Category: reason

If you follow video game news, you’ve probably seen reports of solved puzzles, unlocked secrets, and game-breaking stunts meant to test the limits of a game’s design. 

Sometimes these feats, which can range from speed runs to accessing game areas never meant to be explored, can take years of effort. Other times, they take hours or days, with puzzles meant to take months (or secrets meant to stay hidden forever) unlocked with unexpected rapidity. In every case, the secret is players working together, usually in an ad hoc fashion, loosely—and I mean very loosely—coordinating via online forums. 

These exploits have varying purposes: to beat intentionally designed in-game challenges, to map the vulnerabilities and quirks of a game’s architecture, to secure loot drops or other high-level prizes, or just to brag about what you and your community have done online. Why climb the mountain? Because it’s there. 

So one way of looking at the crowdsourced escalation of stock prices for GameStop, AMC Theaters, and other companies over the last few days—coordinated largely but not exclusively through the meme- and profanity-laced Reddit forum WallStreetBets—is as an inevitable advancement of online video game culture, and the prankish, puckish spirit of both earnest and mock heroism that flows through so many of these efforts. This was a meme-managed, crowdsourced effort to exploit a quirk in the financial system, to test its limits, and, in a way, to break the game. 

The “players” involved did it for any number of reasons. There was a belief that it would afflict the powerful by causing hedge funds that bet heavily on GameStop’s decline to lose money. There was a desire for personal gain—not loot drops, but the real money that at least some of these investors are earning. And failing that, there was a sense of camaraderie and communal purpose: The real treasure was the memes they made along the way. 

It’s also born out of a persistent desire apparent in so much online crowd behavior, from flash mobs to Boaty McBoatface: to simply cause amusing chaos, to see how far things can go. If you could organize a bunch of message board shitposters to bid up the price of a struggling relic of mall-era America and maybe collapse a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund in the process…why wouldn’t you? Do it for bragging rights. Do it for money. Do it for the community. But mostly, do it for the lulz. 

Of course, if there’s one thing America’s national political class does not like or understand, it is lulz. Lulz are inherently chaotic and disorderly, and that tends to cause headaches for most anyone with a bureaucratic bent. But it also produces reactions like one we saw yesterday, in which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) used the GameStop episode to call for intervention by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

It’s not at all clear what the SEC could do to stop what is essentially a financial market flash mob, aside from ensure that no large institutional investors are secretly in on the WallStreetBets side of the trade. If that’s the case (and it may well be, though who knows), then the SEC will probably end up taking some sort of action based on existing rules designed to prohibit fraudulent pump-and-dump schemes, where stocks are artificially boosted and sold off. 

But mostly it just goes to show the limits of Warren’s technocratic brand of populism. For years, she’s positioned herself as a defender of average Americans and a critic of big finance. And in this case, she frames her argument as an indictment of the “hedge funds, private equity firms, and wealthy investors dismayed by the GameStop trades.” Yet if the SEC were to intervene in the GameStop trades, it’s more likely it would end up doing so in a way that benefited the big hedge funds who bet on the game retailer’s fall. It would be to tip the scales against a movement that sees itself as a populist uprising.

I say “sees itself,” because the populist valence of this particular form of guerilla financial warfare has probably been at least somewhat overstated. Some of the retail investors battling the hedge funders will probably make out like bandits; others are likely to lose money.

Some of the money losers are probably prepared to take financial hits, and are effectively paying to consume the experience, like gamblers who come into a casino prepared to lose a certain amount of money in order to have a good time. But there may well be others for whom that isn’t true. This episode won’t end without some sort of consequences. 

That’s not to take Warren’s side; the SEC has no call to intervene in a market tug-of-war that is freely chosen and entered into by all. On the contrary, this context and complexity highlight the ways Warren’s bright-line, heroes-and-villains approach tends to fail as a justification for regulatory intervention.

Besides, it is pretty funny. Let the lulz play out.

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Several police officers were among the mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, a fact that has prompted some serious questions for law enforcement agencies about what they’re doing to tackle the far-right presence in their departments. An article in Monday’s Washington Post discusses how police might work to recognize problematic recruits before they’re hired, and how to make it easier to discipline officers who express violent political attitudes—a challenge as cop-friendly arbitrators often intervene and force law enforcement agencies keep them on board.

Deep down in the Post story, the debate takes a comically absurdist twist. A former Houston police officer was among those charged with joining the violent mob at the Capitol. With the problem at his doorstep, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who is also president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, decided to blame…encryption:

Acevedo also said anonymous online platforms on the “dark web” are making such investigations impossible, even for departments with sufficient resources. He expects the move away from public platforms like Facebook and Twitter to grow rapidly in response to the FBI arrests of those who rioted at the Capitol.

This month, Acevedo was asked by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to explain what actions police chiefs are taking, and responded by asking for help. For years, law enforcement officials have asked for passage of a federal law that would require such platforms to have a “back door” that law enforcement can access if they have “a legitimate investigative need and a court order” to gain entry.

“Congress’s failure to act has enabled industry giants to flaunt the law and operate with impunity,” Acevedo wrote in response.

Destroying encryption—and yes, mandatory backdoors would utterly destroy encryption—has been a pet cause of the U.S. Department of Justice for years. The invocation of the “dark web” as a boogeyman has been a constant recently too. Usually those who have demanded encryption back doors have insisted that it was necessary to fight child trafficking and terrorism.

It feels a bit desperate to invoke encryption as a reason why police departments don’t know they’ve got some dangerous officers, particularly when—let’s be frank—these guys weren’t being all that secretive. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “These officers’ racist activities are often known within their departments, but only result in disciplinary action or termination if they trigger public scandals.”

Meanwhile, Acevedo has inadvertently revealed that people are right to worry that law enforcement would abuse encryption backdoors. Police leaders have traditionally insisted that they need these to make sure tech platforms and communication tools comply with legal warrants. But Acevedo is talking about using backdoors to investigate potential or current police officers without any specific connection to criminal activity. This isn’t crimefighting; it’s domestic surveillance. This is precisely why backdoors are dangerous. Worse yet: The whole premise of these investigations is that there are abusive, authoritarian cops out there who can’t be trusted. This is supposed to be a reason to give officers more access to people’s communications?

It’s absolutely disheartening to see coverage of encrypted communications that suggests apps like Signal or Telegram are problems because they do not (and cannot) police content, therefore allowing extremists to communicate with each other. A tool can be used for good reasons or bad. We don’t throw away hammers and move back into caves because they can also be used to beat somebody to death.

To reiterate for the umpteenth time, encryption protects us from criminals, hackers, and authoritarian governments. What Acevedo proposes won’t help fight crime. It would actually make us more likely to be victims of crime. And that doesn’t even get into what happens when some of our more violent governments across the world start using the backdoors precisely the way Acevedo describes, but against citizens trying to organize for more freedom, not just to cancel an election whose outcome they didn’t like.

We shouldn’t be surprised Acevedo that doesn’t know what his cops are up to. For years, right under his nose, corrupt narcotics officers have been involved in a racket that involved falsifying records, which culminated in 2019 in a botched raid where officers killed a couple. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted just this week, Acevedo is still trying to defend some of the officers involved and maintaining that there are not systemic problems in his department. What good would backdoors be to a man who refuses to acknowledge the evidence that’s already in front of him?

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“People value the truth,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week during an interview on MSNBC. “Incompetent government kills people. More people died than needed to die in COVID.”

He punctuated his remarks with a phrase he recycled multiple times throughout the conversation: “And that’s the truth,” he said.

No objections there. But it appears the irony was lost on Cuomo, whose comments were directed at former President Donald Trump’s federal response—the likes of which were certainly rife with shortcomings. But the New York governor can also examine the state he oversees for another master class: both in the perils of government incompetence and the detriment of lying to the public you serve.

One need not look far for a poignant example of both. A report released today by New York Attorney General Letitia James concludes that the Cuomo administration seriously undercounted the state’s nursing home deaths—a toll that Cuomo has been accused of worsening early in the pandemic with his own policies.

The data “suggests that COVID-19 resident deaths associated with nursing homes in New York state appear to be undercounted by DOH [the Department of Health] by approximately 50 percent,” concludes the report. James found that the state omitted many such deaths for patients who had been transferred out of a nursing home to die in a hospital.

An example: At one facility, DOH noted seven COVID-19 deaths—one confirmed and six suspected—as of August 3. But just by April 18, that same facility had reported 31 suspected coronavirus-related deaths to the Office of the Attorney General.

Cuomo weathered heat during much of the spring and summer for a directive that many say directly contributed to the state’s stratospheric nursing home death toll. Guidance issued by his administration in late March ordered nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 so long as they were deemed “medically stable.” He amended the directive in May to specify that they needed to test negative for the virus.

“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19,” the advisory originally said.

The state’s nursing home death toll currently sits at 8,500, though that’s obviously a questionable metric. In July, the DOH said that number was around 6,500—which, even with the undercounting, was more than most states’ total death tolls. Cuomo says that facilities were free to turn away patients if they couldn’t care for them, but his own guidance largely prohibited providers from doing just that.

No federal, state, or local leader can shoulder all of the blame for the results of a crisis. Doing so gives them far too much credit. Indeed, there are a litany of moving parts and complex factors impacting any event, large and small. When the U.S. outbreak was still in relatively nascent stages, New York City—the most dense cosmopolitan area in the country—was, to some extent, a natural epicenter. But Cuomo has forcefully skirted accountability for any impact his decision-making may have had, both in his regular press conferences and in official government documents. His DOH in July disregarded the criticisms in its own report and instead laid blame on the nursing homes themselves, positing that it was the employees who spread the virus.

The governor, a self-declared foe of government incompetence, also presented medical providers with the vaccine edition of Sophie’s Choice. Earlier this month, he announced that hospitals that failed to use all of their vaccines would face up to a $100,000 fine; those that vaccinated anyone out of the state-approved order of operations would face up to a $1 million fine. The kicker: Cuomo created a rigorous hierarchy of who was allowed to receive the vaccine at what point, meaning hospitals had no choice but to throw away expiring doses instead of finding willing vaccine recipients. Better to lose $100,000 than $1 million, I guess.

More than 7,000 people have reportedly died from COVID-19 in New York since the vaccine rollout in mid-December—some of whom may have been spared had one of those trashed doses found its way into their arms. And that’s the truth.

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Some families, including mine, have always had school choice. But until the pandemic, I hadn’t had much occasion to think about what that really means.

After a disastrous spring of two kids doing spotty online learning through their Washington, D.C., public school, we knew we needed a change: We were contemplating a move to the suburbs, an in-person micro-school run by some friends, and an expensive traditional private school with the sort of fancy testing and hygiene plan that the public system could never manage. 

We even briefly considered starting a compound in West Virginia with some pals.

We were anxious and confused, but had the means to rebuild a proxy of a service that the government collects money for, and promises to provide.

We ended up organizing a pod of six kids from three families in a neighborhood full of overeducated, annoyingly high-functioning D.C. people. It worked out great, and the “governess” we hired—as he calls himself—is adored by our kids.

For us, the city’s faltering efforts to reopen became just a mildly stressful inconvenience. But what about people who can’t afford these options and are already grappling with massive uncertainties and a sense of powerlessness in their lives, such as parents who are out of work, homeless, or struggling with substance abuse?

A recent ProPublica investigation told the story of a gifted 12-year-old named Shemar attending a fully remote East Baltimore public school. His family’s effort to access the free Wi-Fi provided by Comcast “foundered quickly in a bureaucratic dead end.”

“No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account.” His grandmother was on the scene, but she “attended little school while growing up in a sharecropping family…His great-uncle, who also lived in the house, had dropped out of school in South Carolina around the age of 8 and was illiterate.”

In Baltimore, “[c]itywide, about 80% of students had logged on,” ProPublica reported, “but only 65% were reliably present, according to the district. Before the pandemic, the attendance rate was 87%.”

In Los Angeles, kindergarten enrollment was down by about 14 percent; in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by 17 percent. And the prospects for kids who did enroll weren’t great. According to one study, only one in three school districts required teachers to deliver instruction during the spring part of the lockdown.

There is money to give kids like Shemar the sort of choices that my family has. Inflation-adjusted per-student spending has risen 280 percent since 1960, and the U.S. currently spends over $15,000 per child each year. Yet when COVID-19 struck, for most families, there was no mechanism that would allow them to use that money to better serve their particular needs.

District schools with massive technology budgets struggled to get laptops, tablets, or hotspots to kids in need. School libraries full of books sat silent and unused. Playgrounds were roped off. 

Students lost the equivalent of three months of learning in mathematics and one and a half months of learning in reading, according to a McKinsey study. Schools that predominantly serve students of color were most impacted. 

Meanwhile, we learned that opening schools for young children isn’t a major risk. Brown University economist Emily Oster worked with a team to create a dashboard that tracks COVID-19 cases in schools. She says, “This summer there was this idea that we’re going to open schools and that’s going to be the thing that destroys everything. That does not seem to be true. We’re not seeing schools as the locus of large amounts of spread. The rates are actually quite low.”

Schools were imposing tremendous costs on families for very little benefit in controlling the spread of COVID-19. 

But even worse is the sense of powerlessness for too many families. Their lives had been disrupted, and despite the huge amount of resources in the system, they were being told that they had no alternatives.

We always knew that when local governments negotiate with teachers unions, the needs of students and their parents are the first to get traded away. During the pandemic, that dynamic has meant that attending in-person school is a privilege afforded to the children of the rich.  

Families like mine already have choices. The horrors of the last year have laid bare the fundamental inequality of denying the same power over their children’s education to everyone else.

Written by Katherine Mangu-Ward. Edited and graphics by Isaac Reese.

Music: “Killing Time” and “Just Before I Saw Her” by Stanley Gurvich

Photos: Everett Collection/Newscom; Circa Images/Newscom; KEVIN MOHATT/REUTERS/Newscom; MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS/Newscom; Lev Radin/Sipa USA/Newscom; Johnny Louis/JL/Sipa USA/Newscom; Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Newscom; JOHN ANGELILLO/UPI/Newscom; Paul Hennessy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Lev Radin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Rafael Ben Ari/Dreamstime; Ales Utouka/Dreamstime

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In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the U.S. Supreme Court forbade public school officials from punishing students for exercising their First Amendment rights on school grounds unless the speech at issue “would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline and in the operation of the school.” In the coming months, the Court will hear arguments in a new case that asks whether that rule should be interpreted to allow school officials to punish students for certain off-campus social media posts.

The case of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. originated in 2017 when a then-high school freshman and junior varsity cheerleading team member took to the social media site Snapchat in order to complain about her failure to make the varsity cheerleading squad. The student—known by the initials B.L. in court filings because she is a minor—posted a picture of herself and one of her friends with their middle fingers raised. The post went up on a Saturday. Its accompanying text read “fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.”

That post soon came to the attention of a cheerleading coach, which led to B.L.’s suspension from the team. The question before the Supreme Court is whether the school may discipline her for such speech without running afoul of the First Amendment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that the school was prohibited from dishing out such punishment for such constitutionally protected speech. “Tinker does not apply to off-campus speech—that is, speech that is outside school-owned, -operated, or -supervised channels and that is not reasonably interpreted as bearing the school’s imprimatur,” the appeals court held.

The Mahanoy Area School District wants SCOTUS to reverse that ruling. Social media and related new technology act “as a megaphone for off-campus speech, ensuring that it reverberates throughout the classroom and commands the school’s attention,” the school and its lawyers told the justices. But thanks to the 3rd Circuit, school officials have been left with no authority “to discipline students for off-campus speech, no matter how obvious it is that the speech is directed at the school and will significantly disrupt the school environment.”

B.L. and her lawyers counter that the case is a matter-and-shut application of the First Amendment. “In a weekend comment in an evanescent Snapchat message,” they told the justices, “B.L. swore in expressing her disappointment at not making the varsity team to her friends. The notion that a school can discipline a student for that kind of spontaneous, non-threatening, non-harassing expression is contrary to our First Amendment tradition, and finds no support in this Court’s student speech cases.”

Oral arguments in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. have not yet been scheduled.

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