Notes On Digital Sovereignty

Crises have a habit of bringing to the fore uncomfortable and deep seated cracks in civilizational competence. Take for instance, one field that is becoming more and more pertinent as this century unfolds - digital/data sovereignty. For the last fifteen years or so, Muslims have been sleep walking en-masse in adopting Western produced software with systemically close relationships to American Empire and its Deep State - namely the products of Meta - Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp. Indeed, the entirety of Meta's infrastructure depends on patronage from the American Deep State, unencrypted networks of social interaction that are offered for "free" in exchange for providing information to the intelligence apparatus. The real interest in this gargantuan operation of data harvesting unparalleled in human history I suspect is to work towards some form of predictive policing. Indeed the lines between public and private are practically non-existent in the continued existence of Big Tech which at this moment in time has made the calculation that supporting American Empire is the surest way of guaranteeing its current network and market superiority. The price for using "free" apps like those from Google or the Meta empires is not monetary but it is much higher and arguably more precious - your inner-self that is algorithmically shipped into neat data to the servers of the American surveillance network.

I want to make it clear, in this day and age it is practically impossible to have anonymity in the true sense of the world. The window of opportunity to have a viable movement that prioritized digital anonymity well and truly passed us by probably sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. Yet, precautions must be taken, efforts made to migrate away at least from services and software that so openly and blatantly work in harmonious partnership with an Empire that has waged total war against Islam. Even if decentralization is now but just a pipedream of cypherpunk enthusiasts (who were right), and the Internet was always inevitably spiritually and philosophically geared towards centralization there are still serious questions about establishing Islamicate Sovereignty over large centralized networks and technological platforms. Also pragmatically there was always going to be a necessity to use such platforms for some period of time because of the access it granted to a global audience. Yet there should have been preparations to ultimately migrate and move away.

There were of course voices of dissent - a traditionalist if not outright neo-Luddite critique grounded in the work of Neil Postman's popularised by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, but this only ever appealed to a fringe and highly motivated segment of believers and it is questionable whether such a Neo-Luddite configuration is appropriate for a world religion and civilizational bloc such as Islam. Whilst Shaykh Hamza and the larger segment of ulema endowed with similar sensibilities raised issue with the spiritual and psychological illnesses that can spread due to unwitting social media adoption, the structural issues at hand went unexamined. Islamic realism would be to understand that the adoption of such technologies is all but inevitable - the more important questions to ask is who owns and controls your data and how do these parties deploy your own data against you? Whilst Sufi traditionalism offered compelling reasons for abstinence, digital minimalism and discipline there nevertheless remains and continues to remain a gaping hole for a robust Islamicate philosophy of technology and the conscious effort and networks within the community to design software and infrastructure suitable for the Online Islamicate.

As always whenever there is a catastrophe like the current Gaza Genocide, there is a period of a few weeks or months where a renewed sense of Islamicate civilizational consciousness engulfs large parts of the the global community of believers. Even nominal and secular Muslims feel the sense of urgency of trying to reach towards some sort of Sovereignty that at least can guard against the atrocities that we are witnessing right now.

With Al Jazeera we see an imperfect but nonetheless rare admirable attempt at forging genuine Islamicate Sovereignty in the realm of a legacy media outlet that rivals and competes with Deep State outlets like CNN or the BBC. Indeed, Qatar's wider projection of soft power in the context of trying to anchor itself as a space for Islamicate culture and intellectual activity has many lessons for all those concerned. Many Muslims are conscious about its culture war activism across its English language platforms that are incongruent with orthodox Islamic sensibilities but its presence on the international stage is welcome respite from the Five Eyes propaganda of the BBC and co.

For the Muslim diasporas those who have worked hard in the last twenty years or so to create institutions, media outlets on a wide range of Deep State platforms from Meta and Google now must think long and hard about their own sense of Digital Sovereignty in order to avoid being deplatformed, the risk of censorship and constant data harvesting. These are difficult questions with no easy solutions. Those who have successfully monetised their endeavours online, which then permitted them to scale up their operations and efforts - to make them slicker, more professional and effective will also have difficult questions to confront about the longevity of continuing Islamic advocacy on such platforms. There are alternatives to YouTube for instance Odysee, Rumble, or BitChute (also LBRY) to name a few. However, there is nothing really equivalent to Instagram or Facebook. X inevitably if Musk's continued Road to Damascus moment vis a vis Zionism continues will also become inhospitable at some point in the future, particularly as it partners up with Israeli intelligence. Difficult times lie ahead on this front.

The first step towards establishing any type of Digital Sovereignty is to consider migration away from infrastructure and networks that are saturated with malevolent surveillance deployed by American Empire - there must be a simple recognition that anything sustainable from an Islamic perspective cannot be built on the platforms of Meta, Google or Amazon. Inevitably, if you are targeting long term, multi-generational civilizational efforts in the digital domain you need to own your own parallel network. For better or worse, the Chinese with that monstrosity of an "everything app" - WeChat understand this and have not shied away from creating a parallel Chinese Internet that has its own civilizational character. The Chinese have opted for a techno-nationalism because there was an understanding that building on top of the infrastructure of your enemies is suicide. At this point I have to point out that the current trajectory and state of the Chinese Internet is something I do not think is congruent with Islamic sensibilities or sentiments given ours is a decentralized, polycentric civilizational order outside of anything remotely resembling the modern nation state that was comfortable with ambiguity and diversity. And yet I do not see a long term feasible alternative.

Ibn Maghrebi

And God knows best