ege's weblog

Things I read (and enjoyed)

• The Combahee River Collective Statement: Founding text of identity politics by a collective run by Black Lesbian women.
• On Revolution: A cybernetic look at revolution.
• The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

In a technopoly, the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology.

• Scott Alexander on taste: Contra Everyone on Taste, Three Model Organisms for Taste and Nostalgebraist’s Hydrogen Jukeboxes
• Remarks on Gender
• What Deontological Bars?

Links I saved

• Hacker Jargon
• StumbleTV: Roulette for the public internet’s accidentally-open webcams.
• gecit: DPI bypass tool - eBPF on Linux, TUN on macOS/Windows.
• Monitor every stock trade Congress makes
• meditype: Read books by typing passages one by one.
• Are.na personals: Personal introductions/requests on are.na
• The Strategy & Planning Scrapbook: A curated collection of strategy frameworks, creative provocations, and planning tools.
• The Virtual OS Museum: If a working version of an operating system exists somewhere, the goal is to have it here, in a form anyone can run on a reasonably modern laptop/desktop.
• Museum of the Human Web
• Today’s Rothko: Daily Rothko matching the temperature, brightness and the mood of the day.
• url.town: a web directory, curated by members of the omg.lol community.
• TogetherLetters: Everyone in your group writes a short update. They compile it into one beautiful newsletter and deliver it automatically.
• KWSX: WEBSEX RADIO
• Radio Venus: radio according to your zodiac

Books entered my to-read list

• One Man’s View of the World by Lee Kuan Yew
• How China Became Capitalist by Ronald Coase and Wang Yin
• The New China Playbook by Xin Kewu
• River Town by Peter Hessler
• Has China Won? by Kishore Mahbubani
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
• Illumine Lingao by Xiao Feng
• Spinoza, Atheist by Steven Nadler
• Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm
• Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer
• Symptom Invented: Lacan and the History of Marxism by Max Maher
• Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian

Movies entered my watchlist

• Femme Fatale (2002), directed by Brian De Palma
• The Conformist (1970), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

A lot was happening this week. So here are fragmented updates instead of a single overarching theme.

• Thirteen years ago today, the Gezi Park protests started in Istanbul. Those were glorious days of a rebellion that was and still is unmatched in terms of scale and spirit. We lost eight of us in those days. May they ever live on in our fight for justice and freedom.

• We are moving! After spending the last 3 years in Beyoğlu, we are moving back to our old place in Bakırköy, which was nicer in almost all aspects except the location: rent, space, parking spots, noise. The biggest downside is of course proximity to our dear friends…

• I was on paid time off since Wednesday, so we had some time to watch three movies:

  • One Battle After Another (2025): After all the fuss this movie made last year, I was very curious about it. I found the portrayal of revolutionaries too caricatured, but it was nevertheless an enjoyable watch. See Žižek’s review.
  • Sentimental Value (2025): This was a very slow-burning movie but I liked it. I posted about this on Mastodon: “One can endlessly psychoanalyze the characters of the movie but it was ultimately about making peace with Home.” Also, I think this was my biggest exposure to Norwegian and I was fascinated by how beautiful it sounds.
  • Project Hail Mary (2026): I kept hearing about this movie the last few weeks and, being always thirsty for science fiction, we decided to watch it. I really really enjoyed the friendship between Grace and Rocky so much that everything else about the movie was shadowed by it. Because of the camaraderie between them, Project Hail Mary is now located closer to RRR (2022) in my vector space. See Marta’s review focusing on the politics of the movie.

• I started playing World of Warcraft Classic with a friend primarily to have a gathering location in cyberspace. I remember how boring it was to kill monsters to complete quests when I was into MMORPGs years ago. To my surprise, I now find it relaxing to mindlessly farm and loot.

• Susan Sontag’s essay collection On Photography had been sitting in my book pile for a long time. This week, on a whim, I opened it and started reading the first essay, “In Plato’s Cave.” This was my first experience reading Sontag; I can definitely say that I’m impressed by her foresight:

It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. — Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave

A few months ago I was reflecting on my need for a digital community:

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 care. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.

Maybe I should have said hypertext instead of text-based. Hypertext is more than just text. Hypertext is images, links, pages… It’s the internet in its labyrinthine ways. This was also my thought process when I decided to start blogging on this domain, hypersubject.net. I was looking for a space where I can express myself, my subjectivity, via hypertext. Hence I merged the two: hypersubject.

Since creating hypersubject.net, I have been on a constant lookout for communities that I could participate in. I found a few in the wild.

I believe one should not make legible what depends on illegibility for its mere survival. The communities I list below, to the best of my knowledge, don’t depend on illegibility. They don’t really operate in public; all are either gatekept or have their own initiation processes to allow new members. However, if you think this post is exposing a community, let me know and I’ll take care of it.

Continue reading → 574 words · 3 min read

It was a packed weekend, so I couldn’t publish the weekly update on Sunday. Another one-day-late edition.

Fascism became a catch-all phrase for leftists to criticize their adversaries. It is a term that has a historical meaning, and I don’t want to repeat the same mistake of muddying the definition. By fascism I mean:

• consolidation of power in a single powerful leader,
• dismantling of all institutions to remove any safety brakes in the system,
• controlling a large part of the economy and corporations,
• ultranationalist rhetoric,
• cult of regenerative violence,
• separating society into two blocs: decent citizens and indecent others,
• cancelling elections or rendering them meaningless.

Today, Turkey is at high risk of being ruled by a proper fascist government. Out of the pillars of fascism that I listed above, four of the seven are firmly in place, two are forming:

• Erdogan was the strong authoritarian leader from the start in 2002; he reached the peak of his power in 2017 by changing the constitution after the failed coup d’état in 2016.
• Since 2008, all major institutions were either taken over or shut down. It started with the military, then the media, and lastly the whole legal system.
• The government controls many conglomerates directly, and others need to align themselves with it under the threat of otherwise being unable to do business.
• Nationalism is at a strange point right now. Between 2013 and 2024, government supporters were the primary nationalist group, with smaller groups on the opposition side as well. The balance changed after the government started peace talks with the Kurdish armed organization PKK. Today, there is a strong ultranationalist reaction against Kurds, especially on the opposition side. Erdogan is overseeing the whole resolution process with the PKK from a safe distance, so he still has room to maneuver and channel the reactionary nationalist sentiment for his own gain.
• I don’t think the violence is institutionalized, but cliques in the government are experienced in doing psyops through conventional and social media to amplify the bloodthirsty demands of radical groups (“slaughter all stray dogs”, “deport all the immigrants”).
• Erdogan and his AKP separate society into two: immoral atheist laics and decent Muslim conservatives.

In 2025, they started putting together the last pillar: no elections. It started with arresting the popular presidential candidate of the opposition, Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, in March 2025. Last week, it reached its peak with removing the whole leadership of the main opposition party from their posts through legal shenanigans. Today, the risk of fascism is higher than ever.

We have been protesting every day since Friday. The numbers on the street were not huge—definitely lower than what we had when Imamoglu got arrested. Nevertheless, the bright side is that we didn’t give up; there are still people who care to resist. Is it going to be enough? I don’t think so. We desperately need something that can radically redefine the rules of the game, because we are losing the one Erdogan defined. As Hannah Arendt describes, totalitarian systems are capable of eventually restructuring reality to make it coherent with their goals. What we need in Turkey right now is a revolution—not the revolution as the locomotive of history as Marx puts it, but the Benjaminian revolution as the emergency brake.

Previously.

A few days ago I wrote that I want to make peace with the mundane. With that in mind, I decided to update the theme of my blog to a classic weblog format. The new theme is heavily inspired by jwz.org and simonwillison.net.

I have too many books, especially in digital form. Whenever a book piques my interest, I immediately seek it out, acquire it by any means possible, and at least read its table of contents. This of course results in piles of books that I will never manage to read. As my knowledge expands, the pile keeps getting bigger.

This is not an unknown phenomenon for knowledge seekers. Umberto Eco had a huge library, more than 30,000 books. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, describes Eco’s library as the antilibrary:

[Umberto Eco] separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know …. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

In this sense, your library defines the borders of your knowledge. As your knowledge expands, your library grows in size. However, not every inch inside the borders is under your dominion. To exercise control over them, one needs to see them like a state. Just like the sovereign state holds censuses and fractures the land into taxable portions, the antilibrary needs to be indexed and cataloged. Not every pile of books is an antilibrary; most are just decor signaling knowledge.

I have been thinking about how to make use of my antilibrary for a long time. If I put on my engineering hat, I come up with these requirements:

• Having an up-to-date index of all books with accurate metadata
• Ability to perform full text search on all books or a subset
• Ability to reference search results by exact location in the book

Index and metadata management can be handled by Calibre, while full text search is handled by Recoll. I’ve started experimenting with these tools, but I find the user interface of Calibre very clunky and the search results in Recoll hard to parse. The engineer in me wants to build. But I don’t want to be the guy who starts learning LaTeX to write his doctoral thesis and ends up with no thesis and still no LaTeX.

#lazyweb, do you have any suggestions?

the biggest news of this week was definitely the exhibition at OtonomArt. after ~50 hours of work, it was so exciting to put Syzygy on display. it was also thrilling to see my name as the artist on the label.

i’m glad i photographed the sculpture after every session so i could see the gradual process. now, looking back, i find it eerie to look at the first photos. i created this thing from mud with my bare hands!

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one of the most eye-opening videos on youtube for me was anna p. foxen’s exoticizing the impossible, in which she talks about a common spiritual failure mode where the practitioner, being overfocused on the extraordinary, misses the beauty in mundane reality.

i was thinking about this in the context of my relationship with my blogging. i published over 30 posts in all three of my blogs this year. it’s a feat that i am proud of. but i still couldn’t manage to eliminate the friction of writing and publishing. i believe the most important task of the creative is to eliminate friction in creating. maybe quantity doesn’t guarantee quality but lack of quantity guarantees the impossibility of quality for sure.

what’s blocking me from publishing more? the easy answer is lack of time. i’m a busy person with a demanding day job, political duties and ambitions, hobbies, a wife whom i care about… of course, it’s not easy to find time to sit and write. i need at least an hour to write a 600-word, low-effort post. the problem with this excuse is that i know i can find the time.

the real problem is exoticizing the writing. drafts are piling up waiting for me to read three books for each. i am trying to make an elaborate argument tying together jung, land, hegel, lacan while preserving my dignity by not producing utter bullshit.

in the meantime there is a vast world of blogs where people write a few sentences about an article they read or a link they found interesting. they might be mundane but who could say that they are not the building blocks of something bigger? isn’t this the point cory doctorow was making few years ago?

maybe it’s time to make peace with the ordinary.