Another wild week. At least it wasn't as wild as last week.

But what does that even mean, really? It's not like my life personally has had any major upheaval, it's just the news cycle is getting me all worked up. I read something from a screen and it makes me upsetty spaghetti. It's really time to step back a bit and get some perspective. There's only so much QAnon shit I can take in a week.

But that's not going to stop me from talking about it. :D I've been watching videos and listening to podcasts about the movement and the wild influence it has. I've known that the movement has caused a lot of strife in families and friendships. There's a subreddit called /r/QAnonCasualties that is pretty much a support group for people who have been cut off from family or friends after being deemed "the enemy" by their QAnon-supporting relatives. I've even been cut off by a friend for "defending pedophiles" after not believing that Hilary Clinton drinks the blood of children as part of a Satanic cabal. Now people in this movement are storming the capital and who knows what they have planned.

Now that QAnon accounts are being banned en masse from all major online platforms, people are using chain-mail SMS messages to organize. They've gotten too big now and we just have to start weathering "The Storm".

How people can believe this still amazes me. For a while I thought it must have been a joke. Their motto, "Where we go 1 we go all", is literally the mentality of sheep. The odd wording of the motto also made me think that maybe the whole movement was stoked on by some assholes from Russia's GRU cyberwarfare unit. I think it's pretty much a mix of all kinds of things really, a perfect storm made possible by people being desperate and polarized by TV news, bad actors getting people riled up for a laugh or some other more nefarious purpose, but perhaps most importantly, people are looking for some kind of meaning in all of this noise we hear in the modern world.

For Christmas I got the classic cryptography book "Cryptanalysis" by Helen Fouche Gaines. I've been interested in Cryptanalysis for a while now and I see this book being recommended a lot, at the very least I saw David Oranchak and the Cryptool2 YouTube channel have mentioned it. Anyway the book is very fascinating, although it is more of a relic of the past than something that you could apply in modern cryptography. The SSL encryption that this server used to encrypt this website before sending it to you has more to do with computer science than homophonic substitution ciphers.

The book starts by giving the reader a general idea of what cryptography is and how to determine if something might have an encrypted message inside it. Gaines gives many examples of messages being hidden in newspaper personals or inside other messages. At some point she gives examples of wild ways to use Bacon's Bi-literal alphabet to hide messages anywhere.

"Our message of 29 A's and 16 B's could be expressed with a deck of playing cards if aces and face-cards are considered to represent B's. It could assume the form of a fence with 45 palings, in which the B-palings are crooked, damaged or missing. Ohaver once made use of a cartridge belt in which the A-loops contained cartridges and the B-loops were empty. There is an excellent opportunity here, too, for the compiling of "fake" cryptograms, with A-letters and B-letters distinguished as vowels and consonants, or by the part of the normal alphabet from which they have been taken."

I think this passage is one of the most haunting I've ever read. Take a second to let this sink in: there can be messages all around you that you can see but are unable to comprehend. This passage encapsulates the mindset of someone who reads the newspaper and is able to get "secret messages" out of it. It's a mindset that infuses meaning into your entire environment, but at the same time, completely incapacitates you. It leaves you searching for messages that might really not be there. Yet if you decide that some message must be inside the thing you are studying, you are unlikely to give up. If you can't find the message, your mind will trick you into seeing one.

This is something I saw a lot when researching the Zodiac's 340 cipher. I saw a website where a guy was so desperate for a solution that he developed some kind of "encrypted crossword search" where he was getting the messages he wanted. (To get Arthur Lee Allen's name out of it.) Even now with a certified and clear message being published, the guy can't let go of his "solution" and is doubling down. It goes to show that if you infuse meaning personally into something, it becomes almost impossible to let go of.

I think this is the mindset that is the driving force behind QAnon. I remember watching a video where David Gilbert from Vice was saying how since the movement has the members themselves make the connections and has them find the "secret messages", it makes their convictions even stronger.

Figuring something out is an amazing feeling. For the past few years I've been trying to find ways to foster that desire to discover things in various ways like joining the ACA, reading a lot more technical stuff, solving Rubik's cubes and whatever else I find. The desire to figure stuff out and the joy in doing so is a very common human need. But that desire can be lead very deeply astray to the point that a movement like QAnon can hijack it and use it to politically radicalize you. That is chilling.

There is a deeper philosophical point to be made here, like is everything we think we know about the world just the weakness of the human mind trying to prop itself up by projecting meaning onto anything around it, trying to find those "secret messages" that aren't really there in a meaningless and absurd world. I've thought about it enough already in my 20's, so I'm not going to even entertain the notion now. Suffice to say, the lesson today is going to be:

Be careful with the secret messages you are able to extract from your surroundings.