonathan Bernhardt

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

We’ve brought on Jonathan Bernhardt (@jonbernhardt) of Patch Notes podcast to discuss Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We discuss Activision’s super-villain CEO, the dismal state of its business at present, and what ‘metaverse’ fixations mean for the future of gaming. We also discuss a terrible security-state startup and subject Jonathan to Britain. Enjoy! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, hello, hello. It is TF once again. It's a free episode. It is me, Riley, and I've joined You Could Baby Tell when I said it was a free episode that an annoying drive time radio voice didn't immediately chime in and stomp all over me announcing my co-host and our guest. I'm joined exclusively by Allison Hussain today. Yeah, I was tempted, but look, I can't do voices. I'm not going to try to do voices. No, I'm not going to, I'm not going to appropriate Milo's culture of doing the voice. Yeah, Milo's culture of being annoying. Yeah, exactly. Annoying me and everybody else with his insistence on doing that thing. So Bask, Bask in the sort

of warm professionalism of the embrace of a podcast where that doesn't happen. Jeannie, you're free. Yeah, that's right. And we are very pleased to be joined today by Jonathan Bernhardt of the Patch Notes with No Cartridge, which also, of course, you may recognize from friend of the show, Trevor Strunk, to talk to us a little bit all about the Microsoft Activision merger. Jonathan, how's it going? It's going fantastic. I'm sad you got to say Trevor's name. It's such a satisfying name to say, Trevor Strunk.

But of course, at any time we get a guest over from America to talk about a specialist subject in a sort of global, in globe-spanning industries, right? Issues of sort of importance, whether they are from large companies or maybe some kind of international institution, we must always subject them to a little bit of this island before we go on. Unfortunately, unfortunately, some Britain is going to have to be experienced by you. Content warning, Britain. So my knowledge of British politics is sort of, if it's like a TV show, I buy the DVDs, but I don't post on the subreddit. I know, like, just enough for the people who actually

know what they're talking about to get annoyed at me, because I get like 10 to 20 percent of it wrong. Perfect. So you'll have an enjoyable session, I think, with me. I started, I picked up the show with Brexit, which was, which I think a lot of Americans did. I think a lot of us really started paying attention. Our season one finale of Britain. Yeah. So I think what you're in this position of is you're watching Britain with, like,

dubs. Yeah. Yeah. And you've got, like, and you have a Matt Hancock T-shirt that you wear, just like in case another Britain fan sees you in the street. It's like, oh, my God, a Britain fan, but you don't really know what's going on. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Speaking of which, you see our little lad went for a doggy paddle in the serpent

town. He's looking so good. He's looking so healthy. He's looking awesome. I'm so glad. What I love about, I mean, look, what I think is funnest about him is how, for some reason, he appears to have been cursed by a witch in as much as he always, like, his face is never normal.

No. Ever. No. I've seen pictures of him. I mean, his face is never normal, describes a lot of politicians on your island. But no, this is the guy who got fired for fucking his advisor, but he got fired because he was fucking his advisor in violation of COVID regulations, right? Yes. The very things.

Okay. All right. Yeah. He wasn't wearing a mask. That's right. He wasn't using a dental dam, which is now required. You have to have one on you at all times. That's right.

That's right. In fact, when Boris, like, relaxed all the COVID rules to, like, say to, like, the sun, like, please like me again, and it sort of worked. He was like, yeah, the new COVID rules is you have to use a dental dam, like, for every social interaction. Really hard to talk with this thing on, but... No. So, no. So basically, before we get into Britain, though, I heard from an old friend of ours,

who here remembers view windows? Oh, the thing that would tell you whether it was raining outside, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, here's what it's like outside, among other things. Apparently, there is no way for them to make a profit. We could have fucking told you that. And we did. How would I know if it's raining or not?

Well, you'll never know. You're going to have to do the same. What you're going to have to do is you're going to always have to pack both an umbrella and a parasol at all times, just in case. Well, what they need to do is they need to figure out a way to do some arbitrage with that, like to be able to figure out a way to sell the fact that they know it's raining in the split second before you check the actual window. Yeah. Micro frequency, like rain prediction. Oh, it could be. They could front run that information to guys who will come and stand

outside your office and sell you an umbrella for like 10 pounds. Perfect. Jesus. No, not sell. Rent. Rent. This is a rentier economy. That's right. They'll license you an umbrella experience. So this is from Bloomberg. Well, burden cash isn't uncommon among startups. True enough. Views manufacturing process was so expensive that it has hindered the company's chances of ever making a profit ever. Said 12 employees, former employees and one current employee. They will never quote. They will never be able to sell the glass at a price that will

cover the cost. A former employee familiar with use finance is predicted. View was kept afloat with a $250 million loan in 2019 from Greencel. Right. That's great. I just love friends helping each other. Absolutely. Yeah. So that was the actual quote that said we're totally fucked. Like they gave that quote on the record.

Excellent. Yes. They will never be able to sell the glass at a price that will cover the cost. That's the quote. Awesome. This is what happened. I think part of this like you have to understand how stupid SoftBank got like as a function of Saudi politics, right? Where it's like the moment that MBS like locked up his entire extended family in the ballroom at the Ramada, like the second that happened, then Massa and MBS are just two guys that just kept talking each other up and daring each other to go further. And that's why we have like these

multi-billion dollar value startups that like make windows somehow more expensive, but that don't like do anything. WeWork. WeWork was a SoftBank project, right? Oh, was it ever? SoftBank Collab. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's just if you, it's the WeWork. Yeah. That one was made all the headlines.

But if you scratch in further, there are tons of WeWorks in there and it's really fun pulling them all apart. Deep Cuts. Early Albums. Yeah. Someone should make a podcast about that. That podcast has already been made. The other, two others actually. Great. There's a more stuff with Greensill, but I want to revisit that, like, give it more time. And also, OYO

is still going public, but every time they announce their share price publicly, it's always like a double digit percent cheaper than the last time they announced it. Fantastic. I love the machine that kills hotels so fucking much, dude. It's easily my favorite startup we've ever done. Oh, by a fucking mile, it is the most fun startup. It's just this, just a big old thresher. But no, I want to talk a little bit about British politics. I got to start up and then we're going to go into the Microsoft Activision stuff.

So in the ongoing, slow-rolled kind of return of politics to normal, now that it's been sort of quite thoroughly bisected from any kind of material base, and it's now just a fun show for people addicted to the news, what has happened is a 2019 intake Tory MP Christian Wakeford represents Burry South has defected to Labour basically saying, well, I can imagine myself under Kier Starmer's leadership and Boris Johnson is betraying the various principles he was like, the usual shit. And Boris knew about this like a minute before PMQ started, which is very funny. Yeah, admittedly, that is very funny. But as part of the ongoing drama, part of this

is that inter-operations save Big Dog as they literally did call it. I hate so much that it's fucking called operation save. Wait, so there was like Operation Big Dog when there was Operation Red Meat. They love getting operations. They're just like me. Yeah. Alison, you're saying did you guys have Big Dog t-shirts over there? Did we, did that ever make it over? No, I think that's an American phenomenon. Like, I only know about them because of

Twitter of all things. Because it has a unique dimension. Yeah. So basically, right? So that's what has happened. And then obviously, like, if you look at everything he has voted for since he's been in Parliament, like, yeah, he's basically like voted to turn Trident on channel migrants and like make it so that like the government could fire you at a trebuchet if you go to a protest. Like every awful thing this government wants to do, he's lined up four square behind and then he's just like, ah, I don't care for the brand of leadership of Boris Johnson.

I prefer the brand of leadership of Kirstarmer and they're like, hey, yeah, of course, coming over here, which again, Alice, as you and I were talking about, like, yeah, it makes sense in terms of electoral politics to like score a win off of your enemy, right? Yeah. Like, there's no, there's no reason not to let him in the party. I think Corbin would have done it too. But also, he's a piece of shit. Also, it's a massive like insult to the constituency labor party. But like, I feel like that's a limit to electoral politics. It's like Kirstarmer's job for better or for worse is to corral a shitload of rats

together and like scum and awful people. And to then go, oh, this rat has mange on it. And it's just trying to get into your thing to get out of the sinking ship. It's like, oh, yeah, okay, sure. But that's that's like his job. That's what the point of this thing is. But the other thing, right? I actually say, I think the question of whether or not Corbin would have let him in is irrelevant because he wouldn't have gone over to a Corbin labor party because that was more connected to like the material needs of people. It would be a moot question.

That's the sort of like, there's two things that you I think you can fairly criticize Starmer for here. And I hate to be fair to Kirstarmer. Like, letting him in the party, I don't think is one of them. I think it's like going to be running him at the next selection is going to be one thing. And I think the other is just in general, having put the party on this course where the guy can say with a straight face, listen, I'm a centrist. My views haven't changed. I've only changed the color of my rosette. And it's like, well, yeah, you've really fucking, you know, said the quiet part loud there. Yeah. Well, because that's what he was brought in to do, right?

And it's like, yes, it's like, should he be? I think the question is, should he be in a party? I would so I or any indeed any of us would support? No, of course not. But Starmer's job like is to make the labor party just about what color tie you wear. Well, this was also the week where Rachel Reeves, at least she was quoted in the FT, I don't know whether she was speaking to FT, basically saying that like, so like labor is obviously like hemorrhaging money because of like declining and falling memberships. Well, I tweet, I said, I said, I said labor should just become a tech company and get softback funding. And I think actually, I think actually that's like a pretty good idea.

That's what they fucking want to do. That's what they want to do. That's all they want to be. So Rachel Reeves basically says that like, you know, it's completely fine that we're hemorrhaging money because all these members, they were actually like people who are working against the labor party anyway. So we don't really need them and we'll make it up with like, guess who? Centrist sensible voices who just want like a normal party that like kind of gets on board with slogans. But like anyone who's kind of like, I've sort of I have not been really trying to talk much about labor because I think that you can live a perfectly normal and happy life by pretending they don't exist. And it won't like affect your material condition. It won't,

it won't affect like anything in your life if you just didn't think that they existed at all. But like the point is, is that you're right, like this was like the reason that Keir Starmer is sort of in his place is to get rid of like a faction of like the party. And now that he has done that, he's basically served his purpose. And what's happened at the moment is that no one really gave that much of a shit about like what was, you know, the kind of corruption in the conservative party because that's been happening like long before the pandemic and that's been happening long before lockdown parties. No one, no one has ever given a shit about it. What they, what has happened now, like by just like the purist of not even kind of coincidences,

but just like the Tories being more oafish than they usually are and sort of taking it once, like finally crossing that line ever so slightly by having fun when no one else was like allowed, or like, you know, again, as Milo kind of has said before, not being as miserable as everyone else, like at a particular time, or like, you know, having like these kind of lame parties, that's the thing that's cross-flying. So now Keir Starmer has found himself in this like really peculiar position of like being able to kind of feasibly win a hypothetical election if it was going to be held tomorrow. So like his purpose, he's already basically what I want to say is that he's served his purpose. He's now in this bizarre situation, but I don't think that

most people ever thought that he would ever be in any way. And now they're trying to like figure out, okay, what, like, what are we supposed to do? Well, I tell you what they're supposed to do, right, is it's their cuck-tig. They're change UK now. Like, UKIP came in and took over the conservative party from the outside. Basically, like they just had, they're just UKIP now. Cuck-tig took over labor just by like making like a weird liberal process policy. Yeah, we were, we were, we were owned, we were owned by Mike Gape. He's been playing the long game this whole time. He's been hiding, he's been hiding in the, he's been hiding in the shadows like a Palpatine figure. I don't know where like that's the best they can come up with.

Yeah, like this is, this is my, this is Mike Gape's world and we're just like living in it. That's true. That's right. But genuinely, and then John, I want to sort of get your, get your read on the view from the States as per usual, right? Is that it feels like arguing about whether or not like any, all the, you, you've excluded Jeremy Corbyn from the party, but you're letting in Christian Wakefield. And it's like, well, yeah, of course they're hypocrites who like bend and break the rules for their own, yeah, that's table stakes. That's what the rules are there to do. They're there to be abused, they're there to be abused by the establishment to marginalize people they don't like. And then to bind people they don't like

and protect people they do like. Like that's table stakes. Like understand that, that arguing about the justice of this is less important than understanding the sort of actual distribution of power that led to this being like a fate of complete. That's my opinion. Yeah, absolutely. John, what are you, what's your take on sort of, on this, on the general sort of transformation that we're witnessing over here in these stupid islands? So an interesting difference between the US and the UK on this is that there seems to actually be something that animates the British public about in a, in a moral way. Yes, but no, specifically here, I mean, yes, spite, but specifically here, the, there's been a string from the Dominic Cummings incident with the long

drive to Matt Hancock's firing to this, where it actually does seem to significantly matter to the British public that these stories were having fun and breaking the rules when no one else was allowed to, which doesn't really exist over here. Like we've like, what's his face? Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, got in trouble for going to the French Laundry and having, you know, having that. I would have done that in his position. Yeah, yeah. But that's sort of a special case in the sense that it's California. And I guess you have the most weird process liberals there and the Republicans saw it as a really cynical opportunity to do the recall campaign for him because California's recall laws are insane, just like everything else about how

that state's government is set up. But you know, this seems like a really matter of weird, specific, baroque, stupid principle about specifically about specifically Boris dancing and going out to the shop with the suitcase and filling it up with beer. I think it's all very funny. My question is, is any of this happening if the election is October 2022 instead of October 2025 or whatever it is? So I think the way to answer that question is to say, actually, it's not necessarily the British public that's got very head up about this. It's that the British sort of media establishment kind of knows when knows that the media, the state, the Tory party and industry in Britain is like even more closely connected than like in America. And so they kind

of understood that Boris is like, he is, I'm not saying he's used, I mean, anything could happen, predictions a mugs game, but they the mood appeared to be well, he's, he's no longer as useful to us as he could be. And the and Starmer has proven like he's not going to threaten anything about us. So and so I think it's not so much that people were upset at the parties. It's that British people respond to the tone of coverage, basically one to one, they're like dogs, they hear tone instead of content. Exactly. And so they that's and so essentially, right, like especially like British right wingers, like they the the the idea of what is sensible in this country basically is governed by tone like coverage tone. Right. So I think it was just like, yeah, well,

this is just how this is how this is going to be covered. And then so the sun will like, I don't know how or like the the the times or whatever will have like a little leader of Boris looking sweaty. And then like remind you that he was somehow like obliquely disrespected the queen, which if there was a viable alternative that threatened them, they wouldn't do. And if he was still serving their interests, they wouldn't focus on basically. So I think that that's the way to understand it. Some very funny guardian web roles where with like 20 Boris stories on the entire front page. What a great way. Yeah. But like I think the final I think that my final thought on the Christian Wakeford thing, right, is that, you know, at this point,

like this is now mascots, you know, you're sort of you're cheering that like, you know, Mr. Met has gone and shaken hands, you know, with the whoever the mascot for the Yankees is. I wouldn't be cheering up because I love my pasta. Yeah, you're like, you're sort of you're a guest that Chester Cheetah has appeared in a lazed potato chips commercial. Right. Like that's this is now mascots. The sprints is guy changing sides to Verizon. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what this is. And to read anything further into it, like in terms of if you're if you're interested in what is the material basis and consequence of electoral politics, and you're reading into this anything

more than, yeah, the Verizon guy doing a sprint ad, then you are a fool. And I, you know, that's it. There's nothing more I can do for you. All right. That's enough Britain. This is a stupid place. Let's do a startup. The startup is called Oosto. Oosto. O O S T O. It's a Finnish dude. I don't know. That's right. It's like one Finnish man. This is our startup. We're bringing a single Finnish man to market. That's right. So that's an answer that Americans give when asked to name a country, a city in Finland, and they're misremembering Oslo. So I'll tell you this. SoftBank has invested in it. Okay. Good promising stuff. It changed its name in 2019. Can you tell us from what? Any vision? Any vision? Yeah. Okay. I'll even I'll

even before I ask John and Hussein, I'll even give you all the first line of the copy. Please. You're so generous. Protect the people that propel your business. John, Oosto used to be called any vision. Protect the people that propel your business. SoftBank invested tons of money into it. Am I supposed to tell you what they do? What do you think it does? Identity protection services for HR records? Not identity protection, Hussein. Identity theft. It's a gig economy private army. They're to protect rich investors and just like general dodgy people. Yeah. It's called Outer Heaven and it's funded by SoftBank. Yeah. It's a mercenary force, but you can customize it using an app. They bought too many diamond dogs and had to put them down.

We've put Psycho Mantis on the blockchain. You're going to have to unplug your computer to fight him. No. So it is I'll get into it, but I won't because there's a lot here. I'm not going to do too much more guessing. They say you can identify persons of interest in real time with live facial recognition enabling your security team to rapidly respond to threats while protecting the privacy of bystanders. Oh, no. Oh, no. This is not good. I thought it might have done. Okay. Ustow helps you to identify potential suspects who could be working together by ingesting video from disparate sources and search across them. I love to ingest video from disparate sources. I don't make shit constantly. Yeah. It watches multiple YouTube videos.

It watch it with Ustow. You can be listening to like a boiler room mix and then also watching somebody do an all AI civ six game. You can do both of those things. Right. Fantastic. Yeah. And then and find connections between people that may not have been immediately obvious through and here's another word that's going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence ethical machine learning models and state of the art privacy controls. Ustow identifies persons of interest while protecting the identity of bystanders. Wait a second. What's the timeline here? Did these guys get their business model by playing watchdogs and seeing who the villains were? Because that's literally C tech from those games. So I'll give you an example of a use case. They

give a use case as using Ustow in a casino. The sheer square footage of casino floors, conference and event centers and back end facilities make it very difficult to manage security efficiently. It's difficult to know who's thumbs to break, but without help. We used to just break all of them now with Ustow. Thanks. You know, you know who's head to put an advice. Absolutely. You are protecting Ustow. I'll whack this piece of shit. Okay. Ustow helps your casino identify persons of interest such as felons, professional blackjack players, known prostitutes and even VIPs helping you preserve profits, time and reputation. Yeah, this is just watchdogs. You hold down L1

and you get a little like one line bio of the person. I wonder if it's intentional how many times they're using person of interest, the name of that CBS show in this copy. Yeah, it helps you identify the actors from Person of Interest on CBS. He's the guy driving a car into a wall and shooting a handgun. Look, if you are owning a casino and the cast of Person of Interest on CBS comes in, you need to make sure they are walked right to the high stakes tables. Yeah. Jim Caviesel has Jesus telling him it's time to I bet on black. Is he in Person of Interest? Yeah, he's the lead. There was a very funny,

I forget who it was. Was it the Truinan people who did the, who did an episode on him? Jim Caviesel show? Jim Caviesel. They were on anonymous. He's deeply insane. Like to the point where I just made a joke about him crashing the car. He was eventually forbidden from driving on set because he would just crash the cars. He was forbidden from handling the prop guns because he'd do the shit you're not supposed to do with prop guns that gets people killed. They basically had to treat him like a, first they treated him like a child, then like a dog, then sort of like a robot was sort of the progression that they seemed to go through

with dealing with him. He'd love it over here. Even Hancock could be best friends. No, so basically, so that's what it is right now. It's saying, we're not for law enforcement. We don't do law enforcement stuff. We're to protect your companies to do law enforcement related things. Well, yeah, you've kind of cracked the case here, Alice. Yes, that's more or less what it is. It's like, it's like citizen, you know, which exactly great. Fantastic. I feel wonderful about it. It's like citizen that will also like, you know how like police, if you have like, I don't know, if you wear a blue shirt and they want to arrest you, they'll be like, oh, that's Crip Colors working to arrest you. Sure. Yeah. Right. Any kind of like pretextual

law enforcement. Yeah. Or if you like our Facebook friends with someone, with like, you know, someone who was in a drill music video, you know, the police over here will use artificial intelligence to like find you and put you on various lists that you can never leave. Because it's not a law enforcement action, like, okay, you can violate people's civil rights, you don't have qualified immunity or whatever. But like, you're not doing anything that requires a police power. You can ask someone to leave because the computer said, you know, ask this person to leave with basically no oversight. It's a black box. You can say, well, look, you know, ask, ask fucking Usto or whatever. Yeah. The computer said you were,

but also what it does is it establishes connections between people so they can say, the computer said you were with that guy. That's, that's interesting because that's a little bit of counterinsurgency coming home. That's a, that's a classic sort of thing that we were doing in counterinsurgency. It was like mapping relationships between people like that. So that's God, Alice, you keep prefiguring stuff that's about to come on. Was this founded by former intelligence guys? I don't know if they were former intelligence, but do you want to give me a guess as to what country it was founded in? Yep, there it is. Fantastic. I'm so good at this. I'm on a roll tonight.

So what's actually going on here is they're repurposing national security and law enforcement technology and like as a middleman vendor, right? Yes. Yeah. Correct. Yes. Which is a very lucrative business model for all kinds of shit. So yeah, why not? Yeah. So they changed their name from any vision to Usto for a number of reasons. For a number of reasons. Don't worry about it. So with the name change, the CEO, Avi Golan, remarks, historically, the company has been focused on security-related use cases for our watchlist alerting and touchless access control solutions with the launch of beyond the lens of security to include ways our solutions can positively impact an organization's

safety, productivity and customer experience. What they've basically done is they've just like created dark Foucault and then made him into like the ghost in the machine of this camera company. So what did they do as any vision? So this is from Olivia Solan at NBC. Any vision sells an advanced tactical surveillance software system called Better Tomorrow, which feels very on the nose. Well, you wouldn't want a primitive like surveillance solution. Called Worst Tomorrow? Worst yesterday? Terrible. Yeah, the primitive surveillance solution.

How's its body count? Is it anything like the Better Tomorrow movies? So let's say it, according to five sources familiar with the matter, this continues to be familiar with Solan, any vision's technology powers a secret military surveillance project throughout the West Bank. One source said the project is named Google IOSH, where IOSH refers to the Occupy Palestinian Territories and Google denotes how easily it is to search for people there. So pure evil. When NBC News first approached any vision for an interview, CEO at the time, Alon Etstein, denied any knowledge of Google IOSH and threatened to then threaten to sue NBC News and said that any vision was actually, quote, the most ethical company known to man,

then went on to dispute that the West Bank was occupied and suggested that the NBC News reporter had been funded by a Palestinian group. So it's headed by Israeli Trump. Playing the hits. Playing the hits. I love that. Also this like the fact you immediately say number one were the most ethical company ever. Number two is not even occupied. And number three, who paid you to do this? The people were occupying. Get out of here. So here's an interesting question. No, John, you actually know the answer to this because I gave you a hint to this yesterday. Who works for them at the time? All of that came out to handle their crisis communications. I won't say it. She works

handling comms for another very important agency right now. You might say a house that has an old man and some rabid dogs in it. That's right. The Sacky Bomb, baby. Jen Sacky, as well as Eric Holder, both worked on this company. Of course, Eric Holder. So Holder advised, because Microsoft invested in any vision before like all of this happened and then they divested from them. Holder was like, yeah, we can guarantee they're not using this for military surveillance or whatever. Thank you. Thank you. Promise. Feel free to invest. Basically gave them the cover that they asked for, more or less. They gave them the rubber stamp to invest. And then Sacky was

like being like basically just saying what I won at Stein said. Just like, yeah, there is an occupation. Even if there was, we wouldn't be doing it and you're being paid by them anyway, which is awesome. At least we can see with her White House work. She was doing it respectfully and not making the problem worse. Absolutely. You know what? Much like Christian Wakefield, she crossed over to the good team, right? I assume that's what happened and not just all these people are fucking indistinguishable from one another. But then, right, in July 2021, so they changed their name in October 2021, some information leaked, and this was from the markup about what they were doing, not in the Occupied West Bank, but in New Mexico,

which as we all know, counts, apparently. The Land of Enchants. That's right. They stole the crystals and they used them to power. They put a camera on a lay line to try and film New Mexico's aura and found that the vibes were fucked, actually. No. So for a better tomorrow with their system, a trial was carried out in an American high school where basically the school district's police, the school district police department. Like the stupid fucking teens being like, yo, this is just like being in a jail or like occupation and they're fucking right. Yeah. Like I said, this is, they just, they just did Foucault as a startup. What if you were always being watched? You had no idea you were being watched and also school is the same as a prison

as an occupation. It's just they're playing the hits. Yeah. I've a soft bank project and sort of just been very subtle about this one. They're just having fun with it. This is jazz, baby. So there's the school district police department's sergeant basically said, we want this trial happening in our schools because all of our officers are having trouble identifying a suspected drug dealer who's also a high school student. So it's like, I don't know. It's 10 police officers like can't find a guy who's like selling time bags of weed in New Mexico high school and they're like, all right, well, I guess we need to do like we task the fucking spy satellites. They can't solve the C plot of a high school comedy. Yeah, that's right. Which is, you know,

the weed selling. It's so cool. And so they're like, all right, well, we're going to log everybody's face. That means students are having their faces captured and analyzed more than a thousand times a week. So remember earlier when they were like, we promised bystanders won't be captured and analyzed. They will apparently lie. Come on. They can't. They're a company. That's against the rules. Say they say, so not just persons of interest are captured, but like everyone and also again, persons of interest. That's like, how do you identify that? It's like, that kid's got a kind of a weed dealie vibe and he just shook hands with someone else weird. Yep, better track him and everyone he talks to and everyone who passes them in the halls, which just means everyone.

And so basically, and so they say, right, that the algorithm then groups faces belonging to believes it belongs to the same person that adds them to watch lists for future use. And so even if you're not suspected of anything, they would still keep you for 30 days. So you're just on file everywhere all the time. And all of these cameras are all linked together. So any other place that has them will just like slowly start assembling these profiles of you that is just going to carry around. Yeah. So that's probably fine. So a more honest sales pitch for this is it's a streamlined, cheaper way of building the building the LA gangs database. Yeah, but it puts everyone on the one they're getting sued over. It puts everyone on it. Oh, no,

that's the LA gangs database. Yes, great. That's correct. So the Sergeant Ruben Espinosa, the, you know, the bumbling sort of police police sergeant who's trying to, you know, again, like deploy the NSA defined like, you know, a high school weed dealer says, let's upload the screenshots of all the students and do our search for our software for any matches that week. School district purchased any vision after a mass shooting in 2018 with the hopes that technology would prevent other shootings. But then it just used it to spy on everyone. And you for like, like petty crimes, astonishing that that happened. That must be the first time a mass surveillance, a tool for mass surveillance has not gotten its

desired target that has somehow decided that the kind of adequate tradeoff is to surveil everyone for very, very minor things. A huge blow for mass surveillance, a previously proven technology. I'm sort of confused. Is the issue with these these fine and upstanding officers that they know what the guy looks like, but they literally can't find him? No, they all have like goldfish memory. They can't remember what the guy looks like. Well, I think they know there's a dealer at the school, and you know, he's one of the students, but they want to use these cameras to like figure out which one has the dealiest vibe. Excellent. Okay, cool. Who would you go up to at a club and be like, hey, man. Anyway,

the last thing I want to be like, one more minute on this, then we'll get to the meat and potatoes. They wrote an open letter to the White House complaining that like there was, there may be some like regulation of facial recognition technology coming down the pipe, which again, very funny. Writing an open letter to the White House because you're worried you might be regulated is very much the, I'm leaving Twitter, please subscribe to my sub-stack post, just pathetic and it never works. President Biden, my people yearn for freedom. My people specifically are soft bank, my investors. Yes, yes. Feels like a move Elon Musk would do if he was less of a meme lord and more of a normal

fucked brain business man. It is absolutely cuck shit to write an open letter to the White House because you're worried about being regulated. So Ustow, now known as Ustow, of course, after that debacle with mass surveilling of the students. Ustow wants to emphasize the company's mission in developing and deploying facial recognition technology that best serves the interest of society by helping to protect and preserve lives, property, employee safety and intellectual assets. The company defined commercial use cases as uniquely distinct from law enforcement use cases. Please man, look, we're not like those, we're not like Clearview. We're not like that one. We're a good one because we work for companies

rather than the police. These are meaningfully different applications. Absolutely. It is critical that government leaders recognize the power of visual AI to save lives, stated CEO Golan. Visual AI today is often misunderstood and misrepresented, which is again, it's bitch made to moan about that. You own the technology that you make, understand that people will buy it because they know that people you don't like hate it. As a world leading firm in this space, we encourage regulators to conduct thoughtful due diligence in order to provide meaningful guidance and appropriate legal framework regulating the use of biometrics in context specific scenarios. Moreover, we need a cohesive national policy, etc. And every time they ask

for cohesive national policy, what they mean is, let us write it. Absolutely. But what this has to Usually, it comes along with, hey, we already did. If you want it, if you want it, we brought it with us. If you want to take a look at it, put it in there right now. Put like a handprint on the, do whatever you want. You get this done, three day weekend. We are confident that as the facial recognition industry matures and adoption rates continue to increase, optimal outcomes will be achievable for all stakeholders. Meaning, you know, the person operating the camera who tells the guy with the gun where to go, and the person hoping that the camera doesn't tell the guy with the gun to go pointed at them. Stakeholders. This starts with a common definition of what

constitutes ethical facial recognition. Anyway, that's Ustow in any vision. What a company, right? This is depressed the shit out of me. Sorry, sorry, Alice. I personally can't wait to see what SoftBank does with this. Based on its track record, I'm sure that it will be one of those companies that we will not only regret lampooning on this show. Yeah, as we're being chased by hunter killer drones. That's right. Yeah, we'll have to apologize to Ustow. I think the thing to remember, right? Before you get too depressed about this, the thing to remember is that if SoftBank invested in an AI company, usually what it means is that it's just like they have just a JVC camera and they've just like, they're just said, oh, it's

magic. This is a magic camera. So don't react too much to their marketing copy. So I want to talk about games. It's time for fun and games, which I assume the games industry is. It has to be. It's got to be like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Everyone loves playing games, so making them, it's got to be like everybody's having a fantastic time. It's got game in the name. Not if a certain Activision CEO has anything to say about it. He really did have a lot to say about that specifically. So a little bit of context. Microsoft has recently signed a deal to purchase Activision for just shy of 70 bills. This is just coming just after they purchased the parent company of Bethesda,

as well as King, the company that makes Candy Crush. Microsoft, they are buying lots of games. They are becoming gamers at Microsoft. A genuinely surprising piece of news. Well, let's dive into it, right? So, John, can you just give us a little bit of background sort of on what's going on here? Number one, what is a computer? What is going on the computer? Well, I still get Pong. So approximately what's going on with Microsoft's business strategy is that their new thing that they just launched a console recently, the new generation of consoles just launched by just, I mean, about a year, year and a half ago at this point. No, no, about just a full calendar year. And no one's gotten them. A lot of people haven't gotten them

yet because of supply chain shortages and chip shortages. And something's going on with graphics cards, I think, in certain industries. Yeah. But the big selling point for the Xbox Series X, besides having some of the most confusing naming nomenclature available in the market today, is a forward placement strategy on the games themselves. Microsoft is selling a rent concept called the Game Pass. What you do is you pay Microsoft five dollars, I think it's five dollars a month, and you get access to an ever-increasingly large library of games that you download. You can download for free and play. And since this is coming along with larger hard drives and the removal of physical media from the gaming industry, we're no longer

going with Blu-ray DVDs. We're no longer going with, obviously, cartridges are way out the window at this point to everyone, but Nintendo still has them for their Switch console. We're looking at digital distribution, monthly rents, and the idea of ownership receding from the marketplace. They want your money on a regular schedule, and in return, you get to pick in and choose your treats. What this means is, in the last January, it was a funny joke about the PlayStation 3 that it didn't have any games. Sony sort of took that personally with the PlayStation 4, and in many ways won the console. You can do an entire podcast about this conception of who won the console cycle, but they generally had a better product offering.

It was thought last generation in the Xbox, X did. This time, Microsoft wants to be the ones with the gaming library, with the exclusive... They're not even really concerned about the exclusives anymore, because they're buying companies that already have signed PlayStation exclusives, and they're honoring those because they don't really care about controlling just one part of the marketplace spectrum. They want the entire library. They want the ability to offer this game pass service, and have it be so fundamentally useful, and appreciated, and convenient that it becomes a bedrock expectation. Sony's playing catch up here. They've got a similar program, the PlayStation Plus program, but it's not as good. The library isn't

as great, and it's not moving as quickly or as fast as Microsoft is, because Microsoft has a market cap over a trillion, and Sony's market cap is like $150 billion, $200 billion, something like that. Microsoft can simply play big dog here, and it is playing big dog. They now own, I think, the next biggest company they have to buy to complete their takeover would be either buying Warner Brothers games, which Warner Brothers has been teasing, spinning off for years now, but hasn't. Due to some of the IPs they hold, obviously, they still have the Batman IP, the Lord of the Rings IP, and that stuff. They still want to be able to make games based on that and keep all the profits and the margins in-house. They haven't actually sold off and pulled the

trigger on WB games yet, but that would take two, but Microsoft owns now most of the big names in North American video gaming. Contingent on this deal closing, it's going to take something like 18 months for this to fully cohere. But when it does, Microsoft says that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is going to stay on. That's probably going to work the way all mergers like this work, where he stays on until the legal stuff is complete, and then he is either actively kicked out or is persuaded to leave the way Bobby Kotick himself has persuaded a lot of studio heads and founders to leave after he bought their shit. So this is sort of the broad context. This is what Microsoft is trying to do. We're going to get into a little more of the Activision stuff, but before we dive

further into that as well, let's look at this from the worker end. This is also related to, or at least partially related to a unionization drive at Activision Blizzard. So Activision has been in the news recently. I don't think it's responsible to say that this merger, the sale is entirely because of California Fair Employment Practices versus Blizzard, that court case, or because of the just chronic news items that keep coming out of the company about labor discontent, abuse, harassment, the Cosby Suite story, all that stuff. Yeah, but I would also say that it is probably likely I wouldn't bet on it because I don't have money. I'm a podcaster and a games reviewer, but if I did have money and I was forced to bet on it,

I would say that the news coming out recently about Activision did clear some things up in the negotiating process that allowed this deal to finally reach a consummation. Because we are now a month basically after every partner Activision did business with having someone say in public, we don't want to keep working with these guys. Not that they're going to stop. They can't stop working with Activision. There's just too much money involved, but they'd really prefer they work with Activision without this Bobby Kotick guy running the show. Now, of course, this is all what we are saying. You can see in quite a bit of the press, they're doing a lot of what they usually do, which is gormlessly reprinting press releases as news.

From The Guardian is basically reported, well, this is clearly a metaverse play where they said, Microsoft's plan takeover of Activision Blizzard puts the tech company at the center of two big issues facing the sector, the metaverse and Washington's determination to reign in big tech. They say, well, it's a metaverse, but it could also be an antitrust, which I think in the case of which The Guardian has successfully misunderstood both. They said, the metaverse is the place where the physical and digital worlds come together. Yeah, man, for sure. Microsoft has made clear with its planned 50 billion pound acquisition of Activision Blizzard that it expects gaming to be a key feature of this new world,

with Satya Nadella, Microsoft chair and chief executive, saying on Tuesday that, quote, gaming will play a role in the development of metaverse platforms. Again, This is just a press release. That is just like a press release. That's a book report line. Gaming will play a role in the development of the metaverse. It doesn't mean anything. Yeah. It is absurd how, I think, again, in so much of the most mainstream press outlets, this has received some pretty uncritical coverage. And how fast too? Metaverse wasn't a term until Zuckerberg made it one, like by Fiat. And the idea is, oh, well, I guess they're going to use, and I think part of this as well, right?

I wanted to jump to the antitrust thing right away just to get that out of the way, because Microsoft is buying, is a huge horizontal acquisition that's going to give them huge control of the market. They could feasibly say, okay, you can now only get Call of Duty on Xbox, even though they said they won't do that. And Microsoft, they've been burned by antitrust a little bit before, probably not as much as they should have been. And so what happened was, in the US, traditionally, the only question an antitrust lawyer for the government is really allowed to ask in this case is, will Call of Duty get more expensive? Or, alternatively, will fewer people be able to buy it? So the consumer welfare standard that they have here

is very limited. But I think you can see, what Microsoft is doing is trying to come out ahead of that by being like, well, though, by buying Activision, there's this new thing called the metaverse, which is just this shapeless form of frontier. But also, conceptually, it's a frontier, because capital needs a frontier. And so the metaverse is like, this frontier, we can put all of these things into that we don't like to think about, right? Like, is this going to be anti-competitive or whatever? We can say, oh no, well, the metaverse is coming. It's out there. And so we need to do something that's going to get us out there so we can keep delivering for the consumer. And that, I'm almost certain, is going to be one of the core arguments they're going to make,

saying that this is not a monopoly and should not be treated as such. In terms of antitrust, at least the Biden administration is taking its role as government slightly seriously. Like, Lena Kahn's not bad on this stuff at all. So maybe she'll try to interpret the remit more broadly. But I don't know how well the antitrust thing is going to play with this. John, I want to know, what's your take on that? Yeah, I think if the test is going to be, we'll call it due to get more expensive, Microsoft has a couple big arguments. Against that, one being the Game Pass thing, it's going to get less expensive. Activision's offerings are going to get more accessible than ever, especially since Microsoft is sort of swearing off non-first

party, we sort of have to redefine what first party means since they own so much of this shit now. But usually when Microsoft does an exclusive now, a Windows 10 store and Xbox Series X exclusive, it comes from one of Microsoft's studios proper. One of the game studios, they themselves is up. So Halo, when they do a Halo game, that comes from 343, which is one of the core studios Microsoft directly overseas. So when they do exclusives, it'll be through that mechanism. It won't be, like fallout, is going to be becoming exclusive to Windows 10 and Xbox Series X, because it will still go through ZeniMax and Bethesda, which are subsidiaries of Microsoft, but won't be directly overseen by

Phil Spector. And if anything, right, I think this sort of shows the limits of what antitrust sort of can do, right, which is so long as the company sort of badges everything correctly, right, and sort of puts the products in the right boxes through the right channels, you can get as big as you want, center as much under yourself as you want to. It's the rules that you have to follow are actually quite easy to follow. Like the only reason like Amazon and Google got caught out is because they are like, they are all consuming monstrosities and they can't stop all consuming. But like if you're, and even yeah, even then, like American antitrust laws didn't really set up for what happens when you become the marketplace. Yeah, that's absolutely

true. It just like it back when American antitrust law was was doing its shit and was on the ball. A lot of these concepts didn't exist. Yeah, you couldn't say like a standard oil can't own the platforms for like oil trading. No, no, no. It's it's got can't own the trains or this bulletin board where everyone buys and sells oil. All right, so I wanted to move on from the antitrust stuff. And I want to talk a little bit about the history of Activision and Bobby Kotick. So, Jonathan, I want to first ask you, right up, straight up, a question I always ask about everybody who I interview someone else about, is Bobby Kotick in any books? I don't know how to interpret that. He played a character from a book in a movie.

You say he's in a book that might be a black book. Yeah, if that color was black. Oh, that book. Well, here's the thing. If he was, there was a Bobby Kotick in a black book, but it was I think his name only had one B in it. Now, he did have an Activision email address. So, a different Bobby Kotick at Activision in Epstein's black book. I mean, who knows? Who knows? I assume that this would be a legalistic argument that he would pursue as a very religious man. And like, even if hypothetically, Bobby Kotick and a certain Jeffrey Epstein knew each other, maybe, you know, that could be for any number of reasons. It could be just because they're both from New York and they enjoyed talking about like where to get

like a single slice of pizza and a greasy piece of paper. It's Bobby Kotick was in Epstein's black book literally just so they could go meet up for an Athon's famous dog. It's all just because they're New York guys. Hey, they're all New York guys. Hey, I'm not in here. Legally, we're not saying Bobby Kotick is doing that. Bobby Kotick's a man above the age of 30 who goes by Bobby. You can sort of interpret a couple, like there's a couple different ways that breaks and Long Island, dead-eyed, shark business man is definitely one. Oh, yeah, of course. He's like Howard Ratner, but just like with a little bit more forward planning ability. I think that's in some ways an insult to Bobby and in some ways an insult to Howard.

Compare them like that. Bobby Kotick, right. What he is now, like he's, you do tell me about this. This guy that comes up through New York has a bunch of business ventures and he sort of keeps failing but using the investment money and the credit you can raise from them to buy other businesses and he keeps rolling on and rolling on and rolling on until he lands as first in Activision, right? I said failing. I'm not sure. I want to qualify it just not succeeding in the way capitalism views success. Like they didn't, his previous ventures, one of which was for kids entertainment, which you may remember if you're an American and you don't know why you remember that, but you do remember it, they were the ones who localized the

Pokemon anime. That was one of his earlier business ventures was they were a licensing company. They bought rights, you know, business guy stuff. Bobby Kotick is a lifelong business guy, which is distinct from being a businessman. He is a man whose business is business and from before that became like a Donald Trump into Richie Deal's joke. He's a guy like, all right, so there's this profile of him from 2009 that appeared in Forbes and the first paragraph is a story and it goes like this. Robert Kotick's mother dates his compulsive capitalism to toddler hood when young Bobby sold her ashtray to a friend would come over for a play date. He's the boss, baby. He is the boss, baby. He's the boss, baby. Each one of these guys has a formative

capitalist myth they build about himself, about themselves. And his is the guy who is doing deals, which is not a unique one by any stretch of the imagination. But it is fairly unique for the sector of business he ended up in. Because more than anyone else, Bobby Kotick sort of personalizes and embodies the transition of the gaming industry from focusing on the word gaming to the word industry. He's the guy that made it who helped make it big business. Now, there were other guys, the electronic arts was doing much of the same professionalization and financialization at the same time. But Bobby Kotick is the like the personal avatar of capitalism for this sector. He is Activision. He got his start in like a computer programming language

because he wanted his first idol to pretty clear Steve Jobs, because Jobs is basically Kotick. But you know, more of the West Coast version of insane that he is with less kind of anti-social, less oppositional, perhaps. Yeah. And he's eight years older. So by the time Bobby Kotick meets Steve Jobs, it's 1983. And Jobs is at the height of his power in Apple. Like he's he's a couple months away from that fucking 1984 ad that he did with Ridley Scott dropping. And he and Jobs tells Kotick, who is currently who is then a student at the University of Michigan and splitting his time between his studies there and his company, his company at the time. I don't know its name off the top of my head, which is how you know what's going to happen to it. It's it was Arktronics.

And they were involved in some sort of GPU level programming language nonsense, you know, the sort of like basic entry level tech nerd stuff. But Kotick wasn't one of those tech nerds. He was the business guy. So he meets Jobs and Jobs tells him drop out of college, focus on your business stuff. And Kotick does it. You know, who Kotick gets next as an investor. Absolutely bad man. He actually did it. Yeah, he gets next as investor Steve Wynn. Now, you may Steve Wynn is a casino freak from Vegas. And you may remember him because he got a job with the Republican National Committee once Trump Trump won because he was a big Trump backer. And then he immediately got fired from that finance committee committee head job because he wouldn't stop wolf whistling at the interns and

doing sexual harassment and all the stuff you expect a Vegas casino freak to be doing 24 seven. But this is that's the circles he started running in real early in the late 80s into the 90s. It's almost certainly how he got into Epstein's black book. I'm not going to speculate further on anything related to that. But you know, these are the he wanted to be in the financial elite circles. He got his wish. He buys Activision in 1990. I think either close to or entirely out of bankruptcy with a 25 percent personal stake. And here from about 90 to to to the 2000s to like the turn of the century, legitimately takes that company and shoots it to the moon. They become huge. They become a massive player in the industry. All his bets pan out.

His business strategy for acquisition of studios is spot on. He gives them the resources they need and the space they need. He is a king. And then eventually in 2006, he masterminds the acquisition of Blizzard from the French media company Vivendi. And at this point, he is made like there are guys who espouse capitalist ideology. There are guys who talk a big game about libertarianism. He is both of those. But he acquires Blizzard, makes it Activism Blizzard, and he has the money to call himself a capitalist. And from there on out, it is not a lot of fun times for the people that work for him. Well, because what he said, right, is that this is when he starts saying, I want to take the the fun out of the game industry. It's like, I want to know where you gave that speech.

Where? Deutsche Bank Investment Con. Yeah, just some people who, when they're left in charge of industries, just do a great job with them. But also, he also came up with this idea of saying, look, one of the things that actually is a huge waste of money is changing IP. I foresee a world basically where there's like four games. There's the shooter. We make a new version of the shooter every year. And there's the sports game. We make a new version of the sports game every year and so on and so on. Oh, that's good. That's good. It feels like, it feels like we're kind of heading towards the great convergence by which I mean, you're going to have a game slash film that lasts for a week. And it contains all your favorite IPs, but it's all owned by like

two companies. And there's ways for you to spend up to $100 more on it. Homer Simpson is going to appear in the next World of Warcraft expansion. You're going to be able to play as someone from Springfield. They're going to be associated with the Horde. And so this is what he does. This is his innovation, or one of his innovations, which is it's all franchises, nothing new. The way he talks about it in earnings calls is he wants franchises and IPs that are annualizable and he wants their catalog to be narrow but deep. He wants to sell maybe a... Ubisoft sort of has the opposite of this going on, or at least a different version. They make the same game, but it's in so many different IPs. Like Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed

game, not all that different from its Ghost... No, you change the power that you claim to reveal the map. And, you know, not that different from the Division, not that different from Watchtower. These are all fundamentally kind of the same game and definitely the same business model, the same game as a service model, but they don't really care about the IP all that much. Bobby Kodak sees the IP as the start and then you take the brand and you go deep on the brand, which is why you get a new Call of Duty every year, why he has three AAA studios, each of which is the size of what you consider a normal game producing studio. Tag teaming in on one of these titles every year with support studios for them.

It's why Blizzard hasn't had a new IP since their acquisition. I mean, you can sort of say Hearthstone, but that uses Warcraft. Overwatch is new. It's Overwatch. Overwatch is the new Blizzard IP since then. And they, you know, it's been... It's why Starcraft was two, was three games instead of one game. You know, it's why there hasn't really been anything happening moving on from World of Warcraft or, and honestly, why they're kind of losing the race there to Final Fantasy 14. You know, it's a clear business model and it's hard to say it hasn't worked. And effectively, it's worked by making gaming kind of the same as everything else in like modern life, right, where it's terrible, terrible, repetitive, sort of almost like it has antibodies

that get rid of anything new, exciting, interesting, dangerous. It's designed to just funnel, it's designed to just funnel as much money upward as it possibly can, right? It's like, it's, I mean, it's like, if you want to think about like, if you want to think about this in terms of, you know, artisans versus industrial processes, right? Like, and we were talking about this last night, John, like gaming used to be like a sort of more artisanal thing, right? And there, it's almost like 200 years of industrial revolution kind of happened over the course of 30. And this guy was like one of the key figures in it. And now sort of that some of how some of his chickens are coming home to roost. Microsoft is just coming in and being like, don't worry, we're going to carry on your

legacy of having done this and make sure it becomes basically unshakable by competition, unionization, etc. That like it, eventually at some point, you know, a shark loses his killer edge, you know, he stops being, you know, having that instinct, knowing the marketplace, he gets old sclerotic. It's usually around the point where his net worth goes above a billion. You know, it's, I'm actually not sure what his net worth is, but it after this merger, it's definitely over a billion. You know, he, the whole we have a dozen IP things and but we really go real hard on them. It only works if you actually do that. And like every single Activision product is in the currently in the process of falling apart. And not just because

of proximate harassment issues and unionization efforts disrupting them, their war zone product offering for call of duty is in shambles. They recently just had to delay season two of whatever the current one is Vanguard, I think it's called, because they're just not hitting performance. Now you can, you can blame COVID a little bit, but that, but call of duty has been in a very steep quality decline. And their community has been very angry about this for a good four or five years now, the same can be said of World of Warcraft, which is just is not producing content or interest at the same level as its only real competitor in the marketplace. As I mentioned before Final Fantasy 14, I think at this point, Final Fantasy 14 is putting out like two expansions for every one

that World of Warcraft puts out. And there just won't be new content. This year, maybe I forget what the roadmap is, but there hasn't been new content for a while since Shadowlands or whatever the last World of Warcraft expansion was called. And there won't be more for a while. Starcraft II's professional scene more or less fell apart part of the swarm, which was their their attempt at a MOBA fell apart. I think it's its product. It's basically discontinued at this point. Hearthstone is completely stagnating. Diablo IV has been delayed a couple times and they tried, you know, soothing fans rage with like a mobile game called Diablo Immortal, which was a news item for a while, where they like like because at BlizzCon, which I think also

has been canceled, they had a announcement about a brand new Diablo game and everybody was there was on the edge of their seats. Diablo Dev gets up and asks, all right, how many of you have phones? How many of you looking at your phones? Together, we have finally achieved the impossible. We have made gaming not fun anymore. I mean, that's kind of it, right? And what to me what this merger represents is just all of these dead bodies that are bloated like a sort of like a mini Boston, a zombie game, right? These dead bodies just taking up all the space in this in this industry. And then and then this merger just being like, all right, we're just going to keep pumping adrenaline through them. And it doesn't matter because that's basically all you're

going to fucking get. Yeah. I think I mean, like, you know, there was if you kind of like go into crypto spaces, it's kind of been said in very direct and non-subtle terms. Like there was a tweet that went viral kind of fairly recently, which was largely about how like play to like play to earn like couldn't come soon enough or something like that. And I think that's like and that's kind of like a very direct way of sort of saying what these like tech guys really want or what like certain tech guys like want or envision gaming to be, right? Which is like an entirely transactional experience. You know, the whole like gaming is going to be like a fundamental part of the metaverse like is a big glib because like it kind of is so obvious to begin with in

the sense of like justice, how like our current kind of like the way which we use the internet currently, you know, is kind of mediated around like various forms of transactional relationships that come as standard. Like this sort of feels like an extension of that. And where you now just have like a lot of like kind of, well, you have like a good amount of very like valuable IP and you also have like an online framework where, you know, I guess I'm thinking about like, you know, the crypto stuff, the NFT stuff, the blockchain stuff, the gaming stuff, like how it's all kind of combining together to create this version of the internet where like everything you do can be monetized, commodified, transactionalized, etc. Gaming sort of being

kind of like a framework for doing that. But as we all know, like when you start commodifying everything, where everything sort of becomes rooted by some type of profit mechanism and like crucially, crucially everything has to have a profit mechanism. Otherwise, there's no point for it to exist. Like, of course, it's not going to be fun. Of course, it's just going to be like various forms of indentured labor where you have, you know, people who are making a lot of money right at the top and a lot of people who aren't really making a lot of money having to, you know, grind their bones at the boss. And it's like gaming now is, yeah, you have like, you have two options. There are the 10 bloated corpses of the franchises that won't die because

we can't let them die because we're still just hoovering up the money from people who are now begrudgingly playing them. And then if you want to do something else, it seems like most of the innovative energy, if you can even call it that, is in different kinds of pyramid schemes that you're talking about. There's actually coming out of the, this merger is a rapid, the Web 3.0 guys are using the Activision sale as a way to push their new phrase for how they want to integrate this stuff called play to earn. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is what we spoke about with Trevor. He came on. I was also going to say that like, there's also, what was it? It was like related to, it was related to play to earn. But it was, I mean, you know, I guess like to kind of

really distill it further. It's sort of like, we've kind of been through these iterations before where, you know, even stuff like blogging is now kind of, you know, where that sort of becomes integral. So like people's job in some form or another, like it kind of no longer occupies that thing of like that thing you do for fun. Content production is exactly like, ironically, I say this, but like content production is sort of the same too, where, you know, as you kind of, as it sort of becomes more integral into the system and crucially, everyone has to sort of is get gets coerced into some type of content production system. It also doesn't become fun. There's like this much broader question of like, you know, is like being online going to be like a

fun thing to do, you know, once once like the new sort of internet is in place, or is it going to be like a type of system where again, we are all kind of coerced into it to some form. I remember now what it was like a very kind of a very sort of crude example of all this and something that kind of haunts me every so often is, I don't know if you guys remember that Fred, but I came from like some VC or some like CEO or something where they were like, you know, in the metaverse or in web 3.0, you won't have to like send your CV to get a job. We can kind of give like candidates like a game, a game scenario, and they have to complete the game scenario. And this will tell us like about, you know, their, you know, their ability to handle, you know, incoming requests

and emails and all those things. And it was basically just like, well, you've kind of just reinvented the e-tray, but like somehow you've made it sound even like weirder and more dystopian than those types of like corporate games. Imagine second life joker breaking a second life pool stick over his knee in front of the candidates. Yeah, I don't know. This is this to me, this is all just like, okay, well, you know, the internet's not fun and it's not going to be fun. None of these guys really want it to be fun. They want to make that question irrelevant. They want to make the question, is the internet fun irrelevant? Because you have to be here anyway.

Yeah, yeah. So look, I want to sort of bring us back round to the end where we sort of near where we started, which is on the unionizing stuff, right? You said that this partly this measure is to try to crush part, it's trying to like sort of resist unionization Satya Nadella himself always already started tweeting about how Microsoft is going to move forward with Activision Blizzard and quote, address workplace culture issues, which I think can be seen on one hand as the personal unpleasantness of Bobby Kotick. But on the other hand, as being them saying, oh, look, try unionizing here, it won't work. We're Microsoft. Fuck you. So, John, can you tell us a little bit about before as we end, right?

Activision was sort of one of the more developed unionization efforts at a large scale in gaming, as I understand it, we go into a little bit of why that was. It was becoming a flashpoint. So usually when stuff like this happens, there is there's a single move that that's management approved. In most cases, it's the walkout, you know, and the Google's Google employees have done this a couple of times. Apple employees have done a riot game games. Employees have done it where you basically get you schedule on the company calendar at time to get up out of your workspace, walk out front, in front of the building and not work for a little bit as a as a political statement.

Then you come back inside and you get back to work. And these had the usual and and you know, worthwhile, you know, visibility bonuses of such actions, they got reported, they got press, they certainly showed that there was at least some cognizance of the power of organized workers to do something. But that's usually where it ended. And it's that's not where it ended with Activision Blizzard, because Activision Blizzard couldn't fucking stop. They, you know, when they said we're appointing co heads of of of Blizzard to replace the president who had to resign after the Cosby Suite allegations were made known, the woman that was co appointed quit because they wouldn't pay as much as the man. Like he would he kept doing

shit like this. He threatened, you know, the stuff about him leaving voicemails threatening to kill his assistant. It's not like the the issue with Bobby Kodak wasn't that he was handsy, it wasn't that he was doing this. It's that as soon as it happened, he turned into Bobby Kodak about it. Like, you know, it became a personal vendetta, he became that business guy came that that New York, you know, lawyered up tough guy. And it just wouldn't stop, it could not stop like we've got there's so what would have what happened what I think really prompted this was Raven software, which is also an Activision subsidiary, recently let go a bunch of part time QA guys that they sort of tricked into moving across the company with promises of a full time

job. That's happened before it'll happen again. No one ever really gets punished for it except in this instance, there was a network set up throughout Activision Blizzard for solidarity walkouts and complaints and public posturing and press availabilities that did not exist before. Like you usually you had community managers for Raven going off about it. Yeah. But you usually didn't have the rest of the company that day, hours later, minutes later, already keyed in and ready to go. And that I think more than anything is what is what scared the people at the top. And now at this point, all right, so there's there was a tweet from yesterday, it's from a woman named Tracy Kennedy at dog spinster on Twitter. Her bio says that she is a producer

on Overwatch. She is an employee of Activision Blizzard. She is quote tweeting a a interview with Bobby Kodak. And the tweet she is tweeting she is quoting says in an interview with games beat Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kodak explained his motive for selling to Microsoft, citing the delay of Overwatch two and Diablo four is having principal effect on declining stock prices. Her tweet from a current employee reads as follows, Bobby, tell everyone about the random projects for Overwatch one you all would shove on us. The team would do overtime for only for them to get canceled and for months of Overwatch to dev to have been lost, or how almost entire teams are turning over and citing you as the reason. Don't be shy. Next tweet. Oh, wait,

that's right. You hide behind scapegoats because you're a coward. My mistake. The entire world will remember you to be a greedy joke. And there's nothing you can do to change that. We outlasted you and we won by wave emoji. I think she might be being a little bit premature, but that's basically where nothing worse coming down the pipe than him. Yeah, that's that's that's where the confidence level is like for organizing to work. It specific movement organizing to work. You need a clear, you need clear stakes, clear heroes, clear villain villains. You need a story and you need material things connected to all those stories. They're removing the villain. Like they're swapping him out for Microsoft and

Microsoft is a many headed beast. This is going to go from, you know, the little guys and of Activision rising up against Bobby Kodak, the most hateable man in the world, to a bunch of workplace training and feel good reach outs and conversations and negotiations and lived experiences. And they're going to be able to sap it is what I think is going to happen. Yeah, which I mean, look, the I think that in this case, it's that the villain has gotten bigger. But, you know, at the same time, you know, the, yeah, but the the framework, at least for resisting that this villain is more present here than it has been in other gaming companies, right? If nothing else. And I really hope that I'm wrong that they managed to

to keep this going, keep it better and unionize Microsoft. It needs to be one of these big companies for to work in tech. You need to get a massive initial buy in to become the industry standard. You know, if that means, you know, if they can get the AFL CIO on board, I'm not sure what the what the regulations are in terms of what industries they can go into and what they can't. But I just don't think any outside and any outside unions can be able to come in and save them, especially because every outside union has their own shit going on right now. So, yeah, I I thought Activision had a chance of being the flashpoint as long as something like this didn't happen. Now that it has, I think there's a lot more challenges.

But I think those challenges could be overcome. It's it's certainly not the end of the world. It's just, you know, having the company with open litigation from the state of California, and having a boss that no one with everyone was embarrassed to be seen doing business with. Those were powerful things for the for Activision Union organizers. And losing that is not going to be great in terms of what tools they have access to. And, you know, that just means, I guess, you know, well, got to change it up. We go on. Anyway, noting that we have gone far over time because I was very much enjoying having this conversation. I want to say, John, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you. And to you out there in Listenerland, thank you very much for listening to this slightly unusually long episode of TF. Don't forget, as per usual, we have a Patreon. It costs $5 every month, and you get a second episode of this, plus you get Pritonology and other kinds of fun stuff. So do try and get that when you can. And if you want to, I'm signing this off like an email by accident. Best wishes, Riley. Oh, all bests from the heart of the machine. That's right. I think with all that, yeah, we'll say goodbye and see you in a few days. Later, everyone.