When I taught politics in person, it became easy to reveal the tyranny of the phrase and its relations “leave politics out of it,” because that is an attempt to end the conversation as a place of shared reality. What is really being said here is “you are threatening my worldview, so shut up before things get ugly.” I lost students and friends to these moments. First, it’s absurd to suggest it’s possible to be apolitical when everything truly is political. Second, the fact we avoid the most important of issues suggests we are incapable of producing a political system that works. When threat actors accomplish these things, and issue mea culpas as sincere as Homer Simpson vs. the Carneys ring-toss game for the house. Finally, I cannot help but laugh at the bolded statement: our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society.
The English phrasing of “and not creating problems” certainly reinforces the Darkside identity as non-Western. The goal to make money is an attempt to humanize their efforts: given the casino-economy of the world, it’s no secret how the West has more than the rest. So long as such groups appear actually Robinhood-like, they are likely to avoid the scrutiny brought upon themselves. The final frontier of capitalism is all in technology; the virtualization of everything has us on the precipice of a world flooded with the need to secure data. Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Just before the pandemic, many of us persisted in dead-end careers. But with the loss of jobs, forces our hands, and I have decided to join that which defeated my industry.
As I think about my transition into tech, and societal recognition of how important it is to almost all aspects of our lives, I wanted to assess my life so far in terms of major political milestones and the relative technological landscape of the day. I want to share with you the revelations I acquired as a scholar of political philosophy whose desire to have what I called “the best definition of history,” and to record my biggest findings as a teacher before my mind shifts hard towards network and cloud security, threat detection, and other cyber operations.
The Fall of the Soviet Union – My earliest political memory is actually the 1988 presidential election between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis. I remember my oldest brother (14 at time time) being politically aware enough to razz my dad as it was clear the returns showed a win for Bush, the Ronald Reagan third term. This was the era of Atari 2600, original NES, and our IBM Tandy machine where I learned basic boot operations in order to play Rogue (the game that spawned the term Rogue-like) and The Bard’s Tale II. The first online service we had was Prodigy, and we used this beast of a “laptop” to string the phone line across the floor to the 2600 baud modem that made the classic noises of machine communication as the session established over the phone took quite some time given the bandwidth limitations then. Getting online “tied up” your landline, as it was the only way online; you could easily be severed by someone picking up the receiver end of a phone in the house! One morning, the front page of the newspaper showed the final Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbechev, looking what I interpreted to be “sad,” and asked my mom why he was so, and her explanation to 7 or 8 year old me was “well, he lost his job,” or something simple like that. Part of what brought the Soviet regime down was the abandonment of material reality for political reality; another part that brought the regime down was intellectual property theft. East Germany relied on espionage to steal all the tech needed to “keep up,” but the problem with this is at least twofold: you are not sponsoring a culture of innovation/investing in your own people, so the understanding of the stolen tech is going to be limited; second, you’re never really at parity if you’re always stealing and spending time to catch up. Aside from nuclear espionage, the returns seem to be rather diminishing. Will it matter if you’re stealing AGI technology instead of innovating it? Probably.
The Dream of the 1990s – Is NOT alive in Portland. Or anywhere else except for your mind, maaaan. I have a vague recollection of the first “cellular” phone in my family–an emergency device for trips to the mall–the beginning of the end of finding gas stations or asking strangers for help–but nothing more. I told my mom “everyone will have one of these,” and we’ll be able to message wherever people are. Then we proceeded to get lost on purpose finding a new way to the mall, since everyone had their way of getting places before mapping apps told us how to get places. Other than video games, the first part of the decade was consumed by sports and other imaginative outdoor play. However, discovering the electric guitar came into conflict with all sports all the time. Multi-effects units then were a joke; now emulators easily have more fans than traditional tube-driven amps. For this reason, I knew I needed to make a decision at some point which way to go, and I opted for vintage sounds, feeling like the last generation to really know why they were (and still are) better than solid state. Then came high school. I do not remember using a computer much for freshman year, but seem to recall AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM was definitely established by junior year as a de facto hang out space between dinner and bed time. Here’s how underdeveloped the Internet was then: my freshman year, there was a VHS copying of some B-pornography tape. VHS! Meaning, the Internet was not how we found inspiration. However, I believe it was sophomore year: only one kid had a CD-ROM with “burning” (copying) capability, charging $5 to pirate a CD. He was smart because his business was done by the following year as the ubiquity of the technology hasd spread to enough kids’ homes. The mp3 quietly debuted during this time, but it wasn’t until college that the damage that was Napster and Limewire really kicked in, but by the end of college, iTunes began to figure out the way towards successful monetization of the mp3 as a legitimate commodity. But I’m starting to get ahead of myself.
Columbine – I do appreciate marijuana legalization shifting 4.20 away from being a somber reminder of the day all schools became unsafe from disaffected students with access to guns. This marks the beginning of the end of fun 20th century experiences in a lot of ways; however, I can let them go so long as we continue to shake off other vestiges from that century. After the shootings, we could no longer leave the building and use the grounds for change of class; juniors and seniors who could drive, sorry, but no more leaving for lunch (meaning my cohort was like the first person in line to not get a slice of pie). I see this now as a moment when the world became more locked down. The aftermath in my local experience culminated towards a cheap bomb threat the school took seriously enough to allow parents to keep students home without repercussion, but we forgot all about it quickly. The pillars of institutional stability began to crumble earlier in the year with the Clinton impeachment, and now the school building was a shooting gallery. As a galvanizing, political moment, I do recall bullying taking a serious shift in the ensuing years among my cohort at-large. Unfortunately, subsequent generations do not have this memory, and all we have had since is more of these scenes.
9/11/2001 – I remember watching the attacks in real time on television. I only really stopped to watch it as I realized it was on all of the three basic cable news stations. Ok. So, television was cable, and not digital. I could “flip” channels with a “button popper” (Pittsburghese for “remote control”) and I was merely putting it on for my short breakfast-morning “look at something” before I commuted to the University of Pittsburgh. Here’s how slow the news moved then: I went to school, thinking, “wow, that’s crazy, but it’s happening in New York…” I left after the second plane hit to get to what I think was a 10 am recitation for history of ancient philosophy. By the time I got to the classroom, the severity crept in as a classmate was in tears not knowing the status of his sister who worked in one of the towers. Our TA arrived–unaware of the news–and as she noticed the heaviness of the room and was brought up to speed, she recognized the importance of the moment and told us to get to a television (our best access to news then) and phones to check in with loved ones. I vaguely remember going to the Pitt Student Union building and trying to find a spot to stand to watch the news. Then I realized I should just go home. I was a bit slow to that party. By the time I left campus (late morning, early afternoon), downtown was empty. I wouldn’t see such emptiness again until the recent pandemic.
Financial Crisis of 2007 and 2008 – This marks the beginning of the end for teaching as I knew it. Since I graduated in 2006, I trained to teach without computers, robust online learning management systems, mobile devices, reliable WiFi, and all of the other ultrafast experiences provided by networked machines. Unbeknownst to everyone: the impact of the iPhone release sped up the way we consumed information. If I were to make a quick mapping of important communications devices, it’d go: telegraph, telephone, computer networking, and then the merging of the latter. But it would take until the next political milestone to really see the effects of the smart phone moment (The Snowden Moment and Black Lives Matter). The cracks in the latest capital cycle really teetered on a fine edge, but the effects of “austerity” proved near-fatal on top of the symptoms of the system coming undone. For me personally, I think the most meaningful takeaway from this 13 year retrospective is this: a lot of assets and debts became consolidated by the government, making us a far more collectivized state than many realize. I had just moved to Seattle. I was trying to make a sustainable life as an adjunct professor, and BOOM, sideswiped by what I hope is the only Global Financial Crisis of my lifetime. But something tells me that is wishful thinking. Despite this, I managed to eke out a living (at the cost of a mental health depressive period), and thought I could help the world with the social sciences. As my teaching centered around the way politics and technology interact, my own research revealed the final demise of teaching as I knew it; I tried convincing myself we would–as a society–support teachers eventually, but it’s clear ours is a society hostile towards the social sciences, if not most of past intellectual traditions.
The Snowden Moment and Black Lives Matter – Institutional trust eroded further during the previous decade, 2011 – 2020, first with the Edward Snowden interview and fallout, but also in reality as the United States march towards racial equality keeps running into stubborn features of the system. This is where the historian part of me begins to give way to the political side: the nearer the events, the less objectivity or perspective we have with which to contextualize as an historical event. But the ruse is in thinking the two parts (history and politics) are ever really separate any more than the part of your brain you use to make decisions vs. the part that tells you to eat (that you need to do so, not so much as what you prefer). Politically, I understand why Snowden did what he did, and cannot imagine being smart enough to end up in the space where my values were considerably challenged as his were. I remember discussing him in a summer class with one particularly engaged student (who ended up working for the school’s IT department!) and thinking this does not matter to enough people–as many of the other students looked on with mostly silence–given their lived experiences still only hit the application surface of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model.
I learned computers off of computers, whereas far too many people are learning them through phones. They only really engage with the most abstracted level of the OSI – the application layer. With highly sophisticated GUI and voice-command options, the automated processes within apps keep the vast majority of users unaware of the underlying physical layer to the corresponding data and network layers before arriving at the “heart” of the model through the transport layer: the end-to-end connections that are now constantly screaming out to cell phone towers so as to never be severed. With an established session, the presentation of data can occur, and the user can interact and apply. Technology is quickly becoming magical in its capabilities, but without new physics, the underlying reality of technology can be assessed using the OSI.
Whereas there are use-cases for the phone, there are not as clear of a reason still for the home pc, my generational experience with technology began to put me further “ahead” of many students whose only computer experience were phones and tablets, and very little pc experience (or ecosystem dependent: could use Windows but not Mac and vice versa). As I reached the age where my students could not fathom my world, and theirs had always had smart phones that just kept getting better, I cannot help but think their tens decade is a lot like the 1990s – a mirage of hope that things were/are getting better. Cell phones helped bring identity-politics of the 1960s and 1970s into the 21st century first with #BlackLivesMatter, then #MeToo. Though the two can easily be shown to have overlapping interests, the segmentation is very reflective of the compartmentalization technology has always facilitated. Cell phone video has also blurred the edges between fantasy and reality. For a nation-state fixated on fantasy, we are entering a very dangerous situation indeed. But just like Chernobyl irradiated the veneer of the Soviet Big Lie, one can only hope we will suffer a less damning fate from our homegrown Big Lie.
The Pandemic of 2019 – 2021 – ???? – I fall on the side of science, sharing reality for an objective non-belief-distracted truth, and have had the privilege to trust American institutions for the most part. Pandemics and wars are supposed to be big upsets to the lives of individuals, and I am not excepted from the passage of time. Part of me knew this was the end of my teaching career (as I knew and accepted it to be). From 2016 on, I was committed to make the two schools, sort of music career my way, but the night before Governor Inslee ordered the lockdown, I played my band’s last gig at the Central Saloon in downtown Seattle. I went to the last home game the Sounders played before everything changed. I remember anticipating the move from in-person instruction to all online, and I made a forward-thinking decision to reject using Zoom or any of its counterparts. I avoided it for so many reasons, the biggest being “how long is this going to last?” and when my fellow ‘Muricans decided they knew better about public health than the experts they love to mock for having expertise, I knew I knew the answer to that question: this is going to last longer than it should. With the lunacy that is American politics at-large, I realized it was time to contribute to the defense of institutions I care about from a technical standpoint. I hoped to be the son of a revolution, not the middle-aged parent of one. Since education and truth had come under assault, I realized my slight expertise in computer technology mattered more than 20 years of social science work. My future depended on the maturation of my technical skills merging with this work in the spirit of folks like Cheryl Biswas @3ncr1pt3d.
Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Attack – My father’s favorite professor in graduate school at the university of Hawaii provided a “rule” in political science “to assume the stated purpose is the opposite of the actual.” The post image above, the admittance of guilt by the group called Darkside, it should be interpreted as: We are political and active in geopolitics; you should probably tie us to a nation-state or two. Our goal is to make money regardless of how we accomplish it, and we are now surprised by your reaction. Since we are most likely not operating independently, but at the behest of nation-state interests, we cannot make any target off limits. Sincerely, LightSide.
To be continued…
I find this absolutely fascinating how our world produces creativity used for such ill ends. While I wish it remained a classroom topic, nation-state competition is fiercer than ever, and I am ready to help protect data, and the last vestiges of institutional freedom I believe are important to the American experiment evolving from its sins towards its aspirations. Using frameworks and skills learned, I am eager to help in this new space.