https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BernalCryptopolitics

In our new edited volume Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media (Berghahn Books, 2023) we propose the term “cryptopolitics” to draw attention to the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiating power dynamics. Focusing on African societies, the volume brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to consider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

What is cryptopolitics?

Cryptopolitics manifests as secrets, hidden knowledge, skeptical interpretations, and conspiracy theories, which are at the heart of social and political life. Secrecy and decoding are deployed to produce boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, and cryptopolitics are therefore intimately entangled with inequality and difference. Cryptopolitics involves managing communication in ways that play off ambiguity and the distinction between concealed and overt information. Secrecy, deception, and ambiguity are not novel, but cryptopolitics brings these kinds of activities into view under a unified conceptual framework that reveals how they are deployed politically. It focuses attention on the workings of the hidden and the deceptive in relations of power – trying to make sense of signs and forms that obscure and shield.

Cryptopolitics in the era of digital media:

Cryptopolitics takes novel forms and has new consequences when it enters society through digital media. While digital media seemed to promise a new age of transparency and open access to information, it has also created new sources of ambiguity and deception. The recent rise in fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation draws attention to powerful ambiguities manipulated for political ends. We suggest that political conflicts, elections, revolt, and other flashpoints bring cryptopolitics dramatically to the fore. Furthermore, everyday interactions and interpersonal relationships are also fields for cryptopolitics as people increasingly manage their connections with others through revelation and concealment, especially as they conduct their lives across online worlds. What needs to be hidden from whom, and what gains power or protection from being hidden, depends on the social and political context. We suggest that anthropological and ethnographic perspectives are therefore key to understanding the dynamics of cryptopolitics in any given situation.

New forms of cryptopolitics emerge with digital media—including the veiled, complicit partnerships between states and technology companies that enable surveillance or internet shutdowns in times of elections or other tense political moments, as it happens frequently in Africa and throughout the Global South. A growing number of states rely on telecommunication and technology companies to help limit the circulation of information that threatens their political power. States also seek to use data collected by tech companies for various political ends. In both these efforts the official rationale is often that of what is framed as security, a paramount contemporary domain of cryptopolitics since threats and espionage produce and are produced by secrecy and suspicion.

Why Africa?

This edited volume employs the concept of cryptopolitics as a lens that helps bring into focus a dynamic of power and communication that operates in a wide array of settings. It explores cryptopolitics in diverse African contexts through ethnographic perspectives and in-depth qualitative studies. The authors situate their work at the intersection of cultural anthropology, media studies, and African studies. We contend that ethnographies of African digital cultures provide fertile ground for the exploration of cryptopolitics. Indirectness and the cryptic have been preferred forms of communication in many areas of postcolonial Africa, where citizens often have a long history of distrusting their leaders. Digital media, consumed mostly through smart phones, has rapidly become central to African politics and social life: private companies, humanitarian organizations, religious communities, families and other networks rely on digital technology in one way or another. 

Cryptopolitics itself is not a new phenomenon. Discussions about encryption, fake accounts, and disinformation remind us that deliberate confusion, doublespeak, distrust, and deciphering are often part of human interaction and are always embedded in strategies of power. At the same time, we should keep in mind that cryptopolitics is foundational to the digitized world, as technologies amplify the duality of concealment and revelation, and also magnify the scale, scope, and set of stakeholders associated with any particular instance. In our book, we employ the concept of “cryptopolitics” as an analytical space that is fruitful for new investigations in contemporary power configurations. We hope that the chapters of this volume can serve as an inspiration to engage in similar research beyond the African continent.

Digital technologies and social media platforms:

Digital technologies have fostered new surveillance and security measures used by states and private companies. These stockpiles of data are powerful public secrets that are known of yet hidden from citizens: a form of cryptopolitics. The objection of African governments and the U.S. government to the encryption of communications is testimony to the power that rests in information and in data. Struggles over who controls what is known, what can be revealed, by whom and to whom are being waged globally. 

Such new power formations lead to new power struggles, as the tensions between the European Union and American platform companies show. They also generate new strategies and tactics of resistance. All over the world, to varying degrees, people engage in new, digital and non-digital practices in efforts to escape repression, whether enacted by the state or other actors of authority.

The chapters of this book use cryptopolitics as a tool to illuminate the underlying discourses of power and powerlessness that are mediated by the novel technologies. Enabling new strategies of concealing and revealing information and intentions, the digital technologies are shown to disrupt and reconfigure people’s communicative practices and lifeworlds. However, the chapters also show that the emerging virtual public sphere that allows people to connect through a variety of new media, should not be seen as always enabling free speech and empowerment, but is shaped by complex interaction between a variety of actors—individual and collective, public and private. We can therefore see how cryptopolitical practices are anchored in local cultures and social norms, but also interlink online and offline, public and intimate socialities.

Our rich empirical cases:

This anthology brings together original research on diverse countries in Africa and diasporas, including Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All chapters examine the role of emerging digital technologies and platforms in mediating knowledge production. A common theme is the relationship between the state and society with particular attention to conflicts, migration, ethnic rivalries, and authoritarian systems. The chapters demonstrate how political and social practices are always anchored in local sociality, and suggest that the analysis of the role of social media in Africa is often central to understanding the present-day cryptopolitical dynamics between the powerless and powerful.

The rise of digital communicative platforms can be seen as central to contemporary activities of obfuscation and revelation—offering new possibilities for the empowerment of the marginal, but also creating new mechanisms of surveillance and control. The book casts light on the emerging dynamics of digital platforms in Africa that are often characterized by ambivalent implications to power and agency—the ability of individuals to make their own choices and act upon them. Various social media and internet search platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, increasingly feature as an arena for construction and negotiation of alternative meanings and strategies of resistance.  

Our anthology explores the new digital publics that emerge on diverse global and local social media platforms to question and contest the political legitimacy and narratives of the state. It draws attention to important continuities in political cultures, and the ways long-standing cryptopolitical understandings and practices are adapted to digital media. The chapters of our book provide rich empirical material to illustrate these topics. For example, social media in Burundi draws on the patterns of selective concealing that are part of the cultural repertoire in Burundian politics, while providing citizens with new avenues to combat the machinations and violence of the state. In post-conflict Somalia, the enduring struggles to reify and strategically manipulate otherwise fluid and contextual clan identities have been transferred to the digital world of algorithmic search engines. Communication on Congolese digital platforms is shaped by a locally specific aesthetic of ambiguity that foregrounds socially conditioned modes of concealment and revelation, forming an important strategy for managing personal relationships. New digital technologies of identification aimed at regulating and surveilling migrants in Kenya give rise to new strategies among Somali and Burundi refugees who evade and manipulate the state authorities, while providing them with informal ways to draw on their customary ties of sociality and mutual security. Among Eritreans and the diaspora, the double meanings and ambiguities of humor both mirror and decode the cryptopolitics in the narratives of the authoritarian state and expose these to public scrutiny.

While digital media may render participation in political and economic governance more accessible to the masses, the outcomes remain contested and ambiguous. Thus, for example, digital platforms such as Twitter have disrupted state control over the circulation of information in Kenya and introduced new, participatory practices of engaging with institutional politics. At the same time, digital platforms also entail new opportunities for the state to strengthen its repressive regime. Similarly, the restrictions and freedoms produced by the engagement of the users with Western-owned BigTech platforms that often dominate the digital economy landscape in Africa are also ambivalent and context-dependent. In South Africa and Kenya, for example, WhatsApp-mediated informal savings groups have emerged as an alternative to digital group accounts offered by commercial banks and dedicated FinTech platforms. While they build on vernacular templates of mutuality and allow broader financial access to the masses, they have also given rise to rapidly spreading scams, and data capture by technology companies. Fundraising campaigns increasingly combine WhatsApp with offline contribution networks and mobile payment channels, demonstrating the continued importance of integrating offline and online modes of livelihood management. As the chapters show, digital publics in Africa are thus constituted through multiple materialities and communicative forms, and digital spaces shaped by a variety of actors that include individual users, governments, civil society organizations, diasporas, and increasingly, technology companies and investors.

Cryptopolitics and ethnographic fieldwork:

Cryptopolitics is not only a topic to study in the lifeworlds of our research subjects. Collecting ethnographic data and publishing research involves strategies of exposing, concealing and obscuring as well. As anthropologists, we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the politics of ethnographic research and scholarship, and the local and global power relations that shape our engagement with the people we write about.

Our usage of pseudonyms or the alterations of various idiosyncratic characteristics of local people with whom we interact are also practices of cryptopolitics, of producing layers of meaning, of hiding and obscuring so that our interlocutors or our relationships with them are not harmed. These processes of anthropological research are well-known. Yet, with the ubiquity of social media, practices of data collection, contacting interlocutors, and maintaining relationships with them are constantly being transformed. Scholars increasingly need to reflect on how digitally stored ethnographic material will be protected from risks such as data hacking or theft. Just as citizens are not always fully in control of the data flow of data they consciously produce or inadvertently generate, neither are researchers. All this points to a need for new approaches and perspectives in the discipline that would allow for more balanced disclosures in an environment of mutual dialogue and respect, to replace the old, extractive modes of knowledge-making.