I created a group in the Critical Theory space on DFOS for people who want to talk about the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. I don’t know if this will turn into something. I would love it if this place became somewhere Žižekians, Lacanians, Hegelians and Marxists could connect with each other and exchange ideas.

If you’re reading this, consider yourself invited.

The appeal of living in a small town is being surrounded by the right number of people whom you can care about. On the other hand, living in a big city might make you feel lonely in huge crowds.

Being a blogger in smallweb (or IndieWeb) is akin to living in a small town with one big exception: there’s no square in the middle of town, no town hall to gather around. In this sense maybe the proper analogy is a small island rather than a town. Smallweb can easily be an isolated experience.

Contrary to the corporate platforms where the connection is heavily mediated to be commodified, in smallweb the connection needs to be intentional. Connection here requires quilting points even if temporary.

I feel a recent change in the smallweb. It’s started to feel more connected than ever. Take Robert’s Junited for example: this year’s participants outnumber those of all previous years combined. I believe the reason for this liveliness is the emergence of blog directories and discovery platforms that act like quilting points for shared meaning. How would I have participated in junited if I hadn’t heard about it in the first place?

Bubbles is one example of a gathering location for the smallweb. It’s a blog aggregator where you can discover the newest posts published on a handful (~5000) blogs. Kagi smallweb is another one with a different approach. Bear Blog’s discover page is another one; although it’s platform-specific, it’s part of the smallweb in spirit. A recent addition is the standard.site protocol where stitching blogs together happens automatically thanks to AT Protocol. They are gravity points that halt the centrifugal drift of isolated blogs in the smallweb. Together, they create a landscape for shared discourse.

These developments are signs of the upcoming smallweb renaissance. Smallweb no longer feels like a refugee camp where people find themselves thrown together while escaping the high walls of the corporate web. We are now building something together. Our isolated islands have started to feel like an archipelago.

I do strength training with a personal trainer 3-4 times a week. Almost every time I’m a few minutes late and I always inform him that I’ll be late. He says I’m so traditionally late that I don’t even need to mention it. I guess the same applies to my weekly updates.

• I was in the studio twice last week (including today) working on my new sculpture. Today was one of those days where I made negative progress :(
• We watched Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. I was hoping for a scary movie but it was only disgusting. Where are those really scary movies?
• I started reading The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. It’s been a while since I started reading a new fantasy series.
• Last Wednesday we held a memorial for the death anniversary of the great Turkish poet, Nazım Hikmet Ran. It was a day of poems and songs. Many people read his poems I know, but there was one poem I’ve never heard of where Nazım (Turkish) walked over Berkeley and his idealism.

If you are part of indieweb, you probably noticed people talking about standard.site. It’s a recent addition to AT Protocol to publish long form content. You might think of it as POSSE on steroids.

I spent hours today figuring out how to integrate my blog with standard.site. It was not as hard as I thought thanks to David Bushell and Mat Marquis.

The first thing you need to do is sign in and create a site.standard.publication record on Atmosphere Explorer:

{
  "url": "https://hypersubject.net",
  "name": "ege's weblog",
  "$type": "site.standard.publication",
  "description": "We must reclaim the cyberspace.",
  "preferences": {
    "showInDiscover": true
  }
}

Protip: Leave Collection and Record key empty when creating the record to use default values. Record keys are subject to strict validation rules.

Then you need to create .well-known/site.standard.publication at the root of your site.

$ cat static/.well-known/site.standard.publication at://did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3/site.standard.publication/3mnmnwcnftk2i

did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3 is my account, 3mnmnwcnftk2i is the record key of the publication.

I also put the following into <head>:

<link 
  rel="site.standard.publication"
  href="at://did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3/site.standard.publication/3mnmnwcnftk2i" />

This is all I needed to do to register my blog on AT Proto. The rest is creating site.standard.document for each blog post like this one:

{
  "path": "/entries/2026/01/we-must-reclaim-the-cyberspace",
  "site": "at://did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3/site.standard.publication/3mnmnwcnftk2i",
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "title": "we must reclaim the cyberspace",
  "publishedAt": "2026-01-01T09:33:17.000Z",
  "textContent": "The internet I grew up in no longer exists.\n\nThe internet, with its hyper-fast communication flows, was meant to enable the\nnew golden age for humanity. We were promised to have a global village where\ntribes transcend the limitations of geography. We could find our people\nwherever they were. Our ideas, our niche interests were supposed to connect us\nwith others in the vast network of nodes. If, only if, we can discover them.\n\nInstead, what we got is the commodification of communication. The connection\nthat was promised to us has been reformatted in terms of the market: \"How can a\npractice, experience, or feeling be monetized?\" Yes, discoverability is solved\nthanks to search engines and social media platforms. But now we connect, not to\neach other, but to the algorithm. We no longer contribute ideas to each other,\nbut to the circulation of the \"content\".\n\nWe must reclaim the cyberspace.",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://hypersubject.net/entries/2026/01/we-must-reclaim-the-cyberspace"
}

I didn’t want to create records manually, so I started looking for solutions. To my surprise, I couldn’t find an SDK for AT Proto in go. But there’s goat (go at [protocol]). Unfortunately it didn’t allow me to create site.standard.document records:

$ goat record create doc.json 
error: API request failed (HTTP 400): InvalidRequest: Unknown lexicon type: site.standard.document

Protip: Even though I couldn’t use goat to create records, it can delete them. Since I figured out the integration through trial and error, it came in handy:

$ goat record ls did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3 \
	| grep document \
	| awk '{print $2}' \
	| xargs -I{} goat record delete -c site.standard.document -r {}

Then I found Sequoia. It’s a “simple CLI for creating standard.site documents from your existing static blog.” It’s not that flexible (yet) but very simple to use.

$ sequoia auth # authenticate with an app password
$ sequoia init # configure publisher
$ sequoia publish # create site.standard.document records
$ sequoia inject # inject <link> elements to each blog post for validation

It’s also able to post on Bluesky when you publish a new blog post. Very handy.

Finally, I confirmed that everything works with Standard.site Validator.

I’m not sure if standard.site will turn out to be something important but today it feels like a good step forward for the indieweb. And since it’s not intrusive and easy to integrate, I encourage you to publish your content on AT Protocol.

I’ve never seen anything that tickled the gambler in me like this game.

Update: I just hit 0.04%.

Update 2: 0.00%

Things I read (and enjoyed)

• The Combahee River Collective Statement: Founding text of identity politics by a collective run by Black Lesbian women.
• On Revolution: A cybernetic look at revolution.
• The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

In a technopoly, the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology.

• Scott Alexander on taste: Contra Everyone on Taste, Three Model Organisms for Taste and Nostalgebraist’s Hydrogen Jukeboxes
• Remarks on Gender
• What Deontological Bars?

Links I saved

• Hacker Jargon
• StumbleTV: Roulette for the public internet’s accidentally-open webcams.
• gecit: DPI bypass tool - eBPF on Linux, TUN on macOS/Windows.
• Monitor every stock trade Congress makes
• meditype: Read books by typing passages one by one.
• Are.na personals: Personal introductions/requests on are.na
• The Strategy & Planning Scrapbook: A curated collection of strategy frameworks, creative provocations, and planning tools.
• The Virtual OS Museum: If a working version of an operating system exists somewhere, the goal is to have it here, in a form anyone can run on a reasonably modern laptop/desktop.
• Museum of the Human Web
• Today’s Rothko: Daily Rothko matching the temperature, brightness and the mood of the day.
• url.town: a web directory, curated by members of the omg.lol community.
• TogetherLetters: Everyone in your group writes a short update. They compile it into one beautiful newsletter and deliver it automatically.
• KWSX: WEBSEX RADIO
• Radio Venus: radio according to your zodiac

Books entered my to-read list

• One Man’s View of the World by Lee Kuan Yew
• How China Became Capitalist by Ronald Coase and Wang Yin
• The New China Playbook by Xin Kewu
• River Town by Peter Hessler
• Has China Won? by Kishore Mahbubani
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
• Illumine Lingao by Xiao Feng
• Spinoza, Atheist by Steven Nadler
• Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm
• Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer
• Symptom Invented: Lacan and the History of Marxism by Max Maher
• Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian

Movies entered my watchlist

• Femme Fatale (2002), directed by Brian De Palma
• The Conformist (1970), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

A lot was happening this week. So here are fragmented updates instead of a single overarching theme.

• Thirteen years ago today, the Gezi Park protests started in Istanbul. Those were glorious days of a rebellion that was and still is unmatched in terms of scale and spirit. We lost eight of us in those days. May they ever live on in our fight for justice and freedom.

• We are moving! After spending the last 3 years in Beyoğlu, we are moving back to our old place in Bakırköy, which was nicer in almost all aspects except the location: rent, space, parking spots, noise. The biggest downside is of course proximity to our dear friends…

• I was on paid time off since Wednesday, so we had some time to watch three movies:

  • One Battle After Another (2025): After all the fuss this movie made last year, I was very curious about it. I found the portrayal of revolutionaries too caricatured, but it was nevertheless an enjoyable watch. See Žižek’s review.
  • Sentimental Value (2025): This was a very slow-burning movie but I liked it. I posted about this on Mastodon: “One can endlessly psychoanalyze the characters of the movie but it was ultimately about making peace with Home.” Also, I think this was my biggest exposure to Norwegian and I was fascinated by how beautiful it sounds.
  • Project Hail Mary (2026): I kept hearing about this movie the last few weeks and, being always thirsty for science fiction, we decided to watch it. I really really enjoyed the friendship between Grace and Rocky so much that everything else about the movie was shadowed by it. Because of the camaraderie between them, Project Hail Mary is now located closer to RRR (2022) in my vector space. See Marta’s review focusing on the politics of the movie.

• I started playing World of Warcraft Classic with a friend primarily to have a gathering location in cyberspace. I remember how boring it was to kill monsters to complete quests when I was into MMORPGs years ago. To my surprise, I now find it relaxing to mindlessly farm and loot.

• Susan Sontag’s essay collection On Photography had been sitting in my book pile for a long time. This week, on a whim, I opened it and started reading the first essay, “In Plato’s Cave.” This was my first experience reading Sontag; I can definitely say that I’m impressed by her foresight:

It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. — Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave

A few months ago I was reflecting on my need for a digital community:

I find myself once again yearning for a digital community. I believe the future of social media (for me) is some kind of invite-only group chat where the conversation flows like a river. It might live in Discord, Slack or even IRC, I don’t care. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.

Maybe I should have said hypertext instead of text-based. Hypertext is more than just text. Hypertext is images, links, pages… It’s the internet in its labyrinthine ways. This was also my thought process when I decided to start blogging on this domain, hypersubject.net. I was looking for a space where I can express myself, my subjectivity, via hypertext. Hence I merged the two: hypersubject.

Since creating hypersubject.net, I have been on a constant lookout for communities that I could participate in. I found a few in the wild.

I believe one should not make legible what depends on illegibility for its mere survival. The communities I list below, to the best of my knowledge, don’t depend on illegibility. They don’t really operate in public; all are either gatekept or have their own initiation processes to allow new members. However, if you think this post is exposing a community, let me know and I’ll take care of it.

Continue reading → 574 words · 3 min read

It was a packed weekend, so I couldn’t publish the weekly update on Sunday. Another one-day-late edition.

Fascism became a catch-all phrase for leftists to criticize their adversaries. It is a term that has a historical meaning, and I don’t want to repeat the same mistake of muddying the definition. By fascism I mean:

• consolidation of power in a single powerful leader,
• dismantling of all institutions to remove any safety brakes in the system,
• controlling a large part of the economy and corporations,
• ultranationalist rhetoric,
• cult of regenerative violence,
• separating society into two blocs: decent citizens and indecent others,
• cancelling elections or rendering them meaningless.

Today, Turkey is at high risk of being ruled by a proper fascist government. Out of the pillars of fascism that I listed above, four of the seven are firmly in place, two are forming:

• Erdogan was the strong authoritarian leader from the start in 2002; he reached the peak of his power in 2017 by changing the constitution after the failed coup d’état in 2016.
• Since 2008, all major institutions were either taken over or shut down. It started with the military, then the media, and lastly the whole legal system.
• The government controls many conglomerates directly, and others need to align themselves with it under the threat of otherwise being unable to do business.
• Nationalism is at a strange point right now. Between 2013 and 2024, government supporters were the primary nationalist group, with smaller groups on the opposition side as well. The balance changed after the government started peace talks with the Kurdish armed organization PKK. Today, there is a strong ultranationalist reaction against Kurds, especially on the opposition side. Erdogan is overseeing the whole resolution process with the PKK from a safe distance, so he still has room to maneuver and channel the reactionary nationalist sentiment for his own gain.
• I don’t think the violence is institutionalized, but cliques in the government are experienced in doing psyops through conventional and social media to amplify the bloodthirsty demands of radical groups (“slaughter all stray dogs”, “deport all the immigrants”).
• Erdogan and his AKP separate society into two: immoral atheist laics and decent Muslim conservatives.

In 2025, they started putting together the last pillar: no elections. It started with arresting the popular presidential candidate of the opposition, Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, in March 2025. Last week, it reached its peak with removing the whole leadership of the main opposition party from their posts through legal shenanigans. Today, the risk of fascism is higher than ever.

We have been protesting every day since Friday. The numbers on the street were not huge—definitely lower than what we had when Imamoglu got arrested. Nevertheless, the bright side is that we didn’t give up; there are still people who care to resist. Is it going to be enough? I don’t think so. We desperately need something that can radically redefine the rules of the game, because we are losing the one Erdogan defined. As Hannah Arendt describes, totalitarian systems are capable of eventually restructuring reality to make it coherent with their goals. What we need in Turkey right now is a revolution—not the revolution as the locomotive of history as Marx puts it, but the Benjaminian revolution as the emergency brake.

Previously.