The Economist April 30th 2022 Business 61H
ave you ever actually read a terms
andconditions document? Word
Press, a service for building websites
whose clients include the White House
and Disney, thinks anyone who has
deserves congratulations. Its terms of
service are the usual endless scroll of
legalese, until you reach section 14, on
disclaimers. Buried in the verbiage about
warranties and noninfringement is a
short, odd sentence: “If you’re reading
this, here’s a treat.” Click on the link, and
you see a picture of some appetising
Texas brisket. Suitably revived, you can
then move on to the stuff about juris
dictions and applicable law.
Coming across an Easter egg, the
name given to unexpected messages or
features hidden somewhere in a product,
is not like seeing funny advertising or
following a humorous corporate social
media account. Easter eggs are winks,
not gags; asides rather than standup. A
new paper on their use in software, by
Matthew Lakier and Daniel Vogel of the
University of Waterloo in Canada, de
scribes various motivations for them,
from rewarding users’ curiosity and
acknowledging the work of developers to
building hype and recruiting employees.
But their defining characteristic is that
they are playful.
On Google’s search engine, treats
famously abound: if you search for the
word “askew”, for example, the results
page is somewhat offkilter. Tesla cars
are jampacked with references to pop
culture: entering 007 into a text box on
the car’s console, for example, will
change the image of the car to one used
by James Bond in “The Spy Who Loved
Me”. Tapping repeatedly on the software
version number in the settings menu of
an Android phone will usually open up a
game (on version 11, the game is unlockedby repeatedly turning a dial that goes all
the way up to that number, an injoke
nestled within an injoke).
Not everyone likes playfulness in their
products. Microsoft got rid of Easter eggs
from its software in 2002, when it
launched an initiative called Trustworthy
Computing. It worried that they might
introduce vulnerabilities, prompt ques
tions among users about what else might
be lurking in its code, or simply get people
asking why its engineers did not have
anything better to do. “It’s about trust. It’s
about being professional,” explained a
blog by one of its developers in 2005.
Obviously, playfulness has limits,
particularly when applied to products that
must not go wrong or to services whose
reputation rests on sobriety. You probably
don’t want engineers at Airbus or Boeing
to spend too much time on giggles. The
idea of a frisky auditor sounds more like a
fetish than a recipe for commercial suc
cess. Giving rein to employees’ creativity
has risks: jokes can easily backfire. But
Easter eggs do not have to be embedded in
code to have an impact: playfulness is amindset which can show up in design
choices or tweaks to wording. And in
many contexts, irreverence can foster
loyalty rather than weaken it.
Making references that rely on users’
knowledge of a product is a way of add
ing to a sense of community. Hit a bro
ken page on the Marvel website and
you’ll be taken to one of a series of quirky
404 pages; one shows Captain America
grimacing and the tagline “hydrais
currently attacking this page!” Elon Musk
routinely uses playfulness to signal his
antiestablishment credentials to his
army of fans: by including the number
“420” in his recent offer price for Twitter,
he appeared to be making a reference to
marijuana. (If you find this funny, you’ll
be thrilled to know that Tesla vehicles
can also make fart noises.)
Injokes can be used to reinforce
brands. While readers of the New Yorker
wait for their app to load, messages like
“Captioning cartoons” and “Checking
facts” appear at the bottom of the screen.
On an iPhone’s web browser, Apple uses
circularrimmed glasses as the icon for
its readinglist feature, in an apparent
tribute to Steve Jobs.
Showing playfulness is above all a
way of bestowing humanity on compa
nies and their products. Slack, a messag
ing platform, offers users a chance to
pick various notification sounds. The
explanation for the one marked “hum
mus” is that a British employee said this
word in a way that tickled colleagues: it
is her voice you can hear.
There is no utility at all to this feature,
or to knowing the story behind it. But far
from eroding trust, the decision to in
clude this sound in the product creates a
sense that a group of actual humans is
behind it. Playfulness may sound un
professional. It can be seriously useful. The case for playfulness in corporate productsBartlebyEaster eggs and other treats
export controls under which less advanced
pieces of equipment that are not used for
cuttingedge manufacturing might still be
sold to China, while more advanced tools
would be prohibited. That would allow the
toolmakers to retain some portion of their
Chinese revenues.
Efforts to figure out where to draw the
line continue. Akin Gump has been lobby
ing cabinet members and legislative lead
ers on behalf of the coalition, and is in on
going discussions with both the Biden ad
ministration and members of Congress.
“The plan is being driven by the Biden ad
ministration,” the Coalition said in a state
ment on April 25th.
The proposal hinges on getting Ameri
ca’s allies—in particular Japan and the
Netherlands, home to Tokyo Electron and
asml—to impose the same export controls
on their toolmakers. The chances of this
have increased since Russia’s assault on
Ukraine. Officials around the world have
been regularly putting their heads together
to understand the effect America’s bans on
trade with Russia will have on their coun
tries. That has created channels through
which the complex task of shutting Chinaout of advanced chipmaking, a far trickier
task than curbing sales of oil or weapons,
might take place.
The plan may yet fall apart. China is un
likely to accept it meekly. Hawks in Wash
ington may push for harder restrictions.
Defining what equipment can continue to
be exported to China may prove too diffi
cult. But if it works, Chinese chipmakers
would need decades to catch up with the
West—and America would have met its
goals of suppressing Chinesesemiconduc
tor development whilecausing minimal
harm to its own industry.n