Cryptography and steganography are now used more widely in practice than at any prior moment in history, and so one might expect to find the self-evident origins of these modern practices in the work of cryptographic pioneers like John Wilkins, Francis Bacon, or Johannes Trithemius. Just as Newton’s alchemical leanings give pause to would-be historians of physics, however, so do the mystical and theological elements of early cryptography confuse the contemporary study of cryptographic history. Trithemius’ texts were for many years thought to deal exclusively with magic and the occult; only recently did we realize he was dealing with ‘occulted meaning’ of a less supernatural type. One can find polyalphabetic ciphers in Trithemius’ work, and the early origins of steganography in the Baconian ciphers. But when we ignore their mystical elements and reduce the work of these pioneers to the practical uses of their ideas, we ignore the crucial interrelation of cryptography and graphy.

Cryptography is writing whose meaning is hidden; steganography is hidden writing. Explicitly conceived cryptographic systems differ from linguistic ones in that they offer a set of formal rules for translating cryptic text into a natural language: cryptographic script, which both hides and presents a given text, is thereby subordinate to a natural language content. Yet any script not comprehended by its reader is, practically speaking, cryptographic. We might state this relativistic position more clearly by saying that a cryptographic text is one whose combinatorial logic is hidden from a given reader; conversely, a natural language is one whose combinatorial logic feels ‘natural’ to its reader. Thus hieroglyphics were cryptographic prior to the deciphering of the Rosetta stone, and the Wadi el-Hol scripts, perhaps the earliest available manifestations of truly ‘phonetic’ writing, remain so today. We might even say that all texts are cryptographic to small children and the illiterate: we are born into a world of cryptograms, which we decipher by our entrance into a symbolic order. This expansion of the term ‘cryptographic’ can extend beyond natural languages as well, into the field of formal systems, which are cryptographic to those not trained in their decipherment.

However, this leads to a further problematic of the term ‘cryptographic,’ in that it partly depends on a binary between those texts whose meaning is evident and those in which meaning is hidden. The normal graphic text aspires to convey its meaning as clearly as possible, while the cryptographic text aspires to conceal its meaning as securely as possible. The aforementioned binary is commonsensical insofar as we must recognize these two differing aspirations, and yet we must simultaneously recognize the real failures of such aspirations. Once one trains oneself in a cryptographic system, it ceases to be encrypted. Thus cryptography and graphy are, like most binaries, poles of a continuum, rather than discrete objects; it thereby also goes without saying that these poles are historically as well as perspectivally contingent.

The above examples indicate the contingency of perspective in this regard. One foundational instance of the historical contingency of encryption is the discovery of frequency analysis by al-Kindi: essentially the birth of cryptanalysis as a formal science. By modeling the combinatorial logic of a cryptographic system in the ‘universal language’ of mathematics, frequency analysis can easily translate between any simply-encrypted text and the natural language text it hides. As a result, centuries of cryptographic texts based on simple substitution are easily deciphered, their graphy no longer cryptic.

This usage of mathematics in deciphering cryptography leads to the questions of meaning raised by Aronofsky’s π: if nature is a cryptogram from the divine, then can the language of mathematics uncover the traces of that divinity (and thus — it is hoped — the divinity itself) by modelling natural processes? Or can we only follow along these traces asymptotically, locked in a ‘golden spiral’ toward the essence of things, but left unable to reach a final essence by the formal constraints of the language which structure our pursuit?

This second interpretation, like Derrida’s essay, makes recourse to the syntax of negative theology: mathematics is perhaps a formal way of presencing absences for the purposes of analysis, just as the True Name is a means of presencing the absent divine and presence itself is a presencing of différance (which itself ‘is not’). In the real world, this presentation of absence constitutes a metaphysical violence which indefinitely postpones meaning, leaving only an endless project of deconstruction. Even though the 216-letter Name, the Shem ha-Mephorash, is well known in our world, we are no closer to the divine. In the narrative context of π, however, it seems that the mechanics of presence can capture the divine absence: Max actually finds the cryptic Name through computation. His mystical cryptanalysis of nature leads to the divine Name, the ultimate ‘key’ to meaning, and yet he still finds himself thwarted. This happens three times: first, by what appears to be chance (the literal bug in Euclid); second, by the antinomy of the pharmakon: since the Name is too long for him to memorize, it has value only as textual representation; and then finally by the very structure of the pursuit, when Sol reveals that the bug in Euclid was really a ‘bug’ in computation itself. Foreign to chance and the pharmakon, in π the electronic computer can achieve what the mind cannot. Euclid reaches the ineffable Divine through formal logical procedures, but in the transcendence from electro-logical presence to divine absence, destroys itself.

Jaron Lanier says that “reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure.” It’s true, in its way. Wikipedia is tremendously wrong. It’s got tons of factual mistakes. One time, I opened a page, and was greeted with an enormous close-up of a penis. Other times, huge chunks of articles have been cut off. But I’ve just fixed those problems and gone along my way. In other cases, articles are something that’s not quite ‘wrong.’ Just, odd. And serendipitous, and un-encyclopedic. Like this one.

It reads like something you would hear in a bad police movie, not the encyclopedia Britannica. Maybe it was copied directly out of something ordered from the back of Soldier of Fortune. Who knows. Is it wrong? I’m not sure. Will I ever be fighting a ‘close quarters battle?’ Doubtful. But does it give me a very intriguing perspective on a whole little subset of society and its discourse? Of course it does. Pages like that one make wiki fantastic. You can read into a little slice of a culture very different from yours, and learn a whole bunch of stuff about entire disciplines you once knew nothing of. With one or two clicks. From a firefox panel, even. So Jaron misses the point, and so do the Britannica-study guys.

Cory Doctorow says it much better than I could here. In an extended blog-style quote:

“Wikipedia isn’t great because it’s like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.

So, Wikipedia gets it wrong. Britannica gets it wrong, too. The important thing about systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail. Fixing a Wikipedia article is simple. Participating in the brawl takes more effort, but then, that’s the price you pay for truth, and it’s still cheaper than starting up your own Britannica.”

Fantastic.

Es muss sein.

however, i can see his computer monitor from here – as can the individual behind me see mine – and i can see that he has someone on his MSN list who is also on mine.

thus, my being-in-the-world is linked to his being – which resides corporeally two feet in front of me – by an ephemeral series of decentred connections over 2.4ghz radio signal and fiber-optic cable, through dozens of interchained networks and one person’s online archive (our common contact’s list of ‘friends’). the real paradox here is that when we think about it, this connection is one which is essentially more surprising, in that it brings us ‘closer’ together than our actual physical proximity. i am closer to this person in an electronic, intangible sense, mediated by surveillance, than i am to him, two feet away from me, because i would never speak a word to him.

because he’s an idiot.

obscure though it may be, it’s a quite lovely little allusion. in the highly apocryphal tale, Columbus was getting somewhat piqued at the gentlemen who were proposing that “anyone” could have done what he did; ie, discover a new continent. thus, he played his little game with the egg. none of the gentleman could do what he asked of them – to make the egg stand on its end – and they proclaimed it impossible. whereupon columbus cracked that old egg just a little bit on the skinny end and made it stand upright. “big deal!” you, the exceedingly hypothetical reader, proclaim.

“what possible relation could this have to Bentham’s design for a prison?” well, like Columbus’ egg (which was quite woefully spelled with an additional ’s’ to denote the possessive in the text), and the discovery of the new world, the Panopticon is a very, very, simple idea. place people in a situation wherein they could always potentially be watched, and they will (ideally) behave as though they are always being watched. this is a concept which is grasped intuitively by essentially everyone, and with which everyone in contemporary society can express some familiarity. however, we didn’t know it as such until Bentham (or, really, Foucault) formalized it and expressed it in a concrete fashion. and the beauty of the panopticon, from the perspective of the parsimonious administrator, aside from its efficiency, its effectiveness, and its futuristic-sounding multisyllabic name, is that it is a very generalized concept, applicable in any situation by any number of different means. particularly in the electronic society of today, the panopticon – like Columbus’ egg – is “the simplest thing in the world. Anybody can do it,—after he has been shown how!” when Foucault recognized the universality of the principle underlying Bentham’s panopticon, it was a discovery as simple as Columbus’ trick with the egg, but one with effects as far-reaching in the field of politics as his discovery of the New World.

…and Foucault expressed that whole idea in one little simile.