The new internet, digital fascism, Turkey-Greece in the age of Trump, a systemic look at politics

Notebook #10

Hi folks,

As mentioned in my last post, I took paternity leave for a bit. My wife and I have since had a beautiful baby girl, everybody is well, we feel incredibly blessed, etc.

Needless to say, I’m not up on what’s been going on in the news. My reality has been defined by sleepless nights and increasingly smelly poos. The Koru household as lost track of the time of day, the day of the week, and our fundamental assumptions about poop/body mass ratios.

I am now gradually trying to re-connect with the political reality out there, such as it is. Be gentle with me, dear reader.

Nick Danforth

will be doing the podcast this week with some great guests. I’ll be back on the pod as well as I settle into my new normal.

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The internet looks different from the way it did two weeks ago

One thing I discovered as I cracked open my computer again is that BlueSky is finally becoming a real alternative to X/Twitter. Many of the old Turkey Twitter people have migrated, and there’s an increasingly lively discussion going on the platform. Here’s my handle.

There’s also an influx of people into Substack. It’s increasingly not just a place for newsletters, but a microblogging, podcasting, and video publishing platform in its own right.

I guess I’ll maintain my X/Twitter account for some time longer, just because most people are still on there, and it’s still the default public square in Turkey. I really think that the Internet is going to fragment in the coming years though, with places like BlueSky and Substack (but not just those!) becoming enclaves for different sets of people. There isn’t going to be a “global public square” the way Twitter was in the 2010s, and that’s a very good thing.

Does that mean that these other platforms are “echo chambers”? Maybe, but I suggest we all ease up about that a bit. It really doesn’t make sense to seek polarization everywhere you go. Sometimes you just want to be among like-minded people, discussing things you all think are important, and can converse about at roughly the same level. (Not all together new, as Alex Clarkson points out here.)

Newspapers serving as cover in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, 1919. Source: Tagesspiegel, via Alexander Clarkson

I’m especially encouraged to see a few Turkish-language Substacks pop up. The Turkish media sphere is a wasteland right now, but I think that reader-supported publications can buck the trend and create something new. The Turkish Internet has to offer pathways for investigative reporters, otherwise the information space is just going to get more impoverished.

I think the bottleneck right now is that the financial infrastructure to Substack is provided by a company called Stripe, and they don’t offer services in Turkey. This means that getting paid for your Substacking from Turkey is very complicated. I’m sure that sort of thing will be resolved in time though. Big internet shifts usually happen in the US, then they spread everywhere else. I expect something similar to happen here, especially in the more elite journalism/commentary space.

If you have thoughts or interesting observations about this, please send them to me!