Notes on Techno-Nafs and Algorithmic Culture https://listed.to/@TheIqraFiles/44748/notes-on-techno-nafs-and-algorithmic-culture

Some further reflections on the impact the Cybernetic State could have on the religious and spiritual lives of Muslims. Particularly on the urgent question of Technology as it is related to tasawwuf.

Tech is reshaping our culture and society. Particularly striking is the concept of 'algorithmic culture' that might flatten our individual experiences and promote constant consumption, all while we're under surveillance.

'Techno-nafs' combines the traditional concept of the self with our digital transformation. We're seeing a self that both consumes and is consumed in this algorithmic culture, trading privacy for digital participation.

The spread of digital commodification and the quest for absolute control could push us towards a new order of existence. Are we risking our ability to discern truth in this new reality?


You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/vanaUPy

The Techno-Nafs

This piece has been coming for a long time. These are my notes on the Fiqh of Minorities (FOM) discourse in the Anglosand charting a schemata of understanding all that has transpired in the last twenty years by examining the shifting priorities of FOM.
https://listed.to/@TheIqraFiles/44603/notes-on-the-fiqh-of-minorities

I try and chart the evolution between what I see as two distinct phases in the evolution of FOM - FOM1 and FOM2. Unlike most of what the mainstream academia has to say this is a piece that honestly and I hope with a bit of sensitivity looks at the failings of the FOM project

More than anything, I hope this sparks in some corners and quarters conversations about where do we go next from FOM? Where do we go after conceding that political participation is indeed a poisoned chalice?

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/f7QnNyK

The Fiqh of Minorities

Fascinating paper on the formation of privacy as a moral and legal category by early and late classical Sunni jurists:

Some highlights - on the early Hanbali position and its evolution:

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/HgNafoI

Privacy and Sunni Jurisprudence

I like Prof Jackson's Islamic Secular articulation but it should be brought to bear on some fundamental challenges that face us in the coming decades:

1. Biotechnology - the challenge of synthetic life or synthetic biology
2. Blockchain - it has tremendous tyrannical potential

3. Computation - AI and Quantum computing - other potential forms of surveillance tech
4. Nanotechnology
5. Bio-custodianship - environmentalism, resource scarcity etc

All these things will impact other second order issues about politics and social discourse. It is important the Islamic Secular abandons trite and bland discussions like "democracy-compatibility" discourse. May be controversial but "feminism-refutation" should be over too

All roads end towards some form of an unpredictable posthuman future that challenges basic Islamic fundamentals about being and acting in the world

For e.g. is disappointing to note that in the English language anyway (I know terrible bias) I found just one real quality paper that tried to properly tackle the issue of mass surveillance and the Shari''. All these other topics are currently not being tackled fully by Muslims

This is perhaps the definition of a 'dead' or 'moribund' civilization - when it no longer has the capability to tackle or anticipate the challenges to come.

Full thread: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/Spc0EIa

The Islamic Secular For the 21st Century

Pharmaceutical Liberalism and Transhumanism.

https://listed.to/p/EXjHtjZm7f

This is an attempt to briefly flesh out an idea that liberalism as we see it unfolding in so many societies today, is primarily a pharmaceutical endeavour.

We're moving from classical liberal autonomy to the posthuman, as biotechnology shifts focus from merely enhancing existing norms to re-engineering what could potentially exist.

The contraceptive pill was a historic breakthrough in controlling organismic function in the name of personal freedom, a game-changer that propelled us into an era of early transhumanist technology

We're now in an era of absolute self-mastery where technology isn't just a 'neutral tool.' The advent of the pill birthed pharmaceutical liberalism, underpinning many social developments within liberal societies

Massive investment in 'immortality technologies' signifies a shift from curing diseases to overcoming death itself. However, while the global techno-elites chase immortality, they offer the rest of us horrific options like euthanasia.


You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/F284KYz

Pharmaceutical Liberalism and Transhumanism

Twilight of Postmodern Liberalism
https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/sEMmV9n

Pharmacological engineering is an important basis of postmodern liberalism - more important you know how pharmacology works rather than bothering to read Rawls

Similarly, transgender controversies are really nothing but a symptom of a larger incoming rupture -  transhumanist technologies aimed at re-engineering our humanity. The creation of the 'post-human'. In time postmodern variants of liberalism will be eclipsed

This eclipse will occur as pharmacology, biotechnology, nanotechnology continue to grow in powers of manipulation and organic alchemy.

Future ideologies will revolve around Dataism, the Technium and post-human consciousness as machine and man merge -postmodern liberalism is in its twilight years. The danger for the religions of the world is that we are far more comfortable and complacent around technology

In contrast to the visual contours of postmodern liberalism which were always met with a healthy sense of distance scepticism. Not sure the same scepticism will be expressed about what is to come because it will be couched under the rubric of convenience,connectedness and novelty

Muslims already in the affluent parts of the Islamicate and beyond rush to buy every new iteration of the iPhone. This type of mass contagion of yearning for the novel and the new will be a cause for much corruption. Look at the largely uncritical reception of 'Islamic Cryptos'

Twilight of Postmodern Liberalism

Notes On Cybernetics I | The Iqra Files — (listed.to) https://listed.to/@TheIqraFiles/44194/notes-on-cybernetics-i

Following on from the last piece, I'll now pause and offer some reflections on particular concepts that I think are important for Muslims to consider in the years and decades to come. Cybernetic governance and more broadly data sovereignty and privacy is one area

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/KFkjJgS

On Cybernetics I

On Syntheticism: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/BL9GK8s

Syntheticism - man-made creations and attempts at approximating acts of Creation and Intellect - subsets include AI and Transhumanism packaged via biotechnology with slogans about autonomy and ''choice''.


Nanotechnology may also feature and the over-arching goal of Syntheticism is to create a new type of living being. That can be plugged into a cybernetic system - the digital colonization of the physical - physical organic systems being subsumed under algorithmic control.


20th century - trying to replace God with slow and cumbersome bureaucratic institutions - ''the State'' with promises based around abstractions grounded in political ideology of one particular flavour of the Enlightenment or the other - Marxism. Liberalism etc

21st century - trying to replace God by reinventing the human from a foundational aspect - by manufacturing a new type of biology and neuro-chemistry from scratch. Whether through manipulation via tech or reconstructing aspects of our humanness through piece-meal application

Such engineering and craftsmanship has been made possible through the harvesting and unparalleled access to the habits of mind and heart of the populace which is viable through a culture of passive digital consumption that trades momentary gratification for privacy

Remember that the "sexual revolution" was only really made possible through novel pharmacological breakthroughs in contraception. Prior to that such monstrosities were the preserve of perverted French intellectuals but it was pharmacological manipulation

That brought this perversion to the masses - the liberalism we live amidst today in the Anglosphere in its social dimension really is just a child of the pharmacological industry precariously upheld with a cocktail of SSRIs, OCPs and opioid ''analgesia"


On Syntheticism

The Neon God (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-neon-god) - excerpts:
https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/q3WhY4z

"What I learned from that experience is that my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared, and that even people who I imagined would have a serious critique of technology often simply don’t.

You might expect religious leaders to be clued up about the dark spiritual aspects of the technium, but while there have been astute religious critics of the Machine

Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Philip Sherrard and Marshall McLuhan have all made appearances in these essays - most religious leaders and thinkers seem as swept up in the Machine’s propaganda system as anyone else.

They have bought into what we might call the Myth of Neutral Technology, a subset of the Myth of Progress. In my view, true religion should challenge both. But I think, as ever, that I am in the minority here."

"the gushing, uncritical embrace of the Machine, even in the heart of the temple. The blind worship of idols, and the failure to see what stands behind them. Someone once reminded us that a man cannot serve two masters - but then, what did he know?

Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun who writes about the relationship between AI and God, has a better idea:

gender-neutral robot priests, which will challenge the patriarchy, prevent sexual abuse and tackle the fusty old notion that ‘the priest is ontologically changed upon ordination.’ AI...Delio, ‘challenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.’ "

The Neon God: Excerpts

This is the first out of two pieces that will lead up to the elaborating on Iqballian Cypherpunk Ethics. To frame this I need to first explain the Hallaqian Problem and relate it to Cybernetics and other related themes: https://listed.to/@TheIqraFiles/44114/the-hallaqian-problem-and-cybernetics

This is an attempt to ground the Hallaq's Impossible State away from the controversies of 20th century statecraft and classical Islamism into the 21st century and use it as a foundation for understanding future developments

Towards the end I hope there will at least be a discussion about restating the Hallaqian Problem in the Impossible State and then trying to think of solutions beyond sterile political activism and minority-based activism that in vain tried to create legislative safeguards

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/lwbSt9Y