Facebook asks, "What's on your mind?"
Today, as I woke up and started futzing around the house, it dawned on me. People really don't see it. Some of my friends may see it. Some may not. Or, maybe they're seeing what they want to see. I thought about the Kim family, the grandfather, the father and the son Kim Jong Un, ruling that country. I thought about the Japanese invasion of Korea that mom lived through, and about her stories (and the ones I read) about the communist take over of the North. I thought about her stories of crossing into Seoul with her family in the winter, of giving up their farm in the North, of how my grandmother's name was on a list of people from the North Korean secret police, and how she was taken one night during the invasion of the North into the South. I thought about being Zen Buddhist, and my compassion, and last night, I had the dream and nightmare I used to have as a teenager. In the dream, I'm standing in front of Kim Jong Il, the son of Kim Il Sung (and father to Kim Jong Un). I manage to get my hands around Kim Jong Il's throat, and strangle him to death. I wake up terrified from that dream every time I have it. I haven't had it in years. That dream is ultimately like the premise of The Interview, in a way. Except that it's not funny. The reason I get to meet the dictator is different every time. I haven't had that dream in years, but I had it last night. I feel horrible every time I wake up from that dream and remember it.
I woke up and realized that most people don't understand how the internet works. That things like an IP trace can be meaningless, because you can spoof IP addresses. I could waste the afternoon slowly reworking my memory, resurrecting the shitty ebay laptop I bought, wiped, rebuilt, then used in 2009 in Iran, and make that computer look like it's coming from Australia, eventually, on my network. I'm not a great hacker by any stretch. But even I could do that. If I responded as that computer, my deception would be revealed to myself. But I could fool my network to take a look at that.
We all know that software can come from anywhere, and be used by anyone, once it's copied. But did anyone pay attention to what the FBI actually said about North Korea? That part of their evidence is that the software was manufactured in North Korea, because there were hard coded North Korean IP addresses in it? That's like saying that a truck bombing in Afghanistan must be the responsibility of the United States because the truck had Texas plates on it and was built by Ford.
It made me think about Serial. That's a great podcast. It also doesn't have a 'traditional' narrative or ending to it. That's part of the controversy with it. The angst leading up to the ending was whether the end would satisfy. I read that as, "would we get an ending that wraps up the mystery, like a mystery is supposed to do?"
We're in a time of great change. So, when we see a pattern, something familiar, we glom onto it and take our traditional roles. Of COURSE North Korea is the only responsible culprit here, or possibility. Of COURSE the FBI, one of the agencies that missed 9/11 13 years ago, knows what it's doing now. We spent all that money, gave up all that freedom, let the NSA intrude all over the place, started contracting IT services to amoralists like Edward Snowden, and the world has to be better now. We have to be more secure. When our security services finger a culprit, of COURSE it has to be right. Of course.
We read headlines. We skip over words like, "unnamed senior officials," or, "same software used by North Korea," and, "IP Address originated from North Korea," and we nod along, because no one wants to look stupid. We got smarter, didn't we? When we heard that there were nuclear centrifuges in Iraq, when the New York Times and NBC told us about that yellow cake uranium from Niger, and it turned out it was all Dick Cheney lying to us, of COURSE we got smarter, and learned how to see and read between the lines. And when the President, a President I voted for and admired, starts talking about new cyber security laws and frameworks that are needed to protect the country, I'm wondering, do people understand what this means? Really?
Then I think about Sandy Hook, and all the conspiracy theorists who used dead children to claim that the government was instigating a false flag operation to take away guns. And I'm wondering if I'm doing the same thing, or sounding the same way, as I try to get to the simplest version of what's on my mind about all this. Because, even that idea, of a puppet master pulling strings, it's comforting. A villain is always comforting.
I think about opportunism, the hallmark of my business training, a wonderful tool if used for good. It's a skill, to see how things are laid out, to realize an opening, to go for it and make the thing you see possible happen. But like any tool, it can be used for harm. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush didn't need to orchestrate 9/11 in order to take advantage of the aftermath. It was, in a way, an opportunity to start the Project for a New American Century, and clean up old business in Iraq. That's what we did. A couple of business guys saw an opportunity, created by Bin Laden, and took the country in a direction that led us to 10+ years of never-ending war in the Middle East.
Seeing these things is hard, and it brings heartache. It's easier to fall back on your old tropes, and original ideas.
And here we are, right now, with a narrative that makes sense, that falls into the old pattern. A foreign government has attacked our freedoms. We must defend our freedoms. A US Senator has said that the cyberattack amounted to an, "Act of War." Our politicians are gearing up for war, of some kind, again. So are our people.
We're not paying attention. Sony PE said that The Interview was terrible, in their own internal emails. The box office projections for the movie are terrible. The theater owners read newspapers. They've heard word from the advanced screenings. Sony's emails reveal that a lot of people in the company will lie, pretty regularly, in order to do business. That's the nature of their business, to lie. With the pressure on the company, the president of Sony PE went on NPR and said it was the theatre owners who didn't want to release the movie, and to no one's surprise, said that they want to release the movie. Of course, a few days ago, the message was unequivocal that there would be no release. So, who's lying?
I'm not going to say I've seen The Interview. Because, how could I have? I'm not in the press. But I will say that I'm convinced that the movie is racist, in the way that nominally progressive, white writer-directors will sometimes be racist, and in the way that Hollywood is usually racist when it comes to putting Asian people in their movies. For me, it's not that big of a deal. I'm not thrilled with the idea of sticking up for a racist movie to defend our freedoms. I understand that it's a test of character, to stand up for a value on behalf of someone or something awful.
But there's more than one test of character. Like, what do you find acceptable in our culture? Is it more valuable to let rich, racist, multinational corporations have their say in the world? Do they not have enough of a say? Are they not capable of defending themselves, given their money and power? Do they need my help? Life and success are as much about saying No to things as it is to saying Yes. You say No to the things that don't matter. So, No, I don't think it matters that much whether Sony releases The Interview, because they'll do so eventually, when they think it'll make them the most money without hurting their systems. Sony spent the last year laying off a lot of their IT staff, the kind of people who would know how to plant software in their systems. Who knows if that happened? But we know they don't have the IT staff to keep their systems secure.
If the theatre owners thought The Interview was going to make them a lot of money, they would release the movie. If the US Government thought the threat of explosions at movie theaters was credible, they could send National Guard troops to those theaters, or even the Army. The theater owners could ask for this, they could hire security, they could do all kinds of things.
So, why aren't they?
We fall back to cowardice, because we can understand that. Because we're angry, and confused, and we're in a narrative. A foreign government attacked our freedoms, so we must fight back. Sony! Why aren't you fighting? Movie theaters, why aren't you fighting?
Movie theaters, still, make their money by windowing. The distributor of a motion picture releases a movie. Let's say that the window is 90%. The theaters who release the movie make 10% of the box office take, the distributor makes 90%. The window then starts to open for the theater ... the longer the movie is in the theater, the more of a percentage they get, until the distribution percentage falls to an agreed upon percentage. Movie theaters thus make most of their money in the beginning on how many people they can convince to spend $14.00 on $0.35 worth of popcorn, because movies and theaters are expensive.
So, movie theaters are expensive, and theaters don't make much money on a release at first, unless it's huge.
Maybe the theater owners and Sony PE, a company who lies regularly for a living, who all work in a business that requires being skilled at lying, maybe this one time in the press when they say they're not releasing this movie due to fears of terrorism is honest. Maybe they're telling the truth, here, for once.
Or, maybe the theater owners decided that it would be too expensive to hire security, that they didn't want to bother with the National Guard (because who wants to go to a movie with a solider guarding the door?), and that the movie wasn't going to make them enough money to be worth it. Maybe they're thinking of the theater in Aurora, Colorado, that's being sued right now because a kid with a gun murdered and injured over 70 people there. Maybe they just thought, "We're not going to make enough money on this to take any kind of risk, we'd be better off with an extra print of The Hobbit."
That, to me, is just as plausible as a fear of terrorism. In fact, to me, it's more plausible, because it's a decision about money, the kind that large, multinational corporations make on a regular basis. I thought about completion bonds, the insurance that gets taken out for the making of a movie if it fails to get made, like Terry Gilliam's "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote." I wonder if theatre owners have release insurance?
I marched to Manhattan last Saturday, because a black man died at the hands of the NYPD. His family doesn't have money or power. I had a cold, so I didn't do the full march. I feel bad about that. I don't feel bad about not giving two shits about The Interview. Our country is torturing people. Our spy agencies tortured people, and we know about it. Our police, in every city, are torturing black people, killing them. Our police, in every city, are being killed regularly by a flood of guns, everywhere. It's a time of confusion.
But I know who I am, and where I stand on things. I march for people who need help, and do my best to help people who need help. A multinational corporation does not need my
help.
The narrative right now is that a foreign government attacked our freedoms. And a lot of people are going right along with that narrative. The last time we did, we ended up going to war with a small country who couldn't possibly threaten us.
And I'm shocked at how, in less than three days, so many progressives and otherwise liberal people fell right back into that narrative, without missing a beat, without the least bit of skepticism.
So, Facebook, what's on my mind? A lot. The biggest one being, it's time to shut off the computer for a while, and maybe just make some things instead.