Compression & Encryption: Information processing and culture
Mullally, Liam. 2025. Compression & Encryption: Information processing and culture. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (Compression & Encryption: Information processing and culture)
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Abstract or Description
This thesis is an investigation of two information processes: encryption and compression. Epistemically, these are products of 20th c. mathematics, but today constitute core infrastructures integral to digital culture. Compression (coding for efficient storage and transfer) enables a multimedia internet, while encryption (coding to control where/by whom information can be decoded) renders information as a value-form for a capitalist economy.
Technologies are not neutral, but ambiguous and contested: complex, material assemblages rife with contradictions, complications and opportunities. Such complexity demands excursions into codecs: technical devices which enact obscure information processes. Drawing on the methods of media archaeology, historical materialism, science and technology studies, and software studies, I trace the emergence and political-cultural contestation of contemporary techniques of compression and encryption.
As information processes, compression and encryption concern production: of signals, of art, of culture and of subjectivities. Compression, I argue, made possible a historic abundance of ‘free’ information, at once de facto common, an overstimulating shock to human subjectivity and an over-circulation crisis for capital (outpaced by its own information-commodities). Innovations in perceptual coding have made possible remarkable compressions of sounds, images and video, while also drawing humans into the channel and challenging the ontological basis of information theory. Compression codecs raise questions about our sensory economy: what kind of culture is anticipated in code? What is rendered perceptible? Where and to whom?
Within and against this circulation, encryption – ostensibly a tool of secrecy – has been reinvented as one of property. Cryptographically secured files make possible new accumulative mechanisms, and contribute to digital culture’s occult character: opaque, inaccessible, mediated by proprietary interfaces and rights management systems. Against the cryptographic securing of information, I argue the need for a politics and methodology of decryption, alongside a renewed commitment to the socialisation of information.
Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
Identification Number (DOI): |
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Keywords: |
software studies, digital culture, compression, encryption, JPEG, information theory, Claude Shannon, encoding, decoding |
Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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Date: |
30 June 2025 |
Item ID: |
39165 |
Date Deposited: |
11 Jul 2025 13:01 |
Last Modified: |
11 Jul 2025 13:10 |
URI: |
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