Ribā, Robots, and the Panopticon

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It’s not just Muslims feeling the gaze of Big Brother these days: it seems everyone everywhere all the time is feeling like we’re all under the every-increasing watchful eye of the Surveillance State. There is no veil from this surveillance. So how should we as Muslims feel about this and what might we do about it?

Build It Local & Live Off the Land

I know this sounds more like a fantasy or an idea, something you’d see on YouTube with someone living an ideal and charming life “off-the-grid” in a van. But after my experience building my own OCR AI tool using Qwen, a tool which runs locally on my laptop, this might be an opportunity for Muslims to explore the open-source space and stake out our claim.

We cover this and more in Episode 51 of the Middle Ground Podcast.

Here’s some items of interest we think you might want to explore:

• deflock.org: an open-source project mapping license plate readers.
• Rialto police make late-night TV thanks to irresponsible surveillance (warning some profanity).
• What is a panopticon? We thought you’d never ask!
• For more info on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) app (an AI design pattern that improves large language model [LLM] accuracy by fetching relevant facts from external sources such as PDF’s) that I’ve built, watch this video:

• Islamic Economics as an answer to the ribā/usury/ vs. mutual-risk/muʿāmalāt model. Let’s move away from a casino economy.
• Elevate your critique: Muslims, including myself, have been shouting “western!, western!” from the rooftops for God knows how long but we’ve got to elevate our critique because in many ways the world quietly moved past our static critiques, stealthily creating a world which is completely western: the only difference now is to which degree of westerness are we talking about?