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Woke To The Wake of Oneself
by John Kendall Hawkins
Recently, Colonial Pipeline was allegedly breached, its 'back office' software encrypted, a notice of ransom announced. Being the nation's "largest pipeline system for refined oil products in the U.S," with 5500 miles of pipeline, stretching from Texas to New York, and providing 100 million gallons of fuel daily for cars, planes, trains and heating, any prolonged disruption would clearly have proven catastrophic for commuters. The gas stations along the route include Sinclair, Texaco. Gulf, Amoco, Pure, Philips, Citgo, Mobil and Conoco -- they all draw their fuel off Colonial. I put in my two cents' worth about what happened in my piece, "Colonial Pipeline and the Rolling Pearl Harbors Ahead."
I noted the coincidence that the current president and CEO of Colonial, Joe Blount, was the head cheese of Unocal back in the '80s (and into the '90s) when the company, working with the CIA and USAID (some say, soft CIA), was negotiating with the Afghan government, and later the Taliban, to lay pipe from the Caspian to Pakistan. Okay, there needn't be any 'connection' between that fact and the Colonial ransomware attack. But it's a noteworthy coincidence, given the history between the company's CEO and the IC.
And maybe it's not a big deal that some of the owners of the aptly named Colonial have been embroiled in very serious scandals. The majority owner Koch Brothers (28%) are no strangers to them -- here, here, and here. Royal Dutch Shell (16%) had their Oil Reserves scandal and many others -- see their Rap Sheet. The South Korean Pension Fund (23%) has been a bad hombre: "South Korea pension fund chief detained by special prosecutor." Ho hum.
Probably more interesting is that cybersecurity companies Mandiant (FireEye) and CrowdStrike were brought in by Colonial to help investigate and remediate the situation. They now appear to be the Go To 'analysts' to bring in any time a national political statement needs to come out of an investigation. The two were there for the 2012 breaches of the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ, for which they blamed the Chinese, a set of allegations that led to a military hacking group (with the photos of the uniformed men) operating out of Shanghai. Mandiant was the primary investigator in those breaches; but, in a WaPo piece at the time, "Chinese cyberspies have hacked most Washington institutions, experts say," Shawn Henry, the former head of cybersecurity investigations for the FBI worldwide and president of CrowdStrike, weighed in, too:
I've yet to come across a network that hasn't been breached. It's like having an invisible man in your room, going through your filing cabinets.
The piece tells us that Henry's "agents used to alert dozens of companies and private institutions about breaches every week, with Chinese hackers the most common suspects." Hmm. This sounded familiar to me.
It recalled Kevin Mandia's appearance before the Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence U.S. House Of Representatives in October 2011. There he told members of Congress:
In fact, in over 90% of the cases we have responded to, Government notification was required to alert the company that a security breach was underway. In our last 50 incidents, 48 of the victim companies learned they were breached from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defense or some other third party.
So, in short, the government essentially has eyes on every MAC port address on the Internet. This should no longer seem shocking because it's what Ed Snowden revealed to us all in 2013. What surprised me was, back in 2011, Mandiant related an anecdote whereby a 'notifier' slid company secrets in a folder across to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to impress him. It did. But the important thing to note here is that, surely, Colonial's Internet-facing port was being monitored by the government -- unless Mandia and Henry were lying above.
Mandiant and CrowdStrike were also part of the alleged 2016 DNC hack by Russians. Then, CrowdStrike had the lead, and eventually reported to the Muller investigation. A couple of interesting coincidences here: As mentioned above, Shawn Henry was head of FBI global security -- during Mueller's directorship there; so they knew each other well. And another CrowdStrike executive, President/CEO and co-founder George Kurtz, started out in the biz with Kevin Mandia cybersecurity years earlier at a cybersecurity company called Foundstone, which had to shut down after the company's reputation was destroyed -- see Fortune magazine's expose: "The Two Faces of Foundstone A leading computer-security company is accused of software piracy."
Presumably, in a deft attempt to draw attention away from their work with the Intelligence Community (IC) and its two decades-long domestic function as a propaganda engine, the reported breach of SolarWinds that Kevin Mandia (as CEO of FireEye) mea culpa-ed, was called by TechCrunch, "a nightmare scenario." Mandia had recommended SolarWinds to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies, including the NSA, even with its backdoor built in. Sounds like those Foundstone days all over again.
One also recalls StellarWind, which was the NSA's illegal damn hoovering of American metadata from telephone companies that the NYT quashed in October 2004, just before the election, that might have saved us from four more years of Bush. The way it worked, the NSA would pass on "leads" to the FBI, who were then supposed to follow-up. This caused resentment, and some FBI execs weren't happy with the arrangement, including James Comey, although it's not entirely clear what his objections were at the time:
What exactly STELLARWIND did has never been disclosed in an unclassified form. Which parts of it did Comey approve? Which did he shut down? What became of the programs when the crisis passed and Comey, now Obama's expected nominee for FBI director, returned to private life?
But Stellarwind proved to be the tip of the iceberg that inspired and outraged Ed Snowden, leading to his run and revelations.
With diminishing money at MSM newspapers being spent on investigative journalism and long-form reports, more and more journalists under deadline pressure in constantly downsizing staff rooms count and trust the often-unnamed voices of authority that act as sources for their pieces. This is slippery-slope territory. It corrupts the practice of journalism, which, in politics, is to Keep the Bastards Honest and Accountable.
But all of that said, believe it or not, this is supposed to be a review of the crime drama and thriller TV series Mr. Robot. If I caught up in the complexity and machinations of connecting dots before reviewing the series, it's to remind the reader of how difficult it is to understand these issues, which are by nature largely classified and shelled and lost in a series of Kansas City shuffles. But also, these issues, and how to respond to them, in our busy, hive-minded era, are at the heart of the series. It's easy to draw parallels between the ransomware attack at Colonial Pipeline, its insidious intentions and motivations, and the activity that principal characters of the TV series get up to in Mr. Robot. It's good to have a real-life reference point for the kinds of activities that occur in the series.
Mr. Robot is an Emmy-nominated four-season series that ran on the USA Network from 2015-19. It ended up with an IMDB rating of 8.5. It was created by Sam Esmail. It starred Rami Malek (Elliot Alderson), Christian Slater (Mr. Robot), Carly Chaikin (Darlene), Martin Wallstrà ¶, (Tyrell Wellick), Portia Doubleday (Angela Moss), Michael Cristofer (Phillip Price), Grace Gummer (Dominique DiPierro), and BD Wong (Whiterose). Slater has been around for a while and stars in one of my favorite films, Heathers (1988). And Malek gave an Oscar-winning performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Most recently he's starred in the apocalyptic thriller series Black Out, which tells of the events that take place after a nationwide power-grid outage that brings civilization to a halt.
Mr. Robot takes place in a contemporary America that hasn't yet realized that it's fallen into a post-apocalyptic funk. Or at least that's what the viewer is led to believe to begin with as s/he is voice-over narrated by Elliot Alderson, a programmer/hacktivist who may or may not have a mental illness. It depends on where you see yourself vis-a-vis Scottish anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing's oft-quoted observations that
"Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world" and "The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."
The Mr. Robot referred to in the series is a figment of Elliot's disturbed imagination, perhaps a reaction-formation to a traumatic childhood event (in this case, of falling or having been pushed out a second-story window). In Jungian terms, this is, of course, the Wound that wakes our hero to his journey ahead to find himself.
Mr. Robot may or may not be his father, Darlene may or not be his alert, Angela Moss may or may not be his girlfriend, and Whiterose may or may not be the flaming a**hole he seems. In simple terms, and without giving much away, Elliot is seemingly Woke in a world brimming with signifiers, tropes, memes, symbols and information streams that linguistically cryptic; as a hacker, Elliot is at home in the underlying cryptic world where hackers manipulate the world's sub-liminal reality. He is a member of a group called fsociety that finds itself up against the Evil Corporation that, like Amazon. seems to control a greater and greater portion of the world day by day. There is a 'conspiracy theorist' urgency to "bring down" the evil before it swallows up the world and with it human consciousness.
Nietzsche announced that God was dead more than 100 years ago. On the continuum between Beast and Ubermensch, modern man was taking a giant step toward freedom by killing God and taking control of his own fate. The Question is: Can he manage alone? Or is s/he inevitably bound, as Voltaire suggested, to invent a God to rein in the passions and violent impulses? This is the milieu of Elliot's world. Episode one opens with quotes:
"Our democracy has been hacked. The operating system has been taken over and turned to uses that are somewhat different than the ones our founders intended to emerge." - Al Gore, 2013
"Give a man a gun, and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob the world." - Internet Meme, c. 2011
Typically, Al Gore has it right, as he did with his warnings about climate change in An Inconvenient Truth. But one can't help but laugh at how little effort he put into saving his rightful election victory in 2000. And one recalls Richard Branson's joke when a reporter asked him if Gore was a "prophet." Branson returned, "How do you spell profit?" (Sometimes you wonder how much hot carbon Gore has contributed to the atmosphere.) One notes that the dire warnings of the above video are from 2004.
It's nasty, contradictory world, or as Cat Stevens used to sing before he converted to Islam, "Oh baby, baby, it's wild world, and it's hard to get by just upon a smile." It's world where people are at least peripherally aware that Bankers will arrange for mortgages to Black Folk that they know will be defaulted and make money selling shorts based on that knowledge, and help the tip the money world toward insolvency that requires the President of the US to support a taxpayer bailout of their criminality, pleading, "I'm too big too fail," and getting off with nary a warning -- Black Folk losing everything, that President going on after he leaves the White House to garner $200,000 a pop speaking before those bankers. That kind of world; a world terrifying to be 'Woke' in.
As mentioned, Elliot is a more introverted version of an Assange-like hacktivist, who is part of a radical code-cracking collective -- fsociety -- with an office out of a shuttered-up arcade at Coney Beach. Interestingly, the "E" in the Evil Corporation's logo is derived from the Enron sign, life a vowel with a mattress on its back. Some viewers will recall that Enron was an energy company that lured investors using false data leading to a catastrophic collapse of the company just after 9/11 in December 2001. It was one of the largest white-collar crimes ever and heads rolled (that time). It was noted sporadically that the Bush family had close ties to the company and had contributed generously to Bush's campaigns (Texas governor and presidency). While this crime was prosecuted, the importance and ramifications were largely lost in the continuing horror and trauma of the looping replays of the falling towers of New York.
In Season 1, we are immersed in Elliot's world (see above). We meet Mr. Robot (Slater), who seems to be a father figure (or superego figure) to Elliot's bifurcated personality, an ego that is quiet and sensitive and fragile and requires drugs to cope, against a shadow self that channels id impulses to get busy as a hacktivist. The season's energy moves toward doing something to stop Evil in the world. Season 2 begins with a radical symbolic castration of capitalism, as seen in the action of activists cutting off the balls of the Wall Street bull. (Kind of a no-brainer, when you think about it. I mean, it was that, or levitate the Pentagon again.) This leads to "5/9," a further ransomware assault on Evil Corp. that wakes up the world. Sorta.
In Season 3, Elliot has a pique of conscience, 5/9 has hurt people, which was never his intention, and he tries to reverse the effects of the devastation. Season 4 has the Hero finding himself in a high quality season of psychological intrigue, with many but not questions answered about Evil Corp. and Whiterose. The self's triadic dialectic achieves some balance amidst some profound psychological insights for Elliot, and the viewer.
This is all skeletal and meant to avoid spoilers. What I personally got out of it is contained in the following list of themes and problems that I took away from the viewing, and which can be considered aside from the series:
The Nature of Reality
- What constitutes inner versus outer experience?
- The series references so many iconic symbols -- The Matrix, V for Vendetta, and the Monopoly rich guy as a mask, all of which work powerfully, and make one question the influence of memes on our ways of seeing the world.
The Nature of Identity
- See above
- Who am I?
- Am I Good or Evil, and how do I know?
Names of the Major Forces
- fsociety versus Evil Corp. Why f*** society? Rather than offer an alternative to Evil Corp., which effs society everyday and in every way, fsociety's hacktivism seems like another form of evil -- controls taken away from individual and democratic lives. Imagine a war between the world's Assanges and the Deep State and the rest of us merely pawns of economic growth, existing to make fat cats fatter. Fsociety seems to represent Elliot's conflict with the world. He wants to make it better, but that name suggests an inner anger at People for being so manipulable and asleep (as in The Matrix).
What Impact Can One Man Have?
We're not all hacktivists. What can one person do in the world up against so much TROUBLE. The mounting frustration brings about bizarre thought. As the evil behind our own system continues to mount, we find ourselves with unwelcome but potent feelings of empathy for 9/11 hijackers trying to bring down the Great Satan. In a parallel way, and ostensibly for more righteous reasons, that's what Elliot and his hacktivist companions are doing. It raises the despairing realization that Bob Marley voiced in the song "Real Situation" off of his album Uprising. This is untenable, and seems to lead us, as HG Wells suggested, in Mind at the End of Its Tether, toward an opiation of the soul to help get us through to death.
Smorgasbord of Memes, Icons, Tropes, Cliche's
Mr. Robot is chokers with these signifiers and common expressions that bind us loosely and tightly (sometimes) in mental fetters, and raise the question of the utility of language moving forward into a future seemingly absorbing the individual self in the hivemind -- without real originality or even authentic materiality in the world. There's something Hegelian about it, but also something dystopian, as if our movement toward achieving an AI singularity (we don't need) were a surrender to the AI ahead, as its working brain while we are ourselves obsoleted into a phantasmagorical oblivion. Is it already too late?
Mr. Robot is very relevant to our times and has not grown stale. It's readily available for streaming in all the usual places and I strongly recommend a look-see. Break a leg and start your journey.
