This was a busy week and an even busier weekend.

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.

This week I also needed to write a lengthy political report. I don’t know why (and how) but writing feels a bit easier nowadays. Jotting down loose ideas for myself was always easy but writing something with a clear thesis? For others to read? That would paralyze me in a second. But it didn’t. I feel like I’ve finally started to learn to articulate myself. It feels good.

Another thing I enjoyed this week was playing Goose Goose Duck. A lot of hilarious moments and a lot of laughter.

OtonomArt

I finally did it. I finally found a tutor for sculpting. Actually, what I found is much bigger than just a tutor. I found a workshop, a collective, a mirage in the middle of the desert. Actually… in the middle of an industrial zone.

On Friday I went to OtonomArt for an introductory sculpting class. I made this relief with mud:

Starting next week I’ll go there twice a week. Finally I have a space for sculpting and hopefully will have a regular practice throughout the year. I am going to enter 2027 as a sculptor.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

On Saturday we saw a documentary about Ernest Cole, a South African photographer who took thousands of photographs exposing the sheer horror of the apartheid regime. The documentary tells the story of 60 thousand negatives mysteriously found in a safe of a Swedish bank. Who put them in this safe, who paid for them all these years is still a mystery. It was not clear to me if this was a conspiracy to hide those photos from public or simply an act of goodwill to protect Cole’s legacy. The documentary is somewhat ambiguous about this.

Last November I visited an exhibition of Steve McCurry’s photographs. The photos he took in Kuwait during The Gulf War made me think “wow, The Gulf War did happen”. These photos were not about the military power of USA nor the destruction of Kuwait. They were about the dust and smoke obstructing the sun, camels hastily running away from conflict zone and grenades that didn’t explode. They were images, yes, but they were taken within the cracks of the spectacle.

Ernest Cole’s photography made me feel similar about the apartheid. Photos he took were not about the cruel treatment of Africans by white colonialists. They weren’t victimizing Africans and evoking pity. They were exposing the sheer truth of daily life in South Africa, documenting the regular treatment of blacks by whites. Signs on walls that say “whites only”, an escalator that says “Goods & Blacks”, how a white person looks at a young black man interrogated by the police. These everyday moments were what constituted the ideological fabric of the apartheid regime.

Audiobooks

I was not a believer in audiobooks before this week. Many friends recommended me to listen to them but I never knew how. I don’t like walking outside with my headphones. I don’t use headphones at the gym. When can I find time and space where I can listen to a book?

Last week one of my colleagues said that he listens to books while brewing coffee. That clicked. I spend at least 30 minutes a day brewing coffee and sometimes I like to watch youtube videos while brewing. I could simply replace youtube with an audiobook and I did.

I’m now listening to Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. I listened it only while brewing coffee or unloading the dishwasher and today I finished 60% of the book. This is not something I can do for non-fiction because I like to highlight and take notes but for fiction it makes sense and is enjoyable.

Why are vibes so bad when economic metrics don’t look that bad? Scott Alexander tries to find an answer to this question. Zvi too.

I have a great respect for Scott and Zvi. Their rationality and ability to deduce answers from the empirical data are important. However, I am not as rational as they are, so I can only talk about the “vibe” side of things.

Analyzing the “vibecession” —or the Great Vibepression—through the lens of empirical data presents a problem: data is necessarily historical, while the vibecession is about the future. The future is, by definition, uncharted and unquantifiable. One can only sense the future, and what we sense is impending doom.

I think it’s uncharitable to see “high” expectations of younger generations as the main reason of the vibepression. High relative to what? And high for whom? Older generations and the majority of participants of vibepression discourse had time. They had chance to show up, do their work, save money and slowly accumulate wealth. They had that kind of deal with the system. That deal is dead. Do I really have time on my hands? Considering the hyperobjects of our time, I need safety. Safety requires money. I can not defer this requirement to future. I am deeply uncertain about what future will bring.

Ukrainians had all their lives upside down in a day. The war has been going on for 4 years now. Israel hastened the genocide. They hit Iran multiple times. When the time comes they will hit again and probably harder this time. There were armed skirmishes between India and Pakistan. Thailand and Cambodia are once again on brink of war. USA abducted Maduro from Venezuela. They now threaten Cuba and Greenland. The world order was fairly successful to isolate conflicts, especially to Middle East. Now armed conflicts are in every continent. All countries are increasing the military spendings. One doesn’t need to be Jung to sense the incoming Great War.

Even if don’t start killing each other with high end technological weapons or exterminate ourselves with nuclear bombs, there is also AI on the table. Leaving the existential risk aside¹, it’s clear that it’ll lead to end of most jobs. Maybe not in a year, maybe not in two but soon enough to know that I am going to face the consequences. I’m a software developer with 8 years of experience. I am confident with my engineering skills. I know that I’m in a very good position and most likely will be able to find a place for myself in the industry. However, I’m not sure if I want to be a mere project manager for AI agents.

I am a socialist. This means I am ideologically invested in the idea of societal collapse because it might lead to the collapse of capitalism. I might be over-indexing these threats. Maybe everything will turn out to be great. But the world around me right now feels like a Nick Land wet dream. I want my life and I want it now.

I’m excited for 2026.

2025 was a good year for me. After quitting my startup, which was going nowhere, at the end of 2024, I entered 2025 rejuvenated. As a result I read more, experimented more, travelled more, did more… I feel like 2025 was a stepping stone for 2026.

What I was up to in the first week of 2026?

hypersubject.net

My online presence is highly fragmented.

I have a personal and “professional” web site at https://ege.dev where I mostly post my technical writings. I also have a content type that I call “beats” which are unlisted, they only show up in the RSS feed. I was using beats to post short form updates that are usually personal. I have a photo gallery at that site as well.

Another blog I have is https://bengidoom.com. I have been putting my Turkish writing at this blog for some time. Writings there are mostly political. My thinking is also mostly political.

I have had two twitter accounts since 2023. One where I was posting in English and engaging with a twitter scene called TPOT, and the other where I was posting in Turkish and engaging with political scene in Turkey. I abandoned both of them. I joined twitter at a time when I needed connection with others and these accounts served their purpose. Now they just make me feel disconnected.

I was always wary about putting my “real” identity out there. That’s why I heavily compartmentalized my online presence. What if people make fun of my writing? What if I write something dumb? It was easier to hide behind a mask. Turns out this problem of self-confidence is not something you can get away with putting on a mask. “Only way out is through.”

hypersubject.net is my attempt to have an unified space on the internet. I (almost) merged everything into a single place in the last two days. I say almost because there is still work to do. I still need to put my photo gallery here for example. No rush, the year is still young.

In 2026, I want to explore the indieweb and fediverse. hypersubject.net is just the first step.

Sculpting

Last year I visited Louvre and Musée d’Orsay in Paris. I was fascinated by many sculptures, especially the works of Auguste Rodin and Paul Gauguin. When we returned to Istanbul, while buying a gift for a friend, I also bought some modelling clay for myself on a whim.

In 2025 I did a few sculptures. They are not good. But making them was fun. And that’s the important part. I had the same experience when I started programming when I was 19. It was hard, I was not immediately good at it, but it was fun.

This week I did three more sculptures. They are not good but each one is the best I have done so far. I’m excited to do more in 2026.

Also, my friends gifted me a book about sculpting for new year: Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss. I am very excited to read it after finishing the current book I’m reading.

Venezuela

I was sickened by the news from Venezuela yesterday. Imperial war machine is on the move.

I understand the sentiment of some Venezuelans I read online: Maduro was not a benevolent leader of Venezuelans. At his best, he was just like our Erdoğan. But I don’t believe that the USA’s intervention will bring anything good to Venezuela and its people. If anything, this will only produce more Maduros.

The abduction of Maduro was a shameless act. We have been living in a shameless world for some time now; there is no agency that can induce shame. There is no agency that can force countries to play diplomatically or find excuses for their imperialistic ambitions. Israel’s genocide in Gaza was the last blow and with that the glass is shattered. There is no big Other. Or, in Dostoevsky’s words “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”

The internet I grew up in no longer exists.

The internet, with its hyper-fast communication flows, was meant to enable the new golden age for humanity. We were promised to have a global village where tribes transcend the limitations of geography. We could find our people wherever they were. Our ideas, our niche interests were supposed to connect us with others in the vast network of nodes. If, only if, we can discover them.

Instead, what we got is the commodification of communication. The connection that was promised to us has been reformatted in terms of the market: “How can a practice, experience, or feeling be monetized?” Yes, discoverability is solved thanks to search engines and social media platforms. But now we connect, not to each other, but to the algorithm. We no longer contribute ideas to each other, but to the circulation of the “content”.

We must reclaim the cyberspace.