The algorithm being the code leads to encryption. When Alan Turing worked on his Turing Machine, he planned a machine where the instruction-code was part of its working, where the binary code was a fixed logic in dispute, in other words the machine turning into its own algorithm, which means nothing else than dialectic.
And exactly here the theoretical work on cryptography touches - as a consequence of the actor always having been part of the technical arrangements - an issue of modern democracy, the question about the private and the public: the terms are changing, do not fit to their original meanings anymore. One might say the Internet is something private. One might state the contrary. Both sentences are wrong. It is neither of them. Maybe we do not all feel it yet, but humans are going through a stage of blurred words, where classic definitions get lost, just like the codes/algorithms of behavior. The meta-narratives break down, not leaving anything but puzzle pieces. We can never be private on the Internet. Nor could we be in public if we were "out there" in virtual reality.
Cryptography, the study pretending to work for privacy, cannot provide us with absolute privacy either, as the danger of losing it through a decryption attack hinders its prospering. At the latest with the quantum computers coming into existence the patterns of the encoded picture will not be visible anymore. At the same time the social relations, its exact and excluding meanings must blur.
Democracy needs something to rely on, something to refer to, just like the private and the public.
Still, our need for privacy on the one hand and curiosity on the other hand create the longing for cryptography of information as well as its decoding.
"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."
(Cypherpunk's Manifesto)
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Project Censored was launched at Sonoma State University (U.S.) in 1976 as an annual review of the systematic withholding of public access to important news facts by the mainstream media. The team composed of student media researcher and media analysts annually selects and publishes what they believe are the 25 most important under-covered news stories. "The essential issue raised by the project is the failure of the mass media to provide the people with all the information they need to make informed decisions concerning their own lives and in the voting booth". (Project Censored)
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Robot relates to any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. The term is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on mechanical workers called robots that are capable of doing any kind of mental or physical work. Modern robot devices descend through two distinct lines of development--the early