Intro
Spending the Sunday on a trip to İstanbul and back for a lecture meant Monday was mostly spent on rest and cleaning the deck. That’s why I’m sending this one on a Tuesday.
On the plus side, I broke my personal record and used four different kinds of rail transportation in one day. Six is the maximum I can do on a trip to İstanbul but it needs a detailed planning.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
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- Working on the episode for Tuhaf Gelecek podcast.
- Writing for new NLTR incubator program.
- Early preparations for a workshop and speech.
- Should put some time aside for ideas and other things that’s been on hold because of the injury.
From Last Week
- The interview I gave to a university’s magazine is now live both as text and video. It’s in Turkish but if you’re really interested you can give YouTube’s auto translated subtitles a try, it looks decent.
- Gave the second part of my lecture on the future of sports and sports media on Sunday. It was refreshing to think about how media and technology evolves sports and where it can go from here.
- On the blog: Notes on that 2028 Prediction
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
We Live in A System
(I don’t want to talk about politics too much on this weekly post, but when you have a war like this — especially when it’s happening right next to you — it gets harder to avoid.)
Once again, we’re living the results of an action taken by people who insist on denying the fact that we’re all part of a complex, global system and that they can do whatever they want.
The Iran war started for reasons probably not even clear to the ones who started it, and now the whole world is trying to protect itself from the results — whether it’s economic, military, or something else. And it’s really hard because no one has any idea what the plan is. At first, they said it’ll take several weeks, now they say it’ll end very soon. What’s the goal or when the world will know it’s achieved is a total mystery. But who cares about the world, right?
What makes it even worse in my opinion is that this isn’t happening because of short-term thinking like we’re used to from the past. The reason for all of this seems more and more like an obvious denial of reality. Thinking that you’re insulated from the rest of the world or that anything you do will not have any other impacts on the rest of the system everyone is a part of. Losing your touch with reality because you start to think the myth you made up is the reality.
When you insist on your delusions like this, others will respond in two ways: lock you somewhere up for treatment or distance themselves to safety. Since it’s not possible to do the first one to countries, it won’t surprise me to see the second one happening more and more. That’s exactly why people keep talking about the global system changing; they know it’s the only option left. Sure, the system is far from perfect, but for most of its participants, the destruction of it is not really an option.
The real question is how this change will happen and how that new version will look like. Considering the level of uncertainty we’re in, no matter how many scenarios you develop, it’s impossible to know for sure. I know uncertainty usually brings the worst-case scenarios to most people’s minds, but it also means that we can have more choices about where we want to go from here. To do that, you must be prepared to take advantage of this opportunity.
Song of the Week
Mammal Hands released a new album and it opens with this beautiful song.
Reading Log
“The difference was stark. Most people told Ipsos MORI they were worried about their compatriots’ wellbeing, and yet most people who spoke to the World Values Survey were pretty sunny about their own happiness.”
The End of the World as We Know It — Tim Harford
“At some level of interconnectivity we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so easily that we haven’t even recognised when it happens let alone how to prevent it.”
Seeing Like a Network — Rohit Krishnan
“And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns, looking like Burton and his posse, or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.”
The Peripheral — William Gibson
Outro
And that’s all from me for this week. Make sure that your weird side is well fed and comfortable 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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