The Fight for Survival in the Algorithm of the Nafs
Pt. 3 - Introduction of Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World
We are controlled today in this late stage of capitalism by monopolistic corporations keeping us constantly distracted as we are tethered to our desire machines of our phones, computers, digital watches, our virtual reality headsets, and our generative artificial intelligence chatbots. Our children’s lives are connected to what I call the algorithms of our nafs (desirous self) at earlier and earlier ages. Those of us who are just a bit older we remember life before these tethers (phones) emerged where we would go out for the day and not be pulled in many different directions by texting friends, by social media, by ideas of the internet, and our greatest desires that rule our lives - food, sex, sports, gambling, shopping, etc. Realities people of course have been addicted to for generations but not in the way that we can be now with all of our connected devices. These machines monitor our every movement in life, every step, every click, our every base desire, then these desire algorithms spit it all out for us as an endless feed of content. Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted right in front of you, don’t look away or you might miss something. The world burns around us, our children grow older, our families pass on, and these algorithms of our nafs keep us tethered to them as if they are actually giving us something besides dopamine addictions to this endless scrolling. How are we to live a spiritual life without shutting off these desire machines permanently?
The Situationist philosopher Guy Debord wrote about this world in a time even less filled with imagery and illusion based unrealities than our own in his classic book, The Society of the Spectacle,
“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation… The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated —and precisely for that reason — this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness, the unit it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation.”
Taken from a spiritual perspective, this separation is the goal of this death machine of colonialism / neo-colonialsim / US imperialism / Neoliberalism and globalized White supremacy as identity of the mono-culture of the internet age. When this spectacle of unity at the center of our lives, social media, creates deeply depressive isolation through the falsehood of a shared consciousness with globalized standards of beauty, identity, so called success, and ways of being and knowing all baked into it. This is what the rapper, Brother Ali has called, “the mass religion of the algorithm,” a reality that in some Silicon Valley tech circles is deified in a way through generative artificial intelligence as if these engineers are creating god. These ideas were represented on screen in the 2020 FX television show, Devs, created by the dystopian filmmaker Alex Garland.
In the brilliant documentarian, Adam Curtis’s film, Century of the Self he charts the emergence of the field of public relations and advertising led by Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Freud to show how Bernays used his uncles ideas of Westernized psychology to create advertising to turn humans into desire machines. This reality of advertising has today turned algorithmic as our desires constantly flow to us every time we pick up our phones throughout the day. The key difference between Bernays age and ours was he was creating advertising which were designed to create desires in consumers, our age of algorithmic based marketing is advertising that is responding to our own personal desires which is obviously much more powerful and dangerous. We search the internet for something or our phones listen to us saying that we want something in a conversation, this data is shared with advertisers through internet cookies and suddenly a few hours later we receive an advertisement for that very thing, what can seem like an unconscious form of magic, but of course a deeply scientific process designed through computer programming.
The world we live in now is much different than the one I grew up in during the emergence of the internet in the 1990s. Growing up as a young White man on the plains of Colorado in the suburbs of Denver as a teenager I would roll in bed at night sleepless with questions in my mind about my role in the world as I questioned every part of this reality I was presented through endless spectacle as imagined tradition. My racing mind would not stop as I questioned the meaning of life, I questioned the world I heard footnotes about in Hip Hop music versus what I was told about the world at school and by the media. These nights were often accompanied by the intoxicants of a westernized lifestyle as I would suddenly be woken up sober as could be. The drunk state of these intoxicants might seem fun while you are in that state, but it all comes crashing in within you heart as the false expansion becomes clear and the pain sets in. It was in these moments feeling the pain in my heart, that I first questioned this reality I was born into as a White Methodist United States citizen and the ways in which I was initiated into this existence through the culture of spectacle and the use of drugs, alcohol, and sex in dealing with trauma, pain, and loss. It’s a story for another time in explaining the full process of how I went from that pain in my heart, to standing in Mecca just a few years later praying that Allah heal my heart, open, and transform it to serving His divine realities.
In a world that placed the status of class, race, and gender in a secularized worldview of technological advancement and scientific progress as the only signs of achievement that matter it is not surprising then that a world stripped of spiritual meaning is a world filled with nothingness for many people with ever increasing rates of addiction, overdosing, and suicide. For our meaning in this material world, is only that which is right in front of us, so if we aren't successful in a material sense then we see our lives as a failure. How then are our families expected to be whole when the baseline conception of what it means to be human are so far removed from a holistic understanding of existence balanced between this worldly life, and the life beyond this existence.
For most people raised in this Westernized worldview our lives have three basic choices, do we seek in life truth, do we seek power, or do we crumble in the midst of these systems that wield so much power in our lives and numb ourselves to escape dealing with reality in any meaningful way. Most seek the baselines of power throughout their life in the midst of economic warfare that makes living so difficult that the majority of working class people work their entire lives not out of a love for their craft, but to simply survive. This question of power or truth is a trick question because in the context of coloniality, dealing with all the layers of remnants and realities of white settler colonial systems like the United States and Israel you must understand and attempt to deal with both. Power is so all encompassing in our lives today as the powerful control nearly every part of our lives, so the reality is we must deal with power, and understand it, for us to be able to seek the deeper realities and ultimate truths of our existence.
