Which raises the question if my HDD has become a prayer-wheel per se or does it only become one if I believe in prayer-wheels? In Humphrey & Laidlaw's words: Is ritual commitment required? Anyway, I guess that's another example of cultural adoption of ICT ... ?
Believe it or not, I am serious with these questions. Obviously the presence of a human being is not necessary for a prayer-wheel to "function", as there are waterpower-driven ones in Tibet and Ladakh. That means, ritual commitment is given as long as there are humans who believe in the concept of prayer-wheels. But is a harddisk part of this concept? And is the form of digital encryption 'allowed'?
I'm seriously inclined to write to a buddhist scholar to get these questions answered.

HUMPHREY, CAROLINE AND JAMES LAIDLAW.1994. The Archetypical Actions of Ritual: a theory of ritual illustrated by the Jain rite of worship, Oxford: Clarendon Press. [ISBN: 0-19-827788-1 and 0-19-827947-7]
... see chapter 4, The Ritual Commitment, pp. 88-110.

If I'm not mistaken, prayer wheels generally (or even exclusively) rotate clockwise. Do harddisks do that, too? Would be interesting to know.

As for the ritual question: as a layperson I'd say that rituals are a part of social reality and as such essentially depend on human communities for their existence, just like baseball games. But that doesn't mean that every occurrence of a ritual depends on the actual presence of a human being, no?