Wednesday, April 3, 2019

the paranoia of celebrities

If totalitarian regimes greatly restrict public language, pushing people toward coded language but making codes problematic by taking away the shared platforms where they could be unambiguously decoded, then a fraying totalitarian regime where people are bolder with their codes but still lacking the platforms for decoding is doubly problematic.

(Think of a situation where any attempt at alignment, at “clearing up", could constitute an act of transgression in itself, threatening with high costs all participants.)

So while doublespeak and expected complicity were becoming commonplace in the city of my childhood, people were still rightly worried that 1) their codes may be misconstrued, 2) any innocent remark would be interpreted as a code by someone wishing them harm.

Amazing piece on Medium by Anna Gát (Three Prologues to Language), the whole thing here

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