By: ???
At some point, the anxiety that surrounds a pitiable state attaches to a myriad of things. It finds temporary succor in playing panegyrist to one movement or another; it recalls artifacts and imagines their current state according to old authorities; it searches for fictions of fixed proclamations and deliberate ontologies. But rarely does it do the more fruitful thing and act upon its frustration—not through personal prescriptions, but through collective and affirmative cultural incitement.
The question of purposefulness for each individual is not necessarily which activity within a hypothetical global feedback loop of revival is more valuable or worthy, but where within the loop purposeful immediacy lies. Local powers or willful agents of a counter-culture? The impression that one should forego the latter for the former, or even the former for the latter, is born more out of fatalistic performance than any true concern for revival.
This "counter-culture" distinguishes itself from Cyberspace-Islam’s "apologetic cultures," the temporary phenomena that serve as soft power for contained militants or political movements. It does so because the latter can serve no wider role in what should be a positive feedback loop that is supra any singular, local political moment. It is the intention of this essay, in dialogue with other SAIF works, to both review why agency within a counter-culture is significant enough to garner intentional exploration and describe a form that it should take.
Form
Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions—by their very existence as ideas—function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality. Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine…
— Nick Land
Many topics enthrall SAIF accounts—internet privacy, industrial policy, cryptocurrency, the decay of normative social systems, etc. All of them, however, flow from an actual primary interest, that being a hyperstitional Islamic culture. That is to say the myriad of topics that might arise out of the SAIF thesis are not the SAIF thesis itself but, first, fascinations born of the assertion that a culture, in obtaining sufficient escape velocity, might, by virtue of its own claims regarding the future, play a role in bringing about such a future. Second, they are labors of inquiry into what SAIF has ascertained to be the fruitful properties of said culture–for instance, the refusal to conflate between the technical and the inhuman, mirroring what Stiegler describes as the 20th century’s conservative revolutions’ disastrous conflation of technical and economic systems. Third, and most important as it regards the "form" of a project devoted to said culture, they are an essential consequence of how this phenomenon, deliberately promoted, must take shape.
Here it is vital that we separate the culture itself from the cultural-project intended to intensify it. The latter is an agent of the former but not equivalent to it. In being an agent of the former, however, it must establish certain premises to determine how best to empower the object of its attention. It should, for instance, consider cyberspace the basal terrain of a counter-cultural project and, for reasons that will be expounded upon in this article, the decentralized cyber-cult the form best positioned to overtake it. It is important that we define our usage of cult here. As used in this article, it intends a group concentrated around symbols, memes, developing aesthetics, lore, and signals of distinction. It also assumes a variety of internal interests, from art to ethics, that combine into a shared framework, even if said framework exists in a constant metaxy of development and stasis. It does not, however, entail concentration around a personality, lack of permeability, or strict hierarchy; especially because these very elements might undo the breadth of its own capacity.
As said, it is a cyber-cult and so presumes the wellspring of culture (however unsightly) to be cyberspace. But it chooses to approach culture in cyber-space as a global front, non-delineated, which can particularize into local forms as it moves through time from cyber and into "meat." One might also add that it operates with the precognition that what was once unlocalized cyberspace is now tending toward localizable splinternets, sovereign LLMs, and cloud feudalism, a structural observation significant to the properties of the culture it intends to serve.
Whenever this primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a prescientific or parascientific agency. And most important, it becomes impossible to understand the relations between science and technology, science and practice, because nomad science is not a simple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of these relations is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than from the point of view of royal science.
— Deleuze
In being both a decentralized and intentional agent, the cyber-cult operates as a swarm while affirming a primary symbol of hyperstitional settlement. Its decentralization allows it to respond to the subtle movements within the vectors it seeks to use and undermine. Thus, everything it does is based on function: no diagram predetermines its behavior, only a constant (non)movement between effective points. It acts in cyberspace as a Deleuzian religious war-machine, combining behaviors of the migrant and the nomad.This deliberate, un-diagrammed movement attends to a universal project (the aforementioned counter-culture), but does so entirely through dynamic means. It moves based on what is useful, evolves based on what is useful, produces leaders based on what is useful—every trajectory liable to abandonment for another. It acts this way because its settlement lies beyond history, in a place that does not yet exist. So though it might not be "nomadic," as a "migration" with a yet inaccessible destination, it acts, in a great many ways, akin to the nomad.
This cyber-cult is also expected to begin at the "Islamic" extremity—not as a measure of individual piety but as a mode of life fostering communal dissent. I refer primarily to the New World diaspora. The reasons are manifold: structural (this population’s capacity to entertain projects beyond survival) and sociological (based on a reading of a Bataillean sociology of expenditure, rooted in The Accursed Share, in dialogue with acceleration).
It is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury,’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.
— Bataille
Culture is a venture within a system’s self-amplification, the product of expended excess. For Bataille, this "general economy" was existential: it augured a final violence. During the Cold War, the question of "American excess," of where it would place its accursed share, which narrative it would choose to pursue in its burgeoning hegemony, was the question upon which the future itself relied—toward militarization or the rebuilding of Europe. Likewise, we too exist within the expenditure of a tumoric hegemony. And the quality of that expenditure in culture? Abject, hollow, devoid of values, tradition, or virtue; there is no narrative or even the capacity to narrativize. So encumbered by its own speed, by an accelerating, voracious appetite, that even the thought of deliberation has escaped the human architects of its material structure. The system arrives at excess faster, and expends it quicker.
Perhaps the rapid employment of excess, in a system of alternate logic, might consummate into genuinely human content. Currently, of course, it does not. The diaspora, however, might parasitize this process of expended-excess, creating a positive feedback loop that engenders a cyber-Islamic counter-culture. Arguably. this loop is already operational, though not yet concretized enough for casual observers to discern.
Examining the question of technical memory today means investigating the stage of generalized proletarianization induced by the spread of hypomnesic technologies.
— Stiegler
We might additionally suggest that the diaspora is suited to be the primary participant of the cyber-cult because it, of all Muslim populations, exists in a state of near-simultaneity with the process. And for the cult to take upon itself a universal character its early constituents must be furthest along. They must be the most disindividuated, as the process has gone on to produce proletarianization of a different kind, one that spares neither the producer or consumer.
We become proletariat of the mind. Day by day, men of all classes lose knowledge into an evolving hypomnesic architecture, the most obvious of which, of course, is AI. Labor of the muscle or the mind, everything has become data, and the pruners and cultivators of said data, no longer human. We are automated away by a thing that fundamentally lacks a logic other than its own momentum. This is a global phenomenon but one whose temporal cadence is spatially mediated. The Muslim diaspora, within the larger world of its co-confessionals, is at its horizon.
Desire
Of course, a prescript to become a cultural agent does not in and of itself describe the nature of the culture for which one should agitate or how such agitation should take place. So far, we might offer certain features we consider necessarily true of the hyperstitional culture. This returns us, in part, to our previous mention of space. It is a central assumption to the SAIF thesis that the 20th century’s Islamic politics, and its presumptions, are currently—if they have not always been—moot. That is not to say that it negates the need for an "Islamic Politic," but rather to say that the demarcation of an Islamic Politic separated from the politic of a human Other is gone. Islamic Politics is now, as in its essence it has always been, equivalent to Human Politics. The desire to preserve a Dar al-Islam as opposed to a Dar al-Kufr seems to no longer apply.
It is a bitter truth, however, that even if a Human-Islamic Politic be the content of our charge, its form, by virtue of the nature of its Inhuman Other, takes spatial shape in the world of bodies. In other words, the cultural vectors of radicalization that will emerge in cyberspace have as their physical-ends a Dar al-Insan that is a Dar al-Islam, and vice versa. It would be incorrect to even describe this "Dar" as a civilization in contrast to other civilizations, Faustian or otherwise, because it is itself a catalyst that reintroduces the possibility of civilizations-as-such. Not because all-space is completely eroded to an asymptotic inhumanity, but because all spaces, except the pockets that give rise to Muhammadan-refusal, are being pulled in such a direction.
Given this, SAIF asserts, as previously mentioned, that the only exit from the process exists in a deliberate participation, using its very sub-systems to conduct an Islamic cultural-exercise meant to inhere upon a presumed (and empirically discernible) propensity for Islamic, exceptional, symbolic revolt within the physical.
We believe that whatever remains of Humanity, as the process continues, becomes necessarily housed in the Muslim. Currently, however, this Muslim-Human containment is spontaneous, emergent—an intensification of a grumbling reality that expresses itself against an inhuman totality in pangs. It is the role of the cyber-cult to give it abstract structure, which opposes integral reality by way of an alternate diverse reality that refuses, affirmatively, the tenets of its opposite. That, again, intends a hyperstitional project, one that exclaims beyond history, just as Islamic local ruptures act from beyond history. It is to speak into existence a world entirely averse to a flat-unity, which we say/know must come forth from Dar al-Insan/Islam.
The culture also opposes, entirely, its malignant counter: the profanity of mono-culture, even the ridiculous notion of an Islamic-monoculture. We might entertain the nominal descriptor "Islamic culture," but it, itself, and the cult that serves it, refuses the notion that it could ever be so flat. Rather, it is defined by a limited set of properties, the most important of which is the centrality of Man’s relationship to Allah and its role as a ground for a multiplicity of local cultural forms which, in being substantively distinct enough, could engender alternate intra-Islamic approaches to technology. Again, "Islamic mono-culture" only returns us to the aforementioned fantasy of 20th-century Islamists: that there can be any distinction between Islamic politics and Human politics.
The culture also refuses objective-history, revival by form, and does not even acknowledge a world that can accommodate mathesis universalis. Rather, it asserts the human need for individuated collectives; it considers sacred an unending process of substantive, local human-cultures; and claims that where permeability exists, it must exist to supplement, not supplant. It is also tech-neutral, neither optimistic of our current technical direction nor pessimistic regarding the possibility of an alternate direction. As such, it does not do the machine the moral-injustice of placing upon it the enormity of human-error, because it takes to be unequivocally true that the hefty mandate, the worshipful prerogative, was thrust upon all of being—and only Man accepted it in its entirety. It therefore allows, in part, for Simondon’s contention: the possibility of a world wherein the tools that have dissolved the Anthropocene can likewise—themselves, or tools inspired by them—be used in its resurgence.
Misoneism directed against machines is not so much a hatred of novelty as it is a rejection of a strange or foreign reality. However, this strange or foreign being is still human, and a complete culture is one which enables us to discover the foreign or strange as human. Furthermore, the machine is the stranger; it is the stranger inside which something human is locked up, misunderstood, materialized, enslaved, and yet which nevertheless remains human all the same.
— Simondon
Its cyber-cult actively asserts, through swarm agitation and other means, the truth of reversibility—and, as such, becomes partisan against virtual reality. They aggress on behalf of the local, the particular, the possibility that intensification of the Muhammadan Man can, in accepting both spirit and machine, give life to an Islamic cosmotechnic which undoes the magnitudes that dominate both.
Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.
— Hui
Even in asserting the idea of an Islamic cosmotechnic, the cyber-cult asserts it as an Islamic cosmotechnical pluralism. Islam itself might act as a universal glue, but it does so for a real multiplicity.
Of course, simple agitation on behalf of these values must not be the sole activity of the cyber-cult. It needs to layer a genuine praxis that intensifies said values within cyber and the local spaces that offer receptive possibility. It might do so by:
- Producing platforms for the like-minded to form networks and engage in real-world efforts of their own.
- Highlighting and analyzing emergent and present local cultural-forms.
- Accruing and allocating resources to support productive local actors or agitate on their behalf.
- Investigating which spaces might be most receptive to articulating its values through housed institutions that act with a transnational mandate.
In fact,should do all of these things and we suspect it will do all of these things, because if it constrains itself solely to memetic disruption, it creates no tangible, internal referents from which to develop subsequent stages of its framework. This returns us to our earlier points on metaxy and a contradistinction to apologetic micro-cultures. The latter are undoubtedly organic, but they are products of an impermanent affective moment. They cannot engender sober internal mechanisms of reflection and evolution because they take on no effective form to begin with. The cyber-cult, by contrast, develops degrees of complexity and a growing arena of activities, but does so with functional purpose.
Therein lies what makes it most capable of acting on behalf of a hyperstitional culture. It does not agitate on behalf of a thing it considers settled and complete—for instance, the infantile assumption that some metaphysical school contains the secret to Islamic revival—nor does it claim, given both its commitment to multiplicity and a discovered aversion to such banality, a doctrine of its own as panacea. It is, rather, an intensifier and a researcher. It champions a burgeoning culture it knows to exist with certain qualities, while it seeks to ascertain its additional contours, the material structures it will require in its unfolding, and the nature of the local phenomena it could engender.
Because, ultimately, in its travels, its waterways are algorithms, and its destinations—discoveries that punctuate its counter-cultural journey—each of which will layer information on the map it exists to construct. In doing so, it offers its own cyber-space-time travel more precise direction, and to those physical personas engaged in a local symbolic challenge of their own, the opportunity to capitalize, build, and establish in ways consequent to its activity. During this, it is never finally settled—because once settled, it has achieved its primary aim: a world where it need not exist.