Notes on Sufic Rewilding
Dawah Inc is dying. Tumblr e-girl intrigue, the notoriety of public celebrity, the psy-slop of attention hacking economics and industrial scale mediocrity is tearing down the aura, prestige and myth of Islamicate civilization in cyber. The latent iconoclastic potential of Islamicate art has been squandered and instead we have meatspace media empires, fools who have tried to make gold off the back of other fools. In the process we have a contagion of functional illiteracy, cultural apocalypse and no real vibrancy. The Muhammadan spirit is missing from Dawah Inc. There is no real transgression, when Dawah Inc positions itself as a menu item that also includes Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
There must be consideration for what comes next. Part of what must come next, must grasp the iconoclastic potential of Islam. To build on legend and symbolism; poetry, abstraction and mystique. Artists from all fields must forego personal ego, must forego monetization and personal gratification at the altar of Panoptic Technocapital to plant a Dark Forest, to overgrow cyber with wild gardens of Sufic spirit that aims to paralyse and kill the Ego.
What is this Dark Forest?:
The dark forest means an internet overgrown with cryptography/ - Anonymous organizations with on-chain treasuries and democratic token voting. - Anonymous infrastructure for communication, coordination and management. No more GoogleDocs or Discord - any 'privacy' project using this is fake garbage that doesn't believe its own rhetoric and doesn't present a real threat to the current status quo (otherwise it wouldn't be participating in these surveillance systems). - Anonymous money, markets and trading. MEV is bad and against the vision of crypto (disintermediating financial parasites like the FED who extract rent from the economy while doing nothing). Not only do people pay higher fees in crypto than in banks, we now pay moonboy degens to snort coke and have sex with hookers in Dubai while they write twitter posts telling us "Why MEV Is A Good Thing". - Free information. Censorship-resistance? What's up with that? BitTorrent is 20 years old now. Wikileaks is 15 years old and made by 1 man. Yet the entire crypto industry with several billion dollars in market-cap hasn't been able to disrupt this sector. Sounds like it's because the space is full of cucks pleading to law enforcement about how privacy is compatible within the current surveillance paradigm. They're too afraid to 'disrupt' corporate media and government because, secretly, they want acceptance from the elite.
The cyberspace of the New Islamicate must tear down the idols of parasocial network building, to forego the branding of personal attribution and to embrace the dark of fragile pseudonymity if not outright anonymity - to build legend that transcends the foibles of any given soul. New guilds, forms of association creating new vocabularies of Islamicness must arise. We cannot simply parrot the past but build anew myths, legend and symbols that carry with it a new overwhelming mimetic tsunami that carries with it the waves of the Muhammadan mission. No longer tied to any specific meatspace polemicist or "Da'ee" but encoded with a level of abstraction that forces even foes to contend on a spiritual terrain.
Cyberspace must be rewilded - away from the zombie and dead spaces of corporate/nation-state ecosystems that are flooding digital spaces with bad faith actors and bots:
Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?
The critical mass of Dawah Inc in the Anglosphere is so heavily concentrated in a clique, in a corporate band of a few "celebrity scholars", in a staid and bland lecture circuit of aqeedahpoasteres, theological midwit factories, Youtube clickbait that privelges crude Islamic apologetics, that nothing else can grow. Islamicate Cyberspace is dead, ossified and in need of significant rewilding that ultimately channels the iconoclastic potential of the Ishmaelite creed that the Sufi masters of old had perfected in the very distant past.
The Sufic Dark Forest is a recognition that in a world built on the cannabalising logic of parasocial monetization which enters into a Faustian bargain with Panoptic Technocapital; virtue is fragile. Virtue is precious. For the good to be enjoined, the Ishmaelite must jealously protect the integrity and beauty of what is good. Obfuscating and evading algorithmic coercion through cryptography and encryption is not so vice can be performed in atheistic anarchic spaces that are doomed for oblivion. Obfuscation is performed in an adversarial world where virtue can grow, can be nurtured and can spread like contagion. It recognizes the corrosive and inevitable hypocrisy, ostentation and prosperity theology inclinations of hyperfinancialized parasocial cultural production and instead of going to fight it head on, it seeks to go underground. Towards the roots, towards a layer of abstraction that can be used to create new momentum from new spaces.
There are tools - encryption, privacy enhancing technology, private cryptocurrencies, FOSS platforms outside of Big Tech that can be utilised. Even on Big Tech, forceful wrestling against the algorithm is possible - branding must be at the level of a higher abstraction geared towards post-authorship. Iconoclastic cultural production is more difficult to corrupt, it is why idols are prohibited because idols break and decay. They are temporary, false, pathetic instances of the sublime and beautiful. Cultural movement in the Iqballian sense must be bold, innovative and change the rules of engagement.
What must become apparent now is that alongside solarpunk presentations and articulations of Islamicate culture there must be a lunarpunk contrast. The latter must keep the former in check.
And truly God knows best