Survival of the cryptic: Tracing technological imaginaries across ideologies, infrastructures, and community practices

Abstract

This article explores an inflection point for a community of cryptography advocates as they grappled with a series of cascading failures. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographic observation and interviews at conferences devoted to building privacy systems, I consider how a determinist conception of encryption technologies inhibited the widespread adoption of privacy technologies. I develop the frame of “survival of the cryptic” to call attention to the way this conception fails to acknowledge how power shapes the conditions of surveillance: that race and racism, gender and misogyny affect not only who is most impacted by surveillance but also how the encryption technologies developed to inhibit surveillance were designed—and, as importantly, who they were designed for. I conclude by offering a new imaginary for encryption that draws on queer, black and feminist thought by centering the need to create safe and autonomous spaces for collective survival under conditions of mass surveillance.