071: the puzzlement in the play is the point

codes & puzzles, Hamlet & Infinite Jest, plane trees in Ghent + really distressing work meetings

It’s fashionable to talk about cryptography again—which, fine, good. The whole crypto thing, much like its originating discipline, has a linearity about it that I find to be restful. It’s not intrinsically secretive even though it protects secrets; its value lies in complexity, not in mystery. Either you own the key to the code or you figure out how to break the code. One way or the other, the system is knowable.

The equally fashionable cultural orthogonal is the dog whistle, and, I guess, the dog whistle’s obverse, the virtue signal. These kinds of codes are easier to crack and, in some ways, more dangerous.

If you drop the word globalist in a sentence, a lot of people are going to know exactly what you have hidden behind the word. A percentage will like what you are implying, a percentage will know that what you are implying is incorrect on its face and grotesque in its implication, and a percentage will have no idea that it means anything at all. The same goes for saying the name “…