Ahmet Alphan Sabancı's Blog
October 13, 2025
Embrace the Weird | Weekstarter 42-2025
I have a busier than usual week ahead of me and its start was a perfect encapsulation of that. I’m not complaining but just wanted to let you know that’s why I’m making the finishing touches to this post around 18:30.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission ControlInbox: 56
RSS Reader: 3174
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
Check my Now page to see what else is going on.
Embrace the WeirdI have been working through an idea for a while before turning it into a proper blog post/article/manifesto/etc. but after reading Jay’s blog post from last week, I wanted to work on that idea by writing about it here. (Because one thing I’m really bad at is that I always want to perfect everything before putting it out there and that’s why I have dozens of drafts and big gaps in my blog.)
Keep in mind this is just a brain dump version of the idea, which I’m planning to turn into a proper piece.
Let’s start with a quote from Jay:
“Every single day right now it seems like I’m waking up in the morning to some new piece of bullshit. Some new AI thing, some new crypto thing happening, some new insane crypto AND AI thing, politics is mad, war is happening and only going to get worse every where, a genocide is playing out in full view of the world, biosphere collapse, the news of AMOK collapse risk, there is no end to the horrors.
The sea is so very big and my boat is so very small.
But what a time to be alive, to be living through all of this, inside the churn.”
The Voltage Of The Age – Jay Springett
This is a feeling I have regularly and enjoy a lot. Maybe it’s because growing up in Turkey or my brain is wired differently but seeing all the madness, observing and thinking about it is something I find enjoyable. Not because I think it’s all good but any other option I have against this madness feels boring and meaningless to me.
I made peace with the fact that we’re living in a messy world full of ambiguity, uncertainty, chaos, and weirdness. You may try to make sense of it by making up clear cut models of it but you’ll always get frustrated by the world not fitting to those models. You can go with the route of romanticizing the past, a culture or being human but this will only give you a momentary relief — or drive you into a dangerous path.
Or, you can go with what I call “embracing the weird”. Instead of wasting your energy by trying to make the world a static and safe place, you can embrace all of its weirdness and learn from it. Instead of fighting against the uncertainty, you can work with it. Because no matter how hard you try, world insists on being a weird and deadly interesting place. (And now you know where the name of my blog comes from.)
I know what I’m offering doesn’t sound like a good idea for many people because admitting that world will never be a completely safe place is not a comforting thought. This is why people are drawn to ideas and ideologies which hides all of the messy parts of the world under the rug and tells them a comforting story. When you look at most of the problems we face today, you’ll find those stories either causing them or making them worse.
(This is also why I don’t really care about social media anymore because almost everyone there expects others to comfort them or finds comfort in fighting with the people who makes them uncomfortable.)
That’s why I believe more people should embrace the weird if they want to really understand and enjoy the world we live in — and spend more time with the ones who are not afraid of the beautiful weirdness of the world. Every other option I mentioned above feels like wasting our time.
Song of the WeekReally excited about where the new Gorillaz album is going.
Reading Log
“We’ve just forgotten that the future is supposed to BE weird and wonderful. We’re supposed to build that.”
CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis – Warren Ellis
Outro
“In other words, an agency is being ascribed to this thing we call “technology”; we have assigned it a capacity to act and to influence the circumstances. In doing so, we have tacitly surrendered or disavowed our own agency, to a lesser or greater degree.”
week 41 / 2025: stuck in the middle with you – Paul Graham Raven
And that’s a wrap for this week. I want to go deeper with “Embrace the Weird” concept so I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Send me your comments, recommendations, ramblings and love/hate letters however you want.
See you next week!
If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!
October 6, 2025
Productivity in Real Life | Weekstarter 41-2025
Well, we had our first skip in this regular posts last week because I both had a heavy dental operation and COVID in that time period — which was enough to knock me out and leave me with a two weeks worth of backlog. That’s why I’m in a “so much to do, so little time” situation once again.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission ControlInbox: 278
RSS Reader: 3249
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
I also have a Now page on my website if you want to check what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Productivity in Real LifeHaving an ADHD brain, a professional life which I must be the one running everything, and a technical curiosity means that I have an unhealthy interest in productivity systems and tools. I love testing and trying things, talking about them, and trying to refine my own personal system.
But this doesn’t mean that I’m one of those “productivity gurus/influencers” that makes you believe that the one true system will solve everything and you’ll become that perfect self because I know it’s bullshit for the same reason I love playing with those tools. Real life doesn’t care about your routines and systems, it’s way too messy to fine-tune it. None of those systems will prepare you for having multiple health issues back to back or having unexpected events. Most of them will just make you feel worse for falling behind.
Most of those systems will look amazing at first and those productivity gurus or “really successful people” will make them look like that’s the ideal way of living. But you never see them talk about mundane, boring part of the life in those systems. I’ve never seen a productivity system that includes housework or really boring bureaucratic stuff. You’ll never see those successful people talk about doing dishes or cleaning their houses. That’s because either they have someone else dealing with the boring and really time consuming part of the life or it doesn’t look good enough on a system that sells hustle mentality.
I wanted to talk about this because when I started to get better and try to figure out how to clean this backlog of tasks, I also fell into that feeling of guilt — when there’s nothing I should feel guilty about. All of those productivity tools and gurus claim they’re helping you but most of them are actually instills that guilt and shame in the background. This is the problem with trying to put something messy and chaotic into a neat system, you’re trying to do something impossible and making yourself feel like a failure in the meantime.
(This line of “trying to put something messy and chaotic into a neat system” can be applied into many different things as well but right now I don’t have much time so keep an eye for a longer blog post on that soon.)
So, whenever I write about work stuff, productivity tools or systems in this blog; keep in mind that I’m only trying to make this chaos more manageable for myself and hoping that you’ll find something useful in my experiments.
Song of the WeekI’m in the mood for some strong metal lately, so I return a lot of my old favorites like this one.
Reading Log
“Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. In other words, the experiments are about what the author intends them to be and nothing else, much like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, who used words to mean whatever he wanted them to mean. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.”
What is the problem with ethical trolley problems? – James Wilson
Outro
“This is the black-metal nature of task management: Every single time you write down a task for yourself, you are deciding how to spend a few crucial moments of the most nonrenewable resource you possess: your life. Every to-do list is, ultimately, about death.”
Of the hundreds of methods out there to help us get things done…why don’t they, you know, work? – Clive Thompson
I hope you don’t mind that we have a short one for this week. I’m already seeing these regular posts working for me so it’ll definitely continue. I’m also hoping to do more normal blogging as well because there’s so much in my head which I want to work on in a more public way.
Please take care of yourself and do your best to not get COVID.
See you next week!
If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!September 22, 2025
Know Where You’re Standing | Weekstarter 39-2025
We’re deep into the second half of the September and it means things are getting busier around here. After spending most of August in a calmer mood, now I need to enter fully into #1000mphClub mode. Which usually means I also need to finish going over my toolbox and make sure everything is set and updates are made where it needed.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission ControlInbox: 80
RSS Reader: 1531
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
Thinking about futures and foresight as a practice and how I should develop my approach makes me spend so much time about what kind of pitfalls and limits you can face if you’re not careful enough. Combined with my philosophy background, this has been my recent rabbit hole/obsession for a while.
One of the mistakes I see many people are doing is the lack of awareness of where they’re standing. Whether we want it or not, where we’re standing mentally, socially, economically, politically, and geographically puts certain limits on what we can see and understand about things and their futures. When you’re thinking about a certain development limited by where you’re standing, you assume the whole world is same as you and the future will be shaped by the conditions you live in. Which is probably the worst way to practice forecasting.
I have two examples I think a lot about this issue. First one I came across I think last year, in which someone who’s very loved in more lefty tech criticism circles was talking about why speech-based interfaces were completely useless and no one wants something like that. It might sound like a normal argument if you’re living in Europe or have a similar circle of friends. But when you look around the world, you’ll see your experience is not the norm. You can see how elderly people prefer talking to their devices instead of dealing with screens or figuring out interfaces and menus. Children learn navigating those devices by talking to them before they learn how to read, and will expect to do that when they get older. Plus, I know privacy is a major concern when you need to talk to your device in public but when you take a public transport in Turkey, you can see why that’s not a big deal for many people.
Another one is the general discourse about AI on the internet. If you spent some time in social media platforms during the last year or two, you know how it became something polarizing and impossible to discuss with nuance. One thing I see more and more is the fact that the “anti-AI no matter what” sentiment is limited with a very well defined Western based group of people and rest of the world is much more open to a nuanced approach and benefitting from it. This limited mindset plus social media dynamics causes so many misunderstandings about the technology and how research about it interpreted. You may think most people hates this technology if you limit your perspective with this group but more global data shows the contrast clearly.
Plus, just being around people can show you this is not a black and white situation. When I was in İstanbul recently, I heard someone having a chat with a barista telling her she can ask ChatGPT about the diet she was talking about, instead of recommending her to Google it. In the meantime, I heard a middle school student warning her friends to use it in a way to get the answers they need quickly, so that ChatGPT won’t consume so much water. But if your only perspective about this technology is limited by the internet discourse and people who are fixated on hating it and everyone saying even remotely positive about it to gain some internet points, you can never see where the world is going.
I can easily give you more examples about every major issue you can think of. Where you’re standing and how you’re experiencing certain things are important to you on a personal level but this doesn’t mean that whole world experiences it the same way. We live in a world where there are billions of people, standing in different places with different backgrounds and different problems and priorities.
If you’re serious about understanding the world and where the future can go, you need to be aware of where you’re standing and make sure it doesn’t limit your sight. I don’t expect everyone to be this way but seeing so many people who are taken seriously on these issues making the same mistake over and over again annoys me in an unreasonable way. Even though I know that this will not change anytime soon because people are scared of the messy complexities of the world and they need someone to tell them a comforting story.
Song of the WeekSnarky Puppy is a great band and I love their drummer Larnell Lewis but Cory Henry with his solo is the main reason why I love this song.
Reading Log
“There is no excuse in this year 2025 for stories that don’t link to primary sources; and yet, most don’t, meaning they aren’t to be trusted. I give you Evans’s Epistemic Lemma: if they don’t link to primary sources, they aren’t reporting on them accurately.”
Why 95% of AI Commentary Fails – by Jon Evans
“And Extremely Online young Americans are, in their own way, just as intertwined with global culture as young Nepalis are. Everyone on Earth under 30 was basically born into a world where that’s always been the case. Obviously that’s going to change how geopolitics works! And American lawmakers clearly don’t understand that (yet).”
Global politics happens on Discord now
Outro
“Our work is crucial to the future of AI alignment research. If the alignment problem is the first step to safe superintelligence, the alignment alignment problem is the zeroth step. Without solving this challenge, we risk a future where the sheer catastrophic scale of misaligned reports on AI alignment imperils all human life on this planet or, worse, exposes the majority of AI alignment research as a big waste of time.”
The AI alignment alignment crisis
There’s a busy week ahead of me, which is a good thing to be honest. If you’ll need me, you know how to find me.
See you around!
If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!September 15, 2025
What If I Just, Don’t? | Weekstarter 38-2025
Greetings from the second week of the Weekstarter. It’s honestly nice to have something like this to start my week. Still trying to get into the weekly rhythm but I can feel it building up.
I’m starting the week with an extra boost thanks to Turkey’s basketball team. Back in 2001, they were one of the main reasons why I completely stopped following football and became a basketball fan and now seeing a new team playing a perfect game and losing their only game in the EuroBasket final against Germany was really nice.
Status ReportInbox: 208
RSS Reader: 2413
Upcoming Events/Travel: 0
I also have a Now page on my website if you want to check what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
What If I Just, Don’t?There’s a Donald Glower quote I keep thinking about a lot lately. Talking about relevance and success, he says “You define success. Just like you define failure. So it’s really about autonomy. A lot of people you see on the internet HAVE to be on the internet.”
Most of the time, we talk about the internet, and especially social media, like it’s something we must be on. It’s certainly true for some people and I feel that way from time to time. But the problem is that we’re losing sight of when it gets to a point where avoiding or taking a step back is the right thing to do for ourselves. I certainly make that mistake a lot. Mainly because it has an important and useful role in my life — both professionally and socially.
But the more time passes, I realize that using those platforms doesn’t mean that I have to constantly consume and participate in them. Sometimes just having a presence is enough, just to make sure people can have a way to get in touch. This doesn’t mean that I need to be part of every discourse that specific platform has that day.
What made me realize that and start making changes in my daily habits accordingly —aside from that quote— is the moment I noticed that I was on the verge of starving myself intellectually. I was constantly consuming something media wise but it’s mostly junk food with zero nutritional value. People who actually share valuable stuff drowns under the pile of junk and never ending, meaningless discourse. Sure, I can make lists, try to fine-tune my algorithms but is it really worth all the trouble?
This is why I’m going to set some time aside to get my media diet in order. Go through my RSS, newsletter and podcast subscriptions; find some more magazines to keep an eye on, go over my to-read and to-watch lists. If you have recommendations (it can be your own or something you like) feel free to email me or leave a comment under this to share with everyone.
Song of the WeekAnother album I fell in love with on release in 2025. Even though I don’t listen punk as I used to, I still keep track of and regularly listen certain bands like Propagandhi. Their latest album At Peace was released in May and I probably listen it from start to finish once a week. Cat Guy is one of the peak points of the album and I’m not saying that only because the whole clip is a montage of cat videos. But together with lyrics, this video really takes the song to another level.
Reading Log
“We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”
Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme – Garbage Day
“There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.”
Just Like Stuff – thejaymo
Outro
“Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.” “Which means?” “Secrets,” said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, “are cool.” On the screen appeared their images, standing beside the table, Bigend not yet seated, captured by a camera somewhere above. The Bigend on the screen took a pale blue cloth from his pocket, pulled out a chair, and began to dust its arms and back and seat. “Secrets,” said the Bigend beside her, “are the very root of cool.”
Spook Country – William Gibson
And that’s all for this week. I’m still tinkering around with the format and see what works and what doesn’t, so let me know if you have any comments or something doesn’t works right.
Take care of yourselves, keep an eye for things to enjoy, and I’ll see you next week.
If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!September 8, 2025
Weekstarter 37-2025
I’ve been trying to figure out how to start blogging regularly again, mainly because I’ve given up on microblogging platforms in general and believe that in the current state of the internet, having your own space is the best thing you can do. One trick that works for me to develop a habit is to create a semi-strict format that has a regular date and time. That’s why I decided to start this weekly post format on my blog (which also goes out as a newsletter if you prefer to read it that way).
I know Sundays are the day for these kinds of weekly posts and newsletters but I decided to go with Mondays for two reasons. One, many newsletters and blogs I regularly read has a Sunday post, meaning most of the current and potential readers of this blog already has enough to read on Sundays. Two, I’m hoping that starting my week with something I have to write and use that to set my weekly mood will help me spend the rest of the week even more productive. Let’s see how it’ll work out.
So, yeah, this is something I will be putting out every Monday. If you’re not already following my blog, you can do that via RSS or subscribe it as a newsletter below.
Status ReportWhen you’re living in a country that hates being economically stable and culturally conservative, having a career or professional history like mine becomes much more interesting. Running your own business becomes extra stressful and you’ll have an even harder time explaining whatever that your job is.
But from the start I knew I’d end up with a life like this. Not because I enjoy living with constant stress and anxiety but I know this is how I can do my best and I can say that it was worth all the trouble. This is why I finally took that step to start my own independent studio earlier this year.
Since then, I’m focused on two things. First one is to get out there and make sure people are actually aware of what you’re doing so that I can get some work. This one is a mixed bag. On the positive side, I’m getting in touch with friends in the field to learn from them and let them know about what I’m up to. But on the negative side, I’m really bad at self-promotion so what I do is probably a complete mystery for most people. I know I need to figure out ways to become more visible and social media is the first step everyone thinks for that. But when I look at my feeds or what some of the “more visible ones” are doing, I want to start screaming. That’s why I’m stuck on that step.
I’m hoping to solve this problem by making use of my blogs (Tuhaf Gelecek on the Turkish side) because that’s the only way out I could think of. I’ve set up ways to federate all my posts to every platform WordPress Jetpack allows and some more. I’m not sure if I’ll stay just with writing or experiment with some other formats right now but this feels like the best way to start putting some things out there.
Second thing I’m focused on is to study futures and foresight in a deep way to develop my approach further. I think my philosopher side got really excited about all of that because I ended up with a long reading list, which I’m going through like a university student right now. (Let me know if you think that list sounds interesting and I can make a blog post about it.)
I love nerding out about things like this but the main reason why I’m focused on this is mostly related to things I see on the field. Western approach to the future feels really stuck and getting more and more conservative, which makes them even more attached to their exceptionalism. While they’re crying after a dead future, rest of the world has a completely different and much more justifiably optimistic approach to the future. And one of the things I love about being from and living in Turkey is that being neither here nor there creates a really interesting mix. My main goal is to figure out how to turn “living in the limbo” into my advantage.
Song for the WeekI’m a big Deftones fan and their latest album private music is pretty much everything I’d expect from a Deftones album. The whole album is on the loop for a while and this is one of my favorites from it.
Reading Log
“Only if we stop reducing the radical and unprecedented situation facing us, either with rewarmed ideological polarities – autocracy v. democracy – or the intellectual bludgeon of “that’s just history”, do we have any hope of making sense of our circumstances and of actually thinking in medias res.”
Chartbook 407: Polycrisis revisited: Are we beyond Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome?
“I came to realize that for many buyers, a storyline isn’t necessary. In fact, the absence of one might make these characters even more appealing. You can project anything onto them — your personality, your mood, your values. It will never go out of its character (unlike many human idols who might one day upset their fans).”
Pop Mart — China’s Disney, or a manipulated hype? China’s New Consumption #2
“Success in safety lacks spectacle: it depends less on personal heroism than it does on following the rules. But it works.”
A brazen attack on air safety is underway — here’s what’s at stake | The Verge
I think that’s all from me for this week. Like Jay, I’m also one of those who feels like September is the start of a new year. I feel like this is a really good way to start.
Let me know what you think about the format and I’ll see you around!
All my work published here and on my newsletter is supported by the readers. If you want to become a regular supporter of my work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!April 3, 2025
Tuhaf Studio is Here
On March 2015, I started a project called Tuhaf Gelecek (The Weird Future in Turkish) to have an outlet to work on my recently developing interest in futures and foresight. Since then, I published newsletters, podcasts and articles as a part of this experiment. The goal was to develop my approach to futuring.
But a lot happened in those ten years, and continues to happen. We started at the new normal and ended up in the polycrisis. Even though I wasn’t doing futures and foresight work in a professional sense, every other work I did was shaped by my developing understanding of futures. At the same time, I was keep noticing our need for futures (not in the sense of “keynote futurists” but in a way that helps people to gain agency in their futures) increasing more and more because of the things are going all around the world.
Now I’m ready to take the work I started with Tuhaf Gelecek to the next level. Even though I started working on this in the background since 2024, I’m finally ready to announce Tuhaf Studio: my own independent futures and foresight studio is open to business.
If you want to get a sense of the Tuhaf Studio’s approach to the futures, I can summarize it with two sentences.
Tuhaf Studio approaches the future as something we create and not something that happens to us. Meaning, my work won’t be about taking a passive position about the futures but instead focus on helping you to gain agency on your futures and understand how you can create better ones. Bruce Sterling says, “The future is a verb, not a noun.” And this is the mantra of Tuhaf Studio.
Tuhaf Studio also doesn’t limit its futures and foresight work with the hype and the mainstream trends. I’ll always look for the edge cases, weird signals and never limit my work with certain geographies. Because I believe this way of thinking is one of the main reasons of the problems we face today.
If you’re looking for someone to help you make sense of what’s next, want to learn how to approach the futures as something you create, need someone to consult about not just the usual trends and signals but also the weird ones, Tuhaf Studio is here to help.
TLDR: Tuhaf Studio is ready to work and if you want to work with me or looking for a collaborator, just get in touch and we’ll see how we can work together.
Where to find Tuhaf Studio:
WebsiteBlueskyLinkedInInstagramMarch 17, 2025
Programming Update
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post about blogging. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start with apologizing for not blogging for a while. But the way things are developing over here, it’s safe to say that I’m finally returning to regular blogging and writing.
One of the main reasons for this is the fact that social media platforms, especially text-based ones, feel repetitive and not the best place for new discoveries or conversations anymore. While I won’t stop using them entirely, I’m spending less time there and more in my RSS reader and messaging apps like Slack and Signal.
Another key reason is the rapid changes in my work and career. This has prompted me to reassess how I allocate my time and energy online. Moving forward, I’m going to put more time and energy to on my own spaces and will be working with my garage door open. I’m nearing the public launch of PROJECT LUNAR GROWL, which will elevate the importance of my blog(s).
So, what are the main changes I’m talking about. It has several parts but mostly focuses on my websites and how I’m going to create things online from now on.
Since people are treating newsletters like blogs, I’ve decided to take the opposite route and added subscribe as a newsletter option to both this blog and Tuhaf Gelecek. I’ll be blogging here both in longer formats (like longer writings and regular update posts) and more shorter things at the same time but only the longer ones will be sent as a newsletter. If you want the whole experience, I highly recommend using an RSS reader. (I’ll auto post everything to social media platforms but it’s not a guaranteed way to catch them all.)If you were already a subscriber to my newsletters, there’s a good chance you’re already reading this in your inbox or a copy of this is waiting for you.And if you’re not, you can use the form at the home page or the button at the top to subscribe.Even though this blog/website is bilingual, my posts in here will be more English than Turkish. This is both because most of the regular readers here are from outside Turkey, and also most of my blogging and writing in Turkish will happen over at Tuhaf Gelecek. Which started as an experimental space for me to think and create about futures in Turkish and now it’s going to be one of the main parts of the PROJECT LUNAR GROWL.There still will be occasional Turkish posts here but those will be more personal in nature. If you prefer to read posts in only one language, you can use the menus at the header or get one language RSS feeds from these links: Turkish only, English only.I also started to keep an updated Now page, which has so many updates and unnecessary information about me. I’m aiming to keep it always up-to-date so it can be a good reference point for anyone who wants to know what I’m doing right now.Since all of this is funded out of my pocket and I can’t put a paywall/subscription type of thing —because Stripe doesn’t work in Turkey yet— my only option is Patreon. I’m planning to make as much of my work in these spaces accessible to everyone as possible but this doesn’t mean that I don’t need that support. So of you can spare extra couple dollars a month, that’d be amazing.(I’m also thinking about what can I do for the people who decides to support but I’m not really sure. What would you like to receive extra from me?)To wrap up: don’t forget to subscribe if you want newsletters from me, put my RSS feed in your readers, I have a Patreon for you to support all of this, and there’s more on the way.
That’s all the news I have right now, I guess.
November 22, 2024
Echo Chamber is A Lie
If you’ve been following the recent online discussions about how people are getting tired of X-Twitter for many different reasons and moving to alternative places like Bluesky, you probably also saw many different versions of empty criticism of this move as well. This is just one example and most of them boils down to this: people moving to Bluesky creating an echo chamber and isolating themselves from people who disagree with them.
This may sound like a really smart and considered argument if you don’t know what people are actually avoiding and not tolerating in the new websites they move — or act like you don’t know on purpose. But since this argument seems to be quite popular in certain circles and promoted in many different places, I wanted to explain why it’s a completely made-up problem (unless you’re one of the people who others actually want to stay away from).
1. People are not limited to social media to learn about thingsOne major problem with this argument is that it automatically assumes that people learn about the world and/or follow the news only from social media, and it’s the only social interaction they have. If you’re thinking this way, just go outside and touch some grass. And also check rest of the internet outside the several platforms. (If you’re reading this one, that’s a good first step.)
People get their news in so many different ways and can learn about what others think outside of X-Twitter or other platforms. Most people are not as reliant on these platforms as you think. Plus, people socialize and have their social circles outside a single platform or internet in general. So unless they’re in a really isolated position (whether willingly or because they have to) this argument doesn’t make any sense. And even if they’re socializing solely online, this doesn’t limit them to a single platform.
2. Forcing yourself to interact with harmful or useless things is not broadening your horizonAnother major issue with this argument is that it assumes all interactions online are created equal and valuable. You may think that there’s something one can learn from anything but this doesn’t justify people putting themselves in an harmful position. No one needs to interact with people who openly wants to silence or harm them. No one needs to read about another bunch of threats, bullying or open attacks to themselves or another group of people. This will not broaden anyone’s horizons, especially when the goal of the other side is to become the only horizon there is.
When you try to force people into these harmful situations or force them to consume useless information because “they shouldn’t be stuck in an echo chamber” what you’re actually proposing is those people let others hurt them or force them into uncomfortable places. People have a right to protect themselves and none of the echo chamber shit will excuse trying to take away this right.
Also people are leaving platforms like X-Twitter because how much garbage it’s filled with. Accounts playing for algorithm, posting nonsense or blatant misinformation (which are then amplified by the said algorithm) are not going to broaden anyone’s horizons. So stop creating excuses for that garbage and act like we should be consuming that.
3. Why it’s only the one side that needs to get out of their echo chamber?This is my favorite question about this issue. When you look at the echo chamber discourse, it’s never aimed at people who are actually living in an echo chamber and forces everyone to live inside it as well. You’ll never see people telling right wing groups, conspiracists, people who are targeting the minorities to leave their echo chambers and broaden their horizons. It’s always the people who are targeted by them that needs to learn from them. Yet when you look at who actually lives inside echo chambers, the answer is clear as day.
This is why I think echo chamber is now a weaponized term, just like fake news during 2015–16 period. Fake news was a term to describe conspiracy theories and made up stuff but then it turned into a political weapon used by politicians to target any news article or outlet they don’t like. Now we’re seeing a similar trend playing out with echo chamber, specifically used to target people who want to protect themselves from harm, abuse or bullshit all over the internet. When you accept this description, you’re helping those spreading the abuse and bullshit, simple as that.
4. People are smart and they know what’s best for themFinally, this argument is simply assumes most people are not smart enough to filter their media consumption and find the information they needed in a safe and useful way. This is why they think everyone should be stuck on one platform consuming everything that comes into their way to keep up with the world.
For a while, I argued this was a major problem and people will need more and more filtering and curation to manage all the information coming their way non-stop. Now people are looking for ways to do that and all of a sudden it’s a problem because some groups are realizing that their garbage will be blocked by this change.
Most people are smarter than they realize and finally using the tools they find to filter all the noise and garbage they don’t want. This is why some people are really angry and defensive about all of the recent changes on the social media landscape and it’s kinda fun to watch them losing themselves over it. They don’t even realize the fact that they’re telling on themselves with all this drama.
My one advice: Don’t stop with just moving out of one platform. Actually take control of your media diet in any way possible. Use filters on the platforms freely, block what you don’t want to see. Go find yourself an RSS reader and start reading the websites and blogs too. There are so many different ways to take control of your internet use and I hope this wave is just a start for everyone who wants a better internet.
September 9, 2024
Varlık Dergisinin Teknofetişizm Dosyası İçin Siborg Felsefeyi Yazdım
Türkiye’nin önde gelen kültür ve edebiyat dergilerinden birisi olan Varlık, aynı zamanda her ay hazırladıkları özel dosyalarla birçok güncel ve önemli konuya dair yazıları okurlarıyla paylaşıyor. Eylül 2024 sayısı için dosya konusunun başlığı olarak Teknofetişizm’i seçtiler ve benden de bu dosyaya katkıda bulunmamı istediler.
Geçtiğimiz hafta yayınlanan sayıda yayınlanan ve “Artırılmış Dünyanın Siborgları İçin Felsefe” başlığını taşıyan yazımda kendimi basit bir teknofetişizm ve teknoloji eleştirisiyle sınırlamak yerine geçmişten bu yana teknolojinin insanlığın evriminde oynadığı role ve günümüzde teknolojinin dünyayla olan ilişkimizi nasıl şekillendirdiğine bakmaya çalıştım. Yazımın temel motivasyonlarından birisi teknolojiyle insan arasına yapay bir düalizm duvarı örmek yerine, bunu benimseyen bir felsefe yapmak için bir başlangıç rotası çizmekti1.
Derginin genel yayın yönetmeni yazımı şöyle özetlemiş:
“Ahmet Alphan Sabancı, “Artırılmış Dünyanın Siborgları İçin Felsefe” başlıklı yazısında teknolojiyle olan ilişkimizi irdelerken McKenzie Wark’ın “vektöralizm”, Alvin Toffler’ın “gelecek şoku”, Timnit Gebru ve Émile P. Torres’in “TESCREAL” kavramları, Ray Kurzweil’in “singularity” adını verdiği kırılma noktası üzerinde duruyor. “Bugün geldiğimiz noktada her türlü düalizmi reddeden ve insanı parçası olduğu sistemlerle bir bütün olarak görmemizi sağlayan bir felsefeye duyduğumuz ihtiyaç giderek artıyor,” diyor ve hem teknoloji felsefesinin hem de genel olarak felsefenin Donna Haraway’in siborg kavramından ilham alarak yeni bir yaklaşım geliştirmesi ve dünyayı bu eksen üzerinden anlamak için çalışması gerektiğini savunuyor.”
Meraklısı için yazımın kaynakça kısmı:
Dergiyi birçok kitabevinde, dergi ve kitap alışverişi yaptığınız sitelerde ve Varlık Yayınlarının satış sitesinde bulmanız mümkün. Eğer okursanız yorumlarınızı bu postun altında veya email yoluyla bana iletebilirsiniz. Okuyanlarla üzerine konuşmayı çok isterim.
Bu konudaki görüşlerimi ve yaklaşımımı daha da derinleştirdiğim bir çalışmayı Tuhaf Gelecek çatısı altında yayınlamak için hazırlıyorum.
︎
July 15, 2024
Kinds of the Social Media Gamers
Lately I’ve been thinking about how most people —including myself— take social media too seriously and let these platforms dictate how they’re using the internet. This rabbit hole made me think a lot about my relationship with these platforms as well and how I can turn it around and make it more beneficial for me.
Then, during a recent conversation with Jay, he mentioned how a friend treats social media like a game and doesn’t take it too seriously. At first, it sounded like a good approach to me in general. But then my brain started to overthink it and matched different types of social media users with different kinds of gamers. The more I thought about it the more it turned into a thought experiment to see how deep I can go and I ended up with this seven different typologies.
Casual Users: They’re the ones overlooked the most but always form the real majority, both in games and social platforms. They don’t care about all the stuff “hardcore players” care and use the platform without too much investment. Their interactions are usually more passive and they might seem like they don’t contribute much but without them, your game or platform can’t survive. They’re the balancing factor against all the hardcore players. Their absence is the reason why Bluesky or Mastodon can’t compete with the other platforms.
Here for the Friends: People in this group can be active players but they’re not actually here for the game but for the community they have. They don’t care much about what the game offers. As long as they can spend time with their friends, they’ll stick around. But the moment their friends decides to play another game or the game makes it impossible for them to spend time together (like forcing random people into their feeds and make staying in touch with their friends harder) they’ll quit. This is why most MMO type games try to make sure a new player doesn’t have to grind too much just to play with their friends.
Meta Hunters: This group is the one who only cares about the notifications and analytics pages. Their main goal is to optimize everything they’re doing to get maximum interaction and make numbers go up. You know who they are. Just like they don’t have a real preference in games, they don’t have any personality or taste in social media. They can defend or promote anything as long as it brings them better numbers. They might be enjoying their time but they’re making things worse for everyone else.
Toxic Streamers: Just like some games have famous streamers, social media has their own celebrities. Some of those are decent people but there’s a group of toxic ones who thinks that their fame on the game gives them a right to dictate how things should be. They can complain about stuff in the game they don’t like and expect it to be fixed immediately because “they’re big”, just like some big social media users expect special treatment. I think Elon Musk and his relationship with Twitter is the most extreme example of this group.
Lore Nerds: Some video games have a solid fanbase mainly because of their story. People continue to play the game because they want to see how the story develops. I think the social media players who are addicted to the discourse happening on the platform is the same. They continue to stay on these platforms because they don’t want to miss the latest discourse or the developments in the most recent one. This is why there are people you can follow to catch up with the lore on both: what means for Destiny 2 players is the same for what Garbage Day means for social media players.
For games this is usually a good thing but on social media it usually makes things worse.
Grass Deficient Players: If you take the game you’re playing too seriously and become toxic because of it, you’ll end up someone telling you “go outside and touch some grass”. And just like in games, we have people on social media who need to hear this recommendation regularly. They act like this game is the most important thing in their lives and become really aggressive and violent because of this. They need help but this doesn’t mean that you should be the one helping them. Giving them the proper advice and then blocking them is the only proper response.
Glitchers: This group is a lesser known minority who enjoys their time the most. They know how the game works and they can be really good at it but they don’t care at all. What they’re after is pushing the limits of the game, finding the breaking points and misusing the parts. Their knowledge of the game is used to play a completely different game and create a special place for themselves. Their main goal is to have fun and learning the game so that they can break and manipulate it for this goal is the way.
I’m not sure where I want to go with this or how useful these categories are. But it was fun to think and write about it, and it also made me think about social media from a fresh perspective. If you think I’m missing any other gamer stereotypes or have some ideas about how this thought experiment can be used I’d love to hear about it.
