Intro
I was hoping to write a Weekstarter last week but spending the week before like an artist on tour while the weather in every city was completely different was more than my body could handle and I got sick while on my way to Ankara. It was something I can manage and I was already feeling better when I got back home on Saturday but then I had to swim through our street on Monday to get back home from grocery shopping, thanks to our municipality.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 457 (Most of it junk that’s been piling up.)
RSS Reader: 1850
Open Tabs: 179
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
- Couple of projects still in progress, wrapping up others. I have some nice space opening up for new work if you’re interested.
- Visiting Kocaeli on Saturday to give a workshop on journalism and AI.
- Some background maintenance and admin stuff as usual.
- We had to skip an episode of Tuhaf Gelecek Podcast because of my travel, need to record and publish that one as well.
From Last Week
- I have a new article published in the Turkish language outlet Fayn about AI and philosophy of mind. It’s about how the technology, unrelated to its own capabilities, forces us to think about the key questions of the philosophy of mind and why I think it’s an important opportunity we should take advantage of. Don’t worry if you can’t read Turkish, I’m planning to write about it in English over here as well.
- This one is actually way older than last week but I just found out that it was available online (partly because people usually forget letting you know in projects like these and they somehow managed to misspell my last name). I was the Türkiye author of the report titled “Governance of social media platforms and regulation of online media in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Türkiye“, published by SEENPM. My part of the report is also available with English summary and Turkish translation as well.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
I’m open to work and collaboration offers and you can reach me via here or through Tuhaf Studio.
Hubertus Bigend Had A Point
The media system we live in forces us into thinking that if you want to be successful or influential in your field, you need to be visible. You need big numbers, have to put yourself out there and hustle all the time. Which means that you have to find ways to keep scaling, to make your numbers go up. Which leads to dealing with people who doesn’t have any context about you or your work and lots of time and energy wasting interactions — instead of using that time to do the things you want to do.
I’m really not sure whether that’s something I want. Sure, I’d like to be known and reach more people with my work and ideas but I’d much more prefer to reach the right people instead of many. Likewise, I want to focus on the kind of work that actually results with an impact instead of big numbers and goes viral. The “problem” with this is that it’s a much harder path than the other option because you can’t make it with shortcuts, scams and slop. You need to actually focus on your work and the quality of it. Which doesn’t look like a smart idea because we’re living in the risk-maxxing era.
I think there are two sides of my position and why I keep insisting on that. First part is coming from the fact that I’ve been in and around media people and also have a mind that loves to analyze everything in detail. So I know how the sausage made and the more I know the more I’m aware how it will kill me. I know there are so many people who makes it look really alluring from outside but you probably can’t remember most of their names or what they were actually doing. Sure, they were world famous last year/month/week but no one cares who they are unless they do something new to make the media talk about them again. That’s why you end up bunch of people starting brands or crypto currencies as fast as possible.
The other side is more personal. I genuinely find that kind of “being known” cooler and something aspiring. Instead of being famous, it seems much better to be the person that every right person knows. Not a mysterious person but doesn’t care much about how visible he is. Focuses on his work to reach wherever its needed, not himself. And I think it’s something important to have in the current ecosystem if you want to stay sane, don’t want to find yourself captured by your audience, or forced to keep playing your greatest hits all the time.
This is probably why I’ve started to develop a new level of understanding —and admiration— to Hubertus Bigend, from William Gibson’s Blue Ant series. If you take what I’ve described here, dial it to the eleven, and add lots of money and resources, you’ll end up with Hubertus. Not sure if I want to go that far but I wouldn’t say no to some of the money and resources he has.
Song of the Week
Reading Log
“But it is shockingly easy to spend money when a cute little guy is running around the internet with your credit card.”
Meta’s Muse AI agent is an effective helper and great at spending money
“It certainly doesn’t look great. But does it actually matter? An exec’s statement doesn’t change the underlying facts: fair use isn’t copyright infringement, and even when something is infringement, it still isn’t theft. That someone colloquially calls it theft isn’t supposed to change the legal analysis, no matter how emotionally satisfying it feels.”
Copyright Infringement Still Isn’t Theft, Even When a Microsoft Employee Says It Is
“The idea emerges from the fact that nearly all biomolecules in nature have a kind of handedness—all DNA, for example, is built from right-handed sugars, and all proteins are made from left-handed amino acids. Thus, it’s possible to imagine—and maybe even create—a living organism made of mirror-image counterparts to natural biomolecules. The first would probably be mirror bacteria.”
Mirror Life Is Theoretical. The Danger Is Anything But. | RAND
Outro
A quick shout out to Doug Belshaw and his blog before wrapping up this week’s post.
When I started the Weekstarter, I was mainly inspired by people like Warren Ellis, Jay Springett and Paul Graham Ravenbut wanted to add something more to make it a little different. It was a really nice surprise to see Doug liked the format enough to create his own version of it. You should visit Doug’s blog and follow it.
And that’s all for this week. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you around!
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