The Habibi Tech summit might be the purest expression of the mentally fiatcaptured Muslim technological imagination.
Google/DeepMind, Meta, AWS, DHS, CDC, UN, World Bank, Wall Street, Islamic home financing, even combating climate disinformation, and so on, are all being represented
And even where the conference is “critical” of Big Tech, the critique never seems capable of escaping its underlying logic. More calls for ethical AI, more responsible innovation and regulation, Muslim representation with more Muslim founders and more Muslim venture capital. It's really just Muslims becoming more influential inside the machine. Of course, the current technological order itself remains unquestioned.
What seems almost impossible to imagine for these NPCs is Muslims deliberately becoming less dependent on these systems, building parallel monetary, communications and computational infrastructure, owning our identities and data, operating our own decentralized networks/protocols, developing institutions/organizations that are difficult to censor, surveil or financially exclude, and cultivating communities that don't depend on permission from states, platforms, banks, app stores, etc.
That requires a technological imagination the broader Muslim tech space currently lacks the mental capacity to even conceive of.
