The charge of privacy fetishism is illiterate because the underlying tech and protocols clearly work hence the gargantuan state machinery being deployed to desperately try and stop it - spiritual opsec demands it. The charge is usually levied because of a misdiagnosis - there is too much cultural inertia to overcome to move people away from Megacorp Tech options to practical FOSS options that can become daily drivers.

There is actually no need whatsoever for there to be a Cloud apart from maybe enterprise - storage has evolved to the point >95% can be sovereign - goes to show accelerationism does not mean tech supremacy but corporate domination

In the long run for sustainable virality, an anchor state with background Intel agencies working in concert is a necessary precondition because of the architecture of convential social media platforms - Arab Spring & Iran's Green Movement relied on external tech orgs as partners. Virality in this context,wl especially after COVID and the social media revolution becomes a holistic cognitive bioweapon deployed to acheive certain ends and so far it seems online virality is inherently deconstructive because of its primary use as sabotage. The Arab Spring and Green Movement were an interesting episode of experimentation between local grassroots actors & large tech firms in democratic engineering that ultimately faded because virality is inherently more volatile as an anti-trust force that acts as cog war weaponery. The Chinese particularly under Xi in the 2010s understood this and accelerated splinternet formation that was a firewall to protect the integrity of its national projects away from inherently malignant and malicious forms of virality injected by external actors and rivals. In India, virality for Modi-ism did deliver electoral short term gains but another issue with this type of politics that is addicted to virality is the production of idiocratic subjects that no longer have the ability to reason that has ripple effects in democratic regimes. Rich authoritarian states ride out virality by gaming algorithmic feeds to other domains that seem to have inherently more powerful viral properties - see sportswashing, fashion and entertainment in the GCC. The drawback for all these experiments (although the data from China is conflicting) is the problem of mental health contagion and cognitive decay.

Metropolis

Data ownership is key to Web3 being a viable successor to Web2 in any meaningful fashion beyond the sloptrain of Balaji and co. Data must be held by the individual, and sold and exchanged in thousands of markets online. At the moment most platforms can steal and lock you out. Splinternets and national ecosystems backed by stablecoins and CBDCs are in effect feudalizing the data economy and weaponizing the attention one (distinct but interlinked economies). What would these economies of data and attention look like in the New Islamicate? What is coming out of Turkey and its satellites as they financially implode and effectively enter into debt diplomacy with GCC actors particularly the UAE is not encouraging - abysmal and grim. One of the most peculiar projects is Kaspa, developed in partnership with Israel's formidable info-spooks with admittedly brilliant coders which has developed something of a cult following in Turkey. Kaspa is emblematic of the brokenness & poverty of vision in the Old Islamicate. Until nation-states act to provide cognitive and neurological immunity to their citizens - innoculating them without creating prisons of their own the question of the future of the web will continue to be dictated by weaponized interests.

Part of the forecast for Cybernetic State formation is going to be about charting the development of true breakthrough populisms and terrorisms that revolt against the logic and circuitry of the Machine God - until that happens and is resolved, the next century cannot start. Nowhere has there been successful populism that violently rejects Ellul's Technique. These are not prescriptive predictions or necessarily hyperstitional but observations about resolving latent tensions for the next century to kickstart. MAGA, Wilders, Le Pen all kind of sort hint at what's behind the resentment and angst but none have been truly able to get to the heart of the matter, and this has led to a cycle of cultural buffering where we are waiting for the next phase to load. It also speaks to a larger question about what dissent properly looks like in an era where state sponsored splinternets, predictive policing and blockchain surveillance chains with neurological surveillance are increasingly probable in a 10 year window.

Iqra 017

On loneliness, nihilist realism, Nietzsche, Solarpunk and Cybernetic Capitalism