Ask Lemmy

While I like odd scenarios, this would be completely impossible to enforce, for one specific reason.

Anything can be a writing implement, it is simply not possible to ban writing as a concept.

You would need to ban litteracy to do that, and that would quickly ruin any country stupid enough to implement a rule like that.

I can absolutely see banning the printing press, xerox machine, and even a normal printer as they all quickly amplifies the message at a low cost, but normal pen/paper has too many uses and are too easy to make to effectivly ban.

This doesn't speak directly to your question, but in the appendix of the Neal Stevenson book, Cryptonomicron, there are instructions on how to use a deck of cards (technically 2) as a one time pad for encrypting and decrypting messages. This could serve as the foundation for secret messaging using other media than paper.

There are several registered cases of coded verbal languages emerging to enable elements of specific groups to communicate between each other without risk of being understood by outside parties.

Jamaican patoá is easy to identify as an example. The grammatical structure and speech speed creates a barrier for outsiders. Add a very plastic use of words and you have a very hard to follow "code".

In the 60/70's, in Greece, a private language emerged between gay men to enable those people, often persecuted, to communicate. It steadilly disappeared as social acceptance rose.

The cockney rimed slang is thought to have arised out of the need of the house staff to be able to freely speak between themselves in front of the employers with no concern from reprimands.

Then there is the prison and army slang.

Any more?

Briar. It was designed just for this. All traffic routes through Tor, it can also send messages using wifi, data, or bluetooth. There are no central servers to hack, seize, or takedown. Pretty much the entire internet would need to be killed off.

As for face-to-face communications - that's been done for centuries to fight the good fight. No reason that can't continue.

Gratuitous acts of memery. Cats, Pikachu faces, swole doge and Cheems - you name it. Arcane to the uninitiated, ever so meaningful to the inner circle.

act deaf, learn sign language, no one actually bothers to know sign language if they're not deaf or near deaf people

It's really sad when no one is saying "just talk" 😂

Use them anyways.

I can't imagine how supernaturally thorough you would have to be to prevent written communication.

Morse code thrusts during sex.

Puppets

I remember a meme years ago that described how the type, color, number, and arrangement of flowers in a bouquet could be used to convey complex messages. I'll have to scroll through my hoard, but I'll post it if I find it.

But, honestly, as long as there exists a code that is shared between dissenters, and ways to represent discrete elements of that code, communication itself is easy. You could encode anything in a medium that can represent a binary state, like lining up shiny pebbles on your windowsill: two close to each other for a binary 1, or a single one for binary 0. Or you could represent messages by how you hang your laundry to dry. Or embed it into how you play a musical instrument. You could hang Christmas ornaments in your window and use any obvious property to represent a message. You could use a rudimentary radio transmitter to send messages through radio noise. The options are limitless.

The difficult part is maintaining operational security. The limitations presented by human mental capabilities means that a very simple pre-shared secret must be used, which may be leaked or deduced. You have to know where to look, how to decode or decrypt the message, how to respond, and how to do all of that covertly. Prisoners have successfully used hand motions while cleaning their cell window to convey messages outside, apparently for years before authorities caught on.

Pen and paper, even it's outlawed people will always find a way to break the law. Of if you want something creative, through songs, poems or dance.

Reminds me of Arnis which the Spanish banned the practice so people created a dance around it.

Defiant semaphore

I communicate by specially timed farting.

You can make pencils with charcoal, paper bark trees are common here.

Also pirate radio, hard but not impossible to conceal its location if you've got a good portable system.

I can blink in Morse Code.

mostly speech. probably some looks and gestures till we get somewhere private along with coded speech. symbols, placement of objects.

An underground movement forms that uses interpretive dance as a means of steganographic communication. The code is kept secret for plausible deniability. A parallel would be Capoeira, a combat technique developed by Afro-Brazilian slaves and disguised as a form of dance.

Return to Bronze Age, exchange clay tablets with secret messages in cuneiform. I can fashion a wedge-shaped stylus out of any old stick

Edit: better yet, if we don't fire the tablets, we can destroy them quickly and easily whenever we need to or just recycle them. This was common for a lot of cuneiform tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, and much of what we have found in archaeology is stuff that was unintentionally fired because the building it was in burned down

Woodcarving, I'll be passing huge logs with our detailed plans written on it.

I'll get Lil to come over. She's my mother's sister's girl.

Pee in snow

Does this mean toilet paper is banned?

Paper towels are banned?

Food wrappers made wholly or partially of paper are banned?

Is cardboard packaging banned? Does cardboard count as paper?

Are paper sticker labels for shipping banned?

Are paper/sticker labels on all kinds of products not packaged in cardboard banned?

... I am curious as to your answer, but I struggle to concieve of a society where everything is done on electronic devices, but somehow also all kinds of paper and paper based products common to many households and vital to the supply chain and logistics that produces and distirbutes the electronic products are also banned, entirely.

Even if the answer is somehow yes, all kinds of paper based products are banned and replaced with metal or plastic or glass or something...

Clay tablets. Whittle a stick into something that can make impressions on it, bake the tablet, or really any kind of pottery.

Use a knife to etch writing into pieces of thin plastic, or wood.

Use a laser engraver to engrave glass or metal.

Make crude ink or liquids capable of staining on your own from raw ingredients, write on thin fabrics, white fabrics like cheap t shirts or certain kinds of gauze or bandaging, again with a whittled stick, a chopstick, a feather, etc.

You didn't say paint is banned. Spray paint stuff. Make stencils out of thin plastic or metal.

Glue toothpicks to thin plastic.

For any of these methods, you can make up your own language or pictogram / hobo sign style system of symbols to convey whole concepts.

And for most of these methods, the object with the writing or the writing itself on it can be destoryed by fire, immersion in water or pulverization, for more resilient material use a dremel or radial sander/grinder to obliterate the message.

And this is all just homebrew ways to do writing.

Tons of other ways of communicating.

Goo goo ga ga

You live in a dystopian present. What do you say now?