Futurism is the promise those in the present make that all that was, is and will be beautiful and sacred will endure through Time to reach to those yet to be born

The signal to noise ratio on SAIF Nostr is rather excellent - Bluesky in comparison just has a very pale imitation of Dawah Inc with Islamoleftism

Technological acceleration will be fought between two different versions - cynical Yarvin technofeudalism promoting data serfdom by American Empire and FOSS self-hosting where everything is so cheap, all have a chance to be sovereign Technology should end up cannablising capital - the problem with Surveillance Valley is that it ends up being the other way around - China knows this so it will use open source to bleed it out by a thousand cuts in the AI Cold War FOSS is a great way to disrupt and shrink proprietary rent-seeking - if everyone can run highly robust models locally for basic things like search, text analysis that kills 90% of GAE AI startups The need for competent strong anchor states is still pressing, but it's no longer a zero sum game, all or nothing - both can happen. A strong New Islamicate state with a grassroots self-sovereign ethic - both must happen Yarvin Technofeudalism will continue to spread bland and flat monocultural supremacy as a new patch on legacy post Cold War power. Chinese anchored AI localism can allow for multiple technological futures The great hope from Deepseek is that individuals may no longer have to choose between Empires, but that by removing the guardrails, proprietary moats, rent-seeking monopolies, sovereignty is diluted down to the individual, allowing cultural multipolarity - accelerate.

Notes On $TRUMP Financial nihilism is breaking through the breaches - its a story of technocapital repackaging what was once transgressive and on the outside as new state policy. The memecoin is no longer a symbol of resistance against the wrongs and injustices of loaded markets heavily weighted in favor of elites. Nor is it decentralized, censorship resistance or dependent on a new type of monetary consciousness. Memecoins instead are the gateway drug to stablecoin dominance in public life and in turn a foundational plank for the establishment of the Crypto-Dollar. We have seen trial runs of TRUMP before, celebrity coins making waves and sparking controversy. However, celebrity is fickle, transient and not enough to generate the myth-making capital for a mere token to endure beyond the initial moment of virality. Other household memecoins are built on abstractions and symbols, that have been through cultural Darwinian competition to reach the summit. Embodied celebrity alone is not enough to power and stay the dreaded inevitability of exit-capital decay. TRUMP plugs into the mimetic virality of memecoins and fuses it with state power - it is a political abstraction that will displace the absurdist abstractions of its predecessors. Trump is not a celebrity - he is a political myth occupying the most powerful office of our age. The easy, Occam Razor's interpretation of events is that this marks the delirious and violently febrile peak in a relentless cycle of global meltup not just in crypto but across traditional finance markets. This is the point of no return, the catalyst for violent correction setting the conditions for a global credit event. That may well be the correct take on events, who really knows? However, there is an alternative to consider. With $TRUMP, hyperfinancial speculation is now directly tapped into the political fortunes of Global American Empire more explicitly, without the mediation or rationalization of corporations, CEOs, stock market politics or trad-fi sensibilities. Consider this - his inauguration, his inevitable departure from office, his death, every scandal, every statement, every policy initiative, every geopolitical tussle is now intimately woven into the the destiny of a token willed into existence. It is the expansion of the speculative realm beyond internet culture, online cults and esoteric culture on the margins into meatspace itself. It is colonization of the meme of our physical space, based not on the frailty of mere celebrity but that of the Presidential Office. TRUMP is the attempted diffusion of Imperial interest by banking on the animal spirits of financial nihilism - the update patch to Weimar cultural politics. The contemporary architecture of crypto at present is a firm public-private partnership with intelligence agencies examining and auditing transparent chains. On-boarding to crypto is still jealously guarded by traditional finance regulation, KYC and governments. The success of $TRUMP in the long run inaugurates SOL as the Imperial choice for GAE, Trump bestowed upon SOL the Emperor's favor. More unprecedented is the searing domination TRUMP achieved in terms of liquidity, holders (despite the lock-in by Trump insiders no doubt) and marketcap that was achieved just using DEXs without needing the big CEXs. Millions if not billions will be willing to enter the casino of Panoptic Technocapital mediated by Megacorp exchanges and on-ramps. Let us take a moment of silence to remember Satoshi. In all respects, TRUMP is the Empire's answer to Eric Hughes - the fatal nail in the coffin to "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto". The godhead of the State has extinguished the cypherpunk spirit in less than two decades since Bitcoin first arrived. TRUMP is the very antithesis of Satoshi - anonymous, humble, cloaked in mystique, on the fringes, on the outside offering an alternative network of monetary consciousness to the dollar (well initially anyway). Cryptography has clearly not enabled secure anonymous money, it has given new life to animal spirits as all the tools of the cypherpunks are being actively captured and co-opted by the incumbent American financial elites. Cypherpunks write code but so do empires. ETFs, crypto-adjacent stock offerings, companies and retail products backed by Imperial military might and legislative frameworks will completely smother the original intent of crypto-anarchist politics. Centralized bureaucracies because of an asymmetry of resources (chiefly information and data because of mega surveillance structures) are starting to outmaneuver organic networks and tribes. Indeed, nation-states are manufacturing (astroturfing) movements for the purposes of waging total cognitive warfare against its own adversaries. $TRUMP raises fundamental questions about the viability of online organic networks and tribes to raid and wage guerrilla war against nation-state actors. It is becoming apparent that the State can co-opt, manufacture and synthesize swarms at will by entering into cyberspace. An additional factor to consider is the impending MAGA Wars (HB1ndians was only the first chapter - biometric surveillance packaged as checks on mass immigration, private-public stablecoins sold as rescuing the dollar and "fixing the debt" and mRNA acceleration plus more to come) - as the Trump coalition violently breaks and splinters off internally. Surely, libertarians, the MAGA working class, ethnonativists will not be jumping for joy as Trump starts to favor and indulge the speculative impulses of Surveillance Valley elites. How much longer will this merry band stay together? $TRUMP could be the peak, the starting of the end of a cycle - or it could inaugurate the birth of something new altogether, a new horror for all those who were once beholden to the promise of the Cypherpunk Manifesto. Stay SAIF And truly God knows best

The Iqra Files

Notes On $TRUMP

$TRUMP could be the peak, the starting of the end of a cycle - or it could inaugurate the birth of something new altogether, a new horror

Financial Nihilism is now the official position of GAE - $TRUMP - Keep rugging the American people till they completely crack.

Notes On Attention Attention is a unit of commerce, a commodity and weapon - it is all of this at once and more. In the canon of Islamicate Sufic authors, attention was at the core of spiritual rejuvenation. Attention and the gaze of man was meant to be directed to the Divine alone but man all too soon realized there were many ailments that poisoned the mind and body, preventing access to the Source. The authors of tasawwuf then in one sense were keen diagnosticians, aware of precognitive frames that hindered man to not fully utilize attention and direct it to where it needed to go. To conquer the ailments and treat them was a far simpler task a century ago, perhaps even a decade or so ago. Now attention is increasingly anchored primarily in cyberspace, contested not merely by traditional typologies of spontaneous sin like lust and greed but well coordinated nation-state actors, intelligence agencies and propaganda machines - well funded, well financed and often well researched. One recourse for the Muslim is to lean into Luddite retreat. Cyberspace is simply inhospitable to Islam. Cyberspace is not a space that is commensurate with Islamic sensibilities and sentiment. It cannot be conquered, it cannot be redesigned or realigned. However, to concede the loss of cyberspace is for the believer to unwittingly concede the lack of one's own capacity to bear witness to God's Revelation in the Time that he has allotted to us. It also does not understand that the nature of statecraft, commerce, monetary activity and intellectual generation will primarily be cyber in the years to come. Action will inevitably be local, but the generative impulses for it can be done in online networks that recognize Muslim plurality as a feature and not a bug. Cyberspace will be contested by nation-state blocs, empires, corporations and radical private actors. It seems perplexing that some Muslims choose to abandon this field, nor even consider its utility in terms of formulating new political configurations centered around the Divine. Another alternative, is to use cyberspace as terrain for rehashing old battles because there is simply no imagination, vision or will to conceptualize New Islamicate futures. These debates in the past were not centrally generative of any real political project, but often relied on patronage from the Islamic Secular who envisioned a civlizational vision much larger than the often parochial concerns of the jurist-class. In this vision, the mimetic potential of cyber virality repackages marginal concerns of the ancient jurist-class into a mistaken centrality in the project of civilizational anchoring. For example the legality of the Mawlid occupies centrality in cyber-articulations of "Islamicness" - an odd and pathetic use of the potentials of digital discourse. Dawah Inc has catapulted a whole raft of wholly irrelevant concerns and granted them as somehow the be all and end all of civilizational renewal. It creates a class of Muslims who see the negotiation of such question as the be all and end all to the question of how Islam engages today and in the future. It fosters a false sense of a febrile zero sum game that gives rise to interesting psychopathologies. Both these approaches cocoon the believer from the realities of the age, it creates cognitive dissonance. It leads to a distorted sense of the heritage of all those who labored for Islamicate Sovereignty which if one mines the historical archives were a far more expansive set of actors than just the jurist-class. The Muslim modern is orphaned from the larger chain of those who worked towards Islamicate Sovereignty. This has created, whether the participants are aware of this or not - a profound sense of alienation for the vast majority of believers who are not invested in Dawah Inc or the ongoing attempts at self-preservation of a failing jurist-class that have been unduly burdened with unreasonable expectations packaged with responsibilities and obligations it is not equipped to deal with. It can be argued that in the past there was no expectation that the jurist-class was meant to be the generative site for renewal and configuration of new novel forms of political and social configuration. Fiqh was never in the business of culture-making the foundations for political order. The juristic class of course were relied upon to be a bedrock of stability in whatever political configuration was hashed out, contested and arrived at. At a basic level, today the impoverishment, weakness and humiliation of post-colonial Muslim states sparks a transhistorical sense of collective guilt and remorse which forges communal belonging that often boils down to "We can do better, we must do better". However, where do these believers turn to in between Luddites and Dawah Inc? Those who are not well versed in these arcane debates are somehow made to feel as if they have no real part to play in the story of Islamicate civilizations in this century and beyond. They do believe in the gaze of God, the promises of His Messenger ﷺ and the reality of the Last Day, but there is no sense of network or anchoring either in meatspace or cyber that allows them to labour in this cause without being caught up in baboonery. Much can and should also be said about other chasms in the Muslim attention-economy - ethno-narcissism, ghettoisation, perplexing nationalisms - perhaps for another time. So what is the state of the Muslim "attention-economy" so to speak? It is dire. We have lost potential networks of the Islamic Secular within cyber, that could have laboured towards Islamicate Sovereignty, that have as much an authentic role (indeed even more so) than the jurist-class or the Dawah Inc media market merchants. Fixing the attention-economy in cyber is necessary - dragging the timeline towards sanity away from delirium and perhaps most of all denial of the tasks at hand. And truly God knows best

The Iqra Files

Notes On Attention

Fixing the attention-economy in cyber is necessary - dragging the timeline towards sanity away from delirium and perhaps most of all denial of the ...

Alzheimer's Aqeedah - cognitive decline, memory loss (disconnected from the past), unmoored sense of time, odd fixation on aqeedah and other marginal concerns of medieval scholasticism as be all and end all - common prevalence. No cure, just pray.

Can one act confidently in the present only if the matter in question was already prefigured in the past? By deifying the past, we disrespect the other siblings of Time - the present and the future plus all that is in between and happening What drives the need to venture out only if such a step was found neatly packaged in a long forgotten manuscript in the year 1215? Perhaps it's prolonged grief from all that has been lost and that we continue to lose in the present day

Although this comes from the developer of Obsidian (on Twitter @kepano - note taking app) it is a beautiful distillation of the Islamicate attitude towards knowledge in the digital age: File over app File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: > If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s. You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian ( @obsdmd ), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile

Prepare for literacy and archiving with local LLMs on powerful hardware - the issue is data ownership and sovereignty, not artifical intelligence itself. Open source models are eroding the proprietary moat. This may price some out - doesn't matter, those who can should, those who can't will be left behind Local LLMs guarantee sovereignty to a large degree - the divide between those who leverage it and those who don't will be a wide chasm by the end of this year

Bring to life what was once unthought, unseen and unheard to the stage where it becomes foundational - few can do this because most will spend their days trying to revive the dead and the work of the dead. What passes for normative today is just undead parasitism.

Underground nuclear reactors proposed by Deep Fission to power data centres for the AI Cambrian explosion may settle the question about renewables. Nuclear is the future and Spice (data) it seems will settle many a question in the birth of the new world. Big Tech are considering going nuclear and BTC mining may go in the same direction as nation-states consider strategic reserves. Vast swathes of the Old Islamicate are about to be left behind yet again as we stand on the cusp of a new horrific birth - there are too few ready to seize opportunity. The only course is to "leap frog" - abandon current paradigmatic consensus positions on economic and industrial policy, consider data and compute power as the priority to avoid a meagre existence of data serfdom.

Be algo-driven; not algo-engineered

Muslim crypto building needs to be anti-compliant with GAE financial regulation - otherwise its basically a L2 for USD which has short term gain but long term pain. Stablecoins are planned GAE cryptocolonialism for expansion of UST markets via central providers like Tether that offer short term gain for dilapidated postcolonial Muslim currencies but do not generate a new network effect at the monetary layer because it still relies on USD. Still subject to unilateral seizure, censorship, shutdown etc - not to mention it offers the illusion of sovereignty when the political economy of the chain is still dependent on GAE primacy.

More tech has meant more casinofication of the markets and I think those who argue for more market efficiency with tech are understating the cataclysmic fallout from 2008 which provided the cultural catalyst for financial nihilism that millennials and zoomers now take for granted Casinofication however is not the same as market efficiency. The wisdom of the crowds model is quickly replaced by algorithmic hijacking of mobs who are inherently financial nihilists. Crypto has taken off (including BTC) because of financial nihilism - not because of utility These are powerful dynamics - we understate and underestimate the cultural thesis of financial nihilism that spawned the success of the crypto market today including BTC. It was not utility, cypherpunk conversion or anti-state libertarianism that saw its market cap explode...

What many fail to understand is that it won't be just particular configurations of liberalism that will fracture, splinter and fragment - much will have to perish to move forward to what comes next, including things we may hold dear now - that's just how it goes. If you think status quo technocratic managerial liberalism is the only thing being stress tested right now then you aren't paying attention to what's happening out there Little probably of what we recognize today in terms of political economy, social, political arrangements and so on - the things we take for granted will make it out alive. Trying to put a band aid over these failures makes us much worse than Fukuyaman technocrats

Post-sectarianism is the logical outcome for the building of the New Islamicate where the political project assumes cosmic importance over and above the project of furthering scholastic agendas because without sovereignty, scholasticism loses its sting Everyone must arrive at this destination in order to avoid the horrors of the last century, and this isn't in reference to Sunni-Shia relations - that is a political/civilizational fault line - this in reference to intra-Sunni diffrence that must find a home within a project New cultural formation that shatters the old divisions - Salafi, Sufi etc must take place to initiate free peoples to new collectives and communities of meaning that have something pertinent to say not just about the challenges of today (that is reactive) but of tomorrow

Beyond the Silk Roads Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics Across Eurasia Magnus Marsden. Cambridge Univ Pr 2021

Cambridge Core

Beyond the Silk Roads

Cambridge Core - Social and Cultural Anthropology - Beyond the Silk Roads

GAE EU Vassals in 2036 - "There is no energy, demographic crisis is unsolvable, immigration makes everything worse because there is nothing to integrate into, Poland is our greatest power but at least we shake hands with women"