Notes On $TRUMP Financial nihilism is breaking through the breaches - its a story of technocapital repackaging what was once transgressive and on the outside as new state policy. The memecoin is no longer a symbol of resistance against the wrongs and injustices of loaded markets heavily weighted in favor of elites. Nor is it decentralized, censorship resistance or dependent on a new type of monetary consciousness. Memecoins instead are the gateway drug to stablecoin dominance in public life and in turn a foundational plank for the establishment of the Crypto-Dollar. We have seen trial runs of TRUMP before, celebrity coins making waves and sparking controversy. However, celebrity is fickle, transient and not enough to generate the myth-making capital for a mere token to endure beyond the initial moment of virality. Other household memecoins are built on abstractions and symbols, that have been through cultural Darwinian competition to reach the summit. Embodied celebrity alone is not enough to power and stay the dreaded inevitability of exit-capital decay. TRUMP plugs into the mimetic virality of memecoins and fuses it with state power - it is a political abstraction that will displace the absurdist abstractions of its predecessors. Trump is not a celebrity - he is a political myth occupying the most powerful office of our age. The easy, Occam Razor's interpretation of events is that this marks the delirious and violently febrile peak in a relentless cycle of global meltup not just in crypto but across traditional finance markets. This is the point of no return, the catalyst for violent correction setting the conditions for a global credit event. That may well be the correct take on events, who really knows? However, there is an alternative to consider. With $TRUMP, hyperfinancial speculation is now directly tapped into the political fortunes of Global American Empire more explicitly, without the mediation or rationalization of corporations, CEOs, stock market politics or trad-fi sensibilities. Consider this - his inauguration, his inevitable departure from office, his death, every scandal, every statement, every policy initiative, every geopolitical tussle is now intimately woven into the the destiny of a token willed into existence. It is the expansion of the speculative realm beyond internet culture, online cults and esoteric culture on the margins into meatspace itself. It is colonization of the meme of our physical space, based not on the frailty of mere celebrity but that of the Presidential Office. TRUMP is the attempted diffusion of Imperial interest by banking on the animal spirits of financial nihilism - the update patch to Weimar cultural politics. The contemporary architecture of crypto at present is a firm public-private partnership with intelligence agencies examining and auditing transparent chains. On-boarding to crypto is still jealously guarded by traditional finance regulation, KYC and governments. The success of $TRUMP in the long run inaugurates SOL as the Imperial choice for GAE, Trump bestowed upon SOL the Emperor's favor. More unprecedented is the searing domination TRUMP achieved in terms of liquidity, holders (despite the lock-in by Trump insiders no doubt) and marketcap that was achieved just using DEXs without needing the big CEXs. Millions if not billions will be willing to enter the casino of Panoptic Technocapital mediated by Megacorp exchanges and on-ramps. Let us take a moment of silence to remember Satoshi. In all respects, TRUMP is the Empire's answer to Eric Hughes - the fatal nail in the coffin to "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto". The godhead of the State has extinguished the cypherpunk spirit in less than two decades since Bitcoin first arrived. TRUMP is the very antithesis of Satoshi - anonymous, humble, cloaked in mystique, on the fringes, on the outside offering an alternative network of monetary consciousness to the dollar (well initially anyway). Cryptography has clearly not enabled secure anonymous money, it has given new life to animal spirits as all the tools of the cypherpunks are being actively captured and co-opted by the incumbent American financial elites. Cypherpunks write code but so do empires. ETFs, crypto-adjacent stock offerings, companies and retail products backed by Imperial military might and legislative frameworks will completely smother the original intent of crypto-anarchist politics. Centralized bureaucracies because of an asymmetry of resources (chiefly information and data because of mega surveillance structures) are starting to outmaneuver organic networks and tribes. Indeed, nation-states are manufacturing (astroturfing) movements for the purposes of waging total cognitive warfare against its own adversaries. $TRUMP raises fundamental questions about the viability of online organic networks and tribes to raid and wage guerrilla war against nation-state actors. It is becoming apparent that the State can co-opt, manufacture and synthesize swarms at will by entering into cyberspace. An additional factor to consider is the impending MAGA Wars (HB1ndians was only the first chapter - biometric surveillance packaged as checks on mass immigration, private-public stablecoins sold as rescuing the dollar and "fixing the debt" and mRNA acceleration plus more to come) - as the Trump coalition violently breaks and splinters off internally. Surely, libertarians, the MAGA working class, ethnonativists will not be jumping for joy as Trump starts to favor and indulge the speculative impulses of Surveillance Valley elites. How much longer will this merry band stay together? $TRUMP could be the peak, the starting of the end of a cycle - or it could inaugurate the birth of something new altogether, a new horror for all those who were once beholden to the promise of the Cypherpunk Manifesto. Stay SAIF And truly God knows best

The Iqra Files

Notes On $TRUMP

$TRUMP could be the peak, the starting of the end of a cycle - or it could inaugurate the birth of something new altogether, a new horror

Financial Nihilism is now the official position of GAE - $TRUMP - Keep rugging the American people till they completely crack.

Notes On Attention Attention is a unit of commerce, a commodity and weapon - it is all of this at once and more. In the canon of Islamicate Sufic authors, attention was at the core of spiritual rejuvenation. Attention and the gaze of man was meant to be directed to the Divine alone but man all too soon realized there were many ailments that poisoned the mind and body, preventing access to the Source. The authors of tasawwuf then in one sense were keen diagnosticians, aware of precognitive frames that hindered man to not fully utilize attention and direct it to where it needed to go. To conquer the ailments and treat them was a far simpler task a century ago, perhaps even a decade or so ago. Now attention is increasingly anchored primarily in cyberspace, contested not merely by traditional typologies of spontaneous sin like lust and greed but well coordinated nation-state actors, intelligence agencies and propaganda machines - well funded, well financed and often well researched. One recourse for the Muslim is to lean into Luddite retreat. Cyberspace is simply inhospitable to Islam. Cyberspace is not a space that is commensurate with Islamic sensibilities and sentiment. It cannot be conquered, it cannot be redesigned or realigned. However, to concede the loss of cyberspace is for the believer to unwittingly concede the lack of one's own capacity to bear witness to God's Revelation in the Time that he has allotted to us. It also does not understand that the nature of statecraft, commerce, monetary activity and intellectual generation will primarily be cyber in the years to come. Action will inevitably be local, but the generative impulses for it can be done in online networks that recognize Muslim plurality as a feature and not a bug. Cyberspace will be contested by nation-state blocs, empires, corporations and radical private actors. It seems perplexing that some Muslims choose to abandon this field, nor even consider its utility in terms of formulating new political configurations centered around the Divine. Another alternative, is to use cyberspace as terrain for rehashing old battles because there is simply no imagination, vision or will to conceptualize New Islamicate futures. These debates in the past were not centrally generative of any real political project, but often relied on patronage from the Islamic Secular who envisioned a civlizational vision much larger than the often parochial concerns of the jurist-class. In this vision, the mimetic potential of cyber virality repackages marginal concerns of the ancient jurist-class into a mistaken centrality in the project of civilizational anchoring. For example the legality of the Mawlid occupies centrality in cyber-articulations of "Islamicness" - an odd and pathetic use of the potentials of digital discourse. Dawah Inc has catapulted a whole raft of wholly irrelevant concerns and granted them as somehow the be all and end all of civilizational renewal. It creates a class of Muslims who see the negotiation of such question as the be all and end all to the question of how Islam engages today and in the future. It fosters a false sense of a febrile zero sum game that gives rise to interesting psychopathologies. Both these approaches cocoon the believer from the realities of the age, it creates cognitive dissonance. It leads to a distorted sense of the heritage of all those who labored for Islamicate Sovereignty which if one mines the historical archives were a far more expansive set of actors than just the jurist-class. The Muslim modern is orphaned from the larger chain of those who worked towards Islamicate Sovereignty. This has created, whether the participants are aware of this or not - a profound sense of alienation for the vast majority of believers who are not invested in Dawah Inc or the ongoing attempts at self-preservation of a failing jurist-class that have been unduly burdened with unreasonable expectations packaged with responsibilities and obligations it is not equipped to deal with. It can be argued that in the past there was no expectation that the jurist-class was meant to be the generative site for renewal and configuration of new novel forms of political and social configuration. Fiqh was never in the business of culture-making the foundations for political order. The juristic class of course were relied upon to be a bedrock of stability in whatever political configuration was hashed out, contested and arrived at. At a basic level, today the impoverishment, weakness and humiliation of post-colonial Muslim states sparks a transhistorical sense of collective guilt and remorse which forges communal belonging that often boils down to "We can do better, we must do better". However, where do these believers turn to in between Luddites and Dawah Inc? Those who are not well versed in these arcane debates are somehow made to feel as if they have no real part to play in the story of Islamicate civilizations in this century and beyond. They do believe in the gaze of God, the promises of His Messenger ﷺ and the reality of the Last Day, but there is no sense of network or anchoring either in meatspace or cyber that allows them to labour in this cause without being caught up in baboonery. Much can and should also be said about other chasms in the Muslim attention-economy - ethno-narcissism, ghettoisation, perplexing nationalisms - perhaps for another time. So what is the state of the Muslim "attention-economy" so to speak? It is dire. We have lost potential networks of the Islamic Secular within cyber, that could have laboured towards Islamicate Sovereignty, that have as much an authentic role (indeed even more so) than the jurist-class or the Dawah Inc media market merchants. Fixing the attention-economy in cyber is necessary - dragging the timeline towards sanity away from delirium and perhaps most of all denial of the tasks at hand. And truly God knows best

The Iqra Files

Notes On Attention

Fixing the attention-economy in cyber is necessary - dragging the timeline towards sanity away from delirium and perhaps most of all denial of the ...