The Online Islamicate must increasingly build and plan for an increasingly fractured and hostile landscape of splinternets. Software should increasingly focus less on "democratization" but about security and integrity - the ability to function without State interference.
It means adopting adopting open protocols and money that can survive in adversarial environments. A great challenge lies in creating the cultural conditions for people to embrace Lunarpunk attitudes rather than stick to comfortable dekusions about creating with Solarpunk impulse.
American Surveillance Valley billionaires, the Chinese CCP, Old Islamicate autocracies - the list of enemies is large for the fair minded Ishmaelite - one can no longer depend on the goodwill and charity of others.
The Restrict Act will make the Brazilians and Brits look like amateurs - pale imitations of the Original American Panopticon. A consequence of American triumph during the Cold War was the subtle distillation of surveillance into the fabric of liberal constitutional norms away from culture war polemics so that it became the ground on which everyone stands on.
Genius lay in outsourcing and obfuscating nodes of surveillance which the Soviets struggled with - outsourced to private companies, business, enterprise. Musk, Zuckerberg and Gates are the defacto intelligence commissars of liberalism with fans, stockholders, NGOs etc
Third world surveillance states implode because they are inherently fragile - everything is locked up by some configuration of a military junta. The Chinese learnt from the Americans and accelerated to its logical conclusion - techno-national splinternets that sustain commerce
Surveillance is better when done proactively like by Silicon Valley or the Chinese State - private sector partners that offer positive from ecommerce, to media to app based ecosystems and baking the Panotpicon in. If you want to use these "free" products you have to tick T&Cs
Unless your State can develop an Instagram or Google Pay clone, you cannot play the Surveillance Games at the level of the Americans and Chinese - you otherwise end up like Brazil, Egypt or Iran - clunky, heavy ans reactive
Been playing around with 0xchat -
@0xchat - good way to bake in encryption on top of the existing Nostr client and relays. Good to protect metadata and to add privacy layers to Nostr. Secret chat allows for encrypted DMs which adds perfect forward secrecy. Also comes with an e-cash wallet.
The only outcome from the peasant riots in the UK is a massive expansion of Dark Blairism with the involvement of the 77th Brigade; we will see a tremendous media campaign for pushing forward an extreme version of the Online Safety Act bill with warrantless surveillance as the norm cheered on by millions. The legions of chavs, druggies and broken dysfunctional souls have only laid the groundwork for a more aggressive Panopticon.
Very cool and interesting project - privacy conscious messaging app using nostr, signal protocol and ecash in a novel configuration
Keychat
Keychat - Super App for Bitcoiners
Sovereign IDs, Bitcoin Wallet, Secure Chat, Mini Apps — all in Keychat.
Very nice using Minibits which has a lightning address and ecash tokens built in one,
Minibits.cash
Minibits.cash
Minibits is an e-cash wallet with a focus on performance and usability. Cash is issued by mints and backed by Bitcoin via the Cashu protocol and Li...
easy to use as a receiving lightning address with no kyc or details needed.
I don't think custodianship at this scale is an issue for communities that still have reasonable institutional structures in place that have retain trust and reputational prestige so long as they keep a healthy distance from the State.
Looking at ecash as a privacy layer for p2p payments on top of BTC albeit with a custodial element with mints
Denial alone cannot be the basis of the post-Adamic moment which approaches us. Standalone platforms harnessing LLM capabilities will not be as destabilising as the fusion of biology and dataism.
I mention dataism specifically because most bio-computer initiatives, currently being evolved or developed by companies that have an inherent commercial bias on leveraging behavioral data that can be analyzed and incorporated into business models and algorithms. Dataism is premised on the assumption that biological behavioral patterns through cyberspace are a commodity that can be bought or sold and synthesized into "business models" for optimization and "priming".
However beyond biological data there is the more fundamental question of what happens when man is synthesized with machine and the Adamic form is absorbed by the augmented cyborg. Fiqh can certainly respond and react to developments as they unfold. But it cannot be relied upon to evolve a proactive spirit, an orientation ahead of time. At least fiqh in its current iteration and configurations of political economy and bureaucratic stasis vis-a-vis its orientation and troubled relationships with the nightmare modern states of the post-colonial Islamicate.
Now is the need for evolving post-Adamic Tasawwuf, where cyborg can be tamed to serve God - a sufic taming of the man-machine synthesis that denies biological dataism, panoptic supremacy.
There is an arresting paragraph in Hallaq's Impossible State where he talks about how the paradigm of the modern state finds no overlap or common cause with that of Islamic governance:
"Nor did Islamic governance know anything like the scale of surveillance generated by the modern state’s police and prison systems. These, so normalized and a matter of fact today, would have been horrifying to Muslims as specters of domination and cruelty. Nor, still, did Islamic rule so much as tamper with the sphere of education, which remained not only private but also nonformal and highly accessible, accommodating the entire spectrum of social strata"
There are a few times in the Impossible State where Hallaq touches upon the coercive and pervasive net of surveillance the modern state casts over everything it sees in an effort to shape the moral nature of its citizens. Nearly every time he does so he references Foucault's work which is to be expected given his intervention in this particular facet of political philosophy.
Hallaq though does not reference the Cypherpunks as a philosophical resource even though the two share striking similarities. One of the biggest drawbacks with Hallaq's work is there is not enough translation of how his astute theoretical analysis translates into the modern machinery of the State in terms of how it actually works. This does not detract from the merit of his work at all, but there is an opportunity that goes begging.
The modern State is a parasite that logs everything you do, leaving no sphere for an "individual" to truly emerge, it is a consumptive pathology that leaves no space for autonomy even though it dresses itself up in the rhetoric of High Enlightenment aesthetics. This inescapable fact that is now proven beyond reproach is the ultimate vindication of the Hallaqian thesis.
"Exile occurs when society at large becomes estranged from right living and there is an absence of an ethical spirit and voice, when an era lacks a great moral figure or soul"
An Islamicate articulation of the surreal and banal horror of machinification cannot begin in the absence of eschatological belief in the heart of the believer. In Sunni cosmology, as time yawns ahead of us and leaves behind the Prophetic era we are in continuous state of moral decay as we approach the Last Day. Sunni eschatology to those who regularly refresh their hearts with the reminders and literature around the topic will be familiar with the visceral and detailed descriptions of complete moral breakdown and decay and the increasing Prophetic advice that in such times we must withdraw, refrain and retire physically away from such evil whilst engaged in a war for spiritual purification by clinging on to prayer with the Qur'an as a shield. With such an eschatological superstructure one should not be terribly shocked or surprised by the accelerationist contentions (they are varied and diverse) about the march of technocapital and the havoc it would wreck. Nor should the Sunni be terribly surprised that the ruling political elites would exert tremendous oppression to expand and cling on to power.
Props to Elon - he's playing a different game. Rile up everyone into a chimp contest of r-tards claiming who is more based/racist etc all the while building the Everything App - monetizing the simulated conflict and keeping it within the logic of the new cybernetic system.
The Eye of Sauron is upon us but wait everyone is holding mock inquisitorial trials of who is more racist and charging peasants $5 a month via their Patreon for the viewing pleasure.
For every peasant the most important question on the Right or Left right now is who is more racist and they charge people and game the algorithm on this basis.
Alex Jones really matters when you'll happily transfer your biometrics, financial statements, bank account and passport ID to Twitter within the next five years.
Yuk Hui who is the author of Cosmotechnics, proposes an idea of technology that tries to bridge the gap between technical expertise and having a cosmological sense of one's place in the world. In effect, it tries to sacralize one's relationship with machinery and technology.
However, it remains to be seen whether cosmotechnics can evolve beyond just a niche interest of those who are privacy conscious and already aware of the metaphysical implications of the hyperdigital and data harvesting decay of American Empire.
Rather, the task for cosmotechnics is whether it can fully sustain itself as a alternative civilization on paradigm to the one that we currently have, which is premised on big tech surveillance, corporate espionage, and state-sponsored spyware.
If cosmotechnics indeed offers an alternative paradigm to the Leviathan-like organism which is big tech, then it has to be grounded in local sacred cosmologies and local ideas about vicegerency and custodianship, which figures prominently in the Islamicate ethical traditions.
The inherent fragility with the whole tradition of Islamicate critique of modernity from Guenon onwards, finding its fullest expression in the normative Sunnism of al-Attas is that if were to fully realise their projects on their own terms we would be doomed to extinction. This is not to say they are wrong, mistaken - far from it. They are inherently fragile projects because if you take their projects seriously on their own terms with sympathetic good-faith engagement and try to scale it up, I don't see how you escape becoming Luddite fodder.
This fragility - where success, victory of Islamicate critiques end up cannibalizing the entire project is a recurrent theme and motif not just in these philosophically sophisticated critiques but also the Ikhwanist projects too
"Martin Heidegger, in his 1966 interview (published ten years later) with Der Spiegel, was asked what came after the end of philosophy; Heidegger answered: cybernetics. In other words, he announced that cybernetics marked the end of Western philosophy"
