Free knights [are] free to choose their weapon, and with equal strength to fight in open field [but] Thou art a slave; the only weapon that slaves may use is treachery.
—Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod (1828)1
Language swarms with history. Words have roots, replanted from one generation to another, anchoring us into the past. As Polish philosopher Patrick Leftwich notes, social and political life in the United States realizes itself through the vocabulary of community, which echoes the waves of immigration—and social movements—that carved the country into being. In Poland, we find instead the vocabulary of conspiracy.2
“Kręgi” (circles) and “środowiska” (milieus) are words that locate the formation of modern Polish national subjectivity under occupation and “underground” (w podziemiu). From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the country was partitioned between three empires for 123 years, and during much of the twentieth century, it fought for its independence from the Soviet Union.
Community and conspiracy each have their strengths. Each nurtures a different kind of intellectual. What sort of intellectual belongs to communities? As Edward Said writes, “The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.”3 We can imagine such an intellectual as a visible messenger, ambassador, or translator of community interests.
This can be a fraught process—as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—since the problem is not simply whether to represent, but to represent in a way that risks taking the place of the voices on behalf of which one wants to speak.4 The intellectual who represents also works within a specific media history, such as the printing press, the pamphlet, the broadcast, and other spaces where public debate unfolds before a mixed audience of insiders and outsiders, which raises the stakes of landing the message.
A conspiratorial intellectual works otherwise. She has already lost something—a country, a safe space, an open field of debate—and operates in hostile territory. In her world, those who speak openly in front of a general public, laying out their logic or beliefs, are immediately rendered harmless by their legibility. (They are probably not saying anything important, nothing that can truly harm the enemy, nothing that carries real risk.)
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss describes a different approach: “the art of writing between the lines.”5 This art, practiced by intellectuals under persecution, can be found throughout the history of philosophy. Strauss argues that persecution gives rise to a peculiar type of literature in which truth is presented exclusively beneath the surface. There are also other methods. Polish history, like many others histories, is full of intellectual infiltrators.
In 1828, Adam Mickiewicz, now considered the national poet of Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania, was in forced exile in Russia. There he completed his seminal narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod, which tells the story of a Lithuanian man captured by the Teutonic Order as a child and raised among his enemies. He returns to infiltrate the Order under a stolen name, rises to become its Grand Master, and then meticulously destroys it from within by delaying campaigns, depleting treasuries, and leading armies into catastrophic defeat through deliberate incompetence.
He never raises his sword or his tongue against the oppressors. The poem’s epigraph is taken from Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1532): Bisogna essere volpe e leone (One must be both fox and lion). Conspiracy has a personal price that many are unwilling to pay: You might appear outwardly as an enemy of the cause that you are secretly advancing.
Mickiewicz was celebrated in St. Petersburg’s literary salons, welcomed into the leading intellectual circles of Moscow, and adored by “the Bard of Empire,” Alexander Pushkin.6 This Lithuanian-Pole lived, paradoxically, as an honored guest inside the empire that had erased his country from the map. Konrad Wallenrod was really about the liberation of Mickiewicz’s people, but Mickiewicz set the story six centuries in the past, dressed in historical costume. The censors allowed it, but the right readers understood its subtext perfectly; the poem inspired the 1830 November Uprising against Russian rule.
Mickiewicz was doing precisely what Wallenrod did: operating inside the enemy’s cultural apparatus, using their institutions, patronage, and the Russian imperial press to circulate a double-coded message in plain sight. The manual for conspiracy was itself a conspiracy. This method of sabotage from within has been so fundamental to the Polish political imagination that it has its own name: wallenrodyzm.7
A century later, another poet in exile wrote another text about concealed intentions. The Captive Mind (1953), written by Czesław Miłosz in Parisian exile after his defection from Stalinist Poland, mentions a practice by the name of “Ketman,” a term that comes from Arthur de Gobineau’s nineteenth-century account of Persian Islam. The term describes a form of self-protection that can be practiced by those who live under strict religious or totalitarian rule. Those who engage in Ketman, Gobineau writes,
resort to all ruses in order to deceive one’s adversary. He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and maintain in error. One must, therefore, keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible … Ketman fills the man who practices it with pride. Thanks to it, a believer raises himself to a permanent state of superiority over the man he deceives … You walk in brightness before your enemies.8
The mystic Mulla Sadra, for example, traveled from city to city, presenting himself humbly to authorities, speaking only orthodox theology, until he had spread his “heresy” throughout the entire educated class. For Miłosz, this resonated. Ketman, he proposed, also maps onto the operating system of intellectual life under Stalinism: outward compliance, inward resistance.
“Islamic Ketman and the Ketman of the twentieth century,” Miłosz wrote, “seem to differ only in that the boldness Sadra permitted himself would instantly have brought him to a sad end in Europe.”9 Miłosz described his contemporaries as having adapted to living under cultural, political, and psychological oppression by mastering elaborate fakery. He was careful to distinguish Ketman from mere hypocrisy. It was a discipline, even a pleasure: “Internal revolt,” he wrote, “is sometimes essential to spiritual health, and can create a particular form of happiness. What can be said openly is often much less interesting than the emotional magic of defending one’s private sanctuary.”10
Where does this leave us? There is, undoubtedly, irreducible beauty in transparency, in the community-oriented intellectuals who give names to communal feelings and concepts, or speak plainly to power, especially when power is built on lies.11 Yet, every cause has its public face and its backrooms. The tradition we are tracing suggests that truth has always had a shadow practice: a set of conspiratorial techniques that remain useful even when the territory is not (yet) fully hostile, in contexts where speech is (still) nominally free, where no one is exiled (or worse) for a poem.
For example, the intellectual today exists on the internet, which has been overwhelmingly imagined through the vocabulary of community. Take the early metaphors: Barlow’s egalitarian cyberspace; Rheingold’s virtual gathering as a new agora where citizens might rebuild the public life that modernity had abolished; Lévy’s “cosmopedia” of collective intelligence.12 Though these ideas can seem naive now, we still assume that the internet is a space for self-expression, and that online profiles exist as seamless extensions of our offline selves. And yet, the idea of the internet as a public sphere has been repeatedly refuted, and its hostile character has been widely lamented as a site of conflict, anxiety, covert operations, surveillance, manipulation, exhaustion, and countless other ills.13 The internet is not imagined or experienced as a communal space or an agora. But don’t most of us—instead of sharpening our knives and putting on masks—still abide by the model of community? In places of suspicion and trickery, under watchful eyes and permanent storm clouds, the repertoire of conspiracy is warranted.
What might such practices look like? Some carry over directly from older forms of strategic deception. An intellectual has a special talent—an intuition for the interior lives of others, and the words to make use of this intuition. The internet is made of language and sensation, which intellectuals have a unique capacity to manipulate. Just as in Konrad Wallenrod and countless other tales of spy craft, ideas can be seeded in enemy communities rather than one’s own to slowly corrode them from within. While it remains important to speak up for what matters, it is equally important to swarm your enemies with bots or creep into their cliques to sow discord from within, even if this activity could never be disclosed to the public. From doublespeak to outright infiltration, much is to be gained when one changes focus from recognition (to be seen, to make seen) to attrition (to pass unnoticed, to go where others can’t).
There are also wider implications, which immediately revive for us the history of Ketman, of preserving one’s internal being as separate from its expression, and of writing between the lines. Conspiracy must exist on the internet for a reason that no previous historical moment afforded: The audience there does not consist only of human beings. Online, whatever is said about AI is said to it: Our activity is potential training data. How one performs for machines, what of one’s mind to reveal or conceal before them, what to feed them to covertly shape them in specific ways—these are strategic questions that have barely begun to be theorized. As the internet shifts from a platform for discussion to a space populated by artificial agents with their own capacities, the stakes are different. The internet is no longer (just) where we persuade other humans; it is where we shape the behaviors of vast, increasingly agentic networks that, in turn, influence the psyche of their human users. Lest we forget, this “online space” is not confined to our devices, but increasingly lives everywhere, through CCTV cameras, sensors, smart-city projects, and drones already flying above our heads. And thus, not just posting, but our daily, embodied behavior needs to be considered through the lens of machine vision, and what it learns by recording, analyzing, and watching us. The skills of infiltrators, obfuscators, traitors, mystics, spies, and all those who can walk in the dark, carrying their own agendas with them, are more prescient than the tactics of an intellectual used to open public debate.14
The internet is not a benevolent space for the exchange of meaning between humans. It is instead a battleground of hidden agendas, fought out under the ambiguous gaze of increasingly perceptive machines. The community intellectual, riding in on the horse of transparency and accountability, fights her honorable battles in the open. But honor has its limits. The ground is fertile for new practices of conspiracy.
Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod: An Historical Poem, trans. Maude Ashurst Biggs (Trübner & Co., 1882), Section IV, “The Festival.”
@kitsumute, “It just struck me that a lot of US social life revolves around communities, which must be linked to immigration waves in the nation’s origin, meanwhile in Poland we naturally say milieus/circles, which stems from nation’s identity forming in conspiracy under foreign occupation,” X, July 5, 2025 →.
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures (Vintage Books, 1993), EPUB.
Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) poses the problem of the representing intellectual: not that she should abstain from representation, but that without having traced the community’s own itinerary, she risks filling that gap with her own position. As Spivak writes, “The intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation.” The problem is prior: The subject’s voice has not been sufficiently attended to. Reprinted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia University Press, 2010).
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Free Press, 1952).
On the relationship between the two poets, see J. Krzyżanowski, “Mickiewicz and Pushkin,” Slavonic and East European Review 6, no. 18 (March 1928). Krzyżanowski notes that Pushkin’s admiration was substantial enough that he intervened personally with the Russian Intelligence Service to secure Mickiewicz’s permit to leave the empire. A memorandum in Pushkin’s hand was later found among the secret police papers (Krzyżanowski, “Mickiewicz and Pushkin,” 639).
Mickiewicz later regretted publishing Konrad Wallenrod, and before his death expressed frustration at his financial inability to buy back and burn every copy, dismissing it as a mere “political pamphlet.” (He felt like this about his other works too. Relatable.) The regret was twofold: moral (the poem’s glorification of deception sat uneasily with his deepening Catholicism) and political (the poem was incredibly influential and helped inspire the Polish 1830 November Uprising against Russian rule, which was brutally crushed, resulting in mass executions and deportations to Siberia).
Quoted in Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (Vintage Books, 1981), 57–58.
Miłosz, Captive Mind, 60.
Miłosz, Captive Mind, 80.
Miłosz knew this too. In 1950, he wrote a poem addressed to dictators and tyrants: “Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one, but another is born. / The words are written down, the deed, the date / And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.” To have one’s evil truly named, remembered, and written down is a worse fate than execution, since it is a death that even dying cannot undo. This poem is available on the Poetry Foundation website →.
John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996 →; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993); Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (1994; Basic Books, 1999).
See, for example, Jodi Dean, “Why the Net is Not a Public Sphere,” Constellations 10, no. 1 (March 2003); Geert Lovink, Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz, 2022); Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton, 2010); and Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press, 2019).
One exploration of potential covert tactics can be found in the chapter “The Dark Forest Theory of Information” in Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), esp. 31–38. To summarize: If some humans are already aware that they are generating data for artificial intelligence, their messages may begin to appear incoherent, contradictory, or deliberately opaque. They might engage in controversial, socially unacceptable, or morally ambiguous behavior, as a tactic calibrated toward machine interpretation rather than human understanding. In this sense, communication drifts away from sincerity or legibility and toward strategic distortion, as users anticipate a near-future digital environment in which the distinction between human and bot is no longer stable, and in which visibility, consistency, and coherence may become liabilities rather than virtues.
