The authors of this article are engaged in anthropological research on the links between the growing interest in privacy and data security as a technical field and how notions of trust, security and accountability are practised in and beyond technical fields of cryptography, specifically a field called multi‐party computation (MPC). They pursue the relationship between trust in different forms of cryptography – academic and activist – and notions of trust as they are articulated in relation to data security and the protection of citizens’ data. There is a tension between the concerns raised in public debates about data security and the promises of emerging cryptographic protocols. In political speeches and public debates, citizens’ trust that governments and tech companies will protect their data is framed as important and essential. In the environments of emerging cryptographic technologies, such as blockchains, bitcoin and MPC, a promise to provide ‘trustless trust’ and abandon the need for trusted intermediaries, authorities and institutions is articulated.
Just as containerized goods appear to flow seamlessly across the planet’s oceans, internationalized and standardized certificates present seafaring labor as uniform and seamless. But underneath these certificates are the intimate and unequal entanglements of local masculinity norms, age, and kinship ties that sustain the maritime labor supply chain. In this article, we follow how three young, male seafarers from eastern India find ways to contain piracy risks at work and poverty risks at home, and their sense of obligation as men, sons, husbands, and fathers. By delving into the unequal conditions for industrial male workers from the Global South, this article demonstrates how containerized maritime labor commodities are not uniform but are dependent upon economic inequality and intimate kinship ties to be productive.
Based on ongoing interdisciplinary research about advances in a cryptographic technique called Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC), this article explores how research commonalities are carved out among mathematicians, engineers and anthropologists. STS scholars and anthropologists are increasingly engaged in research about and with data scientists and engineers, particularly as this relates to discrimination, surveillance and rights. Cryptography - a sub-genre of mathematics and often-invisible infrastructure enabling secure digital communication has received less attention. The article argues that the ubiquity of digital computing in our lives necessitates the creation of socio-mathematical vocabularies. Such vocabularies have the potential to lead to new situated data security practices based on local perceptions of rights and protection. STS scholars and anthropologists are uniquely situated to do this work. The article follows three anthropologists in their endeavors to find “cryptic commonalities” by “tacking back and forth” (Cf. Helmreich 2009) between mathematicians’, engineers’ and their own scientific vocabularies. Despite these attempts, however, the parties often “talk past each other”. Instead of shying away from the awkwardness that such moments produce, the authors embrace “epistemic disconcertment” (Cf. Verran 2013a), carving out a space in which they can communicate productively with each other. This space does not turn mathematicians into anthropologists or STS scholars into engineers, but it does make space for a shared scientific “pidgin” that enables collaboration (Cf. Galison 2010). With this pidgin, the authors walk the reader through the logics of MPC, and specifically, a cryptographic technique called “Shamir Secret Sharing” (Shamir 1979). In doing so, we join emerging voices in the crypto-community in an effort to develop cryptographic techniques for social good. This requires not just an understanding of the math, but also the social worlds impacted by these techniques.
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