Who to Blame?
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Some of you will hate me for what you’re about to read.
That is, of course, assuming you even read all of it. A lot of people won’t, and will just hate me for publishing this under my furry fandom identity. I always found the lazy bigots to be the least interesting.
That being said, however you feel at the end of this journey, I will respect anyone who takes the time to ingest it all. Even the haters.
Let’s Not Mince Words
There’s an enormous, intrinsic flaw in our society; a flaw that may in fact be an immutable part of human nature, as it’s not isolated to any particular culture. This flaw rears its ugly head in every political party, and it poisons some of the most impactful social media moments you’ll ever experience.
But to understand where I’m coming from, please let me tell you a little about myself first.
I’m a software developer turned information security consultant. In my spare time, I do a lot of furry stuff. Professionally, I’ve worked for startups and large companies alike — both as an employee and as a consultant.
As part of my security work, I sometimes get called into assist companies after they’ve been hacked.
When doing digital forensics, there is a lot of value in answering the questions, “What?” “Where?” “When?” and “How?” Mature organizations understand the value of answering these questions.
What was accessed? Where did the attacker first get in? When did the attack occur? How did they evade the existing security controls? Did they manage to exfiltrate anything valuable? Was customer data accessed?
This sort of understanding lets companies assess the damage, develop a plan to prevent future damage, and take action to protect their customers.
Cyber-Attribution is a Cruel Joke
Immature organizations will sometimes ask the other two questions: “Who?” and “Why?”
The purpose of attribution-focused investigations isn’t to find out who was hurt and how to prevent another breach, it’s to find out “who done it?” so they can be punished (or at least threatened). This rarely, if ever, leads to anything productive for the real victims of data breaches: The users and customers of the platform or company.
The obsession with attribution is also endemic to cybersecurity news coverage, for understandable reasons: “ACME Corp. breached” is a far less interesting headline than “Russia hacked ACME Corp. to attack the 2020 elections.”
I don’t any official numbers offhand, but from experience, I can tell you that a lot of time, money, and talent gets wasted in my field on businessmen demanding answers to the wrong questions.
Retail Hell
Even if you find computer security to be a bizarre and foreign domain, almost everyone who’s worked anywhere has had the unpleasant experience of a toxic work environment before.
What happens when the shit hits the fan? Management and fellow employees alike begin looking for someone to point the finger towards.
“It wasn’t my fault, I was on my smoke break.” “Jackie should’ve been handling that.” “Jackie called in sick, her son is in the hospital.” “Well it’s her fault for not being here.”
Social Media and Outrage Culture
Timely enough, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight just aired an episode dedicated to the topic of public shaming.
Outrage culture is a hot topic on social media, and it’s not isolated to any particular political affiliation, either.
Sadly enough, a lot of the stupid political views you hear about on social media are actually troll ops run by bored/malicious 4chan posters to get everyone to hate one side, and aren’t things they actually believe.
In spite of this, a lot of Internet users are easily whipped up in a frenzy because someone said or did something unwise.
Reputations are insalvageably tarnished. Lives are ruined. The conductors of the hate train, emboldened by (and possibly addicted to) their own sense of vindication, move onto their next target.
Sometimes, social media shaming has a happy outcome, wherein an abusive person is called out for their behavior, and does what’s necessary for a community to begin healing.
What makes the constructive shaming different from the rest?
The Blame Game and the Nazi Playbook
Last week, there was a violent attack targeting mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Many are dead. Many are injured. An entire nation is hurt. The asshole livestreamed his atrocity on Facebook.
At some point before the attack, a manifesto was published by the murderer of innocents that frankly isn’t worth taking the time to read.
Every aspect of this attack, from the livestream to the meme-laden manifesto, to the 8chan post prior to the attack, to the international media coverage in the hours and days following the attack, was all too familiar to anyone who’s ever dealt with hate crimes before.
They’re all (sometimes unwittingly) following the white supremacist’s playbook to the letter.
There is a lot of insight to glean about how hate groups operate from that article. I highly recommend reading the Huffington Post analysis.
White supremacists understand the mechanics of blame very well. Their entire recruitment tactic revolves around hijacking memes and culture to convince people that some group of people (i.e. Jews) are the sole cause for all of society’s ills.
It doesn’t matter how patently false and divorced from reality their worldview is; what they do works on impressionable people, which is sadly a lot of people.
The mechanism that white supremacists seek to hijack — the human impulse to place blame when faced with problems — is the same one that makes cybersecurity reporting awful. It’s the same mechanism that makes your work environment toxic.
The only thing we have to blame, is blame itself.
There is a huge difference between blame and the concepts of accountability and responsibility.
If you get drunk and have a regrettable one-night stand, that is your fault. (You choose to get drunk, after all.) But if a pregnancy is the result of your conduct, that’s both of your responsibility.
Furthermore, if either of you are dependent on others for support (financial or otherwise), the actions you committed have increased their responsibilities as well.
That might sound like it’s something that adds up quickly, but it’s really divided. Responsibility is shared. Blame rarely is.
Stoic philosophers believe, loosely, “You cannot be blamed for what happens to you in life, but you must be responsible for it.”
You can’t stop unfortunate events from happening to you, but you do get to decide what they mean to you. And that power of choice is one of the greatest strengths that humans possess.
Blame and accountability are also different: Blame ends the conversation (“It’s Jeff Bezos’ fault!”), whereas holding people accountable for harm done can segue into solutions (“He created this mess, and it’s up to everyone to solve it. Let’s discuss better regulations”). The difference is subtle, but important.
Does the buck stop with “holding them accountable” instead of progressing onto solutions? That’s blame.
Against Blame
When businesses get hacked and they care more about who to blame for the breach than recovering from it, everyone loses.
When managers and coworkers are more concerned with ensuring their butts are covered and someone else gets blamed when something bad happens, the entire company and its customers suffer, and everyone loses.
When the social media outrage machine decides to destroy someone’s life and reputation over a gross misunderstanding, everyone loses.
When white supremacists twist world events to convince impressionable (and mostly young white male) people that Jews or Muslims are to blame for everything wrong with society, and they are radicalized to commit atrocities aimed to further radicalize others, everyone loses.
When people respond to a tragic atrocity by blaming the Usual Suspects (i.e. gun control, or the lack thereof) and fueling the same tired political debates instead of actually learning from history, everyone loses.
Aside: If you’re for gun control, your arguments should stand even in the absence of this tragedy. If you’re against gun control, your arguments should stand even in the absence of this tragedy. You don’t need to write your thesis in the blood of innocents; the only reason the media does this is it keeps the advertisers paying the bills.
The blame game cannot be won, unless we recognize that this need to cast blame is the very root of many of the evils that plague our society today.
Towards A Post-Blame Society
What would a society look like where we collectively resisted the urge to blame?
That’s not to say that we’d cease to hold people accountable for their actions and the consequences of their actions!
In a post-blame society, I believe our workplaces would improve drastically, people would find it easier to empathize with strangers, and we’d all be a lot happier as a result.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow for some. They’re comfortable with blaming others for problems instead of seeking to understand the actual problem.
But most importantly, we’d effectively neuter the mechanism that white supremacist violence needs to propagate itself in our modern world. And I think that’s a laudable goal in and of itself, especially in the wake of pointless atrocities.
On the other hand, sacrificing blame could (conceptually) mean less social media outrage callouts. While this is probably a good thing in aggregate, it could in turn prevent real harms from being brought to light. I personally feel that this risk is worthwhile: A lot of constructive social media outrage is grounded in the language of responsibility and problem-solving, not blame.
If we decide to excise blame from our society, it’s not going to be easy. But I believe it’s worth trying. Together, we can make a brighter future for everyone.
Always keep in mind: Biography is not destiny, and blame doesn’t solve real problems. Real problems are often complex, but we must resist the allure of simple scapegoats if we want the solutions that lead to a better life.
But I’m just a weirdo who pretends to be an anthropomorphic dhole on the Internet. Decide for yourself which world you’d like to live in, and then work towards that.
If you’ve gotten this far and decided that you hate me for any of the words I said, for who or what I am, or how I present myself on the Internet, I don’t blame you. I’d rather like to move past that.
