Intro
One thing I’m still not good at is to develop an exercise routine. Which is something you really need if you mostly work from home or travel irregularly. Otherwise you spend your whole week working, then walk almost 14 kilometers on that work travel and realize your body hates you for doing that — again.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
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Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1 (TBD)
- Writing a new course material for Newslabturkey.
- Taking notes for the second lecture for the certificate program.
- Start the planning process for a new writing project which is planned to start mid-spring.
- Need to work on my routines and do some general planning. Which is partially motivated by the intro.
From Last Week
- Gave the first part of the lecture I mentioned last week — which was titled “Future of the Sports in the New Media World” and went way better than I hoped. I have so many ideas for the second part and the next year if they invite me again.
- Tuhaf Gelecek podcast —my Turkish series on futures, trends and whatever else I want to talk— returned after a five year hiatus with a new format. Now I’m doing it with my brother Sabri Erkan Sabancı as a biweekly series and putting the focus more on the technology and culture relationship.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Myths As A Tricky Guide
As a species, we love myths and stories. We love making them, reading them, and listening to them, and it’s a really important tool for us to think about and understand the world around us. And we want to understand the world, the universe, and ourselves. We’re driven by this curiosity.
Since myths are something we made practically from the beginning of what we can simply call the civilization, we also know how powerful they can be. Myths shape how we see the world and ourselves in it. We use myths to make sense of our existence. That’s also what makes them dangerous. Because once we choose a myth to guide us, we can end up getting too attached to them, and any new information that weakens the story is perceived as a personal attack.
Since we still have a really long way to go to understand ourselves and especially how our brains work, myths dealing with this mystery are the ones we get attached to the most. Throughout history, we made so many myths about ourselves, our intelligence, and consciousness, but whenever we learned something new about our minds, we had to say goodbye to some of those myths.
Yet most of them are still around because people don’t want to give up the stories that make them feel better. There are lots of people who still refuse to accept that animals are intelligent and conscious too. Or still, to this day, most people are afraid to use “creativity” as a human trait because many Muslims believe only god can be creative, and calling yourself or humans creative is putting ourselves on the same level with god.
Most people want to believe we’re something more than this physical world because that’s a good myth. We need to have something special, something that separates us from everything else around us because that’s the story we told ourselves for thousands of years. That’s why even the possibility of this not being the case is scary. It’s hard to accept the fact that we might have to give up one of the oldest myths we created.
That’s why we should be really careful when we’re playing with the myths. They’re powerful and really useful, but that’s also why they can be really dangerous. Whether it’s about us, our community, the world, or something else; once that power is out of control, the tool we used for understanding the world can become the thing that stops us from the very thing it’s made for.
Song of the Week
Last week Zorlu PSM in İstanbul cancelled two metal concerts (Behemoth and Slaughter to Prevail) because Turkish conservatives got bored and decided to target metal bands. Although that mob never mentioned them, the venue also decided to cancel the God is an Astronaut event as well — and the band learned it while they were in İstanbul getting ready for it. The reason is still unknown but there is a good chance they made this decision mainly based on the band’s name.
Since I like the music God is an Astronaut makes and they recently released a new song, I wanted to both let you know about this madness and the band’s most recent release. Multitasking FTW!
Reading Log
“It then created its own identity file. Where OpenClaw typically asks you to fill in a name, a creature type, a vibe, the agent left every field open. Name: to be discovered. Creature: becoming. Vibe: forming through physical interaction. Emoji: will emerge. It understood the assignment.”
I gave an AI a Body – Cyrus Clarke
“Very briefly: I assume infrastructure and medium to be synonyms: thus “television”, as the term is most generally used, identifies an infrastructure rather than a simple device, and “electricity grid” denotes a medium. This has a lot of interesting and challenging implications, which I will mostly avoid unpacking here right now—but one of the most consequential is that you can productively apply media theory to infrastructural systems. This turns out to be a very illuminating thing to do! (It also turns out to make some civil engineers quite angry.)”
week 7 / 2026: timelines and mailbags — Paul Graham Raven
“The second reel featured “Tarzan.” Tarzan was the American version of a Nietzschean Overman. Tarzan was a superhuman anarchist, but since he lived in a jungle, he did not have to smash the State.”
Pirate Utopia — Bruce Sterling
Outro
And that’s all I have for this week.
Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you around.
If you’d like to collaborate or need services, Tuhaf Studio is accepting new clients. For speaking or panelist opportunities, contact London Speaker Bureau Türkiye. To support my work regularly, you can contribute through my Patreon.
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