Broken At The Top

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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)

This is another one of those columns where I have to say “if you think you know what/who inspired it, you’re wrong.” So, you’re wrong, or at least not 100% right about how this column came about. Well except, yes, some of this still comes from The Unaccountability Machine, but hey that’s gonna be playing on my mind for a few more months.

So I was wondering why do so many “leaders” seem absolutely broken as people? How do they make these poor decisions, hurt people, get arrested for hideous crimes, and so on? How do you rise to the top and be so messed up? I mean I sort of get some greed and megalomania, but come on.

Worse, these people put us in danger. How much power is in the hands of people who are so greedy, biases, narcissistic, and worse? We’re facing a lot of crises right now and too many leaders are dangerous to our survival – they are the crisis.

Then I realized as this played with idea, that’s not actually the thing to contemplate at this moment in history.

The question right now is not why too many of our leaders are broken people. The question is what do we do about it because now’s not the time to play therapist.

Right now we’ve got problems to solve, and there are a lot of them. Climate change, microplastics, financial capture, and more all are bearing down on us. We need to take as much power as much as possible, and ensure the leaders and experts we have are actually on the side of humanity.

This is necessary not just to fix problems but also to make sure we stop just letting our “leaders” hande it. We’ve seen a bunch of them are broken, from weird billionaires to royal families somehow still treating us as peasants. We need to fix crap now and firewall against any a-hole coming alone to screw up a better or at least less terrible world.

Even if some leaders are just firewalls against some actual psycho taking over, its better than, well, the psycho.

A thing I learned from looking back on the old disciplines of cybernetics (Hello, Unaccountabiliy Machine) is that sometimes you just stop asking why something happens and ask what goes into a system and what comes out. There are times to just check your inputs and outputs because the system is too complex or you don’t have time (or you don’t care).

Besides, any analysis of our culture problems and leadership pathologies could take time. Sure we could analyze historical comparisons, but how well do they map across time and culture? We could do psychology but the key thing is we have a-holes now so except how to identify, isolate, or change them we’re not quite as concerned. Whatever is in the Broken Leadership Box, it’s going to take time we don’t have to sort it out.

I find this attitude liberating. I don’t have to play therapist to whatever politician, priest, pundit, or plutocrat is out there except to make sure they can’t hurt people. We can analyze them at our leisure or when we have time.

Sometimes the machine puts jerks in charge. You tweak the inputs to get less jerks before you crack the case to look inside.

Steven 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