You live in a dystopian future where paper and writing utensils are banned, and the world government has outlawed all dissent. How would you secretly communicate with your fellow revolutionaries?
This implies that all electronic communications are insecure.
I remember a meme years ago that described how the type, color, number, and arrangement of flowers in a bouquet could be used to convey complex messages. I'll have to scroll through my hoard, but I'll post it if I find it.
But, honestly, as long as there exists a code that is shared between dissenters, and ways to represent discrete elements of that code, communication itself is easy. You could encode anything in a medium that can represent a binary state, like lining up shiny pebbles on your windowsill: two close to each other for a binary 1, or a single one for binary 0. Or you could represent messages by how you hang your laundry to dry. Or embed it into how you play a musical instrument. You could hang Christmas ornaments in your window and use any obvious property to represent a message. You could use a rudimentary radio transmitter to send messages through radio noise. The options are limitless.
The difficult part is maintaining operational security. The limitations presented by human mental capabilities means that a very simple pre-shared secret must be used, which may be leaked or deduced. You have to know where to look, how to decode or decrypt the message, how to respond, and how to do all of that covertly. Prisoners have successfully used hand motions while cleaning their cell window to convey messages outside, apparently for years before authorities caught on.
Steganography, but with flowers?
I’ll post it if I find it.
Ping me. Then.
Flower language is great because it is not universal. What a flower mean in your language and country doesn't mean the same in my language and country. And neither of it is made of words !
Pen and paper, even it's outlawed people will always find a way to break the law. Of if you want something creative, through songs, poems or dance.
Reminds me of Arnis which the Spanish banned the practice so people created a dance around it.
act deaf, learn sign language, no one actually bothers to know sign language if they're not deaf or near deaf people
You can also learn hobo code. Engrave/mark signs in secret places. All you need is a sharp edged rock, a piece of chalk, or even a stick of charcoal.
Banning writing instruments is not realistic unless you’re keeping the entire population indoors in an immaculately clean prison or mental hospital type environment.
You can make pencils with charcoal, paper bark trees are common here.
Also pirate radio, hard but not impossible to conceal its location if you've got a good portable system.
I can't imagine how supernaturally thorough you would have to be to prevent written communication.
Maybe stop teaching written language, like the taliban did to women
Impossible. We will teach each other.
Women find a way.... https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nushu-chinese-script-women
This
An underground movement forms that uses interpretive dance as a means of steganographic communication. The code is kept secret for plausible deniability. A parallel would be Capoeira, a combat technique developed by Afro-Brazilian slaves and disguised as a form of dance.
There are several registered cases of coded verbal languages emerging to enable elements of specific groups to communicate between each other without risk of being understood by outside parties.
Jamaican patoá is easy to identify as an example. The grammatical structure and speech speed creates a barrier for outsiders. Add a very plastic use of words and you have a very hard to follow "code".
In the 60/70's, in Greece, a private language emerged between gay men to enable those people, often persecuted, to communicate. It steadilly disappeared as social acceptance rose.
The cockney rimed slang is thought to have arised out of the need of the house staff to be able to freely speak between themselves in front of the employers with no concern from reprimands.
Then there is the prison and army slang.
Any more?
I communicate by specially timed farting.
And now, the national anthem
Pee in snow
Imagine you didn't get caught for dissent against the government, but for indecent exposure.
Welp, death sentence either way. 💀
Return to Bronze Age, exchange clay tablets with secret messages in cuneiform. I can fashion a wedge-shaped stylus out of any old stick
Edit: better yet, if we don't fire the tablets, we can destroy them quickly and easily whenever we need to or just recycle them. This was common for a lot of cuneiform tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, and much of what we have found in archaeology is stuff that was unintentionally fired because the building it was in burned down
But can you complain to someone for low quality copper?
I can, I will, and I shall have my review echo through the age
Only when received with contempt
Of course, that's mainly what we are revolting against.
What other purpose does man have in life?
Woodcarving, I'll be passing huge logs with our detailed plans written on it.
Does this mean toilet paper is banned?
Paper towels are banned?
Food wrappers made wholly or partially of paper are banned?
Is cardboard packaging banned? Does cardboard count as paper?
Are paper sticker labels for shipping banned?
Are paper/sticker labels on all kinds of products not packaged in cardboard banned?
... I am curious as to your answer, but I struggle to concieve of a society where everything is done on electronic devices, but somehow also all kinds of paper and paper based products common to many households and vital to the supply chain and logistics that produces and distirbutes the electronic products are also banned, entirely.
Even if the answer is somehow yes, all kinds of paper based products are banned and replaced with metal or plastic or glass or something...
Clay tablets. Whittle a stick into something that can make impressions on it, bake the tablet, or really any kind of pottery.
Use a knife to etch writing into pieces of thin plastic, or wood.
Use a laser engraver to engrave glass or metal.
Make crude ink or liquids capable of staining on your own from raw ingredients, write on thin fabrics, white fabrics like cheap t shirts or certain kinds of gauze or bandaging, again with a whittled stick, a chopstick, a feather, etc.
You didn't say paint is banned. Spray paint stuff. Make stencils out of thin plastic or metal.
Glue toothpicks to thin plastic.
For any of these methods, you can make up your own language or pictogram / hobo sign style system of symbols to convey whole concepts.
And for most of these methods, the object with the writing or the writing itself on it can be destoryed by fire, immersion in water or pulverization, for more resilient material use a dremel or radial sander/grinder to obliterate the message.
And this is all just homebrew ways to do writing.
Tons of other ways of communicating.
When they ban toilet paper, we'll just communicate using the three sea shells. They can't stop us!
Briar. It was designed just for this. All traffic routes through Tor, it can also send messages using wifi, data, or bluetooth. There are no central servers to hack, seize, or takedown. Pretty much the entire internet would need to be killed off.
As for face-to-face communications - that's been done for centuries to fight the good fight. No reason that can't continue.
Signal messaging app.
It's really sad when no one is saying "just talk" 😂
I can blink in Morse Code.
I was blinking Torture during Red One
mostly speech. probably some looks and gestures till we get somewhere private along with coded speech. symbols, placement of objects.
I'll graffiti large dicks everywhere, with charcoal and chalk if I can't get paints, as means of communication
You imply that the government is evil and that I am a member of the rebels.
Dude, I’m all about survival. I‘d get a government job and just work. Maybe I’d drop some oopsie-daisy and that’s that.
All fun and games until you forget to take your Joy.
Thats what a Downer would say!!!
While I like odd scenarios, this would be completely impossible to enforce, for one specific reason.
Anything can be a writing implement, it is simply not possible to ban writing as a concept.
You would need to ban litteracy to do that, and that would quickly ruin any country stupid enough to implement a rule like that.
I can absolutely see banning the printing press, xerox machine, and even a normal printer as they all quickly amplifies the message at a low cost, but normal pen/paper has too many uses and are too easy to make to effectivly ban.
Meet and do it face to face.
Oopsie you accidentally met a member of the Inner Party
🙃
R I P
Sure, that's pretty much the risk in being a revolutionary. Idk, use masks?
I'll get Lil to come over. She's my mother's sister's girl.
Back to clay tablets I guess
If quipu has taught us anything, it's that any object can be used to cue meaning.
Write in sand or dirt. Easy to remove
This is how early Christians identified each other during the Roman Empire. They would draw the symbol of a fish in the dirt and erase it before guards and spies could see.
This doesn't speak directly to your question, but in the appendix of the Neal Stevenson book, Cryptonomicron, there are instructions on how to use a deck of cards (technically 2) as a one time pad for encrypting and decrypting messages. This could serve as the foundation for secret messaging using other media than paper.
In song.
The revolution will be harmonized!
🎵
The seas be ours
and by the powers
where we will we'll roam.
Yo, ho, all hands,
hoist the colours high.
Heave, ho, thieves and beggars,
never shall we die.
Yo, ho, haul together,
hoist the colours high.
🏴☠️
Puppets
Do the right thing consistently. I communicate by example.
You mean the example of getting executed?
Sure thing... 💀
If I am executed for disobeying a rule worth dying to disobey, then sure.
Gratuitous acts of memery. Cats, Pikachu faces, swole doge and Cheems - you name it. Arcane to the uninitiated, ever so meaningful to the inner circle.
Defiant semaphore
Use them anyways.
Goo goo ga ga
Macaroni art
Helicopter dick patterns. Richard Code, if you will.
It's the only way.
Learn to read people's minds, a la Pyre
Nah, fancy fountain pens are way too much of a status symbol to be outlawed. I'd just write with a montblanc - there's no way those filthy proles would be able to afford something like that, thus our interests as the capitalist ruling class are preserved!
Morse code thrusts during sex.
Very deep connections with your fellow revolutionaries, I see. What comaraderie! 🤗
...---......---......--- ...Say it again