The Age of Semiotic Infinity

Decoding alleged MS-13 tattoo symbols is an exercise in prismatic hermeneutics

“Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense.”

- Joseph Knecht, in Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

1.

We live in an Orwellian, Putinian age of semiotic infinity: a time in which meanings stretch endlessly in all directions, unmoored from both substantive truth and procedural methods of verification. Even the meta-discourse about how to tell truth from falsehood is, itself, pervaded by falsehood: news outlets with fact-checking are “fake news” while un-annotated blogs linking to other un-annotated blogs are where one is to “do your research.”

Arguably, this has always been the case, particularly in America, which has shown, in its history, an unusual proclivity to fall for bullshit, con men, and conspiracy theories. Trump is an heir to P.T. Barnum, Henry Ford, and William Jennings Bryan alike, all concantenated together into a conspiracy-spouting con man who lies about absolutely everything.

But Trump is different from his forebears in that he has great power, and an entire online media apparatus that both amplifies his lies and provides new lies for him to amplify. We can laugh or cry at QAnon or Plandemic, but the insane, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Anthony Fauci helped China develop a bioweapon is now online at covid.gov. (This theory of malevolent intent is distinct from the ‘lab leak theory,’ which is still unproven but which may be true and which does have evidence supporting it.) There’s no comparison to this. George W. Bush’s near-baseless claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction would be just one of Trump’s countless policies based on lies about immigration, trans people, climate change, antisemitism, and who pays for tariffs. Some conspiracy theories are harmless, but just one of these — the insane myths about USAID — will kill 25 million people in the next fifteen years.

2.

This past week, the president of the United States released a photo allegedly showing the tattoos on the hand of Kilmar Albrego Garcia, who has been deported to a prison/torture facility in El Salvador without due process, court proceedings, or examination of the (preposterously unbelievable) evidence that he is a members of the MS-13 gang. The photo and post are reproduced here:

Now, there are other, arguably more important, issues associated with Garcia’s deportation: due process to establish whether he is an MS-13 member or not, the administration’s defiance of judicial orders (or, as the government said in court, inadvertent errors), the definition of “terrorist organization,” the definition of “invasion,” and so on.

At the same time, while Albrego Garcia’s cause may be just, it is also, politically speaking, a bad fight to pick, as

Nate Silver

discusses at length in his newsletter this week. Progressives get very animated about threats to democracy, but as we have seen, tragically, most Americans do not. Have we not learned this lesson? Moreover, a large majority of Americans now believe immigrant crime to be a serious problem, and they want MS-13 gangsters gone. So, this issue is a double-loser for Democrats: they’re fighting for an abstract principle rather than ‘real’ economic woes, and they’re doing so on behalf of someone who may be a bad guy.

Having reviewed the evidence, I agree that Albrego Garcia is likely not an MS-13 member — though as Silver explains, the case is not nearly as clear as some progressives make it out to be. But I strongly disagree that the question is irrelevant. Politically, it’s very relevant if Trump deported an innocent man or not.

3.

So the photo, and the prismatic hermeneutical bloom it engendered, is imporant.

The first reactions to Trump’s post were that the picture is obviously doctored. The characters ‘M S 1 3’ are absent in other photos of Albrego Garcia’s hand, and even a cursory look makes it quite clear that they were added in at some point.

On social media, Republicans responded with “Duh.” Of course the letters had been added — this, they said, was simply “annotation” of the coded messages in the tattoos on Garcia’s fingers.

Who knows if this is even true or not? Trump didn’t say the letters were an annotation of an esoteric code; in the contrary, he said Garcia “got MS13 tattooed onto his knuckles.” It’s entirely possible that President Trump shared an obviously doctored photo, trying to pass it off as non-doctored. This could just be Sharpie-Gate, 2025 edition.

I’m going to go with the decoder-ring theory of the photo, because, as a scholar of Kabbalah, esotericism, messianism, and conspiracy theories, I am always down for a good over-interpretation of ambiguous symbols. And in this case, countless Reddit and X users have informed us, the marijuana leaf = M, smiley face = S, cross (looks like a 1) = 1, and skull with three eyes = 3. MS13. Isis unveiled.

There are three wee problems with this interpretation, however.

First, this isn’t how any of this works. There’s plenty of expertise about MS-13; people have been studying the organization for years. Real MS-13 members are often covered in tattoos, as seen in the photos from the CECOT facility. The tattoos are generally required to say MS-13 or “Mara Salvatrucha.” They are generally not on the fingers. So, if these are MS-13 tattoos, they are the most unusual, discreet, and coded MS-13 tattoos any expert has ever seen.

Second, semiotic infinity cuts in infinite ways. I remember, as an undergraduate, using Kabbalistic gematria to prove that Jesus was the messiah, just as Christian Kabbalists did 500 years ago. The ‘Bible Code’ which finds hidden codes and prophecies in the letters of the Bible also works on Shakespeare. And likewise here. A friend of mine interpreted the same characters thus: Grass is G, the Anxiety emoji (not a smiley) is A, the cross/God is G, and skull is S. Thus, QED, the tattoos are GAGS. The whole thing is a joke.

Most likely, as one Redditor said, these four images mean something like Smoke Weed, Be Happy, Have faith in God, and then you die. (“It's just a different version of ‘Live laugh love’ lmao” said one commenter.) It’s a Memento Mori, just like his Chicago Bulls hat is just a Chicago Bulls hat. (Albrego Garcia is reported to have numerous other tattoos, none of which have any MS-13 imagery whatsoever.)

This kind of connect-the-pins-with-string speculation even led the New York Post, hardly a bastion of liberal criticism, to label the MS-13 interpretation a “conspiracy theory.”

Finally, and most obviously, this is a classic case of confirmation bias. This is why people see Jesus in coffee stains or leopards in the clouds. We are neurologically wired for pattern recognition — pattern over-recognition, really, as we frequently over-interpret visual stimuli. This trait is exceptionally helpful if you’re hoping to avoid that lion in the savannah’s tall grass, but unhelpful if you’re looking at ambiguous images with a bunch of preconceived ideas and motivated reasoning.

The Republican calculus, after all, is the same as mine above: just keep hammering home that this guy is a dangerous MS-13 criminal, and people will overlook the procedural irregularities. And so a lot of people believe it it, because they already believe that he’s guilty, maybe because he looks it or because Trump says so or because it would be too terrible to admit that he isn’t. All motivated reasoning and confirmation bias based on ideological priors, just like my liberal friends who scolded for even looking into this question.

So, yeah, I really don’t think these are MS-13 codes.

Where did this image come from? It seems unlikely that someone in the White House cooked it up, though I guess that’s possible. Seems more likely, as another social media friend suggested to me, that this came from The Internet.

Where, exactly? Could be anywhere. Barron Trump is reportedly introducing his father to the pits of the Manosphere. Maybe Reddit, or Parler, or Truth Social, or anywhere, really. This image, “annotation” included, has all the marks of being a product of some nut on the Internet, motivated by lulz or extremism or spending too much time online. I can imagine his (almost surely his) euphoria when he parsed the code and unlocked the secret. And then posted it quickly in the group chat.

And then it found its way to the oval office, where one man’s life, and the American constitutional order, is at stake.

4.

I want to conclude be re-widening this question of interpretation and belief.

Some of the elements of this moment are new: the role of the Internet, the proximity of its darkest corners to the corridors of power, and the extent of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional defiance. But some is quite old. I was half-joking when I analogized the interpretation of tattoos to the interpretation of sacred symbols and signs, but only half. The human predilection to pattern recognition manifests first and foremost in religion, magic, and fortune telling of all sorts. We read the tea leaves, wonder at synchronicities — and if we attune ourselves to them, we see them everywhere.

And this is happening on a mass scale. In the past few decades, not only evangelical Christianity but charismatic, apocalyptic, Pentacostal, and formerly fringe prophetic sects have become predominant in public and political life. As described in Matthew Taylor’s new volume The Violent Take it By Force, these movements combine direct spiritual experience with a religious interpretation of current events — a powerful combination, to be sure. I have a peak experience, with a felt sense of noetic certainty, and with that same certainty, I understand and shape current events.

QAnon is at the extreme (sort of) of this phenomenon, but it is hardly the only quasi-religious conspiracy theory that has shaped our current moment. We are awash in them: I’ve written previously about Covid conspiracy mongering, vaccine ‘skepticism’, climate denial, and of course 2020 election denial (now met by a 2024 version among some on the Left). These belief systems are all quasi-religious in nature: they, too, depend upon the support of a community of co-believers, they are consensual hallucinations, and they are based on core beliefs that are threatened by cognitive dissonance.

And in that context, the tattoos are like any other evidence of the veracity of one’s faith: the shroud of Turin, faith healing, speaking in tongues — or, in other corners of the ideological matrix, messages received during prayer or in a psychedelic experience, synchronicities, astrology, suspicious activities by poll-workers.

In the coming weeks, I’ll have more to say about how religious enthusiasm (in particular, the zeal of the conservative-religious convert) is driving some of the anti-democratic forces within the administration. But it’s true across the political spectrum. The traumas and dislocations of contemporary life — not just the last few months, but the last few decades of technological change, globalization, demographic change, economic dislocation, world-shifting crises of 2001 and 2008 and 2020 — have caused us to look for signs everywhere. Our country is in what Robert Anton Wilson called “Chapel Perilous,” where everything seems to mean something and secrets are nested in secrets.

We are living in the age of semiotic infinity, which is also a kind of perpetual paranoia.

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Thanks for reading, and special thanks to paid subscribers for your support. I’m mourning the passing of Pope Francis this week, who was one of the strongest voices for progressive faith (on many, though not all, issues) in human history. I wrote about him many times over the years: on his statements about climate change, his partial acceptance of gay people, and his support for same-sex civil unions.

Bill McKibben

offered a wonderful summation of the Pope’s environmental teachings this week. And let’s not forget one of the pope’s final public statements: