Four Notes Towards Propaganda and the Post-Digital Symptom

Abstract

What is it about propaganda that Alan Turing deemed sufficient in describing a statement about puzzles, problems and solutions? Despite not being an overtly political writer, Turing’s relevancy is undoubtedly important for the politics of digital culture today: particularly concerning relationships between culture, computation, mathematics, digital transmission and even the purported recognition of the “post-digital”. What on earth provoked him to describe a mathematical idea as propaganda? Might it not be understood as a retroactive sign of a post-digital affect, or, perhaps an expected symptom of embedded life within a politics of mathematical propagation? The purpose of this article is to outline what such a description might provoke.