A Culture of Death

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversion becomes a form of baby talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility.

In his seminal work Amusing Ourselves To Death, Postman tries to imagine what a "culture of death" would look like given the rapid adoption of centralized technologies by corporations not beholden to any shared conception of virtue. The epistemological reframing as souls as "audience" with the invariable connotations of business strategizing and algorithmic maximalisation undoes and undermines the potential for genuine conversation.

Islamic responses have tended towards forms of scepticism and digital uzla. These are necessary pushbacks to such a powerful culture but unlikely to inform the foundations of a renewed Islamicate civilization that must in one way or another confront the question of Technology. The Chinese have opted for a different form of technological expression, attempting structural independence from the American Surveillance State extension of Big Tech.

Purpose driven, virtuous expressions of Technology consistent with the idiosyncratic blend of fiqh, tasawwuf and muhasabah are possible but invariably will have to move away from algorithmically driven expressions of form.

At a very basic and fundamental level, Islamicate civilization is suited to being a text-based culture - and increasingly text, image, video, audio and more forms not even thought of yet will blend and coalesce. However, the basic layer of such a civilization is epistemic sovereignty - not just fuqaha and ulema, but "men of letters" - lay people with a background in secular education but an autodidactic/hobbyist interest in the Islamic sciences must compose their works independently. The choice of markdown text files in such a case with the use of an editor like Obsidian offers an opportunity.