2026 is definitely the year of blogging for me. I already published twice as many posts as I did last year. Last Friday I published a post in my technical blog in the same vein as this post: a reflection on the week. Today I posted another one there about the women who shaped me in my career. Happy Women’s Day to all women around the world!

I’m writing this while my neighborhood is under siege by law enforcement. There’s a bunch of police officers in every corner just because the women of Istanbul want to have a rally to celebrate March 8, express their anger and mourn the losses of their fellow sisters who were killed by men.

As politics affects citizens of privileged countries more and more, I see more people writing about it on their personal corner of cyberspace. But for some reason it always comes with an apology for bringing up political issues. That’s the primary reason why we feel powerless in the face of the political crisis we are currently in: political space is treated as something separate and political issues as something you should almost feel ashamed for caring about. The collective person is forgotten in the pages of history. What we have now is a radically atomized individual who can only relate to others by their choice of commodities and lifestyle.

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

Marwan Makhoul

Another Sunday, another weekly reflection.

This was a really busy week. I worked more than 8 full-focus hours every single weekday. This means I probably spent more than 10 hours in front of the computer. It’s a lot! Thankfully this week was a 4-day week so I had time to rest.

On Friday I spent the whole day working on my sculpture. The bust is coming along. I decided to do something strange (as I usually do) and make it half female and half male. I don’t know how I will do the transition smoothly in the middle of the face but we’ll see.

The biggest thing this week was seeing Louis C.K., my favorite comedian, live in Istanbul. It was amazing. He’s the king of uncomfortable topics and no one does body horror like him. Seeing him live was an incredible experience, I feel very lucky to have had the chance.

I tried to see Louis before, in 2022. He was going to do a show in Kyiv on February 25. I bought tickets and went to Ukraine. On February 24, the war started. Yes, I was in Ukraine at the time (maybe I will write that story here some day). A day before the Istanbul show, I jokingly said that USA is going to attack Iran on the day of the show. My friend laughed at me for believing such superstitious shit. On Saturday morning he sent me the news about Israel’s bombing of Tehran. I told you so!

It didn’t affect the show though and I managed to see Louis this time. Writing this makes me a bit ashamed of myself. People’s homes are bombed and I am grateful because it didn’t affect my Saturday evening plans. My father used to say that we are like antelopes. Our fellows are mauled to death right in the corner and we keep chewing the grass until it’s our turn.

I wrote about the upcoming war at the beginning of this year. I don’t know at which point history books will start the third great war in the future—or whether there will be history books or humans to read them—but it’s happening right now. It’s crazy how contingent everything is. The world is in the middle of a political crisis on top of the economic one. But in the end, we are heading to this war because of a handful of people’s personal agendas—Netanyahu’s imperialist ambitions and Trump’s need to get away from Epstein. Busy, busy, busy.¹

A few hours before writing these lines, we watched Sinners (2025). I really enjoyed it but I don’t see why it has record-breaking number of Oscar nominations. It definitely didn’t feel that groundbreaking to me. Nevertheless, the racial tensions were perfectly portrayed. And the music… I am writing this while listening to the soundtrack. The scene where Sammie sings “I Lied to You” deserves an Oscar.

Ah, also I wrote The Designated Rebel this week. It had been sitting on my backlog for a long time. I don’t think I did a good job writing it but I am happy that I did it anyway. Someday I’ll revisit it and do it the justice it deserves.

Another Sunday, another weekly reflection post.

This is the 8th week since I created hypersubject.net. The effects of this experiment are already tangible. Compared to last year, I have already spent twice as many hours working on my blog(s) and nearly half that time writing even though we are only two months into 2026. I have already published 12 posts this year, which is far more than my total output for all of 2025.

Two weeks ago, I decided to write a blog post every day. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. It’s better to focus on what I can accomplish rather than beating myself up for things I simply cannot. This week, I visited an exhibition of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s drawings on the envelopes of his letters. In one of the letters, he writes about how writing letters is difficult and requires one to find an opportune time for it. It’s exactly the same for blog posts; they demand their own time and space to emerge.

My wife and I started watching The Museum of Innocence, a miniseries based on Orhan Pamuk’s novel. When she first suggested it, my initial reaction was negative—I have a natural aversion to anything popular. But I caved, and I’m glad I did. This might be one of the best things I’ve watched in my native language. And the directing… Zeynep Günay is doing something magical. In many scenes, I thought, “Where has this level of directing been in other Turkish works?” I haven’t read the novel, but I am certain the director’s female perspective has only elevated the story. One could talk about obsession, repetition, and the objet petit a for hours. I would, if I were Žižek—but I am not.

Speaking of the female perspective on the silver screen, this week I watched Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao. It’s easily the best movie I’ve seen recently. I don’t think it’s enough to say the movie is feminine; I would say the movie is a woman¹. It tells the story of William Shakespeare by telling the story of his wife, Agnes Hathaway. If I could describe the feelings the movie awakened in me, I would be a candidate to put my name right up there with Shakespeare himself.

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.

This type of interactions is at the heart of my ideal community. An off-hand remark starts a discussion where we argue and develop the idea and in the end this turns into some kind of writing. Then this writing gets responses from other members in the community in a variety of forms. A community that perpetually creates discourse for discourse’s sake.

This is not something that I might just land on. This type of community requires someone to build it from the ground up. “Somebody has to, and no one else will.”

Speaking of Against the Non-Normie, I feel a bit uncomfortable about that piece. I believe what I said there but I feel uneasy because of the process I wrote it with. During our conversation, kerey raised the similarity between non-normies and queer community. Since gender studies and queer theory are not my forte, I asked Gemini to make the connection:

So I used AI. This might be an acceptable use of AI but I also copied two sentences from its output:

• “The ’normal’ (heteronormative) subject only exists because it has successfully ‘cast out’ (abjected) anything that threatens its boundaries.”
• “Reclaiming ‘Queer’ is an act of strategic essentialism; it’s taking the site of your own exclusion and turning it into a fortress for survival.”

These are not things I couldn’t write myself but they were just sitting there for me to copy them. But the fact that I copied them verbatim into my post makes me feel ashamed. I don’t believe this stains the whole post and makes it slop though. Maybe I think too black-and-white about the AI problem. This will be a problem I will need to navigate in the near future.

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.

I decided to create this blog after reading about the 100 Days To Offload. I thought I can write two blog posts in a week and at the end of 2026 I’ll have more than 100 posts. This sounds achievable, right? So far I wrote two posts in a week only once. So far the weekly post experiment is going well but I find it hard to write a post in the middle of the week. It’s hard not because it’s hard to find something to write about. It’s hard because things I decide to write for are too ambitious. I have these sitting in my writing backlog:

• Where is art?: Art is not about the attributes of the artwork but the position it occupies where art is presented. The status of the object as artwork is decided by the symbolic efficiency of the art institution and the symbolic capital of the artist.
• Politicism: The warning for Economism is a premature optimization as in “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
• The Champion of Passivity: Assuming the role of the champion for a group of people might calcify their passivity.
• Filling the uncertainty with values: Ideology, as a map of values, is useful to fill the gap between the map and the territory. One should not fear to use ideology to fill the gap but also aim for reducing the uncertainty as much as possible.

These are all topics I deeply care about. I want to write them well. I want to link these for years to come. I want others to link these. I want them to be groundbreaking. This desire is paralyzing. It’s paralyzing because I don’t have a regular practice of sitting and writing words. It feels like being put in a cage fight without doing any sparring first. I need to spar.

#100DaysToOffload is for sparring. Visakanv’s 100 things is also a sparring practice. It’s a practice of quantity over quality to get things started. I think when I decided to write two posts a week, one about a random topic and second for reflecting on the week itself, was too ambitious. Looks like I was thinking that I will only write one post during the week and it will be good.

Writing only once a week has another major problem: I let the engine get cold. I went back to the studio for sculpting after a week in Brussels. It was a disaster. I spent two hours on the bust and every point I touched became worse than before. Then I went again the next day and made a lot of progress. Pausing harmed the process and only cure was doing more.

During my career, a lot of junior engineers asked for advice to get better at programming. My advice varied from person to person but one thing was constant: “You need to write code.” I was jokingly saying “You have a lot of bad code in you. You need to vomit it out first to produce something good.” It’s funny that I don’t apply my own advice to my writing.

universe sweetheart was talking about the practice of daily blogging yesterday. Her post contains the famous quote of Scott Alexander about daily blogging: “Whenever I see a new person who blogs every day, it’s very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don’t get good. That’s like my best leading indicator for who’s going to be a good blogger.” The hardest thing about daily blogging is not finding a topic to write about. It’s structuring your day to allocate time and space for the practice. To write regularly one needs to have the habit of writing.

See you tomorrow.

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.

Stallman’s ideas had a tremendous effect on me. I was a law student when I first read about him, free software and open source. Free software, as an ideology, was the primary reason for my interest in programming. It was rebellious, collective and a threat to the status quo. It was the right kind of religion—as Kurt Vonnegut says: “A really good religion is a form of treason.”¹

In the halls of Free University of Brussels, thousands of developers gather around to hoard swag from open source companies, write “Fuck Off Google” on the walls and talk about technology. If you ask them about their interest in free and open source software, they’ll mention things like “innovation”, “community”, “privacy” and “freedom”. But if you dig enough you’ll see that their—our—reason distills into simply “being on the right side of history”.

This is why the free and open source community² resembles Marxists to me. It’s a community formed around an ideology that is rational, progressive and collective and it is unapologetically resistant even in the hardest moments because “what they stand for is just right.” I am a proud member of this community and I truly believe my employer is a bastion of open source software. I hope to be in Brussels many more years and I hope FOSDEM continues for many more years after I pass away.

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.

Kerey persuaded me to give twitter¹ another chance. He said it’s still filled with interesting people (true) and there is still a chance to have meaningful connections with them (also true). My friendship with him started on twitter. Since we met, we’ve published four zine issues together and writing about vastly different things. It’s more or less clear that our friendship and creative collaboration did not stem from shared interests or aligned worldviews; they stemmed from the infamous tpot.

Anyway, I decided to give it a chance—as I usually do— scrolled a bit, and even tweeted something from the hip. Another banger, another only-liked-by-kerey tweet. It felt familiar, even nostalgic.

The timeline made me feel like I traveled back to 2023. It’s crazy how the discourse sounds exactly the same. Rival dunking on Nietzsche to farm engagement, visa continuing to weave elaborate webs by qting himself (and he follows zero people now—wow), lumpen chaining words together that don’t mean anything to me. It’s all the same and yet all alienating.

However, as usual, I got something from doing the thing I resisted: universe sweetheart started a blog. We were following each other with her for a long time, but I don’t think we ever been moots. I’m happy that I’ll be able to read her stuff outside of twitter.

Some links I enjoyed this week:

• The Story of AI: The real threat of AI is much more mundane than Terminator-like scenarios.
• A Metabolic Workspace: The author is definitely on something there. But, still, something rubs me the wrong way. First, another productivity post showcasing a process that has only been running for a few weeks. Second, it focuses too much on opposing the concept of Second Brain. I don’t see my Obsidian vault as a second brain; my notes are a garden where I plant whatever is salient to me. Yes, things I stop nurturing die and rot, but that’s part of the process. They turn into compost. I like documenting what mattered at the time. Nevertheless, it’s a good post that forced me to reflect on my own note-taking processes.

Anyway, I’ll be in Brussels, Belgium, from Wednesday, January 28 to Monday, February 2 for FOSDEM. Wanna grab a coffee? Find a way to contact me (there are plenty of options).

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.

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.”