Politics is being swallowed up by techno-corporate totalitarianism; Anish Mohammed tells ILNA

Anish Mohammed is an accomplished an multidisciplinarian who has worked as medical doctor, bioinformatician, strategy consultant, blockchain researcher and cryptographer . He has spend first half his career researching cryptographic algorithms and protocols at three different research groups. His research interests include Zero Knowledge Proof systems, Privacy Preserving Machine Learning and Ethics of AI. He has been involved in designing or auditing half a dozen blockchain protocols and more than a dozen distributed applications.He was also an early advisor to Ripple and  reviewer of Ethereum Swarm Orange paper . He is cofounder and CTO of Panther Protocol and an adjutant faculty at Harbour Space. Below is ILNA's interview with this distinguished figure about latest developments in Jullian Assange extradition case.

ILNA: The extradition order of Julian Assange was finally signed by the British Home Secretary. Can it be said that the British government's signature on the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder is a death sentence for radical journalism?

What happened with extradition order of Assange is more than  that. Western governments showed us their double standards, that they are just as vindictive and uncaring of human rights and the principles of privacy as the regimes they like to criticise. We should all be concerned about this, because when the pretense is gone (as it did through Trump in America) the political games are going to change. We have to develop the concepts and tools to understand it.

Radical journalism as a phrase has to be made a bit clearer. I don’t think that there is a journalism going back to the roots of journalism or making a break with it. I also don’t think that there is any journalism going to the roots of the political systems, because then it can’t be journalism, but political philosophy. So what I would like to insist is that journalism is an activity with an interest in the politics of the present time. It works within a window of time. We can make something radical with it, if it is combined with political philosophy, which is what you are doing here.

ILNA: Perhaps one of the most important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks and Assange story was that our unfreedom is most dangerous when it is experienced as the very medium of our freedom. Is this is how fascism which smells like democracy really operates today?

I see what you mean here. This situation of “unfreedom” was made acceptable a long time ago when Islamophobia was unleashed as state policy and terms like “clash of civilisations” began to dominate state theory. But the relation between democratic appearances (of elections and a somewhat free media) and real fascisms creating those appearances through primarily technologies is not very clear yet. At least philosophers and social scientists are not going there. With Shaj Mohan I wrote something on the status of the principle of reason today. In it we said that, when we accept machines and the authorities which own these machine systems to give us the reasons for our actions we are in something worse than fascism. The way beyond is to re-possess the principle of reason. That is, people have to be courageous to say that they will act on the important issues of politics only when there is a rational discussion which is satisfying.

ILNA: The bodies of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, who had been missing for more than a week in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, were found on about a few days ago. Today, more than ever, we seem to be confronted with a single slogan from around the world: "If you even peep into the sensitive issues that upset the rotation of capital or the political balance, you are done for and no one can help you." Can it be said that today's battle is a fight against new forms of control and regulation of our lives, which are much more efficient than the old 'totalitarian' ways?

 Absolutely! As we discussed earlier, we are not confronted with the old fashioned fascism. Our privacy, freedom and rights are threatened by something worse. I am a cryptographer and a medical doctor who spends most of his time working in the field of privacy and blockchain. From that expertise I can tell you that soon a new set of regulations will appear which will say that the technological control of your body is essential for your health, and should you refuse the continuous technical control of your body then you will not be given admission into ‘normal’ society. People are getting trained into it already with health monitoring wearables and apps.

Now, how do we fight it. Again I will say this, only a new philosophical understanding of politics can help, which will require that the good philosophers (those who are the masters of that discipline) should work with the good people of other disciplines. You need to challenge the epistemology and the fundamentals of these technologies of dominance. But not just challenge, there has to be a new way of understanding our relation to the world and also of the divine without trivialising the divine. As far as I know Shaj Mohan is doing just that, because is he is in fact someone trained in philosophy, economics, and computation. Let me quote him here, “in this moment of the crisis of the earth, to be a philosopher is to be the one who is held in the gaze of the stone”^.1 We talk about radical. But are we ready to be this radical? That is the question

ILNA: Are figures like Assange pursuing an impossible dream? Is there any hope that we will see a tangible change in the wake of these tragic events?

 I have to say that Assange is something very unique, both as a person and as a cultural phenomenon. I wrote about it a long time ago, titled “The New Secret”^.2But to put it quickly, Assange is someone who walked through the different periods our history while remaining almost the same person. Assange was made in the era when technology was being seen as the vehicle of freedom and new politics, the era of crypto-punk. When that person walked into a, then developing, world of technologised control of politics in the first decade of 2000s it created unusual effects. Assange showed that the old dream of freedom through technology is over. Today Assange is still the same person, but the technical control of the world is now going outside politics. Politics is being swallowed up by techno-corporate totalitarianism. So, he is the living reminder of the possibilities we lost.

Interview by: Kamran Baradaran

Edited by: Azadeh Keshvardoust