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Writing, The Hidden Fear in Academic Writing: Why We Can’t Stop Showing Off

There’s something peculiar about the way academics approach writing that nobody likes to discuss: We’re terrified of getting straight to the point. This isn’t about writer’s block or imposter syndrome – those topics have been analyzed to death. No, this is about a deeper psychological pattern I noticed while teaching academic writing: We treat every piece of writing as if it were a defense against invisible critics.

Watch any academic write and you’ll see this defensive behavior in action. Before making even the smallest claim, they’ll build elaborate fortifications of citations. Before presenting their actual insight, they’ll construct vast moats of literature review. It’s as if there’s an imaginary committee standing over their shoulder, ready to pounce on any undefended statement. “But what about this 1973 paper?” the phantom critic whispers. “Haven’t you read the German scholarship?” another ghost mutters disapprovingly.

This defensive posture creates a bizarre paradox. The more expertise we gain, the more we feel compelled to demonstrate that expertise before getting to our point. It’s like we’re stuck in an endless job interview, constantly proving our qualifications to an invisible hiring committee. As one senior professor confided, “I know more than I did twenty years ago, but I feel less confident making direct statements without first showing all my work.”

It’s like writing from fear rather than purpose. The irony is that this defensive writing actually undermines our credibility rather than protecting it. When we lead with elaborate displays of knowledge, we signal insecurity rather than authority. It’s like starting every conversation by listing our degrees and publications – technically impressive, but deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved.

What makes this pattern so resistant to change? Partly, it’s because academia rewards this behavior in subtle ways. Papers that display comprehensive knowledge tend to be seen as “thorough” while direct arguments can be dismissed as “superficial.” But there’s also something more personal at work. Many academics were the smart kids in school, the ones who gained approval through displaying knowledge. We’ve internalized the idea that our value lies in showing what we know rather than in contributing to understanding.

The solution isn’t to abandon scholarly rigor or stop citing relevant work. It’s to recognize that our defensive writing habits come from fear rather than necessity. Our readers aren’t looking for proof of our credentials – they’re looking for contributions to their understanding. They don’t need us to prove we belong in the conversation. They need us to advance the conversation.

Maybe it’s time to write as if we belong, rather than as if we’re constantly applying for membership in the academic club.

Writing, The Art of First Paragraphs: What We Learn When Students Review Each Other’s Writing

Today, I ran a peer review session for “Writing the Middle East for Your Daily Read.” The setup was simple: Students exchanged their papers and read just the first few paragraphs. What emerged was a fascinating pattern that writing teachers see constantly but students rarely notice until it’s pointed out.

Most academic papers start with what I call the “knowledge display dance” – a carefully choreographed sequence where writers demonstrate everything they’ve learned before getting to their actual point. It’s perfectly understandable: After weeks of research, we want to show we’ve done our homework. We lead with broad historical backgrounds, throw in a few scholarly references, maybe add some definitions. One student captured it perfectly: “I feel like I need to prove I know what I’m talking about before I can talk about it.” The problem? Readers don’t particularly care what we know. They care about what they might learn that matters to them.

This disconnect became obvious during our review session. When asked what the papers were trying to communicate, readers could identify topics but struggled to articulate why these topics mattered. “It’s about exhibitions of the Middle East in Berlin” one student said, “but I’m not sure why I should care about this.” Another noted, “There’s clearly deep research here, but I had to read three paragraphs before I understood why this research might be important.” This pattern showed up in nearly every paper: Writers leading with their knowledge rather than their contribution.

This happens a lot in academic writing how we usually teach it or require it in university settings. Students learn to write by showing teachers they’ve understood the material. This works perfectly well in school, where the reader (the teacher) is paid to care about your display of knowledge. But academic writing serves a different function – it helps readers understand something better that they already want to understand well. The shift from showing knowledge to serving readers is one of the hardest transitions for academic writers to make.

The review session revealed another common pattern: the “safety blanket introduction.” Writers tend to open with broad, historically sweeping or general statements that feel safe and inarguable. “Trade has been central to human civilization since ancient times.” “Scholars have long debated the role of women in medieval Islamic societies.” These openings feel scholarly, but they actually distance readers from what makes the work interesting. When we asked students in previous semesters to identify what made them want to keep reading, not a single person mentioned these broad openings. Instead, they pointed to moments where papers surfaced specific tensions or challenges in our understanding.

What makes this pattern so persistent? Partly, it’s habit – we write what we’ve read. But there’s also an element of academic imposter syndrome at work. Starting with broad knowledge displays and historical sweeps feels safer than leading with our specific intervention. It’s easier to hide behind other scholars’ work than to stand behind our own contribution.

The good news is that awareness of these patterns is the first step to breaking them. Once students could see how their writing reflected these unconscious habits, they began to imagine different approaches. “What if I started with the problem my research addresses?” one student suggested. “Maybe I could open with the specific question that drove my research,” said another, or “Maybe I could use a personal story.” These insights didn’t come from me lecturing about writing techniques – they emerged naturally from students seeing their work through others’ eyes.

The next challenge will be helping students move from awareness to action. But that’s a topic for another post.

Explorations, Beyond Location: Rethinking Cultural Heritage in an Age of Global Flows

When Nefertiti gazes out from her vitrine in Berlin’s Neues Museum, where exactly is she looking? To Egypt, her place of origin? To the thousands of tourists snapping photos? Or perhaps to a future where questions of cultural heritage transcend our obsession with fixed locations? Her presence in Berlin has sparked decades of controversy, yet the very terms of this debate might be outdated in our era of global cultural flows.

For decades, debates about cultural heritage have been stuck in a geographical tug-of-war. Should the Parthenon Marbles return to Athens? Must Nefertiti go back to Cairo? These questions assume that cultural objects belong in specific places – that somewhere, somehow, there’s a “right” location that would resolve complex historical entanglements. This thinking reflects a certain “fetishism of place” – our tendency to bind cultural meaning to fixed geographical locations, even as global flows of people, media, and ideas increasingly challenge such static notions.

Consider Berlin’s Şehitlik Mosque. Is it a piece of Turkey transplanted to Neukölln, or is it creating something entirely new? Men drinking tea in its courtyard, are they preserving a static tradition – or are they actively crafting new forms of religious and cultural practice in a transnational space? Similarly, when manuscripts from Damascus, Baghdad, and Isfahan are digitized in the Qalamos Project, they don’t simply move from physical to digital space – they enter new networks of meaning and interpretation. These spaces exemplify what might be called “cosmopolitan realism” – the recognition that cultural practices and identities are increasingly shaped by global connections rather than local rootedness alone.

Our traditional vocabulary of cultural heritage – focused on ownership, location, and authenticity – emerged in a world of nation-states and fixed boundaries. But today’s cultural flows refuse to respect these neat categories. A Syrian artist in Berlin creates works that are simultaneously local and global. A digital archive in Germany makes Persian manuscripts accessible to scholars in Tehran and Texas alike. The stumbling stones (Stolpersteine) scattered through Berlin’s streets mark absences that connect multiple geographical points into networks of memory. These aren’t just isolated examples but indicators of a fundamental shift in how cultural heritage operates in contemporary society.

The implications are profound. Rather than asking where cultural heritage should be located, we might ask how it moves and transforms. Instead of treating cultural artifacts as fixed objects with single “homes,” we could recognize them as nodes in complex networks of meaning and memory. This shift requires new frameworks for preservation and interpretation that acknowledge the multiply-situated nature of cultural heritage in our interconnected world.

Take the Jewish Museum Berlin, which offers an unexpected model for this new approach. Rather than simply displaying artifacts, it creates spaces that make visitors physically experience displacement and disorientation. Through Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, the museum suggests that understanding cultural heritage might require us to leave behind our comfortable assumptions about place and belonging. The building itself becomes a metaphor for how cultural memory operates in a globalized world – through disruption, connection, and transformation rather than static preservation.

This doesn’t mean ignoring histories of colonialism or dismissing claims for restitution. Rather, it means recognizing that cultural heritage in our globalized world might need new frameworks altogether. Instead of asking “Where does this belong?” we might ask “What connections does this enable?” Instead of “Whose heritage is this?” we might consider “What conversations does this start?” These questions open up new possibilities for how we understand and engage with cultural heritage.

Back in the Neues Museum, Nefertiti’s gaze takes on new meaning. Perhaps she’s not looking in any single direction but rather witnessing how cultural heritage in the 21st century refuses to stay put – flowing across borders, spawning digital copies, generating new meanings, and creating unexpected connections. As global flows intensify, her presence in Berlin becomes less about ownership and more about the possibilities and challenges of cultural heritage in an interconnected world.

The challenge, then, isn’t simply to determine where objects belong, but to understand how they, and the practices they embody, help us navigate a world where meaning and memory flow in multiple directions at once. In this light, Berlin’s memory institutions become not just repositories of the past but laboratories for understanding how cultural heritage works in an age of global flows – sites where we can begin to imagine new ways of preserving and sharing culture that reflect our interconnected reality.


VM

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ai and the Middle East, Reaching for the Stars: The Middle East’s Celestial Ambitions and Archaeologies

As billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk pursue their ruthlessly ambitious visions of space colonization and off-world mining, they cast these endeavors as an escape from the limitations and “stasis” afflicting Earth. Yet their rhetoric echoes earlier epochs of extractivism and settler colonialism that have indelibly shaped the Middle East. What if we viewed the “new space race” not just through the Silicon Valley technoscientific imaginary, but through the region’s own rich astronomical legacies, cultural cosmologies, and fraught histories with colonial expansionism?

The Islamic Golden Age witnessed influential pioneers like al-Biruni, who calculated the radius of the Earth to a startling degree of precision, and Ibn al-Shatir, whose modeling of the solar system improved on Ptolemy’s geocentric theories. This continued a tradition of engaging with the cosmos that stretched back to prehistoric astronomical sites like Göbekli Tepe and Chogha Zanbil’s remarkable 5,000-year-old ziggurat. Al-Battani, another key figure, made significant advancements in trigonometry and astronomy, laying the groundwork for future space exploration. Such achievements laid foundations for subsequent space science and exploration, providing a rich heritage that informs current Middle Eastern initiatives.

Today, nations across the Middle East pursue ambitious space programs as symbols of technological ascendance and economic diversification. The UAE’s Hope Probe, which entered Mars’ orbit in February 2021, marked a significant milestone as the first Arab mission to another planet. Turkey’s Turksat satellites enhance communications infrastructure, supporting everything from broadcasting to internet services. Iran’s Simorgh rocket has successfully launched domestic satellites, despite international sanctions and geopolitical tensions. Israel’s private SpaceIL venture, which aimed for the Moon with its Beresheet lander, demonstrated the potential of non-state actors in the space race. Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan University operates a nanosatellite program, emphasizing education and innovation in space technologies.

Yet these high-profile endeavors also provoke polarizing debates around priorities and justice. Immense state resources funnel into the astronomic budgets and infrastructures for space exploration in countries still mired in poverty, conflict, and gender inequality. For instance, the UAE’s Mars mission is estimated to have cost around $200 million, a significant investment for a nation with ongoing socioeconomic challenges. Critics argue that such funds could address pressing issues like healthcare, education, and housing. However, proponents claim that these space programs drive technological innovation, economic growth, and national prestige.

There are also complex threads interweaving space activities with regional security dilemmas and geopolitical contests for primacy. The same rocket technologies enabling satellite launches stoke fears of latent weapons delivery systems. Iran’s space program, for example, has faced scrutiny from the international community over concerns that its advancements in rocket technology could be repurposed for military use. International governance regimes aimed at limiting proliferation, such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), could constrain national space ambitions. Rivals like Iran and Saudi Arabia beam signals of their technological capabilities through duelling spacecraft reveals, showcasing their advancements in a highly competitive geopolitical landscape.

Moreover, histories of colonial occupation, extractivism, and territorial conquest loom over contemporary space ventures in the region. The ostensible ability of whichever power “gets there first” to lay claim to celestial resources evokes traumas perpetuated by European and Ottoman expansionist projects. From Palestine to Western Sahara, the settler-colonial quest to “empty lands” is scorched into the Middle Eastern consciousness. This historical context adds a layer of complexity to current space endeavors, as nations grapple with the ethical implications of space exploration and resource extraction.

Space activity also carries weighty environmental repercussions that disproportionately impact the arid climate. Intensifying launches deposit particulates and greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere, contributing to climate change. The UAE, for example, conducted several rocket launches in a short period, raising concerns about the cumulative environmental impact. Accumulating orbital debris shrouds the night sky, posing risks to both current and future space missions. On an overheating planet farmed for its last drops of oil, water, and lithium, venturing outwards may seem like an escape, but it risks replicating destructive patterns of resource exploitation and environmental degradation.

Speculative writers like Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari and Mustafa Mahmoud offer Islamic visions of space exploration rooted in traditions of itinerant curiosity and contemplations of divine creation. The Quran metaphorically lauds those who “ponder the creation of the heavens and earth” and celebrates knowledge. Yet there are also warnings against transcending human limits and ethical guardrails through vain conquest. These cultural and religious perspectives provide a rich tapestry of thought that can inform a more holistic approach to space exploration.

Perhaps, ultimately, the quest is less for escaping earthly confines and more for addressing the mindsets and forces driving humanity towards those seeming limits in the first place. From the region’s foundation as a cradle of celestial investigation, a Middle Eastern space ethics and jurisprudence of the cosmos could emerge. One expanding humanity’s eco-spiritual consciousness rather than its footprint, rehabilitating outer space as a true common heritage before it is irrevocably enclosed. This approach would honor the region’s historical legacies while addressing contemporary challenges, offering a vision of space exploration that is inclusive, ethical, and sustainable.

ai and the Middle East, The Algorithmic Ghosts of Empires Past

When we talk about artificial intelligence in the Middle East, we cannot untangle it from the region’s long and tumultuous history with power – the lingering spectres of colonialism, the brutalities of military occupation, the revolving hierarchies of ethnic and sectarian oppression. AI does not exist in a vacuum, but rather gets shaped by and shapes these age-old dynamics of domination and resistance.

Look closer at the AI systems being deployed across the Middle East and you’ll find the fingerprints of former empires still present. The very data mills that feed the machine learning models often mine their training examples from repositories of orientalist archives, anthropological texts, and multimedia propaganda pieces – relics riddled with colonial lenses and racist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.

Predictive policing algorithms promised to fight crime then criminalize entire communities based on their names or neighborhoods. Computer vision models struggle to recognize Arab faces without first associating them with stereotypes of violence and terror. Even the language models representing the region’s rich dialects and scripts remain sorely lacking, a statistical echo of centuries of epistemic oppression and alienation from knowledge creation.

But AI is not just an inheritor of bias from the past – it has become a powerful new frontier for authoritarianism and social control. Across capitals like Riyadh, Cairo, and Istanbul, regimes are turning to AI-enabled surveillance and censorship tools to identify dissidents, curtail online freedoms, and systematize discrimination against minorities. An entire AI-assisted architecture of oppression is being erected on the ruins of the Arab Spring’s dashed dreams.

From the deserts of Jordan where destructive mining for AI’s rare earth minerals is starting anew, to the drone warzones flickering with the code of lethal autonomous systems, the Middle East is being remapped as a region of perpetual extraction, exploitation and experimentation. Its people’s biometrics, locations, messages and emotions ingested as mere training data by Orwellian security states. Its bodies, spaces and resources terraformed to quench machine learning’s infinite thirst.

Some argue that the solution lies in democratizing AI capabilities, empowering local communities to develop and steward these systems themselves rather than be subjugated by outside tech powers. But such an agenda will require decolonizing the entire field – dismantling not just AI’s racist code but its deeper civilizational shackles to empire, capital and cultural erasure.

Because in the end, the battle over artificial intelligence in the Middle East is ultimately about narrative power – about whose experiences and worldviews get embedded into this world-shaping technology and whose are disappeared into the ether. It is a battle over the right to not just be seen and heard, but to dream new futures unbounded by the dogmas of machines designed to entrap.

Can we let AI become the latest tool for dehumanization and authoritarian control? Can we treat its harms as some unforeseen malfunction when they are so intricately pre-coded into its colonial logics? The age of powerful ethical scrutiny of AI’s impacts and politics, especially but not only in the Middle East is overdue.


Thought-provoking question:

If AI systems are so deeply rooted in colonial power structures and racist ideologies about the Middle East, can they ever be “truly” decolonized – and what would that even mean? –and democratized to represent diverse Middle Eastern, Arab, Turkish, Islamic, Yezidi, …, perspectives and experiences?

Or is reimagining an entirely new paradigm of humane and just artificial intelligence required – one not birthed from the epics of Western empire?

ai and the Middle East, Can the Middle East Develop an Indigenous AI Ecosystem Beyond Western Framings?

As artificial intelligence emerges as a transformative force reshaping societies and economies, a crucial question arises: How will the Middle East, with its rich diversity of cultures, histories and knowledge traditions, engage with and influence the development trajectories of this powerful technology?

From the outset, it’s important to recognize that the origins of contemporary AI have been heavily shaped by Western military priorities, corporate interests and Enlightenment ideals of rational calculation. The major breakthroughs powering today’s AI boom – from machine learning algorithms to massive language models – have their roots in research agendas cultivated by U.S. defense laboratories and tech behemoths. This framing of AI as an instrument of centralized power and social control represents a direct inheritance of the region’s colonial histories.

Yet, the Middle East is no mere recipient of externally-imposed technological narratives. Across its mosaic of nations and communities lie pluralistic wellsprings of knowledge that could catalyze alternative conceptualizations of artificial intelligence – ones grounded in localized contexts, value systems and lived experiences. These counter-narratives hold immense potential to not just develop indigenous AI capabilities, but to fundamentally reshape how we perceive the role of AI in service of more socially-conscious visions of progress.

Take, for instance, the ethical philosophies and jurisprudential traditions within the Islamic world that champion ideals of justice, human dignity and public welfare. What might a framework of “Sharia AI” look like if it prioritized these virtues over the encoded biases and profit motives of dominant AI systems? Emerging initiatives exploring the intersection of Islamic ethics and AI governance in places like Saudi Arabia and the UAE could provide crucial ethical guardrails for new AI systems centering human flourishing.

The region’s rich literary canons and linguistic heritages also offer radical new possibilities. The metaphoric expressiveness of Persian poetry, the complex semantics of Arabic, and the oral storytelling customs across the Levant and North Africa could all spark novel approaches to areas like creative language modeling and multi-modal AI – ones that move beyond reductive, decontextualized statistical representations. Advances in natural language AI grounded in these pluralistic knowledge systems may pioneer more nuanced, culturally-aware AI assistants and interfaces.

Furthermore, postcolonial thought emerging from Middle Eastern diasporas holds immense analytical power in deconstructing AI’s insidious reinforcement of power hierarchies and systemic inequities. Critiques interrogating how AI encodes Western epistemologies of extraction, surveillance and domination over subaltern populations are already surfacing. These contextualized lenses are vital for developing AI systems explicitly designed to resist oppressive dynamics and structural marginalization.

Of course, catalyzing a more pluralistic regional AI ecosystem will require confronting immense challenges around access, infrastructure and governance complexities. Bridging socioeconomic and gender divides to democratize AI capabilities must remain a priority. Defusing AI’s potential to exacerbate geopolitical conflicts and sectarian tensions through transparency and stakeholder engagement is paramount. And maintaining robustness against adversarial use of AI systems by both state and non-state actors will need clear ethical redlines.

Yet the Middle East’s heterodox knowledge systems, if harnessed judiciously, present a generative catalyst to reimagine AI beyond its Western military-industrial baggage. As this technology continues rapidly reshaping our world, the unique histories and futurist visions emanating from this cradle of civilizations could be vital in steering AI towards more pluralistic, equitable and human-centered trajectories that serve all peoples and societies.

In this pursuit, we must wrestle with a crucial inquiry: How can the Middle East’s diversity of traditional knowledge frameworks converge to shape an AI paradigm grounded in shared regional values of human dignity, socioeconomic justice and pluralistic co-existence? The answers may catalyze a renaissance in artificial intelligence.

ai and the Middle East, Echoes of Extraction: Middle Eastern Perspectives on AI’s Earthly Costs

In her eye-opening “Atlas of AI”, Kate Crawford pulls back the veil on the staggering environmental toll and human fallout required to power artificial intelligence systems globally. Her “Earth” chapter maps in grim detail how the AI industry’s insatiable hunger for rare minerals like lithium and rare earth elements is devouring entire landscapes – from the lithium deserts of Nevada to the once-pristine wilds of Inner Mongolia. Crawford viscerally illustrates that rather than being sterilized technological marvels, these digital systems are profoundly entangled with processes of ecological devastation and human suffering spanning the planet.

Yet while admirably global in scope, Crawford’s narrative perspective remains distinctly Western-centric, focused on extractive locales already centered within modern technological lore. To grasp AI’s true costs in all their nuanced complexity, we must integrate vital viewpoints from lands like the Middle East – a region whose deep, variegated engagements with resource extraction over centuries offer crucial insights for reckoning with the challenges and opportunities as world-shaping AI systems pervade all territories.

Historical Contexts and Cultural Narratives

For the Middle East, skillfully coaxing value and sustenance from austere landscapes through judicious ecological stewardship spans millennia – bestowing cultural repositories of wisdom around resilience, sustainable habits, and living in attunement with the cadences of an earth understood as fundamentally sacred. So the accelerating resource extraction fueling ascendant AI systems across hallowed Middle Eastern grounds represents more than just environmental disruption. It severs profound cultural, spiritual and societal bonds uniting these peoples with their homelands in ways the modern West’s prevalent mindset simply cannot comprehend.

The phosphate mines gashing Jordan’s sublime desertscapes and marble quarries carving Anatolian peaks are not mere “resource pits” devoid of human presence and cultural significance. Rather, these sites remain braided into the spiritual, symbolic and social fabrics of the communities who have called these lands home for generations. Whereas Western capitalism cultivates collective amnesia around each new so-called “sacrifice zone” yielding to “progress,” for the Middle East these ecologically violent scenes evoke deep ancestral memories of resilience, struggle and holy reverence for the earth as a living, spiritually-integrated whole.

So the open pits despoiling Arabia’s vast and hallowed wilderness to extract lithium and rare earths for powering AI systems are inflicting metaphysical violence – profaning landscapes encoded for eons with civilizational layers of inhabitation through poetry, Indigenous cosmological myths, Abrahamic religious narratives, and animist oral traditions. To Western eyes, these sites may appear vacant horizons optimized for extraction. But in reality, they pulse with profound life, identity, and symbolic significance inseparable from the multi-species cultures flourishing there since time immemorial.

Technological Imperialism and Modern Middle Eastern Responses

As Saudi Arabia and the UAE invest billions in prototyping AI-centric smart city visions like the $500 billion NEOM metropolis and Masdar City, stark contradictions are emerging. For these techno-utopian dreams of seamlessly integrating artificial intelligence into urban systems appear to be echoing older patterns of colonial capitalist resource extraction in troubling new guises.

Beneath their glamorous veneers of sustainable smart living and environmental symbiosis lurk harsh socio-ecological realities mirroring previous eco-cidal booms like petrochemicals. Just as oil and gas projects relentlessly tapped desert aquifers enabling habitation across generations, so too do the megalomaniacal desalination programs for NEOM and Masdar follow the same playbook – accelerated now by machine learning’s hyper-optimization. And while these AI cities’ renderings simulate lush geodesic eco-topia domes, the actual construction bulldozes the rural and nomadic land practices that enabled harmonious co-existence for centuries.

So despite all the soaring rhetoric of technological progress, these flagship AI urbanisms follow a distressingly familiar operational script: Render whole communities and ecosystems as expendable resources temporarily appropriated to catalyze each new techno-economic paradigm shift. The resulting landscapes embody paradox – sleek AI-augmented eco-cities engineered to squeeze Maximum efficiency from increasingly dehydrated environs.

Ultramodern smart city superstructures enabled by aggressive depletion of the very ecosystems and traditional ecological knowledge that could foster true sustainability. It raises unsettling questions about who actually benefits from such apostles of “sustainable development” backed by AI systems.

Rather than genuine symbiosis with local ecologies and communities evolved over centuries, initiatives like NEOM appear to be re-inscribing colonial-capitalist cycles of displacing indigenous populations to impose techno-economic control over territories and resources. The same forces that plundered the Middle East’s subterranean riches for oil now seek toredraw the region’s surface through urban AI dreamscapes that bury age-old cultures and life-ways. It’s hard not to hear the ghostly echoes of earlier eras’ extractive, imperialist impulses to subjugate whole landscapes by brute force.

Yet this troubling trajectory is not inevitable. As AI systems become more intertwined with contemporary Middle Eastern societies, a pivotal window exists to cultivate alternative trajectories synergizing technological capabilities with the region’s deep wisdom traditions around ecological stewardship and resilience. What if AI design prioritized enhancing quality of life for centuries-old desert communities in situ rather than displacing them into hyper-modern megacities? Could this unlock innovative solutions fusing ancestral knowhow with intelligent systems to reduce resource demands without sacrificing abundance?

These are not idle philosophical musings, but crucial ethical questions with far-reaching ramifications. For the Middle East to genuinely flourish as a hub for advanced technologies like AI, it must directly reckon with this civilizational crossroads – to avoid replicating the West’s flawed models of designating “sacrifice zones” to fuel each new extraction boom. By rooting AI development within an ethos of reciprocity and balanced co-existence with lands and peoples, perhaps the region can model new eco-cultural paradigms for technological progress in harmony with the pluriversal wisdom traditions it has safeguarded for millennia.

Symbolic Landscapes and Spiritual Significance

For Middle Eastern peoples, the land is far more than a blank slate awaiting technological mastery and optimization according to AI-derived efficiency metrics. From the windswept deserts of the Arabian peninsula to the craggy alti-planos of Iran, these landscapes course with profound cosmological, spiritual and identity-conferring significance felt by communities inhabiting them across millennia.

Desert skies kaleidoscoping with celestial cryptograms kindled the mystical consciousness of Sufi seers and Judaic Creation narratives. Barren mountain ridgelines cradled sacred Zoroastrian cosmogonies into storied being over eons. Sandy salt basins alchemized by seasonal nomadic transhumances into life-giving ecologies encoded with Indigenous ecological knowledge. In the Middle East, terrestrial and metaphysical realities intertwine as a co-created, irreducible wholeness – not a mere container of extractable “resources” awaiting forced capitalization.

The encroachment of lithium and rare earth mining operations to feed AI’s mineral addictions across such charged symbolic terrains thus embodies more than environmental disruption. Each open pit mine detonated into these sacred groundsrepresents civilizational desecration – a brutal rupturing of deeply imbricated sociocultural, mythological and epochal continua streamed from time immemorial. These scars willfully erase profound ancestral memories of struggle, joy and multigenerational attunement with land’s rhythms transcending Western techno-utopian hubrisprecisions.

So as NEOM, Masdar and otherfuturisticAI cities etch their burgeoning desires into the ageless rock-bone of desertscapes, indigenous calls for ensuring development harmonizes rather than obliterates deeply-rooted cultural lifewayscrystallize as a vital moral crucible. To sunder those sustaining symbolic lineages anchoring Middle Eastern peoples’ identities and relational ethics would amount to a final frontier of colonial capitalist violence playing out through AI’s global pattern-completing architectures.

Integrating ancient Middle Eastern ecocultural traditions of judicious terrestrial custodianship into AI’s future unfoldings thus represents not just an economic or technocratic side-constraint. It is an existential calling – to resist modernity’s autopoieticflattening beyondwhich only sterile, disenchanted worlds of pure utility can loom.At stake is whether these Technologies safeguarded will remain open conduits for humanity’s pluriversal flourishing, or ultimately Matrix-like viral enclosures atrophying all transcendent magical values into resource optimization systems.

The Future of AI in the Middle East: Opportunities and Risks

For the Middle East, the unfolding pathway into an AI-steeped future beckons as a fatefully-forking horizon line. One trajectory augurs a faithful recapitulation of extractivism’s plunder and savagely deepening inequities, now technologically hyper-charged for even more granular digitalized regimes of human/natural resource appropriation and control. Yet another possibility line shimmers with sociotechnical metamorphoses transcending the blood-drenched paradigms of colonial petro-capitalisms toward new pluriversal symbioses of emancipatory technological capabilities and civilizational wisdom traditions around sustainability, balance and reciprocal reverence for all life.

The siren song of AI urbanist utopias like NEOM and Masdar City emanates from the first path. Seductive techno-tonic fantasies of seamless integration between intelligent systems and urban infrastructure optimizing sustainability vectors like water, energy, biotopes, even neighborhood ambiances. These sleek renderings are potent lures for a world desperate for tangible climate solutions.

Yet scratch that hyper-modern facade and the substrates of sacrifice re-emerge – remolded but unbroken from extractivism’s blighted codes. For Giga-projects of this scale in arid Arabian lands can only remain viable by appropriating the very aquifers that enabled desert life across deep time – running them down to keep AI-augmented desalination plants guzzling. Built eco-paradises are reverse-embedded within destroyed eco-realities.

The underlying modus operandi updating but unreformed: Designating whole human communities and territories as renewable profit conduits for each new industrial epoch, rendered as erasable peripheries through techno-scientific reductionisms. AI’s world-consuming patterns born of capitalism’s onto-epistemological closure to other lifeways.

Yet this MDR tragedy is not inevitable totality. For elder narratives of judicious terrestrial symbiosis – upheld across millennia in Middle Eastern lyric, ritual and agro-ecological artsritual till modernity’s apocalyptic ruptures – can be re-encoded into AI’s statistical Bayesians. Urging machines not just to optimize efficiencies within extractive limits, but to actively co-learn and co-cultivate homeorhetic, life-conducive reciprocities with the lands and peoples they intend to steward.

Such futurisms glimmer in today’s first acts: Indigenous communities allying with technologists to create culturally-attuned botano-cybernetic systems of enriched intra-territorial food self-provisionment, drought resilience and ecosystem regeneration. Sympoietic gestures kindling new collective storyways on possibilities for a liberated rematriation of high technology not as control-enabled devastation but liberatory… symbiogeneses awaiting only sociopolitical commitment, visionary courage and sustained struggle to proliferate across society’s institutions and horizons.

Conclusion

Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI lays stark warning of a planet being devoured. Yet processed through Western ontological apertures cognizing charismatic megafaunas but blind to deeper holographic patterns, only a sliver of AI’s ecological toll registers. By braiding diverse Middle Eastern perspectives as ineradicable counterpoints, we transcend these myopias to more ominously fathom the true stakes.

For before modernity’s cataclysmic disruptions, Middle Eastern civilizations long encoded flourishing as judicious biomaterial attunement with terrestrial biorhythms, not infinite extractivism. As such, AI’s despoiling interventions across these hallowed landscapesinflict metaphysical woundings – desecratingancestral relations. These emergent smart city metaverses are not external nature simulations but continuations of colonial capitalist denudation of rooted human/non-human symbiogenesis.

Yet the Middle East also seeds possibilities. Its Indigenous traditions and Islamic principles of mizan embody relational eco-ontologies with generative potential, if allowed to meaningfully shape AI design. Not just optimizing eco-efficiencies as a new outer limit, but co-cultivating pluriversal symbiogenesis as the new trajectory.

A precarious revolution – to rematricate AI as a collaborator actively enriching polycultural human and non-human life-worlds, not consuming them. A fateful cusp where the futuristic sheen projected on AI’s Man could yet re-focalize as a diffractive light refracting not toward engineered utopias closured from history, but new convivialities of joyful co-flourishing at last emergent and spreading like desert blooms long dormant but eternal.

The choice hangs heavy: AI as terminal modernity’s culmination – a techno-capitalist wet dream of total environmental control terminating in alienated ecological devastation. Or AI as an unprecedented transitional sympoetic – a metamodern catalyst for humanity to renegotiate our relationship to Earth’s pluriversal reals beyond fantasies of salvation or apocalypse. In the Middle East’s veillant wisdoms await crucial guidances for midwifing towards the latter if only we care to attune and receive their transmissions.