Once we understand that a government is essentially an information-
processing network, Assange believes that we gain clarity about the nature
of contemporary political systems. For example, some defenders of
democratic government believe that mass surveillance—the act of
monitoring and recording the activity and communications of entire
regional, national, and global populations—is an aberration that can be
corrected through legislative reforms. But Assange’s cybernetic theory of the
state emphasizes the fact that governments cannot function effectively or
efficiently without total information awareness of their environment; thus,
mass surveillance is an integral component of the modern computational
state. Furthermore, the cybernetic state model is not bound by traditional
nation-state geographies, which is why Assange draws upon the work of
Harold Innis to argue that it is not only nation-state governments but
imperial governments that operate as computational networks. As one of the
founding intellectuals of communication studies, Innis (2008) argues that all
communication media have an inherent “bias” toward either time or space,
the former enabling temporal duration and the latter enabling geographic
extension of any given society.

In the work, Cypherpunk Ethics, Radical Ethics or Digital Age^[1], this passage above finds Anderson asserting that Assange fundamentally considers contemporary political systems as information processing networks. Moreover, he perceives the state as a cybernetic organism that can neither be viable nor function effectively without complete information awareness. Consequently, mass surveillance isn't an aberration but an integral component of the modern computational state.

It then logically follows that surveillance is neither a quirk nor an aberration of the liberal state but rather its very essence. Any legislative attempt to reform or halt it becomes an uphill battle. Within the legislative framework of the existing liberal state exists an allowance and an underlying superstructure that recognizes state surveillance as essential for the organism's functioning and more importantly as Fukuyama discusses - its longevity.

Therefore, any appeals to privacy become convoluted forms of intellectual gymnastics. They attempt to create a foreign conception of the individual and privacy that is unrecognizable, not only to enlightened thinkers but also to Sufi theoreticians. The latter conceive the dense Self within the Islamicate with a strong inclination towards mysticism and exemplary ethical behaviour.

Seeing that this is the adversary we are up against, working within the system seems destined to fail. The only remaining alternative, therefore, is to construct a new communication infrastructure from scratch. Such infrastructure should circumvent the panopticon of the computational or cybernetic state. In principle, this would require prioritizing cryptographic maximalism, a concept developed by computer scientists in the late 80s and early 90s to create encrypted communication channels impenetrable by governments.

This idea marks the starting point - or a significant part - of epistemic sovereignty. Given the political reality, one cannot realistically expect corporations like Google, or others under the American empire, to permit Islamic sovereignty to thrive. Moreover, attempting to build a competing network amid their digital infrastructure would undeniably set Muslims up for failure.

There are two interpretations of the cypherpunk commentary on the state mentioned in Anderson's book. One is May's crypto-anarchism, which frivolously suggests replacing the state with anarcho-capitalism. May's perspective denies the legitimacy or sovereignty of the state, replacing it instead with the market.

However, May's idea is flawed, mainly because the market is a state-dependent subsidiary. Without the state's military might, technological advantage, and Leviathan infrastructure, there wouldn't be coercive instruments to facilitate free trade and regulate the marketplace. As such, and for other reasons, I find May's concept of anarcho-capitalism naive.

Conversely, Assange's conception of crypto-justice upholds certain post-Enlightenment values, conceding that the state is a legitimate sovereign entity. However, Assange notes that a state can only exert authority when an informational symmetry exists between the citizen and the state. And he recognizes this is in part a utopian vision, but he counters this and tempers this with the idea that if you bring in cryptographic maximalism where you protect the citizen against the state by putting in place all these universal open protocols that provide privacy for the weak, for transparency for the powerful, then you can make the post-enlightenment model of the state viable. But again, this has problems as well. Hallaq talks about this in The Impossible State using Foucault as the fulcrum of his contention that if you do that, then that actually isn't the state any longer.

The state for it to be called a state in the post-enlightenment sense must have a complete monopolization and colonization of any space that could potentially provide an alternative locus of sovereignty, an alternative locus of existence.

I find both May and Assange unconvincing, even though there are quite a lot of useful insights in terms of how the world actually operates and how liberal states are actually these computational organisms bent on imposing cybernetic control.

Footnotes