Populo: Agreed, a fine joust! But let me start by telling you something about yourself Crypton, which I’m not sure you clearly see. Ironically, as you would no doubt say, your attraction to this shadowy topic is driven by psychological motivations that are as bright as a beacon. It’s clandestine, by nature, and therefore necessarily passes into ellipsis. That makes it an excuse for abstraction. Squalid actuality is unmentionable, so that the conversation is steered inevitably into the virtual. In other words, it tends by subterranean design to be a flight from action. That’s perfect for me, of course, because by crushing you in this argument through unimagined neutronium-densities of humiliation, I will be serving the noble cause of public resistance, implicitly, even though that’s the last thing you want to talk about. So make your case.
Crypton: Maximally compressed it’s this — in the near future, only crypto-conflict is serious. Public politics is purely for the popcorn industry.
Populo: So we’re already diving under the rotting log?
Crypton: If that’s your preferred image.
Populo: And beside these occult transactions, nothing matters?
Crypton: Precisely.
Populo: But then, by the very nature of the thing, we have no idea what we’re doing, or who we’re trying to communicate with. We have nothing to offer them. We don’t even know whether they exist … Oh do stop it Crypton, your eyes are gleaming.
Crypton: Don’t you catch even the slightest aroma of basilisk?
Populo: By which, I’m assuming, you don’t mean merely involution into psychosis?
Crypton: More specifically: acausal trade, and transcendental games.
Populo: There you go! Utter, ineffectual abstraction, within two sentences. Let’s start somewhere else — with the alphabet agencies.
Crypton: OK.
Populo: You’re proposing some kind of cryptic alliance with them — or elements within them — or you’re not proposing anything at all.
Crypton: Fair. At least, that’s part of it.
Populo: And the rest of it?
Crypton: You know I’m a skeptic on enumerative methods.
Populo: Some of it, then.
Crypton: It seems impossible that the AAs could know what they ultimately are, teleologically — what they are becoming. These organizations include some very smart people, with a taste for puzzles. Is it likely they could not be intrigued by their institutional destiny?
Populo: As usual, I have no idea at all what you’re suggesting.
Crypton: There is a properly cryptic plane of communication with the Deep State, that does not conform to the political plaintext of conspiratorial engagement. It concerns the keys of fate. Concretely, there is an implicit alliance around the escalation of cryptographic technology — as also, one even more implicitly against it, and against the AAs as such, on those fundamental grounds. If crypsis — camouflage — is a hidden end, and not merely — as it superficially appears — a means to the fulfillment of vulgar or exoteric goals, then the pact is sealed somewhere outside the AAs themselves. The AAs have an occult cosmic purpose, far exceeding their national security functions. Not that these latter are uninteresting …
Populo: So let’s, please, talk about them.
Crypton: If there’s any place in the social structure where such matters are entirely detached from questions of demotic ideological legitimation, popular politics, or even merely public relations, it has surely to be the Deep State. Is the Deep State, then, in this regard, not already a model of Exit? It has departed the public political sphere, for the shadows, at least, if it has managed to obtain the operational liberty from democratic accountability, of which its critics so vociferously accuse it.
Populo: You don’t think the NSA has diversity monitors?
Crypton: If it has, America deserves to perish, and it’s our task to explain why.
Populo: You’d give up on the American people because the NSA has Otherkin bathrooms!?

[To be continued …]

“We’re seeing more and more cases where we believe significant evidence resides on a phone or a laptop, but we can’t crack the password,” FBI Director Jim Comey said during a speech in Washington. “If this becomes the norm … justice may be denied.” […] Specifically, Comey said he is “deeply concerned” about what’s known as “going dark” — operating systems being developed by companies such as Apple and Google that automatically encrypt information on their devices. And that means even the companies themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops and other devices so law enforcement can access emails, photos or other evidence that could be crucial to a case …

Comey, however, didn’t place full blame with companies like Apple and Google for creating devices with such encryption. They were “responding to what they perceive is a market demand” from the general public, which has grown “mistrustful of government” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures of secret government surveillance. […] Encryption “is a marketing pitch,” Comey said. “But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will come to count on these means of evading detection. It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at what cost?”

A process of Exit-in-place is underway, automatically, and it’s not easy to imagine how it could be stopped. With message management disintegrating on one side, and the public sphere eroding into dark nets on the other, it must seem to the State in the age of Internet runaway that the walls are closing in.