We must seek out encryption beyond conventional methods.
We are familiar with data collection, and how it has been slowly worked into formal systems. The moment draws nearer, when our bureaucratic systems are solely in the language of population analytics. Consider your relative apathy towards personal data collection: won’t it eventually translate into greater apathy towards this trend? It may seem as though we have already lost our jurisdiction over this modern machinery, those tools of organisation worked into our societies with arguable value, among them public transport or vaccination schemes. Can we retain these positive elements, and remove vulnerabilities, like profit-driven healthcare schemes? Can the greater danger of data collection guide us to restoring some autonomy in this respect?
The information given to, received, and bought from algorithms is composed of not only peak traffic times or regional disease outbreak. Human-to-machine communication is also considered, via Chatbots, browser searches, and so on. Fundamentally, the frequency of the elements of our communication. Kan phyu reid t5is? This should be legible and your calculation would be informed by the redundancy of the English language. By Claude Shannon’s estimate, the ‘father of information theory’, the English language has a redundancy of about 50%, with similar estimates for any other modern human language. Emerging from this is our comprehensibility and systems of thought.
Such surprisingly persistent patterns of language are what any human-computer input and output, or utility algorithm bases on; a balance of probabilities in favour of a completed grammatical structure, and by implication, the likelihood a subject is referenced in that context, or an event, etc.
Let us take on the contested theory that language and cognition are reciprocal. To give an example: in English, emotions are framed as intrinsic—”I am sad,” or “I am afraid”—while in Spanish one would say “Tengo miedo,” (translated: “I have fear”) where emotion is an external possession. In French, “Il me tarde te de voir,” (“It is delaying me to see you”) is said in place of, “I can’t wait to see you.” A Romance language can be a factor for more subtle behaviour. In our examples, (hu)man is a conduit for fear or anticipation, states one chooses to let on. By extension, semantic patterns are also patterns of behaviour.
In sum, there exist online thousands of entries useful for approximating habits, practices, and action. If you bought PVC pipes, you would be recommended diamond-tipped drilling bits; you might read the Washington Post if you’ve watched Andrew Huberman; you might go to an anti-AUKUS demonstration if you’ve digitalised your presence at another rally. Could it be that we receive the ‘state of affairs’ when the odds are against us realising and confronting them successfully? Knowing the, at least significant, dependency of action on language, could dissent be scheduled both by information asymmetry and its non-simultaneity, via suggestion?
The choreography of an individual life, the dialect and routine of a community or culture or income class, is ritualistically mapped. Our critical theory is whatever we can make of the random echoes of past time from the perimeters of an event field. Our experience should verify that most people are not apathetic, that we desire sustainable conditions, but this delay in historical creation does materialise in deterministic attitudes. This is as clear in effect as assuming that you can’t catch a self-correcting gunshot.
The caveat: your last resort is not a VPN, encryption does not begin and end with bits and qubits. We should become more discrete, we should safeguard projections of ourselves onto or into whichever platforms, only not by the same structures of language they are stored under or recognised by. Despite the evolution of language slowing with the creation of Morse, of the alphabet, it has only calcified. There is still no universal grammar, there exists communication and logic behind and beyond modern practice, which is still incomplete.
If incomprehensibility, incomputability, indecipherability are the end goals, our language of reason, of feeling and logic, should be stripped of the redundant half, by which we favourably assume incompleteness. Otherwise, we should consider the many avenues and possibilities of communication.
Unlike traditional languages, the Yoruba language is based on the tonality of talking drums, whose pitch is regulated to mimic the tonality of spoken word. With only rising and falling pitches, it can sound out complete phrases. It has redundancy, but remains confidential. This is one method of encoding grammatics and meaning among many.
In the process of engaging with not values and conclusion but their medium—the structure of a message, the form it takes, how it becomes a statistic—in considering their logical chains, we distill them into their smallest constituent parts. Lose the fat and you close into essence. If we could encrypt our logic, our action, our position in space-time, we may restore some self-governance, variability of the status quo, and gain clarity all the same.
