The Turkish internet, repression economics, Elon Musk, the jail effect, Turkey vs. Israel, Mahir Polat

Notebook #19

This is a regular post about the things I’ve been reading, watching and thinking about. The first item is free, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

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Virtual event

On April 16, I’ll be taking part in a MERIP event on the protests in Turkey. You can sign up here.

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A recommendation

The political economist

Umit Akcay

(Ümit Akçay) is on substack now.

Akçay is always worth reading. He has a mature understanding of the interaction between capital and the state and brings it to bear on important political issues of the day. A lot of people are still murky on why the 2018-2023 crisis happened, but Akçay wrote a book about it that actually puts forward a rational explanation for Erdoğan’s decisions at the time.

You can tell that I’m always happy to see more Turkey-adjacent substacks come up. I think the bigger the pool, the more readers we’ll have. Apart from that, I also think that think the ownership model here could be a very strong alternative to the advertisement-based model of the Turkish internet right now.

Anyways, you can sign up for Akçay’s posts below.

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The Turkish internet and its walled gardens

Something has shifted in the structure of Turkish opposition media. We keep hearing about X accounts getting banned, TV stations being shut down, YouTubers getting arrested or threatened, all of which results in massive self-censorship.

It used to be that this sort of thing was significant because of how centralized speech was. Twitter/X kind of was the Turkish internet for a long time, especially for politicos. I don’t think that’s the case any more. There’s now a lot of walled gardens. Discord channels, subreddits, groups chats, newsletters like this. It’s going to be hard for the state to keep track of all that and stomp out dissent.

A lot of people are also migrating to Bluesky. The remaining investigative outlets, like Birgün and Evrensel, have been there for some time, and aggregators like Diken and Vaziyet have made the move recently.

I have written most of a 2-3 part essay on the evolution of Turkish journalism and online culture, but whenever I try to finalize it, something big happens and I end up shelving it again. Perhaps I’ll get back to it at some point.