Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system—and then merge into it.¹

In....Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick described a utopian vision-a world of communities, each set up under its own rules, with members free to move among communities or start their own. Within the limits of cyberspace, that vision already exists in the form of mail groups and will exist, within a few decades, in the form of virtual communities. Each community will have its own rules, enforced by a single ultimate sanction: expulsion. The result will be a world defined by a single rule: freedom of association. Encryption is the essential defensive technology for such a world, the technology that gives individuals the power to set up and maintain virtual communities inhabited by willing citizens, whether or not other individuals, or governments, approve. Think of it as crypto-anarchy ²

This utopian vision of crypto-anarchy is what I contend is the logical extension of the Hallaqian critique of modernity which is quintessentially all about the technology of the State that has only been made possible because the culture of narcissism we inhabit provides the incentive to part with sensitive data. The parting with sensitive data to accumulate greater social standing is done with a zealous religious fervour that forms part of the communal and religious dimensions of liberalism, which I have elaborated on here.

What keeps liberalism going is Technology - it is the constant flow of sensitive data, information - seamlessly integrating private and public institutions, blurring and deliberately corroding the lines between civilian and military until it all becomes one cohesive organic whole with the Godhead of the Deep State firmly in control. The Deep State is not a conspiratorial cabal of sinister people (although spiritually they may well be) but rather is a critical component central to the longevity of the Liberal State. Electoral politics on its own is far too chaotic and at times messy to guarantee longevity for a political project. The genius of the liberal project is to allow electoral politics to be arena of competing trivial political passions whilst the Deep State in a very Fukuyaman sense continues the reign of History's End. Fukyama mentions it as explicitly as this in his paper on the topic, that having a competent bureaucracy autonomous and to some degree immune to the tussles of the public arena is necessary to keep the project going:

That bureaucracy necessarily operates independently of its political masters, however, since elected leaders cannot possibly specify the thousands of daily decisions that are needed to keep the government running. They delegate authority to bureaucrats, which is what we call bureaucratic autonomy.³

It is thus no surprise that in order to continue the long march of the State, that American Empire and its vassal states have launched another series of legislative attacks against encryption.⁴ These attempts have come broadly at a time that American Empire is trying to run damage control for the Israeli Genocide with Big Tech doing its bidding whilst also using it to perpetuate new forms of industrialised violence at a hitherto unprecedented scale. In conjunction with deploying these capabilities abroad, American Empire is now rushing to draft new forms of legislation that can be considered spiritual successors of the Patriot Act. These include wide ranging surveillance powers⁵ forcing privacy conscious companies to bend the knee on encrypted messaging and considering new forms of invasive financial surveillance. Surveillance is not an end in itself - surveillance allows for the harvesting of data at a massive scale to allow bureaucratic entities to centrally plan the next chapters of the liberal project. Without surveillance, it is not an understatement to suggest that the liberal project would collapse in on itself.

Julian Assange, is a present day cypherpunk currently being persecuted by American Empire who crystallises the importance of encryption:

Cryptography can protect not just the civil liberties and rights of individuals, but the sovereignty and independence of whole countries, solidarity between groups with common cause, and the project of global emancipation. It can be used to fight not just the tyranny of the state over the individual but the tyranny of the empire over smaller states.⁶

Encryption is what allows for genuine discourse - it allows participants to argue, debate and discuss without the prying eyes of the bureaucracies of the Deep State which invariably taken on a deeply militaristic bent often interlinked with intelligence agencies. The reality of the modern State today is far removed from the lofty academic critiques offered by religious traditionalists,⁷ Marxists⁸ or today's populist ethnonationalists like Orban who do not have a philosophical project as such but command significant electoral success - the critique which is most insightful is that offered by the cypherpunk. What is curious unlike say religious critiques of liberalism which are grounded in sophisticated theology and philosophy, the cypherpunk are more grounded describing the architecture and machinery of the State with unerring accuracy. What they lack in philosophical sophistication and theological training they make up for technical domain knowledge of how the State imposes its will today moving beyond the abstract and theoretical. For Muslims, I think there is something there in terms of the way our illustrious predecessors imagined the Self fundamentally differently - a project of continuous purification, edification through a complex set of patterned legal obligations couched with spiritual meaning - an example of this can be seen in the projects of numerous Muslim revivalists. ⁹

From a more profane perspective, lack of encryption capabilities for Muslim actors who invariably are pitted against wanton American militaristic expansion leaves them vulnerable to leaking metadata which allows for profiling and exposure to assassinations from the skies above.:

As the Snowden documents showed, during the Obama years, the National Security Agency’s global metadata surveillance program would geolocate a SIM card or handset of a suspect, and then the U.S. military would conduct drone strikes to kill the individual in possession of the device. “We kill people based on metadata,” said General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA. The NSA’s Geo Cell division was reported to use more colorful language: “We track ’em, you whack ’em ¹⁰

Invariably, the theatre of war will move towards digital forms. If there is any hope for genuine Muslim movements geared towards establishing Islamicate Sovereignty there has to be an end to the crippling addiction of the masses to the popular platforms of Big Tech which I've elaborated here are deeply immersed in the American war machine. There is no feasible scenario where Meta, Google and Amazon will allow for genuine Islamicate dissent and the development of organic online networks of resistance against American Empire. Sovereignty must be grounded in having infrastructure that you own, that is under your control and that you can deploy. Renting out the digital infrastructure of your foes is not a long term sustainable solution towards reanchoring the Islamicate.

And God knows best

Footnotes