An Eulogy for Muslim Social Media

Lately, there has been a lot of circle jerking in the digital realms of muslim cyber space. Revival of the slogans of a "two state solution", the championing of a BDS "tactical success". Zombies are parading around a 45 year old political corpse like a pharaonic antiquity making one last tour in the museum of cyberspace to milk out a bit more cash for its colonial masters.

Muslim digital space is intellectually colonized. It's so biased in this western orientation it can't even recognize it reeks of this shit amongst its "Islamification" of everything. If consumer pressure is our prized economic weapon then why has it not been directed at the tech and weapons industry? Choosing particulars in the service industry instead just reveals that we are slaves of our own desires and have ourselves produced nothing of value. Islam is already in a post nation state era because it forsook the responsibility of sovereign governance and became a vassal to the GAE alliance with Absolute Evil.

Muslims have done nothing but normalize a status quo of failure for the past half century, and over the past two decade this mentality has been transposed into cyberspace with all attempts at forming something new simply being replications of this same physical dystopia.

Trust in Muslim leaders and scholars is at an all time low. Good! Most of them openly admit they are terrified of being cut off from the teat of USD liquidity and tech software stack. The rest have blinded themselves from vision to see the rope of Allah in the wires of the internet and risk becoming two dimensional clerics in a world of $$wizards^3$$ as AI forces new epistemologies upon us. Doesn't mater if you are KSA or Mauritania, LaunchGood or Muzz - the human ability to compete against AI governance models will drop your customer satisfaction level to one star.

we. do. not. trust. you.

It is fundamental to understand is that there is no rule in Muslim lands which are themselves fully occupied in both the physical and digital sense of that space. Your weak structures are stuck in meatspace while cyber has already gone and liquidated your assets leaving you stuck trying to vibe out an meme-gasm with a tool you don't own and somehow thinking that isn't cuckery.

"We need our own platform."

"We need a compliant muslim crypto with halal yield."

"We need to build according to our values."

YOU'VE LOST THE PLOT.

Stop complaining about the coal mines when you are still in them.

If you are not vomiting with rage yet, go back and read all of that another hundred times before moving on because you aren't ready for a solution. There's a reason the sufis a year of litany while mopping the kitchen and cleaning the outhouse before beginning an initiation. Maybe "no pain, no gain" talk is better understood though. Anyhow, let's let the masses do what the fuck they want while we hold ourselves to a higher accountability. If they want to make nostr a meme already then we've probably succeeded even though it feels like the work has barely started.

Some of us have been here three, even four years. Many have gone cold-turkey and abandoned decades of legacy social credit to the ether of a delete button. The commitment I've seen here toward building this decentralized network is remarkably similar to what I have witnessed in the addiction recovery space. If you do not hate the bonds of dependency, the spiritual abuse, and the depravity your desires take you to then you will not purse recovery with the certainty to avoid relapse.

The rest of this article is for those of you who are healing here and have found something on nostr that maybe you can't quite describe yet but can feel is significantly improving your state. Be at peace! Enjoy your time here and find community. If you are Muslim we have founded a dedicated relay space for you to connect and build upon. Check out #NoorNode if you are not already plugged in.

What I want to briefly explore goes beyond relays, private keys, and clients. How do Muslims imagine a new form of governance in cyber? Taxes, voting, citizenship, and war are the most boring topics and not what we should be focused on. Why are we always jumping straight to a khalifate or al-Mahdi? Such things happen only by Divine Providence. Every generation for a thousand years has thought they were the last only to be proved wrong. Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't start with that assumption.

Thinking bottom up here provides us with great benefit and is extremely important for us operationally working in the margin and in a decentralized space. We do not own the tech stack. An open source foundation is not something you can dictate your way though and such fiat mindedness must be purged from out thinking. Gun-boat diplomacy should be resisted and assumptions of positive intent are a luxury we cannot afford if autonomous AI are about to be unleashed. Mis-alignment is their feature, not a bug.

So, what are the building blocks of society that we can safely attempt to replicate in cyber? My proposal is that we should think in terms of family units rather than individual human actors. Prophetic tradition has always held families at the core of civilization. In fact, when confronted with the existential crisis of artificial intelligent entities the natural structure of the nuclear family and its ability to extend itself through time via lineage is a unique human feature. AI could potentially mirror this, but not replicate it fully. And why would it want to anyway considering how inefficiently biological such a process would be in contrast to super-intelligence.

Yes, my suggestion is that we should exploit this human inefficiency of the family structure and use it as our cornerstone for building digital identification systems. One of the primary reasons for this is it returns us to an ethical model of responsibility over rights. This is an important element of sharia that is almost lost in muslim society today due to the hyper focus on individualism. Human responsibilities to others in their social environment have alway come before universal rights because they come from our biological existence itself. Guardianship over children is the pillar of this and a litmus test for how a civilization measures to its potential. This guardianship is the responsibility (not right) of parentage, not that of a governing entity. Likewise marriage is a covenant that needs no third party oversight regardless of what fiqh says on that matter as Adam and Hawa who are the source text on marriage obviously had no witnesses beyond the birds and the bees. Exploitation of these two responsibilities is why the Prophets were sent to guide us to the religion - so we could be reminded of our humanity. I do not think we need to look any further than these for guidance in cyber.

Now within these two responsibilities are three elements that make up their core and are also foundational responsibilities that should be guiding factors for us to consider. These are food, clothing and shelter. If a family has not sufficiently provided for these then their is injustice. So what do these things look like in cyber?

These may be open to some debate but I will suggest that food relates to what we consume. It is the data flows, the connectivity, the online engagement. But as Muslims are we providing our families with halal food to consume? There is a quality and level of purity here we are to maintain. Why did you outsource this regulation to a kafir ISP? "Just say bismallah and eat." At least the luddite is consciously being a vegetarian.

Both clothing and shelter I think are closely related to what is commonly talked about as OPSEC. The main distinction being that clothing is worn by individuals where as shelter is for the whole family. Clothing is for the maintenance of dignity and modesty. One could say that not caring about a basic level of personal OPSEC is like saying hijab doesn't matter. When was the last time you said your quls before entering your seed phrase? And let's be honest, most of us doomscroll on the crapper - full spread heedlessness in front of the jinn. Shelter is more an environmental protective layer and this is probably were we get down to the granular hardware and software tools. Are you always in your home? No, you go out and about. But is your home a safe space to return to when threatened. Do you have a cyber equivalency for your family? Maybe I'm going out on a limb here but cloud architecture sounds like living in an apartment compared to a home server.

Without thinking about and attempting to address these subjects how can you call yourself a responsible, sovereign family living in hypermodernity? This base level defined here needs to be mastered before we can even begin to think through and build out the more tribal elements of a digital community or network state. I do not discourage discussing those things but if they are done without addressing the core role and responsibility of the family I do not see how you avoid repeating all the same failures that have happened before.

I'll end this rant with a shameless promotion of The Spiritual OPSEC Guide that was recently produced by PodSystems. It's something I think is obviously related to this conversation and has personally inspired me in many ways. Hopefully the inclusion of it here as a footnote is able to bring others some benefit as well.

nostr:nevent1qqs0flg8hj2hvd34234wzvdxgag2l409g8wygfzqwwrfz57mre9mnwszyrs9hw6wcsl2wqxu75wp07ausnvq89qhu48fgpqee3hth63xy9sgcqcyqqqqqqgv40tgg

And Allah knows best.

#staySAIF