Avatar photoSteven Savage

Waiting to Be Stolen

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’d like to discuss politics. I am going to take painful efforts to be nonpartisan, but let me say the issue I am going to discuss can happen to anyone, but is much more common in certain areas. I make no promises of sounding entirely neutral, but it is important I do so.

We all wonder “how can anyone believe this bullshit?” or “why do people follow someone obvious lying to them?” We’ve perhaps wondered it about ourselves at times. But how can it be in modern times, with all our knowledge of history and education, with the internet and all else, do we believe obvious lies?

Well there are many reasons, and this isn’t a discourse on propaganda. There are other experts for that. But one factor I think that’s missed is we’re more primed to be taken advantage of than we realize.

There’s an old Taoist saying I’ve heard in a few forms, but basically “You can lock your treasures in a chest until a thief strong enough to lift the chest comes by.” What you use for control can be taken from you.

Now think about the first time you saw people believe obvious lies. You wondered how they can believe such falsehoods. Consider that they may have been primed to believe by other people, who then got their marks snatched from them. Someone locked them in a chest of ideas and the right podcaster or politician just happened to pick it up

A lot of us are gathered together waiting to be stolen.

We’re primed to believe marketing. We’re awash in advertising, demographic targeting, and old fashioned techniques perfected by modern technology. People don’t just push your buttons, they’ve installed new ones. The right product or company can snatch you away if you’re not careful, and steal a swath of customers who think it was their idea.

We’re primed to believe politicians – at least our politicians, you know, the proper ones. We’ve got plenty of news organizations that are propaganda, intentionally or because it’s marketable, or both. Someone else who learns the right game can steal an electorate right out from under someone.

To add to all of this, we’re also in a time where everyone can be a propagandist and are encouraged to be. Reach out for your church! Get more hits to your blog! Get that meme circulating for likes! You, yes you might even get famous on social media and start a career as a grifting a-hole!

All of this is enabled by technologies we’ve never fully assessed – and I don’t just mean the internet. Have we really asked about what commercial television means for us? How we have to prepare for increasing information choices in the internet age? Just how disorienting is streaming?

We’re not just locked in treasure chests, we’re taught how to steal others using tools we had dropped in our laps. It also is so normal. We’ve become used to being marketed to, propagandaized, lied to, etc. that we accept it, miss it, and participate in it.

So no, it’s not surprising that someone you know or even you got deceived into following some awful person or cause. We’ve been primed by a lot of our culture and economy to be locked up, stolen away, and even help others steal the minds of others.

There, I managed to stay non-partisan enough. I hope enough not just to make you think, but maybe doubt yourself a little bit.

Steven Savage

It’s Not The Next Outage

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So the CrowdStrike Outage of 2024 happened. Actually, let me clarify, the CloudStrike Outage of July 2024. I might as well be clear because that was a doozy and it showed some wide-raging system instabilities. Also considering it was such a disaster maybe there’s another.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, an update to some security software bricked a lot of windows machines in a disaster that shouldn’t have happened. If “scrutiny software shut down systems” sound bad, yes it was!

If “security disaster happened” AND you work in IT, AND your friends are nerds and/or work in IT, you know MY experience. I spent most of that Friday quietly losing my mind.

Of course there’s questions of “how do we avoid the next outage” which is sort of sad, because you’d kind of like there not to be one, or one as widespread. But I don’t think that’s quite the issue, preparing for the next Giant Ooposie misses two things.

First, this exposed just how vulnerable systems are, and I’m worried about intentional attacks. We saw in real time how a software update could destroy systems. We saw how people did – or didn’t recover. We saw where vulnerabilities might be. We wondered what would have happened had this been during another crises – hurricane, terrorist attack, etc.

CrowdStrike was a mix of blueprint, roadmap, and test run for how to screw up IT systems worldwide. This is what you get by accident, meaning intentional attacks are now much easier to pull off effectively. We need to worry about intention.

Imagine a CrowdStrike-like outage but with more destructive not just an issue that an in theory be fixed by booting 15 times. Something designed to not be recoverable, an IT WMD.


Secondly, we’ve just seen that many major systems are just plain vulnerable period. Everyone is on Windows, a lot of people use CrowdStrike, and recovery plans were individual. Though I was impressed with the global recovery, if you’re an IT pro or hang out with them (I do both) you know this was not easy.

Recovering from a one-shot, caught, error is one thing. But it’s a reminder that we are very vulnerable and might want to be questioning about how a lot of infrastructure is set up. How many smaller-scale disasters do we not see because it wasn’t big news? My general take is systems need to be easier to recover, more diverse, and honestly more walled off.

Also we need to stop depending on heroism in IT security. It should be incredibly boring.

The next CrowdStrike type error should not happen. But right now my concern is what happens intentionally, what may happen on a smaller scale at first, and that we’re probably not ready for either.

CrowdStrike was a wake-up call to so many things wrong in modern infrastructure, so many things that could go wrong. As much as the company screwed up massively there’s far more to worry about.

Steven Savage

The Unaccountability Machine: Political Madness By The Numbers

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I just read “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davies. If you know me and when I get obsessed, be aware I’m about to become insufferable for awhile.

The core of the book is that our institutions have seemed to go mad, and the author finds explanations in the oft-ignored realm of business cybernetics. This isn’t science fiction, it’s cybernetics in the feedbacks/system sense, and how it relates to organizations. A core element is that members and parts of organizations become unaccountable in ways that lead to bad and mad decisions.

The financial crash of 2008. Any number of organizational meltdown. And of course, politics.

One of his points – and believe me, I’ll be dissecting this book on and off for a time – is that when your goal is a single measurement, an organization will go insane. When “line go up” is your only goal, problems occur – if not for you, everyone in your path. People are held unaccountabile for bad choices when “line go up.”

You may be thinking about any number of corporations and stock prices. But also I thought about American politics in light of (checks his calendar) about seventy percent of my life. Now I have my own quite pronounced political beliefs, but I’m going to set them aside to discuss a number.

The amount of votes.

Votes are the goal of democratic politics. It elects people. It gets people power and benefits and determines policy. Everything is about getting someone, often anyone, into office. Politics is a team thing, so as long as one of “Your Team” is in office, you can reach your goals.

This means politics in modern times isn’t just the old repression/gotv routines and campaigning and winning people. It means calculations and triangulations, test-marketing, lawsuits, etc. Anything to Just Get Enough Votes.

Anything for Line Goes Up, sometimes just a bit. Even if it makes you do some crazy things.

I remarked once about a certain political activist organization that it was a “winning machine” – and that wasn’t a compliment. Said organization later got itself entangled almost suicidally in various legal troubles and scandals. I wasn’t sure that they didn’t get the mission, but that they got it too well.

Their goal was Line Goes Up, vote-wise, and they’d do anything.

But also let’s say that you’ve made certain decisions to get votes that, perhaps like this organization, aren’t legal or ethical. Then you want to win no matter what to cover your backside or to soothe your conscience or whatever. Line goes up becomes an imperative, and you’ll deal with the bad things later or maybe you just ignore them or hand-wave them away.

Or maybe your opponent(s) are bad people – or you’re told they are. You want to win to protect yourself! Also anyway telling people those folks are threats makes the voting Line Go Up. Keep telling, keep talking, keep escalating, what’ll go wrong.

Kinda seems like politics, if you’re not careful, doesn’t become about helpful results. It takes a lot of effort to make it meaningful not “what three things can I say to get 0.5% more votes?” It’s so much easier to find what buttons to push – and hey, you’re a good person, right? What could go wrong.

Lots of things. Like many of my columns I want to mention the Latest Thing, but each week is a new Latest Thing. All in the name of Line Go Up.

So as we look at the 2024 election where my prediction is that I don’t know what the hell is going on anymore (look at France and the UK in 2024), I wonder if we’re in the political equivalent of a financial meltdown like 2008. My own (obviously correct) political views aside, it seems like Line Go Up is so important, any and all fallout is ignored, and the most batshit things are tried – and sometimes work.

But the batshittery, the triangulation, all of that might be hitting a breaking point. I’m certainly seeing that as I write this in July 2024.

As for a solution, well we’d have to step back from Line Go Up and ask what we want as society, as people. We’d have to make the Line a tool, one of many. But in this current state, I’m not holding my breath.

Well managed to do that without leaning into my own beliefs. Perhaps those will come later, maybe in the rebuilding.

Steven Savage