A Slightly Older, But Still Relatively Young, Ring

It's been a while since I posted about Elden Ring! I'm still playing and loving this game.

 

 

First, some general thoughts and comments on the gameplay:

 

This game is just fun to play. I don't feel like I'm checking off a tasklist: I'm wandering around, seeing cool sights and doing cool stuff. The open world feels really liberating in a way I haven't felt from many other games: it isn't a vast plain to slog through or an overwhelming set of icons on your world map, but it's a fertile land packed with things to explore or - just as validly and importantly - ignore as you wish.

 

The enemies are non-scaling. In a lot of other open-world games or large-zone-based games, there's a sort of soft limit on exploration based on the strength of the monsters you encounter. In Elden Ring, though, outside of dungeons you don't really need to worry much about enemies if you don't want to. You can kick your horse up to a trot and blast past monsters before they even realize you're there. I'm not saying that you should do this, but it's viable, and can even have advantages: for example, by finding Golden Seeds in the landscape you can increase the number of Flasks at your disposal, which in turn can make earlier dungeon content a lot easier.

 

There are multiple ways to advance through the game: for example, after doing a lot of the Limgrave content and getting to a decent level, you could head south to the Weeping Peninsula or north to Liurnia of the Lakes or east to Caelid. They're all pretty different, but each is a step up from Limgrave. And you could be like me and explore one region for a while, then switch to another for a bit longer.

 

I think that the actual difficulty for specific areas and encounters probably varies based on your build. My character is a Sorcerer, built entirely around ranged damage, so I do very well in places where I can engage enemies from far away; a melee-focused character would have a harder time in big open spaces, but do much better than me in a tight enclosed labyrinth. And I think it would be interesting to do a Faith-based build, which gives access to a lot of buffs. I think this would allow players to shrug off status effects like Poison and Scarlet Rot that are much more debilitating for me.

 

Early on I did some reading on optimal attribute allocations during leveling, but in practice it's turned out to be really casual. Overall I'm mostly putting points into Intelligence, some into Vigor and Mind, occasionally into Endurance and a couple of times into Dex. If I realize that my Flasks are fully filling my FP, then I'll bump up my Mind so I can fully utilize my Flask capacity. Early on I took a lot of Vigor so I could survive a couple of hits from bosses. Lately I haven't been leveling that as much; other than bosses, it's usually more effective to nuke enemies before they can reach you (enemies can't deal damage if they're dead!), so a strong Int-based offense is generally superior for my playstyle. For burst damage, Stamina runs out before FP, so Endurance is important to keep that burst high. This is especially useful for bosses: at the start of a boss fight, you often have several seconds while the boss rears up / charges in / unwinds their serpentine coils / otherwise prepares to fight, and if you can be pummeling them this entire time, you'll have a bit advantage heading into the fight.

Oh: my main spell bread-and-butter these days is "Magic Glintblade". This is a fantastic spell: when you cast it, a projectile will appear above you, pause a few seconds, and then fire off towards your enemy; it can arc slightly to follow your foe if they are moving. This has all sorts of great implications. You can cast it rapidly multiple times in succession, so by the time the first blade fires several more are ready to go. If your enemy is unaware, you can nuke them down before they entire combat (this also doesn't cost Stamina). If they are chasing you, you can line up some shots, then focus on evading, and still do damage while running away. Enemy AI will dodge when you cast the spell, not when it fires, so it's hugely helpful against agile and evasive enemies. It has a good FP-to-damage ratio. Each individual cast is pretty quick and small, so it isn't a major disappointment if a couple of shots fail to land. I use this all the time, on basically every regular monster and most bosses.

Prior to getting Magic Glintblade, I mostly used the starter spell Glintstone Pebble. This is one of the most economical spells in the game: cheap, decently fast, decently powerful, decent range, with a little bit of tracking. I almost never use it since getting the Glintblade, though.

Glintstone Stars and Star Shower can be useful against extremely mobile enemies. For the most part Magic Glintblade has replaced these in my arsenal, but these projectiles seem to have better tracking/homing qualities, so I'll switch to one if an enemy is consistently dodging my Glintblade.

Carian Slicer is situationally very useful. Unlike most of my spells, this is a close-range spell, making a magic sword that sweeps through the area right in front of me. It's a life-saver for boss fights where I can't stay at range during the fight and need to fight in close quarters. It's also useful when fighting against invisible enemies who aren't be targeted.

Rock Sling is a crucial addition. Unlike most spells, which deal Magical damage, Rock Sling deals Physical damage. There are a few specific enemies, like many of the foes inside Raya Lucaria Academy, that have very high magic resistance. You might spend almost a full bar of FP on casting Glintblades to take down a single zombie. Or just hit them with a Rock Sling. It's a bit trickier to use: the casting time is longer, and it makes large projectiles that can collide with the environment, so it's really hard to use effectively in close quarters. But, again, when facing certain enemies it's a life-saver.

Oh! Other than spells, one of the biggest things I've figured out in this game is how to use summons. Before a few select boss fights, you can sometimes see a faint glowing space on the ground, which you can activate to summon an NPC to help you in this fight. This usually requires you to have previously chatted with that NPC and/or solved a quest for them. Most of those summon opportunities are early on; as I've gotten further into the game they've become a lot more scarce.

 

A far more common thing, though, is summoning Spirit Ashes. You can acquire these in the world and add them as quick items, like your horse, lantern or consumables. The Spirit Ashes are not consumed, though. You can summon a Spirit whenever you see the portal icon in the center-left of your screen, which includes most boss fights and also more difficult/hectic environmental encounters. The Spirit Ash is controlled by the AI and will support you until it dies, or you leave the area, or all enemies in the area are defeated. You can upgrade your Spirit Ashes (similar to upgrading your weapons). Spirit Ashes vary a lot and can be useful in different situations. Some are better for distracting enemies and absorbing damage, others for inflicting status effects, others for directly dealing damage, others for staggering, and some can summon swarms that will keep your opponents' hands full.

 

Anyways, I didn't really understand Spirit Ashes or summons for my first dozen hours or so of the game, and it got a lot easier once I started using them: there's never any downside to using one, and it's worth bringing one out whenever you see the icon appear. Some fights that previously felt impossible became significantly easier once I had two or three people on my side facing off against a boss. In particular, if you get in trouble, you can focus on running away for a while; your summon(s) should continue doing damage in the meantime, and eventually the boss will pivot back to them, giving you an opportunity to recover, reorient and dive back in.

MINI SPOILERS

For the most part I'm playing the game unspoiled, but one thing I occasionally peek at online is side quests. There aren't a ton of actual sidequests in Elden Ring. Most of the game's side content is nicely self-contained: you'll reveal a map section, notice a cave somewhere nearby, wander over to it, go inside, have a great encounter in there, and just be done when you leave. But some NPCs have longer-spanning quests, which are a lot more vague than what I'm used to seeing in RPGs. They might request an item, which could be anywhere in the world; or as you to deliver a message to someone you've never heard of. As much as I hate the "Go here and do that" style of quest from Elder Scrolls, I do find myself wishing for some guidance in Elden Ring.

 

None of these are essential - these are side-quests, after all - and I'm sure lots of players will have a great time just blasting through the content. Personally, I'm afraid of missing out on stuff, particularly since sometimes a later development will kill or change or relocate an NPC, which may end the possibility of doing their quest. So, I'll periodically consult the wiki to see if I should be doing something before heading out.

 

I do kind of wish that there was more of an in-game reference for this sort of stuff (information like "The Tattered Man near Sellen is looking for a Golden Needle" or "Aloquia in Roundtable Hold needs to send a message to Prancis, and thinks he's near a waterfall somewhere"). I do love that there isn't an Elder Scrolls type of quest journal, but it would be nice to have something similar to the "Sites of Grace" locator that would show you where already-discovered NPCs are located. And just having a free-form in-game writeable journal would be awesome; I think some of the early Ultima games had something like that. I think a lot of Elden Ring players play with a pen and a notebook near their controller, and maybe that's something I should start doing as well, which would be more fun than periodically opening the wiki.

 

The story itself is interesting. I have a better sense of what this world is and what's going on, but so far the story has been much more evocative than descriptive. It doesn't feel like an epic novel; it's more like an anthology of short stories, all set in the same universe and each one interesting on its own. That's a different feel from the grand RPGs I'm used to playing, which introduce their Big Story early on and keep it in focus throughout the game, but the change in pace is nice. (And, necessary caveat: I have a lot more game to play through, and it may end up being more unified later on.)

 

MEGA SPOILERS

Oh, and a general checkin on my progress so far: I've defeated two of the Shard-Bearers, Goddrick the Grafted and Rennala Queen of the Full Moon. In both cases I skipped past the boss's stronghold and did a lot of content later in the game before doubling back and defeating them later.I walked around Stormveil Castle and into Liurnia, spending a lot of time there before going back and defeating Magritte the Fell Omen. I found the Goddrick fight really difficult, then realized that I didn't have to fight him alone: I went back in with two summons and beat him on my next try.

 

Raya Lucaria Academy is extremely difficult for magic users, since most enemies have high Magic Resistance, so I did basically all of Liurnia of the Lakes and quite a bit of the Altus Plateau before doubling back and finishing it. I did get a lot of great gear out of it, though, including several INT-boosting helmets. And unlike Goddrick, the Remembrance I got from Rennala looks really useful, though I'll need to level up quite a bit more to have the stats to use it.

 

I've made it to the gates of Leyndell the Royal Capital, but I'm currently focusing on clearing the earlier areas of any unexplored dungeons, undefeated bosses or unfinished-but-finishable sidequests first. It's taking a while, but I'm having a blast doing it.

 

END SPOILERS

That's it for now! I think I'm taking a fairly thorough, though definitely not 100%, approach to the game. That means it's taking a while, but I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, and it's nice to overcome some of my natural deficiencies with higher levels and gear. I'm sure I'll have more to check in on later!

No (Nah)

I had the privilege of taking a whole week off of work, which among other things meant a lot of focused time for reading. I brought entirely too many books, including the absolutely massive House Of Morgan, which I may finish in 2026. Balancing that tome, though, was the incredibly fun and readable Nona the Ninth, the third entry in Tamsyn Muir's excellent series about Necromancers In Space.

 

It looks like I never blogged up my reaction to the second novel, and perhaps partly because of that, my memory of that book was a lot fuzzier than the first. I remembered many specific scenes and characters, but not much about how that book exactly ended, and as a result felt somewhat lost when following the new action here.

MINI SPOILERS

I've enjoyed all three books, but my favorite remains the first, almost purely because of Gideon's voice. Harrow and "Nona" are great and well-drawn characters, but it's tough to compete with Gideon's razor-sharp wit, sarcasm, anachronistic pop-culture references and relentless meanness. Harrow wasn't as funny, but felt really dangerous and intense. In contrast, Nona seems like a total cinnamon roll: sweet, helpful, considerate, compassionate. I can see why the people around her act so shocked at her attitude!

It felt a little constricting to step into a seemingly smaller-stakes story after dealing directly with the Necrolord Prime, the Resurrection Beasts, the River, the Saints and the other high-profile elements of the previous book. I think it works pretty well, though. Living at the smaller scale of a city wracked by fear gives a great sense of the human stakes that are impacting everyone in the galaxy. And at the same time we keep tabs on the grander story proceeding in the background. The most dramatic face of this is a series of flashbacks, between the necromancer emperor ("John") and a female companion, which lays out the origin story of the whole series.

MEGA SPOILERS

It's a pretty cool story, and makes it clear that this story takes place in our future, not some alternate Star Wars-style universe. Things on Earth have continued getting worse and worse, to the point where the whole planet is dying and our species with it. A lot of people (and companies and governments) are debating and experimenting with various last-ditch survival strategies. The big goal is to somehow get humanity to a far-away planet that can sustain life. The problem is how to get there: the distances in space are unimaginably vast, far longer than people can live. There are some suggestions like cryo, freezing bodies for the long journey and then thawing them out; and more radical ideas, like digitizing peoples' consciousness and carrying them on hard drives or scraping a few cells onto a plate and then cloning them after arrival.

John is working on his preferred approach, and discovers by accident that he is able to animate dead bodies. He experiments with this, getting to learn more about his ability and the underlying powers of thanergy and thalergy. As amazing as this ability is, it still pales in comparison to the threat of species extinction, and he tries to find ways to put his gift to use. There's some limited progress along commercial lines, but he and his followers become supremely disenheartened when they discover that the rich and powerful people bankrolling this effort have no intention of saving all of humanity: they're building a single ark that will get themselves off the planet and leave everyone else to die behind. (Which is sort of an inversion of the Douglas Adams story of the B Ark.)

Things escalate, with John deciding that he'll get more ability to direct things for good by presenting himself as a necromatic wizard instead of some scientist, and using his powers to directly affect things. It all comes to a head when John realizes that individual peoples' souls are all connected to the soul of the Earth, and then he devours the planet's soul, making himself incredibly powerful, able to crush his enemies and bring his plan into action.

These passages were really compelling: the story itself is pretty wild and bonkers, it does a great job at filling in backstory that was only teased at before, and John himself has a pretty great voice: wry, self-deprecating, chagrined, occasionally angry.

The main story doesn't rise to those high levels, but I came to really love Hot Sauce, Honesty, the Angel, and the more domestic glimpses of Pyrrha Dve and Sextus Palamades and Camilla. The Sextus/Camilla situation in particular was interesting; again, my memory of the second book is pretty fuzzy, but I think there was a similar scenario in there of multiple memories / "souls" residing in a single body, and the first book also played around some with mistaken identities and swapping bodies. I don't want to say that this book is "about" gender necessarily, any more than Gideon the Ninth was "about" sexual orientation, but it's cool to have a book that's comfortable portraying these ideas in interesting scenarios.

END SPOILERS

This was another really fun book, a quick read but not at all ephemeral. It looks like we have at least one more entry on its way. Next time around I think I'll refresh myself with a synopsis or something before diving back in, but I am definitely going to dive in!

Ferreira

Well, I've done it again: started a new Charles Stross series! I've previously enjoyed his near-future cyberpunk "Halting State" and multiple-worlds "Merchant Princes" series. This time I'm jamming on "Singularity Sky", which has a bit more of a Vernor Vinge or Iain Banks feel to it: further out in the future, after humanity has surpassed the limitations of scarcity and is spreading through the cosmos.

 

 

I was recently thinking of Stross thanks to a post he made a few years back about why he barely reads science fiction these days. The gist of it is that a lot of SF is built around cool stuff: some spectacular scene or neat encounter that the author wants to create. Stross, though, cares very deeply about the science behind those things: could that encounter physically occur? What would that scene actually look like in the void of space? Obviously this is fiction and there's endless license available, but often it seems like authors aren't aware of and don't care about the various laws they're violating (physical, social, fiscal, etc).

That definitely matches what I've seen in Stross's other novels, which often take a Stephenson-esque pleasure at explaining why things are happening the way they do. One small example I remember is from the Merchant Princes series. In a previous book, a character discovers that hostile government agents have discovered where she lives, and she flees to another world. Much later, she and another character return to that place, and debate whether it is safe to enter and retrieve some records left behind. Is it likely that government agents still have the house under surveillance? The man she's with does some calculations out loud: how much an FBI agent earns in a day, times the two at a time that would be required to keep watch, multiplied by the number of days since she has left... and concludes that there is no way mid-level management would be willing to keep up this cost after several fruitless months and no assurances that she will ever return. They proceed, and find that, yep, the spooks left behind some passive recording devices but no live men in black.

MINI SPOILERS

Singularity Sky similarly thinks deeply about systems: not just cool stuff happening, but how it can come to happen, and what the effects of it happening are. This extends across all sorts of areas and disciplines. So, there's a "Cornucopia Machine" that can create literally anything by reprocessing matter. Okay, cool, so what does that mean? Obviously the existing economy is toast: there's infinite supply and, it turns out, only limited demand. What happens to society in these conditions? Well, it depends on what the society was like prior to receiving the Cornucopia, right? How about a strongly hierarchical, rigid, moralistic society? And then when it comes to space travel, he's very concerned (as is Stephenson) about delta-vee, not merely getting from point A to point B but matching your velocity with point B so you can actually meet it and not smash through or immediately depart.

There are some things that don't have satisfying scientific answers to them, which feels fine here, because Stross acknowledges them and gestures towards the "beyond our ability to comprehend" sign. The big one is how and why humanity has spread across multiple star systems and how to travel and communicate between them. The big force lurking in the background is an entity called Eschaton. Once technology on Earth advanced sufficiently far enough where they (we!) could travel faster than light, 90% of the population instantly disappeared. They were forcibly resettled by the Eschaton, scattered throughout the nearby galaxy. Eschaton delivered a stern message: humanity was NOT to violate causality by traveling at faster-than-light speeds or otherwise playing around with temporal shenanigans.

Limitations lead to creativity, and so we have a whole toolbox of options that are available. Quantum entanglement is one: after a physical box has traveled the far distance, it can "instantly" communicate with its partner box at the point of origin; but only a limited number of times, until the entangled atoms are exhausted. And there's a great deal of expertise around "timelike" space travel: if you curve far out in space, then travel really rapidly, you can make up for the extra distance with a lot less time, while not technically breaking the Eschaton's speed limit.

MEGA SPOILERS

The actual plot is pretty breezy and fun. There's a wide cast of characters, mostly focused on two people from Earth who are visiting the Republic with both overt and covert agendas. The romance angle is a bit brief but satisfying, and nicely raises the stakes for what's already a tense (albeit arguably needless) conflict. The villains all seem pretty two-dimensional, but near the very end there's a small nod towards why people might prefer a rigid and constrained society when overwhelmed by chaos.

END SPOILERS

Like a lot of Stross's work, this was a fun read: quick and entertaining, but with a nice solid-feeling depth beneath it. It looks like there are several other books in this series, and I'm looking forward to checking out more and learning about this future.

Control Alt Delete

I thoroughly enjoyed Jason Schreier's "Press Reset," and have been looking forward to checking out his previous book on video game development, "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels". Both books cover the same industry and have similar structures: every chapter covers the development of a different video game from a different publisher, with reporting and a lot of (sourced!) quotes from programmers, artists, producers, executives and others describing what happened during the project. The overall feel of the two books is pretty different, though. BS&P's games are mostly huge, popular successes, and the stories cover all of the sacrifices and toil behind the scenes that made them possible. Press Reset's games are mostly failures. Their developers worked just as hard, and had ideas that were just as good, but due to forces beyond their control things didn't turn out how they wished and their stories end in mass layoffs, cancellations and studio closures.

 

 

The biggest constant between the two books is probably crunch. As I've noted before, crunch is the single biggest reason why I've never even tried to get into the video game industry, despite an almost life-long passion for making and playing games. I really liked how Schreier presents crunch in this book: never apologizing for it or saying it's good, but complicating some of our knee-jerk assumptions about it. Early in the book he covers the creation of Uncharted 4, a massive game from a AAA studio. A very late reboot in the game's direction puts things severely behind schedule, and the hundreds of people working on the project start working 100-hour weeks to redo everything they did before and make sure everything is fun to play.

Obviously, this is a terrible situation, and you really feel for the people involved. The people crunching aren't doing it because they were slacking off before or had put in poor work. They're responding to events beyond their control, decisions made by higher-ups and executives, but the low-level workers are the ones who need to bear the burden of those decisions. It feels extremely gross and exploitative.

And then, Schreier immediately follows that up with a chapter on the development of Stardew Valley, which is kind of the exact opposite game. It's the creation of a single person, a shy college graduate who coded the engine, drew all the pixel art, composed all the music, did all of the testing, and every single other task that went into making the game. He doesn't have any boss to set milestones or any shareholders to appease. And yet, he crunches hard as well, going for years of very late nights and little sleep, living in his parents' house and making this game.

Later on, we learn about Yacht Club Games, the makers of Shovel Knight. They quit their previous video game employer, which churned out new games every 6 months or so in a crunch-heavy environment. YCG runs a mildly successful Kickstarter that will pay for about 6 months of salaries while they try to finish their game. They decide to squeeze more time out of it, calculating how much they need to draw down to cover their rent and food and utilities, which then gives them an 8 month runway. When they reach the 6 month mark, though, they know that there's just too much left for them to do before they run out of money... so they all start crunching. Missing anniversaries, birthdays, their kids' first steps, so they can make their video game better.

So, reading all of these, you are left with the grudging impression that there is some sort of real connection between video game development and crunch, not merely the exploitative capitalist tendency to extract maximum labor at minimal cost. People may crunch for their own projects out of passion or perfectionism, because they love what they're working on or because they hate it and can't wait to be done with it.

Some of this rings true to my own experience as well. It's been years since I did any serious game-y things, but I still vividly remember working on my Shadowrun campaigns, which had a lot of crunch to them. There were more than a few times I'd be up well past midnight, sipping on hot tea and listening to Invocation Array while building out levels or testing combat triggers or structuring conversation trees. Like the Stardew Valley guy, I didn't have anyone else putting pressure on me, but I would slip into a productive zone and just jam on code until I would force myself to go to bed.

That said, I do love how the penultimate chapter visits CD Projekt Red, working on The Witcher 3. As with most other chapters, they reach a point where they're racing towards their deadline and not sure if the game is of high enough quality, so everyone starts crunching to make sure things pull together. But, as Jason notes, this company is based on Poland, and so everybody is paid overtime for their extra contributions. To me, that's the single most important factor and the thing that's so gross to me about crunch. More broadly, we have a problem in our country with classifying nearly all white-collar workers as "exempt" salaried employees who don't merit overtime pay, which has been ruthlessly exploited for so many decades to extract unpaid labor. So, y'know, we should stop that! Plenty of other countries require all employees to receive overtime for excess labor, we should do that too. That might result in higher paychecks, but I suspect the more common outcome will be the vanishing of crunch.

Overall, BS&P is more triumphant than PR, but there are a lot of good variations in the stories. The most common one is probably "People were working on a project, something happened that disrupted stuff, people had to work way harder and get an extension to finish it, but they did: the game launched to positive reviews and sold more copies than they expected." So it's cool when a curveball comes in. Diablo 3 is one of the most interesting chapters: unlike most stories, which end shortly after launch day, Diablo 3 starts with launch day. The team is enthusiastic and proud of what they've built, and are blindsided by Error 37, hatred of the auction house, and negative reviews. That whole chapter is about the post-launch effort to fix Diablo 3 and rehabilitate Blizzard's reputation. There's a ton of interesting stuff in that chapter, too much to go into here, but one that sticks out to me was how one of the things that hampered D3's development was the team's awe and veneration of Diablo 2. As their (new) director points out, though, what they were thinking of was what Diablo 2 became, after the Lord of Destruction expansion, which was quite different from what D2 originally launched as. Likewise, they had to be courageous to reexamine their assumptions about D3, and really the series as a whole. This led to some really drastic reworkings, which ultimately paid off. Today Diablo 3 is well regarded, thanks to the game it has become, not the game it launched as.

The very last chapter tells the tragic tale of Start Wars 1313, a very compelling and highly anticipated game that was killed off: at first due to the whims of a mercurial owner, and ultimately due to conglomerate corporate maneuverings. It's a sobering tale to end on, and serves as a good bridge to the later Press Reset, which has plenty more examples of games that never launched, or were disowned by their creators, or emerged in a form unrecognizable to anyone who had worked on them. It's also a helpful reminder that for every fun and beloved game that gets released, there are a lot more terrible games that get released... and vastly more games that never see the light of day. As with most examples of "business success" or celebrity in our culture, the cheery optimism that "anyone can make it!" hides the terrible odds facing anyone who tries.

Overall, I think my recommendation would be for people to read Blood Sweat and Pixels first: it's more fun to read about successes than failures, and odds are you've played and enjoyed at least a few of the games in these pages. You should also check out Jason's many long-form journalism pieces floating around the Internet, he's almost certainly the best person on the video game beat at the moment.

Source Code

Ever since reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I've been on an endless quest to Learn More about the topics it raised. This has led me down the path of more Piketty books, but as there are a finite number of these, I'm increasingly branching into Piketty-adjacent writing. The latest stop on my journey has been The Code of Capital, which examines the same fundamental questions of the nature and behavior of capital and wealth, but from the perspective of a lawyer rather than that of an economist or political scientist. This results in a fascinating and really compelling argument that supplements and explains the more purely economic and social aspects I've been focusing on.

 

It isn't too surprising that the author Katharina Pistor brings a new perspective to this. She's a law professor, and it's natural that she would think that the legal system is a crucial aspect of capitalism. While reading this book I mused about how a farmer or a miner would probably argue that natural resources are the only true form of capital, how an architect or building tradesman would argue that human improvements are the only true way to grow capital, or how a software developer like me might claim that ingenuity is the primary component of capital expansion.

Katharina Pistor seems equally inspired by two things: digging into the root causes of the 2008 financial crash, and digging into a phenomenon that Piketty raises in Cit21C. In his grand tour of the last 2000 years of wealth, and in particular the last 250 or so since the French Revolution, he examines the forms that wealth has taken over time. There has been a drastic shift during the last 100 years: prior to that, most wealth was held in the form of land, particularly rural farmland. Over time, there has been a strong increase in the total value of urban real estate. In modern times, though, the vast majority of our planet's total wealth (as valued by the market) is held in financial instruments, especially stocks and bonds.

What's remarkable to Piketty is how consistent wealth has been: whether you're valuing a patch of dirt that has existed for billions of years and will exist for billions more, or valuing a handful of bits in a computer register that we've agreed to pretend is worth something, the way that capital accrues wealth to its owner hasn't changed, nor the patterns in how it is accumulated and passed down to heirs.

Pistor, though, is curious about how those new forms of wealth were created: it seems like a really big deal! Her thesis is that only the law (that is, the civil legal system) can create new systems of capital. Lawyers function much like priests. They take an unadorned asset, like a loaf of bread; they endow it with legal encodings that are recognized by the state, much like a prayer; and the asset is then transformed into capital, like bread into the Host.

Pistor is writing to a general audience, and I really appreciated the time she spends going through fundamental questions. One that she spends time on is a question that I feel embarrassed to ask: what is capital? I needn't feel embarrassed, because it turns out that there's a great deal of debate on the topic, and she gives a good survey about how various factions would describe it. In her view, though, capital is simply an asset that provides guaranteed income for its owner. Examples could include a house that you rent out, or money in a bank savings account, or a patent that pays you royalties.

Not every thing that exists in the world can generate income, of course. People won't pay you for merely owning a musical instrument, or for inventing a new dance move, in the same way they would pay you for owning an acre of farmland or for inventing a gadget. Why do some things get the special status of capital?

In the author's explanation, capital doesn't depend on what kind of asset it is: traditionally only physical assets were considered capital, but today most capital value is intangible. Rather, an asset becomes capital once it is "coded" with certain properties. These include:

Priority. There needs to be a way to determine who has the rights to declare themselves owner of the asset. Something that is held in common, like fresh air or the historical record, can't be owned by any individual and is thus worthless as capital. If there are multiple claims to a specific asset, then there needs to be a way to determine whose claims are the strongest. If a landlord owns a house, and the bank has a mortgage over that house, and a tenant occupies the house, then whose interests will be protected?

Durability. The asset and its ownership needs to continue existence for a long time. Something that is only temporarily "owned" isn't capital, nor something that will rotate its ownership.

Universality. The owner's, er, ownership, needs to be recognized broadly. It isn't enough if you and I agree that our parody songs are worth billions: the whole country, and other countries, need to agree that parody songs are valuable and that we are the sole owners of them. 

Finally, Convertability. A capital asset needs to be able to be sold for something of actual value: in particular, government-backed currency.

So, how does new capital (in particular, new categories of capital) get created? By high-priced private lawyers. They use the legal code to designate assets with the above properties, using existing tools from areas such as contract law, property law, trust law and bankruptcy law. Two parties might enter into a contract with one another in which they agree to recognize certain claims and obligations, and code the asset in such a way that they can exchange it with others not party to the original contract. These contracts will likely invoke existing statutory law to protect and defend the new aspects of ownership, taking law that was originally created for one type of asset and claiming it applies to a new one.

Throughout the book, Pistor returns to a central irony of the creation of capital. Ultimately, capital completely depends on the coercive powers of the state. At the end of the day, only the state has the authority to arrest people or enforce massive fines, and only the state will defend certain rights against the interest of people abroad. And yet, the actual creation of capital takes place entirely in the private sphere, and seeks to avoid involvement with the state as much as possible. Particularly in common-law jurisdictions such as England and the State of New York, new law may be drawn up in private agreements, and never face the scrutiny of a court, at least not until some catastrophic event occurs. By that time, such law may have been de-facto followed for decades: it will likely be blessed by the courts, and if not, the "owners" will still have reaped decades of gains.

I think that Pistor and Piketty came to many of the same conclusions from their varying journeys, with Piketty's more recent thoughts in Capital & Ideology often lining up with the arguments in The Code of Capital. In particular, both of them emphasize that the state has enormous powers to regulate capital that are currently going entirely unused or actively abused. Piketty sees this through a democratic lens: we, the people, collectively get to decide what kind of a society we want to have, and that includes the role we want wealth to play in society. Pistor sees it at an even more fundamental level: regardless of whether we're in a democracy or not, at the end of the day the coded wealth of capital won't be worth anything unless the state's police force and courts are willing to defend that capital, and the state provides a stable currency that allows the capital to be converted and used: capital could not exist without the state. And yet, we've seen endlessly that the masters of capital want to enjoy the benefits of state protection while providing none of their gains, or as few as possible, to support the state. They'll use the apparatus of the state to invent new wealth, but also code it in such a way that it avoids taxation, such as placing it "overseas" (while enjoying the benefit at home), or deferring obligations indefinitely, or refusing to let transactions settle, or any other chicanery. Anyways, Piketty has an enduring fear that, if capitalism isn't reigned in and wealth continues to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands, the end state won't be an eternal oligarchy, but rather a violent revolution that destructively redistributes wealth from outside the system. Somewhat similarly, Pistor sees that brilliant legal minds are moving more and more wealth beyond the reach of the state; but if they succeed, the end result won't be unlimited capitalism, but rather the end of capitalism: the state will shrivel, and with it the underlying coercive power to enforce the legal code, and with that capitalism itself.

Both are also acutely aware of the ills of globalization and have provided a lot of detail on how the liberalization of capital flows have enabled a race to the bottom, as more and more money is supposedly placed in tax havens while actually being spent elsewhere. Piketty seems to focus more on the economic measurements and impacts of this trend, while Pistor focuses more on its mechanics: the combination of treaties and domestic laws and contractual arrangements that enabled the status quo, as well as how those changes were accomplished. She even attempts to answer why states would voluntarily cede their sovereignty in such a way. Like Piketty, the overall analysis feels very bleak, but she holds out hope for reform. Piketty's plan seems to be broadly populist; Pistor's is compatible with populism, but she also makes solid arguments for why this trend is so dangerous and why a country's political and even economic elite should work to gradually reverse it. Also like Piketty, she acknowledges that a broad multilateral approach would in the best case take a long time and in the worst case never complete, but that in the meantime there are very strong moves that nations can take on unilateral or bilateral bases, which could break the chain and restore guardrails to our entangled financial system.

The penultimate chapter covers the rise in crypto, and more specifically the "code as law" idea. She takes this very seriously, tracing the origin of the blockchain and how its promoters envision it working. Crypto offers a potential alternative to the legal system: rather than writing a contract in human language and relying on the courts to enforce it, you can write a contract in code and have it automatically executed: the contract IS the transaction. As she shows, though, this has only been demonstrated to work for instantaneous transactions, which are a tiny fraction of all contractual arrangements. And furthermore, the binary nature of code isn't a good match for the uncertainties of reality. Natural language can occasionally be vague and messy, but that is part of its power: when unexpected details develop, as they inevitably do, courts can interpret the intent of that language in coming to a decision. There's no such wriggle room in crypto, so transactions will either fail without termination, or they will need to be thrown to human mediation.

And furthermore, even if we did perfect a computer-based system for contracts and mediation, there's still the fundamental problem of how we determine who owns what in the first place. Our current system is labyrinthine; for example, there's no central registry of who owns every parcel of land, but rather, each locality maintains its own roster of ownership. And these claims can face dispute: does a parcel of land belong to the indigenous tribes who occupied it for centuries, or the settlers who took it from them? The crypto system can't judge the rightful ownership of the assets it oversees, only trace the movement of those assets since they were entered into the system.

Prior to reading this chapter, I was thinking about crypto a lot while reading this book, but not so much about the cryptocurrency stuff Pistor addresses: rather about the NFT movement. This book was published in 2019, shortly before the NFT craze really took off, so it isn't addressed much here, but I think it's extremely applicable to Pistor's main thesis and NFTs make a phenomenal case study. We were all, in real time, witnessing the attempt of the creation of a new category of capital asset. The underlying asset is famously just a kilobyte or so of code, basically a signed URL, arguably "worth" an infinitesimal fraction of a penny. And yet, thanks to a big marketing push and the endorsement of celebrities, the founders hoped to establish that these assets were investments, worth thousands or millions of state-backed currency.

So, let's take a look at how the code of capital was applied to these assets!

Priority is arguably the main selling point. One of the virtues of the blockchain is that at any moment in time, anyone can verify the ownership of an asset through the public registry. In the case of NFTs, this is an incredibly strong and unbreakable priority system, even in the presence of fraud or theft. "All my apes, gone!" As endless internet commentators have noted, the law-less quality of NFTs means that there's no legal appeal to the state to reverse a movement of assets, which is arguably terrible, but does reinforce the stability of the Priority system for an NFT.

Durability. On the one hand, NFTs are infinitely durable: they only exist in the digital space and will never decay. And the blockchain registry will also endure, so ownership of the asset is permanent until transferred.

Universality. This seems to be the category where NFTs fail as capital assets. Within the NFT community, members can agree to treat one another's claims with respect; outside of that community, though, there is no recognition that the claim means anything. We've all laughed at people online who say that only the "owner" of an NFT has the "right" to display their ugly monkey image: it's a JPEG, and anyone can right-click and save the image. When someone's "property" is "misused", there is no recourse or enforcement available. They can't sue someone in the courts to make them stop using "their" image, or send a sheriff to reclaim "their" property. 

Finally, Convertibility. There is a fairly robust system in place to exchange state-backed currency for NFTs and vice versa, so on the one hand, they are highly convertible. But they run into the same issue as crypto, in that the market is extremely volatile and a terrible store of value. As the market has crashed, they are less and less desirable assets.

So, overall, it seems to me like NFTs failed to be successful capital assets precisely because of what they were advertised as: assets that relied on computer code (blockchain) rather than on the legal code (copyright) for their value. You can see what an incredible amount of influence it takes to truly mint a new form of capital, and in particular, how to ensure that the state will use its courts and police to enforce the private interests of the holders of capital. Just take a moment and imagine what that world would have looked like: if your apes were stolen, the thief would be thrown in prison; if someone used a hexagon image as their Twitter profile pic, they would be forced to pay millions in damages. Well, that's the world we live in when it comes to derivative securities, or Mickey Mouse, or Scrabble. A century or two ago, those examples would have seemed as ludicrously unworthy of state protection as a Bored Ape does today.

But, who knows? One possible, if unlikely, future might exist where those "rights" do become embedded in law; the depressing surge in Crypto-friendly members of Congress may be a harbinger. That would follow the path Pistor predicts at the end of her chapter on Crypto, suggesting that in the end law will win out over code and crypto assets will be enveloped and absorbed by the current masters of capital. The alternative might involve NFTs or their descendants becoming entangled in other, protected assets, such that harm to them causes harm to others. That could result in them belatedly being coded with universality, even in the absence of statutory law, as existing holders of capital would feel compelled to recognize and uphold them. Either move would probably move NFTs firmly into the realm of a true capital asset.

So, yeah! This was a really wonderful, fascinating book, with a whole lot to chew on, including quite a few topics I didn't get into here. I really appreciated Pistor's approach through the book; as a total novice in legal matters, I was able to follow what she was talking about, and follow into what becomes some relatively complex structures. That complexity isn't an accident; one of her observations is that much of what high-priced lawyers do is deliberately obscure, hiding important information behind impenetrable jargon, more or less explicitly to remove these actions from the public democratic sphere and make them exclusively available to the wealthy elite. So it's really important to know exactly what is happening and why. Globalization wasn't just some sickness that struck the world overnight and we all have to live with now. It was the result of a series of calculated legal maneuvers in order to achieve a particular outcome. And we don't need to live with it now that we've seen its catastrophic consequences. Those same tools of law can undo it. That won't happen naturally, or easily: greed is an incredibly powerful motivator, and such actions would be fiercely opposed. But it's an important job to do, and one I hope I see completed in my lifetime.