Thanks to Pim for correcting the translation :)
It’s been years now since we’ve been trying to install the imperative need for a cryptography that works point to point, supports groups, it’s ubicuous, automatic, easy… Yet app after app we’ve tried, this cryptography comes up as an empty promise.
Before we could only do it in pairs, from the same device. Or you had to physically meet and show some identification documents, leaving our legal names and trust networks in the Internet forever (our alternative was to become cryptopromiscuous). Now we can encrypt groups of people, as long as we aren’t many, but our online identities are tied to phone numbers, in turn tied to our statewide identities. Or maybe we can encrypt a group, but only if and when everyone’s paying attention, have storage space available in their devices, and always-on network connectivity…
It’s either that or total surveillance, we’re told by all those projects that colonize our guilt, and so that’s how we’re approaching our collectives.
If we dig too much, we’re told that crypto is difficult, not for us.
What we’re not discussing however is that the whole digital telecommunications infrastructure isn’t trustable and it’s permanently surveilled precisely because it isn’t ours nor it has been built to be our ally. In this cyberspace, the enemy is the other.
(Where are the collective identities, the cyborg sex-affectivity…)
Furthermore, that’s the issue in following these imposed crypto models, when we could build affinity cyberspaces for ourselves, where mistrust isn’t possible because we have mutual care.
In technopolitical terms, this would imply to build cyberspaces for ourselves and our friends, in a way that prevents total storage to become ephemeral, or at least just and necessary, and encrypting, yes, but only the transport without pretending to encrypt each individual message.