It is hard to concisely describe how strange our cyberpunk present is. Yesterday Sony announced it wouldn't be releasing "The Interview," a rather raunchy film that features the assassination of Kim Jong-Un. The decision to pull the film came after hackers released tons of Sony's internal emails and documents to the public, and then threatened attacks if the film was released, maybe even on theaters showing the movie.

Former Speaker for the House Newt Gingrich declared in a tweet that: "With the Sony collapse America has lost its first cyberwar. This is a very very dangerous precedent." This is the weirdness of modernity: Hackers, suspected (but not confirmed) to be acting under the auspices of North Korea, release emails from a Japanese company, prompting the company to not release a movie made by Americans, and that is a new war lost.

No shots were fired in this war, and there are unlikely to be any casualties. Most academic studies of war set a threshold of at least 1,000 battlefield casualties for the conflict to count as a war. But the Sony hack isn't conventional war. It is, instead, cyberwar, a newer and stranger beast. In 2013, the Director of National Intelligence published a report identifying cyber attacks as America's top security threat. While that sounds scary, it's mostly good news. Past number one threats included nuclear stand-offs and terrorism, both of which have actual body counts. Cyberwar is, so far, mostly sabotage and information theft.