I find myself once again yearning for a digital community. I believe the future of social media (for me) is some kind of invite-only group chat where the conversation flows like a river. It might live in Discord, Slack or even IRC, I don’t care1. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.
On Friday, I got a message from kerey on WhatsApp saying that “there is a need for a non-normie consortium”. It triggered a long conversation about the normie/non-normie dichotomy and whether this type of distinction is elitist or not. I collected my thoughts on this in Against the Non-Normie.
“Normie” is a volatile term. Depending on the context, it might refer to atheists, New Agers, people who watch Netflix, people who don’t do drugs, conservatives, liberals, people who care about politics, people who don’t care about politics, people who are optimistic about the future, people who are pessimistic about the future, people who read only fiction, people who don’t read at all, people who read Kant, people who enjoy dancing in the club, people who don’t enjoy dancing, or people who are monogamous. In the end, “normie” is a signifier that points to the outgroup.
Just finished another session of psychoanalysis. Analysis is by far the thing I least enjoy every week. I mean, it works, at least for me, but it’s definitely not something I look forward to. Because it demands me to say the Thing.
What’s the Thing? No one knows. Is there even a Thing? Probably not. But its non-existence doesn’t mean that it has no effects. Structurally, the analyst occupies the position that demands you to say the Thing. How you react to this feeling is the basis of the analytical relationship between you, the analysand, and the analyst.
Daily blogging is definitely not easy. I couldn’t write a post today :(
I am writing this from the drafts.app and will publish it via an action. I hope I don’t turn this site into twitter. Although, since it’s my site, I can do whatever I want. This is my home; I can behave however I want here. Twitter, on the contrary, feels like a town hall. Yeah it’s crowded, so no one really pays attention to you, but it’s still a public place. I don’t want to go crazy in the middle of a town hall. But if you are at my home (my blog), my rules apply.
I wrote five different paragraphs to start this post and couldn’t stitch any of them together. So here are all five fragments.
My ability to do good is limited by my ability to work with others.
Three years ago multiple earthquakes devastated the southeastern region of Turkey. The things we saw were unimaginably bad. Within a few days people started organizing to collect food, clothes, sanitary products etc. I participated in none of it. One day, I felt disgusted with myself. A disaster happened; people were trying to collectively do what they can and I did nothing. Was I really this distant from the people around me? The answer was yes—I was that distant and alienated. I guess it’s no coincidence that I was also depressed as fuck.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to merge all things I wrote in different corners of the internet. After 5 weeks of that experiment, I decided otherwise. My old writings are worthy in their respective contexts. Visitors of this blog are probably not interested in technical posts about Kubernetes nor political posts about Turkey. And I am not interested in writing about them here.
So, my Turkish writing will continue in bengidoom.com and technical posts in ege.dev. Deciding this was a relief—I don’t need to carry the baggage of old writings here. hypersubject.net is the home of a different persona of mine. A persona that I can use to be more personal and honest on the internet. A persona who can regularly hit publish.
Richard Stallman had a Marxian effect on technology in the 1980s. He started
the Free Software movement. His ideas mobilized a vast number of programmers
and the ideology he initiated still has a great gravity in the software
ecosystem. Since the year 2000, thousands of developers travel to Brussels
every February like pilgrims for Free and Open Source Software Developers'
European Meeting (FOSDEM). I am proud to be among the pilgrims for the second
year in a row.
Weekends feel busier than weekdays lately. Time flew, and I just noticed that I didn’t manage to finish this week’s post. This was bound to happen. It’s okay. Shhh… it’s okay. IT’S OKAY! Discipline is not punching yourself into the mold of a wireheaded soldier. Discipline is the ability to flow around, between, and through various slip-ups. Discipline is persistently looking at the horizon. Okay, I needed this pep talk.
I started my first bust this week. The number of details on a human face is crazy. And what’s hard about reflecting all those details on the clay is not the technique but actually noticing them. Making art requires a lot of noticing. Noticing requires giving a fuck. You need to give a fuck to create something. But too much of it can also paralyze you. There’s a fine balance between giving a fuck and letting go and allowing yourself to create something messy.