The use of technology to map human populations, though not new, gained ascendancy in the post-9/11 era. This was when biometrics and fingerprinting became major markers of border control by political regimes around the world. Agamben once described this process as the political tattooing of the body by the state in ways that turn the political body into a criminal body constantly under surveillance. Cryptopolitics goes deeper than Agamben in nicely pointing out the contours of surveillance, secrecy and concealment in the digital world. Thus, we have moved from the age of anthropometric (Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon) to the era of cryptometric. This book lays out, in many of its chapters, how political tattooing has further manifested itself in what the authors calls cryptopolitics. As they describe, cryptopolitics is not just about the state but also about the ways in which citizens are interpolated as subjects and agents in power games that rely on ambiguity, confusion and deception.
Cryptopolitics is attentive to the significance of ‘hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiations of power’ (p. 1). It shows how secrecy and decoding can be deployed to produce regimes of exclusion and inclusion, shaping difference and unequal power relations. While encryption and decryption are seen in most literature as belonging to the purview of the technology and business sectors, this book brings to the fore how both categories – encryption and decryption – can be studied as cultural phenomena. While socio-cultural anthropologists have tended to focus on understanding people, communities, institutions and technologies as social phenomena, cryptopolitics calls attention to the significance of understanding how non-human actors can also shape relationships in both political and non-political ways. For example, biometrics can encode and decode human bodies while algorithms in search engines can code and encode human identities. Here, we see the affordances of infrastructures of communication – and I refer to verbal and non-verbal communication – how what is hidden can also be known and how what is known can be unknown depending on the way in which infrastructures of communication disseminate information.
The book identifies what it calls three genres of cryptopolitics: humour and rumour; conspiracy theory; and religious culture. Each of the chapters in this edited volume discuss in detail these genres, while also putting forward a more nuanced theoretical understanding of how cryptopolitics shapes power relations in many African countries. Cryptopolitics challenges many of the assumptions about the role that technology plays in the life of a state and its subject population. It situates its analysis within an explanatory model derived from the economy of technologies, which shows how the study of the digital can be understood through an ethnographic lens of the everyday life of the state and its people, from Kinshasa to Nairobi to Bujumbura to Bamako to Asmara. Cryptopolitics demonstrates how the micropolitics of relationships in digital spaces can reveal concealments, secrecy, vulnerabilities and exposure.
Organized into eight chapters, each focusing on an area of inquiry that connects with the subject of study, the book ties together the digital and non-digital worlds. For example, Chapter 2 shows how idioms of practice are central to the emergence of social media ethics; ‘pulling the images’ (p. 26), a process of extracting familiar or unfamiliar pictures from social media platforms, becomes a social dictum that governs life in the city. In this chapter, we see how Pype’s interlocutors sometimes display their vulnerability even when they are engaged in practices of concealment, secrecy and cryptic aesthetics. The chapter shows the value of ethnographic methods that account for ‘reconstructive shadow conversations’ that highlight the differences between ‘conversations of the shadow’ and ‘conversations in the shadow’ (p. 27). In the following chapter, Simon Turner calls attention to what he says are the ‘skills and politics of sounding out’ (p. 73). Turner maps how cryptopolitics are inserted into the everyday life of Burundi and Rwanda through secrecy and concealment. This chapter shows how people navigate the art of revealing and concealing through speculativity, which he describes as the practice of speculating and theorizing about motives, hidden agendas and causalities behind events.
Other chapters delve deeper into everyday digital practices. The meme in Chapter 7, which depicts Isais Afewerki as Hitler, not only shows the importance of humour as a coping strategy under a dictatorship, but also makes clear how resistance can be organized against a state that encodes people’s bodies with scars of fear. It is these scars that simultaneously provide a future to behold – a future that is imagined as ingrained in freedom from dictatorship. The proliferation of ‘informal’ savings schemes, using social media platforms such as WhatsApp in spaces such as Kenya and South Africa, is a further demonstration of how cryptopolitics can help create a form of mutuality that is encrypted in trust and community. An old contributary system thus takes new shape through digital platforms.
Cryptopolitics offers a captivating account of how politics interact and interrelate with the question of digital technology, urban spaces, everyday survival strategies, and the complicated power of the state over its subject population. The book presents a fascinating and refreshing argument that shifts our attention away from seeing technology as just a ‘thing’ that is ingrained in state systems to something that is crafted as an everyday practice by different actors across Africa. The book makes a significant contribution to scholarly understandings of the connections between power, politics and vulnerability, and their interrelatedness to everyday survival strategies in a digital space. It is bound to open up new research possibilities, especially for graduate students interested in crafting new research ideas in the anthropology of digital and media studies. Cryptopolitics is intellectually stimulating and will provoke debate about the ethnography of digital technology in Africa and beyond.
