Even if North Korean cyber warriors didn't hack Sony,
there are lots of reasons why we might think they did.
Here are some ideas about why.
In case you missed it, over the most recent festive period,
some media meets politics meets foreign policy meets
cyber war capers went down.
Sony Pictures Entertainment was haxed.
All kinds of sensitive, important, and embarrassing
information was leaked.
Concurrently, Sony was slated to release
"The Interview," a movie about two schlocky journalists
involved in a plot to assassinate North Korea's
supreme haircut, Kim Jong-un.
In response to the film, ostensibly North Korean
internet troublemakers threatened violent retribution
upon its release.
Sony scrapped the premiere.
But after a PR nightmare, released it anyway.
I watched it yesterday on demand.
It was, um, a movie.
Anyway, it would seem that all of this, Sony being haxored,
"The Interview," North Korea terrorist threats,
it all fits into a nice, neat little narrative.
North Korea, a country we know to have been training cyber
warriors for the last number of years,
infiltrates the servers of the notoriously bad at securifying
their stuff Sony in response to a film that,
alongside a bunch of butt jokes, pokes fun at and depicts
the demise of its most revered marshal of the republic.
The FBI has said that this is the case.
President Obama even acted on this narrative,
issuing the first ever executive order
sanctioning a country for perpetrating a cyber attack,
a thing which I fear will never sound serious,
no matter how awful the results.
It's just very hard to take seriously,
the cy-- cyber attack.
It just-- I dunno.
And for a lot of people, the story ends here.
This is just an unfortunate side effect
of living in the 21st century.
PHIL COLLINS (SINGING): That's just the way it is.
Except lots of folks aren't buying this narrative.
Was it really North Koreans who hacked Sony?
Security professionals say that the evidence
is circumstantial at best.
And was the hacking really in response to "The Interview?"
It seems impossible that the media drew the connection.
And then the perpetrators or someone
corroborated just for lulz, sources for this,
by the way, and lots of them, in the doobly doo.
Either way, the FBI, some news outlets, and some people
were able to do a very convenient, if as far as
available knowledge goes, somewhat hasty, thing.
They could and did group two mysterious
and narrowly understood groups of people, North Korea
and hackers, into one threatening bundle o' other,
which, in this case, maybe they should.
Maybe they shouldn't.
It's really hard to say.
And that's what's interesting.
To quote computer security expert Bruce Schneier,
it's a strange future we live in when
we can't tell the difference between random hackers
and major governments.
Or when those same random hackers can credibly
threaten international military organizations.
In other words, reality is stranger than the Shadowrun
game I'm currently GMing.
Sally, watch our butts.
For many of us, hackers and North Korea,
or maybe more specifically, its leader and combat forces,
share a kind of menacing mystique.
We don't know much.
But what we do know feels like a peek
behind some forbidden curtain.
The glimpses we do get via the news or media
or whatever form this kind of irresponsibly essentialist sad
but no less threatening portrait,
aggressive inhuman technophiles, malnourished victims of state
supported megalomania, but regardless,
forces with which it is best to not reckon if you can help it.
The shenanigans surrounding Sony and "The Interview"
provide an opportunity to collapse these two groups.
But--
You mean shenanigans?
Let's assume the infosec professionals
who say it probably wasn't North Korea but rather a former Sony
employee or someone who just does
this for shrimps and giggles are correct,
which is a thing I, personally at least, am inclined to do.
What then?
What does that mean?
Well, given Obama's executive order,
it means that foreign policy needs
to consider the fact that it has potentially just
been influenced by random hackers, in Schneier's words,
and perhaps more importantly, that those same random hackers
can potentially influence foreign policy, which,
as an aside, plays perfectly into the other essentialist
portrait of hackers not as basement dwelling keyboard
jockeys but the more Hollywood portrayal as the kids
from "Hackers" or that Michael Mann film
where Thor has to shoot guns at the haxors to stop them
from exploding Jakarta or whatever.
This convicted hacker's a genius coder.
Anyway, at the heart of this, I think
we're witnessing the effects of abstraction,
of taking concrete ideas and practices
and applying them to related but increasingly
referential and general areas.
The abstraction that we're all probably the most familiar with
is the one that happened to money,
which went from useful and valuable tradeable commodity
to gold back to fiat currency and now, at its most abstract,
to credit and all of its related and practically
arcane financial instruments represented not
by physical currency and goods but by laws, regulations,
and records.
The move to abstraction is one from specific practices
to almost ephemerality to concepts, from things to ideas.
With Sony, "The Interview," and North Korea,
we can see how we've also abstracted the state,
the corporation, even combat.
The hacking of an American based subsidiary
of a Japanese corporation by people
who claim, maybe just for fun, to have acted
in the interest of a secretive nation state responding
to the portrayal of silly American journalists
assassinating their comedically fictionalized leader
is called unflinchingly an act of war by US authorities.
Abstractions in abstractions.
The US is whatever the US has interest in.
North Korea is whoever acts in its name.
And an act of war is apparently any hostile action taken
by the latter on the former.
And the role of technology here, what
is required to successfully defeat network security
measures, only adds to the obfuscation.
Ideally, in observation, a hacker
is not a person but more like a process, just something that
happened to some system somewhere
and, through no shortage of skill and cleverness,
is never once identified as human, just something that
happened.
Only effects, no cause.
I might wager that the future we live in
is so strange and symptomatic of that strangeness
that the line between random hackers and governments
is so blurry for these very facts, that maybe
as an effect of the postmodern condition
or an increasing comfort with ideas
as opposed to objects or a technologically inspired shift
away from the primacy of the physical,
we are increasingly comfortable with
and able to operate in abstraction.
Good, bad, I'm not saying either way,
but I do think, personally at least,
that that comfort or maybe even overcomfort
is what has led to some of the lines drawn between the US
and Sony, North Korea and hackers,
and "The Interview," the main characters
of which, I think it's worth noting,
were conscripted into the assassination plot because
of their desire to do real journalism,
to be making real news.
Wish granted, I guess.
What do you guys think?
Does abstraction play some role in these North Korea allegedly
hacking Sony over "The Interview" shenanigans,
if that's the word that you wanna use?
Shenanigans?
Let us know in the comments.
And you can turn the abstract concept
of subscribing into a concrete practice by doing the thing.
You know what I'm gonna say.
I feel like we haven't spoken in weeks, because we haven't.
Let's see what you guys had to say about the morning ritual
video, which we made literally forever ago.
So first things first, you might notice that it
looks a little bit different.
We're changing things up for next week's episode
about Serial.
Again, if you haven't listened to Serial,
you should get going on that.
You have 12 hours of material to cover.
I know it's a little weird.
So we'll make it a little bit more homey.
Put up the record wall.
OK.
Much better.
All right.
On with the business.
Recently, you may have heard that you can now
make animated GIFs of Idea Channel videos
in the side of YouTube.
And you guys have made no shortage.
So we will put some links to some of our favorites
in the doobly doo.
They're really very good.
They have consistently been making my day.
So thank you for doing that, for making GIFs of my silly face.
Estaban Riposa talks about how after you've
developed a morning routine, you can really
start to feel off kilter, even that your life is
no longer yours, in some sense and asks for some advice
about how to deal with that kind of thing.
And I think you kind of don't have
to go any further than your fellow Idea Channel
subscribers.
There were a lot of commenters who
wrote great comments about how they
have had to be clever to try to figure out
how to fit a routine, even if it's not in the morning,
in their life, because they identified it as something
that they needed.
And it-- reading these comments has been really,
I think, heartening, like, knowing
that people identify productivity as a thing
that they really want and have to do
and that they will figure out a way to do it.
Idea Channel subscribers, good at life.
Lindlyshawnasusan talks about how
they are not able to have a morning routine because
of their work schedule but have figured out
that an evening routine accomplishes a similar thing.
And I want to stress this, that I think a lot of the ideas
that we're trying to get at apply even if it's not
in the morning.
We started with that thing because I
think it's something that is recognizable and also available
information for the types of people
that we wanted to talk about.
But yeah, like, morning routine, afternoon
routine, evening routine, still equally
contribute, I think, to this idea of comfort
and being able to become a conduit,
whether it is for creativity or just being a human being,
Nina Bice asks a really great question
about if you don't have a morning routine, if you're
doing the something different every morning,
is that similar to having a Spartan lifestyle?
And I think that if you follow the metaphor of the episode
very closely, then the answer is maybe yes,
that if the idea is that you're not owning things,
and in not repeating things, you feel no ownership, then
and in so far as a Spartan lifestyle is owning less stuff,
I can totally see it.
But I don't know.
I'm having a hard time getting my mind around it, because
to me, the Spartan lifestyle is very much about this diligence
that I associate with routine.
But I'd be really interested to hear what everybody else thinks
about this and how they see this relating
to other types of lifestyles, like what if you are-- if you
have a very opulent lifestyle with lots and lots of objects,
is that a more complicated morning routine?
I don't know.
What do you think?
Ricky Russell, I have one of those.
It's called Reasonably Sound.
You can find a link to it in the doobly doo.
It's about sound.
You can listen the crap out of it.
Dan Rayner, it is a Bennington Potters mug.
They make the best mugs.
This is my hand.
It is down.
[INAUDIBLE] talks about how the basis for this idea
is maybe unnecessarily romantic and that the relationship
that I explained isn't a thing that really exists,
that we are just being trained to have
this like or relationship with these objects just
through their continued use and that there are things like they
mention, the shower, the toilet, that
are part of our daily routine that we choose not to love
or that we just do not love and do not consider
as part of that larger picture.
And I think that that is true.
But I also think that it's maybe a little quick
to not give credit to those sets of things
that we do have relationships to, because I
think we do have them.
And they are important.
So overly romantic maybe, but I think
only as an effect of our general over romance
with certain objects, which I think is fair and fine.
Mitchell Gates writes a really interesting comment
about the linguistic dimension of this idea
and how ownership and the saying that something is yours
are things that are not necessarily isomorphic,
that there is a separation between them
and that you can feel ownership over something that is yours.
But you can feel that something is yours without actually
having ownership over it, that you might not necessarily
feel it.
You might not even necessarily have it.
And I think that this is a really
important and interesting thing to talk about
that I have no particular response to,
other than Mitchell, this was a great comment.
Thank you for writing this.
Link to this comment and all of the others in the doobly doo.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these cyber warriors.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit,
which I didn't take any comments from this week.
I totally forgot.
I'm sorry, you guys.
I will get them next week.
Gah, I feel terrible.
And the tweet of the week comes from [INAUDIBLE],
who suggested that we do our Valentine's Day
episode about Korrasami.
I think that sounds like a great idea.