Cryptography and Dissent

If, as Timothy Mitchell writes, technical and material processes are the arrangements through which our politics take shape, then the politics of dissent today emerge through processes of encryption.¹

Encryption — a technique for hiding the content of messages as they circulate — is part of a larger collection of technical practices. These include decryption, a process of uncovering the messages sent by others. They also include sharing moments of vulnerability, story and song that then make their way back into encryption and decryption as touchstones for these techniques. In other words, encryption and decryption are not merely technical; they are also political, and in their politics, they are affective and aesthetic. Taken together, I call this particular relay of the technical and the political cryptowork.

Cryptowork is neither cryptography, the narrow technical practice of creating cyphers and keys to decipher messages. Nor is it cybersecurity, a governmental technique that shores up states and corporations as institutions that mete out violence in the name of protecting “their” populations and users. Cryptowork is instead the sum of techniques that create a relationship between the practice of politics and those who practise it. In other words, cryptowork works to redistribute the sensible, in Rancière’s terms, to shift political sensibilities so that those who have been left out of politics can begin to exercise the right to decide.

Over the past five years, I have learnt to see the relationship between the technical and material aspects of protecting communications for dissent, through ethnographic research on anti-caste organising amongst the South Asian diaspora (though this can be a reifying term), in the U.S., the UK, and elsewhere.

anti-caste thought imagines the annihilation of caste and a world beyond it. It is a centuries-old strand of philosophy and practice, both within and in staunch critique of Hindu beliefs and customs. Often, it draws on Dalit, Buddhist, and other non-dominant-caste traditions of social, political, and economic mobilisations. It is embodied in the writings of figures such as BR Ambedkar; Periyar, the avowed anti-theist 20th-century organiser of the South Indian Self-Respect Movement; Jotiba and Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh, 19th-century radicals in the western Indian state of Maharashtra; and contemporary thinkers like Yashica Dutt, Shailaja Paik, and Thenmozhi Soundarajan. It provides grounding for political action, precisely because anti-caste theory figures caste as a flexible form of humiliation, one that has neither a fixed geographic meaning nor a transhistorical one, but is instead mobilised around caste’s complex social and territorial geographies. There is, therefore, no single agreed-upon way to be an anti-caste activist. You might come from an oppressed caste or a dominant caste background, be from different regions of the subcontinent, have different orientations to religious practice and identity, and have different understandings of gender. This is part of what makes cryptowork a fecund site for working out the commitments of anti-caste organising. Cryptowork gathers together and pours forth, in the sense of becoming a techne, through which the idea of a place without caste can be materialised — where, as the 17th-century Marathi poet Tukaram says, all “dance together on the sands, trampling their anger and their arrogance, forgetting their caste pride, and bowing at each other’s feet.”

What we might call a new wave of anti-caste organising emerged during the COVID pandemic, a period when online organising and new forms of protests flourished, according to media theorist Paulo Gerbaudo.² This period also saw the enactment of several laws and events that facilitated a rapid rise in authoritarianism in India. These included a series of draconian laws that affected Kashmir and the northeastern state of Manipur; a failed set of laws to deregulate crop sales; the creation of citizenship registries; amendments to India’s IT regulations that enabled the removal of online content deemed “dangerous” by the government; and blanket Internet shutdowns that vaulted India to the top of the internet shutdowns list for the years between 2016 and 2023.³

Caste increasingly came to the fore as an issue both within and outside the Indian subcontinent. In the U.S., anti-caste organising converged around a lawsuit filed in 2020 by an engineer at CISCO Systems, a software and hardware company worth close to $350b.⁴ The plaintiff alleged that he was being denied promotions, opportunities to learn, and recognition for work well done by his dominant-caste supervisor. The CISCO case was followed by a group of Dalit women engineers publishing an anonymous open letter in the Washington Post, outlining the kinds of discrimination they collectively faced while at work, and the complicity of social media companies in the perpetuation of the harassment and bullying of caste-ised individuals online — a widely known phenomenon at this point.⁵ A high-water mark of this organising arrived on 5 September 2023, when the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 403, the first statewide attempt in the United States to add caste as a protected category to housing and employment law.⁶ A month later, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it.⁷

Such anti-caste organising was both linked to and distinct from earlier waves of diasporic dissent, such as the nationalist Ghadar movement. It also followed a lineage of activism carried out by those who were part of early outward migrations from South Asia, such as the movement of indentured workers to Fiji, Mauritius, and the Caribbean in the 19th century, or the migration of farmers from Punjab to California and the Canadian West Coast in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A particularly significant influence has been the Ravidasa Sikh community in California, a Dalit Sikh community that has long developed anti-caste strategies in the diaspora. Drawing from these movements, activists both within and outside of South Asia devised strategies for staying safe while continuing to practice dissent in what was a prefiguration of the embattled politics of dissent now emerging in the larger U.S. context.

How, then, does cryptowork shore up dissent? To continue practising anti-caste work in an atmosphere of surveillance and threat, activists in the diaspora have had to protect their communications, understand others’ communications, and reflect on those practices.

Here are three examples, starting with a moment of encryption. By the mid 2020s, most of the anti-caste online groups I followed relied on the Signal protocol. This protocol is a standard for encrypted messaging, used by both the Signal messaging service and other forms of online encryption. It allows messages to be sent without a third party reading or tampering with them, or impersonating a sender. If the keys stored on a sender’s phone are leaked, hacked, or stolen, the keys are changed. Keys also evolve over time, so a single breach does not endanger past or future communications. In other words, after the initial message, a session is set up. Future communications create new keys and erase old ones. This process is also called ratcheting: communication moves forward, deriving later keys from the one just before. While this protocol is the standard by which encrypted messages operate, the question of how communities come to use it is subject to historical processes and negotiation.

But moving to an encrypted messaging platform was not the end of the story. About a year after the Signal protocol had been established as part of the ritual of online communication, another tool, Zoom, inverted a taken-for-granted infrastructure of activist practice into a moment to recognise “the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards and […] the work of politics and knowledge production.”⁸ Zoom, which we used for meetings, had just released a feature called Zoom IQ: a generative AI tool that could produce a summary and send it directly to meeting hosts. In this meeting, held on the encrypted platform Jitsi, participants floated the idea of quitting Zoom altogether. But the safer Jitsi could only hold four or five participants at once. Perhaps more importantly, expecting others to join in for yet another technical migration might have been too big an ask.

A student member of the group, who by now had become something of an expert in cybersecurity practices, informed us that Zoom IQ was far from the only issue. Zoom’s customer license grant, for instance, gave the company the right to use service-generated data in perpetuity. These general terms of service were concerning, even though Zoom claims it does not store personal data but instead merely aggregates it. It would still use content as training data, and while the platform would ask for user consent in order to do so, many were sceptical about whether opting out would even matter. As the student cyber expert noted, because it is in the nature of AI models to learn through the repetition of patterns, the data could become integrated into the model, and it was very hard to say how that data might “leak” into generative AI platforms and be revealed through queries; or how facial recognition training data might be used to create deepfakes of those in the meetings — particularly individuals who might be well known or subject to regimes of hypervisibility because of their overlapping identities, such as Dalit women or Dalit Muslims.

These moments of encryption are also complemented by analysing the messages of others, a process that distils into practices of decryption. In early 2021, a group member started a Signal conversation about a series of messages circulating on WhatsApp. These messages — collectively titled “Important Information about WhatsApp’s New Rules To Group Members” — warned receivers about the supposed steps that the Indian government was taking to control messaging. Three smartphone screens long, the messages included the following misinformation:

Important information about WhatsApp’s new rules to group members…
1. ✔️ = message sent.
2. ✔️✔️ = message reached.
3. Two blue ✔️✔️ = message read.
4. Three blue ✔️✔️✔️ = the government took note of the message.
5. Two blue ✔️✔️ and one read ✔️ = the government can take action against you.
6. One blue ✔️ and two red ✔️✔️ = the government is checking your information.
7. Three red ✔️✔️✔️ = the government has started proceedings against you and you will get a court summons soon.”
The message’s end exhorted the reader to “be a responsible citizen and share with [their] friends.

These messages were popping up in WhatsApp groups that the group member, his friends, and his family were part of, making him wonder what to do about them. First, group members analysed what they thought was going on. On the face of it, it clearly felt like an attempt to suppress critical conversations amongst Indians about their government. Who was behind it, on the other hand, was a lot harder to ascertain. Some amongst them suspected that it was not government officials but rather low-level party members who were taking the initiative. Several were afraid that the WhatsApp groups they were on would become even less open to critical discussion as these missives circulated. Group members then turned to ways they could combat this sort of messaging. Most writers agreed that a word-of-mouth approach would make sense, since anything else — like a public campaign or a viral social media effort — might simply end up spreading the warning over the Internet.

What we found most chilling about the message was not so much the content, but its slick visual style. It masqueraded effectively as a friendly public service announcement on how to interpret the platform’s system of checks, and it relied on people’s tendency in WhatsApp groups to forward information without checking its veracity. These first two moments of encryption and decryption correspond to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls exhaustion.⁹ Exhaustion, here, is a “reminder that modern thinking can sneak in and re-pose its dichotomies” between those who are protected by default and those who constantly need to work for their protection. But, as da Silva notes, it may also refer to “how to respond to the need to move beyond the well-known and tried.”

The stories that are threaded through moments of decryption and encryption carefully interleave the subjectivities of all members of a group or all actors in a movement, including those not yet known. In this way, technical practices sketch out a horizon of possibility for imagining a political subject — a cryptographic imagination that provides a horizon, not of a public constituted by empty homogeneous time, but instead a horizon that works through time, bringing the past into the present; a time that is not quite circular or linear, but collapsed. Threats and surveillance, then, make the past always present; they also shape the future as a series of risks to be acted on in the present. However, this quality of time also makes relating to one another pass through, rather than short-circuit, the intimate times of biography.

A cryptographic imagination can also be animated by story. In one telling, Uma recounted the story of a snake. A venomous snake was taught by a saint not to use its venom. Although the snake was harmless to humans, the villagers would still beat it repeatedly with sticks until it was almost dead. After many months, the saint returned to the forest where the snake lived, saw the snake’s bruises, and heard what the villagers were doing. The saint exclaimed: “What about your hood and your fangs?” Uma, who wrote this story into our group chat, was thumbing through her response to ongoing discussions; the missives were flying so fast, and so many people were writing that it was hard to track what had elicited this particular response. Later, when I asked her about it during a Signal call, Uma told me she was not quite sure why it had come to mind just then. A poet and a mother of three-year-old twins, Uma had emigrated to Scotland from India ten years ago. She had joined our shared chat as a way to understand and fight back against what she saw as India’s slide into fascism.

Parables often have an enigmatic quality, reaching beyond the extant space and time of their enunciation, resolving a dilemma through stories whose ultimate meaning lies in the disputed space between the story and its moment of telling.¹⁰ A parable can be a form of hiding and revelation; it can convey meanings that are obscure even to the teller.

The story of the snake is canonically derived from the Parables of Sri Ramakrishna, a Hindu saint living in Bengal in the early 20th century — though, within an oral tradition, it is certainly much older. In Ramakrishna’s telling, the moral of The Snake That Refused To Hiss is straightforwardly included at the end of the fable: “You must hiss at wicked people but not injure others.” Without this neat ending, however, the story of the snake retains its ambiguity. Sometimes, fangs might be useful; sometimes, they open you up to attack and give too much attention to the attackers. In the context of needing to hide through encryption and unmask through decryption, it becomes a way of bringing to the fore the question of how a community should act in concert: both to protect its members and to enact change.

Across these descriptions, I have offered an account of cryptowork as the everyday practices that make up responses to digital surveillance today. I draw here on a similar move made by Emily Yates-Doerr — which she calls bloodwork — which describes how blood works in biomedical contexts to index both structural inequalities and alternatives to contemporary medical practice.¹¹ In a similar way, cryptowork is both a necessary but regrettable response to institutional surveillance and the violence it entails, and a space through which to work out alternative imaginaries.

There also exists an affinity between cryptowork and anti-caste thought. The politics of concealment and revelation, along with the problematic of how to move beyond caste, even while staying rooted in the realities of caste as a real social force, resonate with aspects of cryptowork that I explicate here: encryption, decryption, and the story that mediates between them. For if describing cryptographic imaginaries as a regrettable but necessary aspect of contemporary life maintains a fiction of liberal personhood, fettered by unfree speech, then adding into this imaginary the shape of a story that brings with it a relationship to the past and the future simultaneously reveals cryptowork to be a figuring ground of an always partial future.

Cryptowork may itself be one way to glimpse that future, for anti-caste thought operates through a collapsing of time as a propulsive technique. As R.T. Samuel writes about anti-caste imaginaries in his introduction to the Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF: “Whenever you look back you find that people have always been looking forward.”¹² Cryptowork may be a technopolitics precisely in the sense that it shapes politics, not as a restriction, but as a drawing of the horizon of possibility for the practice and imaginary of politics itself. And as such, it enunciates a cryptographic imagination of the contemporary.

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, 2021. [^]
Paulo Gerbaudo, “The Pandemic Crowd: Protest in the Time of COVID-19”, Journal of International Affairs, 2020. [^]
Ananya Bhattacharya, “India shuts down the internet far more than any other country”, Rest of World, 27 September 2024. [^]
Rishi Iyengar, “California sues Cisco for alleged discrimination against employee because of caste”, CNN Business, 2 July 2020. [^]
A statement on caste bias in Silicon Valley from 30 Dalit women engineers, The Washington Post, 27 October 2020. [^]
Brian Osgood, “California passes bill banning caste-based discrimination”, Al Jazeera, 6 September 2023. [^]
Sameea Kamal, “Newsom blocks a bill to ban caste discrimination in California”, CalMatters, 10 October 2023. [^]
Geoffrey C. Bowker & Susan Leigh Starr, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, 1999, p. 34. [^]
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 2022. [^]
Priya Chandrasekaran, “Thinking parabolically: Time Matters in Octavia Butler’s Parables”, Fieldsights, 2018. [^]
Emily Yates-Doerr, “Bloodwork: Circulatory Disorders, Immunity, and the Scarring of Systems”, Anthropology of Work Review, 2022. [^]
R.T. Samuel, Rakesh K. and Rashmi R.D., eds. The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, 2024. [^]

Notes