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

Cognitive enclosures (splinternets) with constant neurological surveillance (BCI) creating loops of reinforced illiteracy will render the Enlightenment dead - deterministic social engineering via cybernetic governance will threaten to overwhelm any cosmotechnic project. AI search engines like Perplexity is the first crude prototypical iteration of what such a structure could look like; coupled with new device interfaces that fuse silicon and biology, digested snippets bereft of deep context and literacy presented in neat bullet points beamed in. OpenAI has given up any pretence of its original mission statement offering the GCC potentially nationwide subscriptions with undoubtedly editorial priveleges on the responses through the blackbox. China competes on the same trajectory with Deepseek.