SNAFUBAR Reports — 03.11.2020
This is just so good.
Preface
November is here and so is the winter. In the last three days the weather decided it’s winter now and already saw one digit degrees in Celsius. It’s 18 right now but goes down to one digits in the evening.
How are you all doing?
Self Promotion, No Matter What
If I was making a list of the cultural problems which causing the most important problems, self-promotion and advertisement would be very close to the top. I know it’s unusual to hear this from someone who works mainly as a freelancer and needs to promote itself but something about it just makes my skin crawl.
And this is not just about digital advertising, major problems caused by that. My main problem is how everyone —and I mean EVERYONE— thinks that this is a necessity and they have to promote themselves all the time, not matter what they’re doing. No one even cares about whether that’s necessary or it might be the wrong place or the wrong time.
You might be wondering why I’m ranting about this now. It all started with the earthquake in İzmir last week. Dozens of buildings collapsed or heavily hit, 107 people died and 1027 wounded. I’m sad, angry and scared —because right now we’re living at the city which was hit really hard by the 1999 earthquake, plus I have bad memories from 1998. There were some really good news like the little girl who was rescued after 91 hours.
But… Right after the earthquake practically everyone tried to turn this into a promotion material. At the night of the earthquake a minister talked with someone waiting to be rescued on the phone, while he was on top the fucking building that person was stuck. Then it turned into a pissing contest for the government as usual, against the opposition municipalities. Since that’s the only opposition they can do, they joined.
Then started the rescue promotions. NGOs, municipality rescue teams, AFAD all turned it into a race to show off how they were the best, how they rescued people from the collapsed buildings, giving every TV channel an interview after every rescue, tweeting how they were part of the rescue effort for X or Y… It’s beyond disturbing, made me feel sick. Any decent people should not be capable of even thinking about using people’s fight for their life as a promotion material. But here we are.
I’m not sure if one can rationalize this. I know we’re primed to think about our every action as a part of our brand but when did we fall this low? How desperate one should be to think this is something normal to do? Like will you lose anything if you don’t show your NGO logo every time there’s a TV camera? Did you really need to send that tweet to tell that your team was there too?
I only wish to never find myself that desperate.
(PS. I didn’t include any links to the mentioned events on purpose, because I didn’t want to include disturbing images and videos and also didn’t want to search for them and watch again. Hope you’ll understand.)
Status Report
November looks quite busy for me. So many things to do and many more videoconferencing. I’m glad that I can do all of it without leaving the Mission Control —considering the fact that we don’t really know how bad the situation is in Turkey— but my time blindness is still here and I have to cut some things, starting with doomscrolling.
There is not much to report on the public work side. Only one blog post and a Turkish webinar about the new social media law (I’m still working on that piece).
Another thing that can be included here is this piece written by Anab Jain from Superflux and Andrew Taylor, titled Experiments in Feral Futuring. The piece is based on the Feral Futuring Sessions Anab organized and it perfectly explains why it was a joy to be a part of it. I’m also humbled by the fact that they have a quote from me.
Quote of the Week
”Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains.”
Filtered Down
- Patriotwave’s Boogaloo: Engineering an Aesthetic of Violence
- Soylent Founder’s Unhinged Politics Rant Shows Tech Execs Don’t Understand the World
- xkcd Phone 12
- Rough Guidance: Some Reflections On The Making Of Travel Guides To Places That Don’t (Yet) Exist
Epilogue
I was not planning for an angry newsletter like this one, sorry about that. Guess I need to write less about Turkey if I want to write less angry and dark stuff.
Take care of yourselves and the loved ones! And American friends, please make some decent choices this time. See you all soon!
