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 “James Baldwin” in a certain kind of hushed tone. A percentage of people will have actually read James Baldwin and have thoughtful things to say about his work, another percentage will have not read his work, nor have anything thoughtful to say about his life or what he stood for, but will pretend that they do, and a percentage will have no idea who he is or was.
There’s another kind of code which we don’t talk about as much right now—steganography. This is the practice of hiding a message inside of something else like a photo or painting, a text, or an audio file. Most of us have dabbled in the most common form of it, making disappearing or invisible ink out of lemon juice or wax pencils, making treasure maps or writing secret love notes.
I’m into it as the viable alternative to the other kinds of codes—it’s all about steganography now. Get ready.
∞
Unlike cryptography and much like very hip unmarked clubs in Brooklyn, steganography does not advertise its own existence—you just have to know to look for it. It has both complexity and mystery as components, and you can dial up either of these to make the message harder or easier to find and interpret.
Renaissance painters used steganography to embed tiny images or text to say things about religion, or politics, or whether or not they thought much of their patron.
Today, people embed bits of text or numerical patterns into code or inside of images. For example, this steganography insert from Wolfram, which I really wanted to mess around with for this piece, but didn’t, because . . . time.
There’s a story, told by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, about a tyrant who tattooed a secret message on to the shaved head of his servant, then after the servant’s hair had grown back, sent him to his political ally with the simple instruction to shave his head. The steganography was foolproof—only the person who knew to shave the kid’s head would get the message. Et voila! a well-timed surprise invasion could occur.
Which is a) just wow, quite a view on the expendability of human capital in ancient Greece b) a long lead time on a secret message involving a strategic invasion, and c) wtf does this kid do to be useful for the rest of his career as a servant/slave, once the tattoo on his head is out of date?
∞
What I like about steganography is the infinite possibilities and the propensity for playfulness and humor. The best puzzles and riddles have a joke attached, or at least a trick, if not a very good cheat code, which makes them fun to solve. It’s also cool that it’s hidden; it gives you a reason to always be looking under the couch cushions and inside the medicine cabinets, should you like that sort of thing, which I do.
Shakespeare was good at it—of course he was—and not only in his ability to assemble words so that they accumulated double, triple and quadruple meanings, i.e. through poetics. He was also good at creating riddles, name games, anagrams, numerical patterns, and layers of references, amongst other puzzles. Here’s one of the famous ones:
Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too.
People have spent about a billion hours uncorking this word puzzle, and it’s not even the best one in the play. Hamlet just couldn’t not speak in code, not even to save his own life.
(For anyone whose eyes glaze at the mention of Shakespeare, here’s a link to Andrew Scott destroying these lines 👆🏻, see if it helps. )
The puzzlement in the play is the point. Mass hysteria and confusion due to hidden messages, real and imagined, is the drumbeat that keeps everything and everyone going round and round: no one can get through to anyone else, not through blank or rhymed verse or the loneliest of soliloquies, not through theatre productions, nor lectures, nor foul-mouthed, punning grave-diggers, nor flower symbolism, nor even conferring with ghosts. Nobody likes this situation and everyone is busting their asses to crack the code.
The fact that pretty much everyone fails is beside the point—the energy flows toward solving, which is why William Shakespeare is not Samuel Beckett.
Infinite Jest, which (more or less) relocates the story of Hamlet at the center of end-stage capitalism instead of a Danish monarchy, is a puzzlement commensurate with post-modern levels of human desperation. What Foster Wallace lacks in Shakespearean poetics, he makes up for in generalized virtuosity. IJ is riddled with messages and clues embedded in the lexicons of drug culture, broadcast radio, film, psychology, psychiatry, info-sec, PSYOPs, AA, mathematics, physics, tennis and other professional sports, brand and marketing, and the highly specialized patois used by a group of Canadian Assassins Fateuils Rolents, amongst others. Here again, everyone is doing everything they possibly can to fix the mess, which is why IJ is a handbook on resilience and an absolute solace for anyone who is trying to solve the problem of suffering.
In both Hamlet and Infinite Jest, the difficulty of the text around the hidden messages contributes to the pleasure of solving. Both are a thicket of name-play; asynchronous chronologies; cryptographs snuck into metered lines and/or end-notes; and layers of intertextual references.
Only the most foolishly brave and irredeemably desperate can make their way through, emerging from the steganographic wilderness unwashed and anemic, scratching their wiki-scars and marginalia-glyphs, waving flags of boldly decoded truths. Those of us who make it are in a new cohort now, now, red-pilled and ready for the reckoning.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
∞
The problem with puzzles like steganography—and of course there is a problem—is there’s a corporate derivative of steganography that appears to be on the ascendant. It’s the one that is made of a surprisingly indelible invisible ink that lurks behind decision-making and reporting at seemingly every level.
That there are hidden codes behind corporate structures isn’t revelatory; corporate speak existed long before Orwell, though he perfected it. What is revelatory for me, anyway, is the way the professional managerial class doesn’t seem to want to find or decode these hidden messages. I guess you could call this branch self-steganography.
It’s a willful participation in a co-created matrix of institutionalized confusion for the sake of—
—I don’t know.
I honestly don’t.
Take the existence of the “alignment meeting” as an example. Every time I am invited to an alignment meeting, I think of that meme about the $10,000 meeting. Alignment meetings never really seem to be about getting aligned for some reason. There is always a stated desired outcome, but there’s always a de facto steganographic message, too: often it’s something someone heard in another meeting that one time. Other times it’s in a multi-thread email that only osme of the people in the group were on. Sometimes it’s a multi-thread Slack channel that’s been screenshotted and put into a multi-thread email.
If there is someone like me in the meeting, i.e., a person who is freakishly uptight about wasting time, that person will often just come out and ask: “what are we really talking about here?” This is because I always kind of hope that it will work to just say open sesame.
It never works. It’s somehow impossible to just get someone to say “look, I think [name of VP] wants X, so let’s figure out how to do it right.” Instead, there’s this feeling of climbing round and round a stone staircase that winds around a meeting-as-a-castle-tower, saying phrases like to build on what X said, and let’s align with Y stakeholder first, and maybe we should run some additional numbers. It’s as though no one wants to commit to a decision, i.e., be accountable for it. So, they bury the secret in layers of emails and “inputs.” This happens at every level, right on up to the very top, where in the owner or chairman of the board can say things such as “circumstances…have tied our hands” as a means of avoiding a real reckoning. This is the essence of modern, corporate, steganographic forms.
∞
At my company there’s a lot of talk lately about the idea of “disagree and commit” and I celebrate the idea in principle. There was even a Slack discussion about it in the #Learning channel in which many, very earnest folks were trying to think through what it means to be bold enough to disagree, but then to be flexible enough to pivot to pull with the team.
It was a good discussion that was also very indicative of engineering culture as I have experienced it, namely that it is male-dominated (it just is) and this does sometimes mean that defaults are competitive rather than collaborative. In my company a lot of the people are from European countries that favor rules and order which can contribute to an atmosphere that feels combative, as well. A male engineer from Poland is not as likely to put a smiley emoji at the end of a statement as, for example, a marketing person from Vermont. In this particular Slack thread, the guys circled in and out of various interpretations of “disagree and commit”, including one that advocated for fighting “to the death” for your particular point of view so as to “win” the discussion and “capture the princess.”
To me, this seemed like the opposite of what “disagree and commit” means, but I was curious, so I kept lurking.
At some point, someone quoted Arthur Schopenhauer, at length, which was possibly the only way to take things in a less warmly collaborative and hopeful direction than “fight to the death.” Luckily, though, someone thought to ask ChatGPT what it thought of “disagree and commit” which gave us a much kinder approach.
It's like a vote, but instead of just counting the most votes, you talk about all the ideas, and then make a decision together. And even if you don't agree with the decision, you still do it because you're friends and you want to have fun together.So fun!
Even more fun was when someone asked ChatGPT to make a poem out of its answer, which included this tight little quatrain:
It's like a vote, with a twist, you see
You discuss and debate, before you agree
It's not just about winning, it's about the team
So even if you disagree, you still commit, it seems As goofy as some of this conversation was, to me, it was at least a spirited attempt to solve the corporate communication puzzle of “exactly how honest are we supposed to be with our leadership about our opinions?” For once, people weren’t trying to get each other to “align,” but were honestly trying to figure out what are the boundaries of being principled but also collaborative.
That said, I think that inside contemporary corporate culture, even people who possess a humanities-trained kind of mental elasticity seem to lose it inside the atomization of tasks and teams and the relentless, earnings-driven, focus on deliverables and meetings, instead of on making things.
Which means that despite the wisdom of chatGPT and Arthur Schopenhauer, the spirited debate in the #Learning Slack was pretty academic, to be honest. I have yet to work with anyone with real managerial power who actively puts in the time it takes to cultivate a “disagree and commit” approach that has an impact on office culture. It just takes too much time and too much listening. It’s not efficient. And so, the “alignment” puzzle is created to make people feel like they are collaborating, when really they are just ‘socializing’ an idea that has already been decided. This, for people who are creative, is where innovation goes to die.
Schopenhauer turns out to be kind of apropos:
Thus it is that the weakness of our intellect and the perversity of our will lend each other mutual support; and that, generally, a disputant fights not for truth, but for his proposition, as though it were a battle pro aris et focis. He sets to work per fas et nefas; nay, as we have seen, he cannot easily do otherwise.
Pro aris et focis means “for alters and hearths,” i.e. for the things that we love and make us feel safe. Per fas et nefas means, “through right or wrong.
Maybe here is the answer to my question, why don’t people want to find and decode the hidden messages?
Because they don’t want to risk losing something that they hold dear, no matter what. Like, for example, their jobs. Or their standing in the group. Or their sense of belonging.
It occurs to me that the raggedy barbarians who are drawn to solving insane puzzle-thickets like the ones found in Shakespeare or David Foster Wallace have maybe already lost something that they hold dear, maybe several things. Maybe the difference is that some of us have very little left to lose or fear.
∞
I was traveling again this last week, which means there are exponentially more hidden messages floating around.
Do I say dank je well or bedankt? Does this person or that person that I haven’t seen for awhile want to hug? Or shake hands? Or kiss cheeks?
Does “I’ll see you in the office on Wednesday?” mean that we have an appointment? Or only sort of?
It exacerbated that craving for mathematical certainty that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago—a craving that percolated all week, and finally landed on this photo.
I had taken it on the fly as I walked through the Koningin Maria-Hendrikaplein on my way to a meeting in Ghent, Belgium, to which I was late, because I am always late when I am traveling in a language that I don’t speak.
As I hurried out of the park, I promised myself that this time I would look up what kind of tree it was. Back in the old days I would never have failed at this. Back in the old days the name of the tree, both the contemporary name and its scientific names, and its provenance, as well as some sketches of language about how to describe it, would have gone right into my poetry notebook as precursor to discovering all kinds of meanings.
It seems that I’ve spent so much time urgently decoding the post-modern cacophony that is my world, that I’ve lost the habit of looking for simpler, more beautiful, hidden messages.
So, I looked it up. I found out that they are plane trees and that there are 60 of them, arranged in concentric circles around the Koningin Maria-Hendrikaplein (here’s an aerial view). This particular group are over a hundred years old and are protected landmarks.
I even got as far as looking at whether or not they had been mapped in OpenStreetMap. I think the answer is no, because they are genus Platanas, and I don’t see it on this list, but I could be most certainly be wrong—I’m not finished decoding most of the puzzle yet.
Fantastic essay! “Only the foolishly brave and irredeemably desperate…..” I’m tempted to return to IJ and try to finish. I got maybe half way through years ago, after he killed himself, and the depth and velocity of his mind started to unnerve me. Maybe I can be more brave and more desperate