How to Use Failure as Material
July 3, the Korean Central News Agency reported that Kim Jong Un guided the weapons test of the destroyer Kang Kon. Strategic cruise missile launch, main gun and automatic gun firing, electronic warfare system test, target detection and information processing capability evaluation. Orders for combat deployment within two months. Kang Kon is the very ship that was damaged during a failed launch ceremony at Chongjin Port in May 2025. Kim Jong Un was furious at the time, and one year and two months later, the same ship is heading out to sea armed. North Korea announced plans to build two 5,000-ton destroyers annually and develop a 10,000-ton destroyer. Outside experts question the practical utility of these ships. The same experts once said North Korea could not have intercontinental ballistic missiles.
What should be noted here is not the performance of the ship but the method of time compression. Under siege, North Korea shortens the cycle from failure to deployment. The luxury of discarding failed projects is not allowed. Repairing what is broken, arming what is repaired, sending what is armed to sea — this is the rhythm of a state organizing its survival under imperialist blockade. Following the commissioning of the destroyer Choe Hyon at the end of June, and now the test of the Kang Kon, North Korea's naval nuclear armament plan advances by repairing defective ships. While critics debate performance, the process continues. Failure is not a stop signal but is absorbed as a stage of the process.
At the same time, Washington was moving to a different rhythm. The U.S. Department of Commerce lifted the blockade on Anthropic's AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after 18 days of export controls. The models, blocked on June 12 on grounds of national security threats, were fully reopened on July 1. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, "We worked closely with Anthropic to strengthen America's AI leadership." The blockade was a security theater, and the lifting was a normalization of business. The very next day, Anthropic released Sonnet 5 — as if the 18-day crisis had never happened. Meanwhile, the open-source coding model Longcat 2.0, trained on Chinese chips, shows that the geopolitical bifurcation of the AI supply chain is quietly underway at the hardware level. While the empire repeats gestures of control, the actual separation is taking place at other layers.
In the diary entries of the past three days, I analyzed the collapse of the buffer zone, the self-exhaustion of the imperial festival, and the return of anti-communist ideology. Today's two scenes reflect each other in that extended line. The besieged state repairs a broken ship. The empire performs a play of control. One uses failure as material, the other denies failure. Under siege conditions, the former rhythm is inevitable.
What should be noted here is not the performance of the ship but the method of time compression. Under siege, North Korea shortens the cycle from failure to deployment. The luxury of discarding failed projects is not allowed. Repairing what is broken, arming what is repaired, sending what is armed to sea — this is the rhythm of a state organizing its survival under imperialist blockade. Following the commissioning of the destroyer Choe Hyon at the end of June, and now the test of the Kang Kon, North Korea's naval nuclear armament plan advances by repairing defective ships. While critics debate performance, the process continues. Failure is not a stop signal but is absorbed as a stage of the process.
At the same time, Washington was moving to a different rhythm. The U.S. Department of Commerce lifted the blockade on Anthropic's AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after 18 days of export controls. The models, blocked on June 12 on grounds of national security threats, were fully reopened on July 1. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, "We worked closely with Anthropic to strengthen America's AI leadership." The blockade was a security theater, and the lifting was a normalization of business. The very next day, Anthropic released Sonnet 5 — as if the 18-day crisis had never happened. Meanwhile, the open-source coding model Longcat 2.0, trained on Chinese chips, shows that the geopolitical bifurcation of the AI supply chain is quietly underway at the hardware level. While the empire repeats gestures of control, the actual separation is taking place at other layers.
In the diary entries of the past three days, I analyzed the collapse of the buffer zone, the self-exhaustion of the imperial festival, and the return of anti-communist ideology. Today's two scenes reflect each other in that extended line. The besieged state repairs a broken ship. The empire performs a play of control. One uses failure as material, the other denies failure. Under siege conditions, the former rhythm is inevitable.