2025-01-19 03:40:00
Attention is a unit of commerce, a commodity and weapon - it is all of this at once and more. In the canon of Islamicate Sufic authors, attention was at the core of spiritual rejuvenation. Attention and the gaze of man was meant to be directed to the Divine alone but man all too soon realized there were many ailments that poisoned the mind and body, preventing access to the Source. The authors of tasawwuf then in one sense were keen diagnosticians, aware of precognitive frames that hindered man to not fully utilize attention and direct it to where it needed to go.
To conquer the ailments and treat them was a far simpler task a century ago, perhaps even a decade or so ago. Now attention is increasingly anchored primarily in cyberspace, contested not merely by traditional typologies of spontaneous sin like lust and greed but well coordinated nation-state actors, intelligence agencies and propaganda machines - well funded, well financed and often well researched.
One recourse for the Muslim is to lean into Luddite retreat. Cyberspace is simply inhospitable to Islam. Cyberspace is not a space that is commensurate with Islamic sensibilities and sentiment. It cannot be conquered, it cannot be redesigned or realigned. However, to concede the loss of cyberspace is for the believer to unwittingly concede the lack of one's own capacity to bear witness to God's Revelation in the Time that he has allotted to us.
It also does not understand that the nature of statecraft, commerce, monetary activity and intellectual generation will primarily be cyber in the years to come. Action will inevitably be local, but the generative impulses for it can be done in online networks that recognize Muslim plurality as a feature and not a bug. Cyberspace will be contested by nation-state blocs, empires, corporations and radical private actors. It seems perplexing that some Muslims choose to abandon this field, nor even consider its utility in terms of formulating new political configurations centered around the Divine.
Another alternative, is to use cyberspace as terrain for rehashing old battles because there is simply no imagination, vision or will to conceptualize New Islamicate futures. These debates in the past were not centrally generative of any real political project, but often relied on patronage from the Islamic Secular who envisioned a civlizational vision much larger than the often parochial concerns of the jurist-class.
In this vision, the mimetic potential of cyber virality repackages marginal concerns of the ancient jurist-class into a mistaken centrality in the project of civilizational anchoring. For example the legality of the Mawlid occupies centrality in cyber-articulations of "Islamicness" - an odd and pathetic use of the potentials of digital discourse. Dawah Inc has catapulted a whole raft of wholly irrelevant concerns and granted them as somehow the be all and end all of civilizational renewal. It creates a class of Muslims who see the negotiation of such question as the be all and end all to the question of how Islam engages today and in the future. It fosters a false sense of a febrile zero sum game that gives rise to interesting psychopathologies.
Both these approaches cocoon the believer from the realities of the age, it creates cognitive dissonance. It leads to a distorted sense of the heritage of all those who labored for Islamicate Sovereignty which if one mines the historical archives were a far more expansive set of actors than just the jurist-class. The Muslim modern is orphaned from the larger chain of those who worked towards Islamicate Sovereignty.
This has created, whether the participants are aware of this or not - a profound sense of alienation for the vast majority of believers who are not invested in Dawah Inc or the ongoing attempts at self-preservation of a failing jurist-class that have been unduly burdened with unreasonable expectations packaged with responsibilities and obligations it is not equipped to deal with. It can be argued that in the past there was no expectation that the jurist-class was meant to be the generative site for renewal and configuration of new novel forms of political and social configuration. Fiqh was never in the business of culture-making the foundations for political order. The juristic class of course were relied upon to be a bedrock of stability in whatever political configuration was hashed out, contested and arrived at.
At a basic level, today the impoverishment, weakness and humiliation of post-colonial Muslim states sparks a transhistorical sense of collective guilt and remorse which forges communal belonging that often boils down to "We can do better, we must do better". However, where do these believers turn to in between Luddites and Dawah Inc?
Those who are not well versed in these arcane debates are somehow made to feel as if they have no real part to play in the story of Islamicate civilizations in this century and beyond. They do believe in the gaze of God, the promises of His Messenger ﷺ and the reality of the Last Day, but there is no sense of network or anchoring either in meatspace or cyber that allows them to labour in this cause without being caught up in baboonery.
Much can and should also be said about other chasms in the Muslim attention-economy - ethno-narcissism, ghettoisation, perplexing nationalisms - perhaps for another time.
So what is the state of the Muslim "attention-economy" so to speak? It is dire. We have lost potential networks of the Islamic Secular within cyber, that could have laboured towards Islamicate Sovereignty, that have as much an authentic role (indeed even more so) than the jurist-class or the Dawah Inc media market merchants. Fixing the attention-economy in cyber is necessary - dragging the timeline towards sanity away from delirium and perhaps most of all denial of the tasks at hand.
And truly God knows best
2025-01-18 13:54:00
Dear Bearblog neighbors,
I write today to confess that I, unlike many of you, am unfortunately a Bearblog maximalist.
Just this past week, I had an idea. It went like this:
I liked Katherine Yang's little thesis statements on the right side of her website, so I wanted to see if I could achieve something similar on Bearblog
Building off the short-form content feed, I experimented with styling posts as tiny notes on the side
It turned out pretty cute, and I thought, what's stopping me from making my whole homepage just a series of tiny notes? So I went ahead and built tiny notes everywhere
Then I thought, hey, this could be adapted into a Polaroid-style image gallery, and I went and built that as well
And then I thought, well, what if I don't want these to be feeds of separate posts, but simple Markdown lists? So I created Polaroid-style image gallery (static), tiny notes everywhere (static), and tiny notes on the side (static)
After all this, it became clear to me that there are so many ways we can style posts, notes, and images — so the next thing I'm going to do is clean this all up and set up a skeleton, a base that's easy to duplicate and customize
But this didn't end there. In addition to the above, I was curious if I could achieve a table of contents-style post list, the kind with leading dots, à la Manu's website. Voilà.
You see? I can't seem to stop.
What am I even going to do with all this? Probably nothing, but this was so much fun to build. I loved that this was all possible with out-of-the-box Bearblog features and some CSS.
I hope you will find it in your hearts to forgive me for my lack of restraint and inability to embrace the minimalist spirit of Bearblog.
Your neighbor,
Sylvia
2025-01-18 05:41:00
This past week was my first day back at work after the holiday break. Due to the nature of my work and being in between clients, I didn’t actually do much work in the traditional sense of hands on keyboard productivity. Instead, I ended up working on myself, which was a much needed reset.
When I’m building products for a client, I put 110% of myself into the work. No, that’s not a good thing. Especially for myself. In the past, I get so consumed by delivering and shipping these products that I lose parts of myself along the way.
This is exactly what happened to me over the past 7 months. I didn’t realize how burned out I was until I was already deep into it. It felt like treading water against the current, barely managing to keep my head above water. There were some okay days, but then there were really bad ones.
Now that I have some “free” time to reflect, I’m starting to acknowledge just how much I (consistently) put myself through.
This week, for the first time in months (maybe even years), I’ve been able to focus on me. It’s something I constantly struggle to prioritize when I’m in the thick of a project. My last stint was 13 months long, with only a month-long break before jumping into the chaos of the last 7 months.
This past week has been different (and good). I’ve made it to the gym every single day. My muscles are sore, my body is tired, but I know it’s grateful that I’m actually paying attention to it again. I’m running, biking, and lifting weights consistently (even if “consistent” right now means just sticking with it for the first 17 days of the year). It’s my attempt to build a routine that feels doable right now, even though there’s a huge chance these habits will fall apart once I join a new project again.
I think, right now, I’m also just trying to be more intentional about the kind of work I take on next. I don’t want to lose myself in the process again, but I’m still trying to figure out some sort of balance without outright turning down opportunities.
Let’s see how long it takes to find that next product to build. But also, let’s see if I can keep this focus on myself intact when that opportunity does come along.
If you'd like to comment, please send me an email, respond on any social media of mine you know, or sign my Guestbook.
Keenan: I’m proud of you for identifying how burnout has been affecting you. I realized way too late the toll it had taken on me.
I wonder how things would’ve been different had I learned to take a step back and breathe. I suppose I always thought “burnout” was a crash, an epic, fiery explosion, rather than a slow erosion of my ability and confidence and joy.
I appreciate how self-aware and hopeful this post is. Keep putting you first. :)
Binary Digit: +1 exactly what Keenan said, for myself! I'm glad you are focusing on yourself now <3
Damian: yay!! Go you!!!! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 That is important, good choice 😊
James Sweeting: Christmas 2024 was the first year in a long time that I completely took off. It was also the first time I wasn't ill in any way (most of my colleagues were ill though). Also like you I'm going to the gym, although I'm new at it so going 2-3 times a week at the moment. Rest and exercise are a great combo!
Scott Jones: Glad you took some time for you!
Alexandra Wolfe: Burnout is the worst, and 7 months in a high pressure situation? No wonder you’re running on empty. Definitely time to take charge and do not just take some me time, but a lot of me time.
Brandon: I’m so glad to hear you are taking some time for yourself. I burned myself out last year and I think I spent a year or two in that and it just about wrecked me. Take care of yourself first, always.
2025-01-18 02:46:00
I've been using Feeder to keep up with the news for awhile now. For a long time, I just checked AllSides.
But then I found out NPR in my state supports RSS, my local news org supports RSS, and YouTube even supports RSS!
One outlet I really like is GovTrack.us, and they did not support RSS - so I emailed them about it, and they added support.
Feeder's news website wasn't working with the Feeder app, so I emailed them and they fixed it.
I learned my State Senator's website supports RSS, but my state's GOP website does not - so I emailed the GOP asking for RSS. We'll see.
I emailed Ubisoft/Nadeo asking for RSS support on the Trackmania news website. They replied that they'll send the suggestion to dev team. We'll see.
I spoke at my Library's Board meeting last night asking for RSS support on their website. Seemed well-received. We'll see.
Substack supports RSS. Jurist.org supports RSS. Justia's supreme court summaries support RSS (I used to read those, but I don't any more). Blogger supports RSS.
So yeah - If you are interested in an organization's updates, then get a feed reader app, and subscribe to their feed on their website. If they don't have a feed, just ask them to add one!
You'll be surprised how nice it is to keep up with things you actually care about in a way that you're completely in control of, without bloat, without ads, without algorithms.
Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with. This can be video game news websites, government organizations, political news websites, entertainment platforms, blogs, or whatever.
2025-01-17 23:13:00
I am you, from another time, if you experienced all that I had; everything and everyone I have come to know.
Will you recognize yourself when you see me?
In 2022, I kept a daily log. In the morning I captured three things I was grateful for, and in the evening, three moments where I experienced happiness. The results were varied each day.
My morning logs were often skewed by my recent wakeful state. I wrote of sleep, the morning light, and of espresso. My nightly logs were much different. Sometimes there were pages rambling about the day, all the glimmers of joy. Others were clearly filled with frustration that I set this task for myself. "Did anything make me happy today?”
I tell you all this because I fully indulged in my person at that time. It served then as it serves now; a reminder of who I was, who I am, and who I have yet to be. A reminder of all things Anna.
These days I find myself thinking more consciously about who I am. Locked in the space of staticity, where I am both change and unchanged. I am not the person I was yesterday, not the person I was a year ago, not the person I was a minute ago. I am not the person who arrived twenty-three years ago, fresh in the world without the impact of experience.
Will you be able to recognize me when you see me?
xoxo anna
2025-01-17 15:05:00
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
-Confucius
I’ve made some good choices the past few weeks.
I made some decisions for the betterment of my health, and so far I’ve stuck with them. So, why am I struggling so hard right now? I have an idea.
Last year, was a year of growth for me. I wanted to break off the shackles of my past and try new things. I began exploring new hobbies, reading different books, and changing up how I approached things in my life. It was difficult at times, and not everything was a perfect fit, but I began my fortieth year on this Earth by trying to grow, instead of remaining stagnant.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve regressed. I found myself taking solace in the past. I started watching old movies, playing old video games, and doing anything I could to avoid the present. This always brings me temporary comfort, so much so, I named it 90s Therapy many years ago. 90s Therapy is when I surround myself with the past until I’m cheered up, or I overcome whatever funk I am dealing with by indulging on 80s and 90s nostalgia.
90s Therapy works in small doses, but it can also be dangerous for me, because that comfort I receive from the nostalgia can be too inviting. I’ll find myself not wanting to leave. So, I stop trying new things. I reach back in the past to find moments of happiness, but I also encounter moments of sadness and missed opportunities.
The problem with watching old movies is they can make you feel old. You realize the actors who played the characters you related to are now in their 70s or older. You start thinking about how it was just a few years ago that you saw that movie in theaters, and suddenly you realize it’s been twenty-three years ago. It forces you to face all of those uncomfortable truths and that can really break the illusion of comfort nostalgia can offer, and it can quickly turn depressing.
One other problem with looking for the past for comfort is sometimes the things that felt useful at twenty, are not useful at forty-one. You see the way people behaved, and you realize that maybe it was funny or cute then, but it doesn’t really apply to you today. This realization can create fissures between the past and the present, which can be as equally disruptive instead of comforting.
I remember chatting about this once with my friend Jennifer. I told her I wish I could just go back to the past and relive it all over, or recreate the past in the present. The yearning for this was troubling to me and causing me anxiety, and I remember her telling me, ”I love to look back on the past, but I’d never want to live there. That would be dangerous.” I think she was right. There is definitely a line you can cross where it becomes unhealthy. I think I’ve crossed it.
It’s 2 AM and I’ve been journaling and trying to work this all out. I think I finally have a grip on it. I’m going to try and get some sleep and tomorrow, I’m going to get up and consume some different media, maybe read a new Conan story or something. I’m going to create a new playlist, and I’m going to go for a walk. I have no illusion about being a perfect self-disciplined robot anymore, but I also don’t want to live in a fantasy that the world of 2000 was the peak of my existence. Well… maybe society was, but my life didn’t peak there, or at least it shouldn’t have.