More longer friend see that sky?

The advent of quantum computing really threw the wrench into cryptography. By making computational speed an arbitrary function of coding, of basically figuring out how fast these things could be made to go, any given implemented protocol would soon find itself outpaced by a more recently implemented hack. Secrecy became a function of frequent updates, which ultimately came down to how fast you could make your coders work. These same coders had, through some miracle of actually existing communications technology, unionized and gotten something asymptotically approaching decent working conditions. The genie would never again go into that bottleneck, and thus other avenues than mere mathematics had to be explored

The key realization came when a digital humanities scholar made an off-hand remark that fiction could contain a nearly arbitrary amount of information, if written intertextually enough. Fan fiction, in particular, excelled in constructing densely connected webs of references, countersigns and internal winks that would utterly nonplus those uninitiated, but be completely apparent to those in the know. The key to keeping something a secret, then, would be to hide it in plain sight in such a way that it was functionally illegible to society at large, and even more so by incorporating false narrative leads familiar to those wanting to figure out what was what. At last, the cryptographic arms race could finally continue apace