Suprahuman

<p class="p1">This brings me back to the possibilities of disappearance, of disappearing in language. Outside of a sensible distribution of the signal, there is a realm of ambiguity incapable of being processed. “In English, a sentence ending in n prepositional phrases has over 2n syntactic interpretations.”<span class="s1"> </span>A sentence such as “I saw the man on the hill with the telescope,” then, has 5 parses; “I saw the man on the hill in Chicago with the telescope,” 14.<span class="s1"> </span>Further, prepositional ambiguities are but one available mode of confusion within natural language. This is a proposal for an unreadable syntax, an assertion of a new politics, a resistance to surveillance that manifests as a resistance to understanding. It has long been the practice of human subcultures to develop shibboleths that distinguish them from the mainstream, seeming illegibilities that in fact mark one as the member of a marginalized group—the identifier of randomness itself. I propose that it is time to reclaim the territory of the nonsensical through a subterranean language legible only to humans, an anthropocentric subculture in the machine age. Against our frenetic attempts to be understood by our computers, we should seek to be misunderstood, to mask the trace of our presence in a cheap signal that is costly to untangle. In so doing, we may just reconfigure the machines themselves, as they scroll over our very human illegibility. Who knows what will happen when the computer sees the woman on the internet in camouflage.</p>