ege's weblog

• What a week, huh?
• Captain, it’s only Wednesday.

This was me on Tuesday evening. Someone hit my car while it was parked and ran away. Since Tuesday, this has been the biggest thing occupying my mind. The problem is not that the car is damaged and I need to take it to the shop. The prick who hit my car has vanished. Even though I found his employer, they are denying responsibility. They know that the incident happened where no CCTV cameras can see.

This is the inverse effect of the panopticon. The panopticon makes you internalize the power and assert control over yourself on behalf of the powerful. Since you can never know when you’re being observed, you need to behave like you’re always being watched. But if somehow you realize that you’re not being watched at a particular moment, you’re free to subvert and defect. If someone else gets harmed, no problem. The important thing is that the watcher didn’t see you. The subject-to-subject relationship has no importance as long as you don’t become the object of power.

OK, I know I’m unnecessarily philosophizing about this. What I’m trying to say is that the bastard ran away and I’m fucking annoyed by it. They don’t feel the need to assume responsibility for the damage they have done to me until the state finds them guilty. And the police are doing nothing because, again, there are no CCTV recordings of the incident. It’s funny how helpless the police suddenly become unless you demand dangerous things like democracy, freedom, and equality.

Anyway, this week was not all dark and gloomy. I finished my second sculpture on Friday—the female torso I’d been working on for the last three months. I know it’s not perfect but it’s my best work so far. Unfortunately I wasn’t taking photos of it as consistently as I did for Syzygy, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to show you the whole process once it’s cast, but I’ll share photos for sure. My goal was to finish three sculptures in 2026 and enter 2027 as a sculptor. I’m happy to report I’m on track.

I got sick. I don’t know how I managed to catch a flu-like virus in the middle of the summer, but I did. Funny, in English you say “catch a virus” but in Turkish we say “get caught by a virus”. I don’t know who caught whom, but I had been under the weather since Tuesday.

Despite not feeling well for the majority of the week, I managed to spend ~8 hours in the studio working on my sculpture. I missed it after a two-week hiatus. To my surprise, the first time I went to the studio I found that my sculpture had grown hair. I was very puzzled until my mentor checked it and said they’re fungi. At first, I was very repelled by the sight of them but thankfully I managed to clear them off and the work is once again in good shape.

I don’t know how long it will take me to finish this thing. My mentor says it’s the perfectionism that makes the artist continue working on something past a point, but where’s that point really? I am at a level where my hands are confident enough to work with the material, I know how to shape the clay and how to properly use the tools. But my eyes are still not fully trained to see what I need to see. I work for a few hours thinking I’ve made great progress, but then my mentor finds a great number of errors in the work. It’s frustrating, yes, but I strongly believe frustration is the dominant feeling of learning something new.

July came and went and I didn’t write a reply post to anyone.

Why? I simply haven’t read anything that I felt I could build upon. I had a few knee-jerk reactions where I could have written a condescending reply post, but what’s the point of that?

To be honest, I’m not sad about missing JulyReply. I don’t like forcing things.

one day late edition. again.

I spent the last week in my hometown at my grandma’s summerhouse. I didn’t take time off from work since I had a lot of commitments to meet, and couldn’t swim as much as I’d have liked. Anyway, I’m grateful to be able to swim at all!

Last week I mentioned a recent addition to my personal infrastructure. This new host created an avenue for me to run custom-made applications. The latest thing I deployed there is a small app to serve my blogroll on this website. I didn’t want to manually maintain a separate list of blogs here, so I opted for serving them directly from my miniflux instance. As of today, there are 91 blogs in my blogroll, four of them owned by me (yes, I subscribe to myself via RSS).

The new host will allow me to deploy much more. My current plans are:

• A custom app for my antilibrary. Since we recently added support for MongoDB Search in Percona Operator for MongoDB, I’m thinking of indexing my digital library in MongoDB to perform full text search. This will also serve as my book registry.
• An app for converting a bunch of links into an e-book. As I mentioned last week, I canceled my read-it-later subscription. However, the need for it remains, especially for being able to read essays offline. So I’m thinking of creating a small service to bundle essays together into an e-book so I can read them on iOS Books.app or on my Kindle.

Lastly, we watched Backrooms (2026) at last. I had big hopes for the movie. Were they met? Yes and no. I think I need to separate my opinion into two: vibes and story. Vibe-wise, the movie was spectacular. The rooms, the atmosphere, the tension… it was all on point. Story-wise, it was underwhelming. I’m not after over-exposition, but shouldn’t loose ends get tied together at some point?

What’s the point of putting things into my read-it-later app?

Actually, I know the point: it gives me a false sense of accomplishment. I now have this essay in my possession. It makes me feel good about myself immediately—without doing the thing.

Even though I wrote a somewhat negative review of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? it made me remember a crucial insight about knowledge. If my relationship with knowledge is to hoard information, I’ve missed the whole point. I need to bend, squeeze, and transform knowledge and get bent, squeezed, and transformed in return. Having hundreds of articles in my read-it-later app doesn’t really yield anything. I’d rather read a few.

I canceled my subscription to Readwise Reader. It’s not that the app was bad. I just had an unhealthy relationship with it. I had almost 700 articles saved on it and I knew I was never going to read all of them. I was basically paying 9 dollars a month for Readwise to carry deadweight.

I feel lighter.

The Frankfurt School has a special place in history. It’s an object of hatred for both ends of the political spectrum. Leftists, especially Marxists, hate them for diluting revolutionary thought and creating a version of the Left that is “compatible” with the capitalist ruling class. Rightists hate them for giving birth to identity politics and political correctness. However, it’s a mistake to think of the Frankfurt School as a single harmonious entity. While it’s true that the school consisted of thinkers on the left side of the spectrum, their thoughts were diverse and not always compatible with each other. Nevertheless, they shared an ethos of human emancipation and mostly had the same view on why it kept failing to happen: “The revolutionary promise of the 19th century has failed and the reason is the culture.”

Erich Fromm was one of the youngest members of the Frankfurt School. Fromm, a German Jew, fled the Nazis and settled in the United States in 1934. He was a psychoanalyst, a democratic socialist, and a radical humanist. He died in 1980. To Have or to Be?, published in 1976, might have been his last book before he passed away.

I was not aware of this book until I read Manuel’s announcement for the IndieWeb Book Club. It’s one of those titles that immediately tells you the stance of the author. Without reading a single page, you know that Fromm will argue for “to have is wrong and to be is right”. Therefore I started reading the book with a positive bias, thinking that I’d agree with Fromm along the way. Not that I disagreed with Fromm, especially about his thoughts on the superiority of the being mode. But I didn’t enjoy how he presented his ideas, how far his analysis went, and his conclusions.

I said that the Frankfurt School’s ethos was human emancipation. To Have or to Be? is Fromm’s last attempt to incite a societal change to realize this ethos. However, the book kinda reverses the classical Marxist doctrine that human nature is a totality of societal relations and that to change human nature you need to change societal relations. I’m saying kinda because Fromm is not wholly consistent with this notion. At the beginning he says “that ‘religious’ impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, and hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one” [emphasis mine]. Towards the end he claims “… I do not believe anything lasting can be achieved by persons who suffer from a general ill-being and for whom a change in character is necessary, unless they change their practice of life in accordance with the change in character they want to achieve. For instance, one can analyze the dependency of individuals until doomsday, but all the insights gained will accomplish nothing while they stay in the same practical situations they were living in before arriving at these insights.” The new society requires a new subject to emerge. But this new subject can’t really emerge unless the daily practices of the subject change first. Changing the daily practices requires a new society. You see where it goes, right?

I think at some level Fromm was aware of the vicious cycle he got caught in. He doesn’t really offer a praxis to the new subject who is supposed to change the society. As if he doesn’t expect the society to change in response to the actions of the new man. The new society will emerge naturally once everyone—or at least the majority—changes. Also, sadly, he’s aware of the impotence of his weapon: “One cannot construct submarines by reading Jules Verne; one cannot construct a humanist society by reading the prophets.”

I believe Fromm has his heart in the right place. He believes that people can’t really be subjects in the struggle for emancipation until they have a change of heart. But the capitalist society molds people into the having mode. The features of the man who’s stuck in having mode—greed, selfishness, egotism—prevent him from genuinely loving others and participating in the common struggle. Someone needs to convince people to change. And what better example does history provide us to mediate the relations in a society than religion itself? or so Fromm’s reasoning seems to go.

Yes, To Have or to Be? is a deeply religious book. Fromm spends 2/3 of the book drawing religious examples to prove the superiority of the being mode. He references Buddha, Jesus, and Meister Eckhart abundantly. Although he leans on classical religious sources, for him religion “does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” The new society needs a religion of being and Fromm unapologetically preaches that. His preaching turns the problem of having vs. being into a moral problem. Rather than a structural analysis of society, Fromm makes the individual responsible for their mode of living. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School, also criticized Fromm on this point, saying that while Fromm’s early work is indeed radical, his later psychology is essentially conformist in character.

I was not satisfied with Fromm’s analysis mostly because there’s nothing of substance that tries to explain how the having mode became the dominant mode of our society. Sure, there are fragments here and there that accuse capitalism of cultivating a society of having, but it feels incomplete without also analyzing how the being mode also exists in the very same society. Should I believe that the being mode is thinkable thanks to the buddhists and christians of the 20th century who had a deeper insight into the mode of being? Is that even plausible when Fromm himself doesn’t count the christianity actually practiced by most of the world as real christianity? This dichotomy of having vs. being felt too binary and antagonistic to me; I couldn’t find a real dialectical movement in it.

This doesn’t mean the book is without substance though. There are plenty of insights in it. Fromm’s analysis of the newly emerging “marketing character” that describes how the living being becomes a commodity in the “personality market” is impressive foresight into the times we live in right now. His criticism of the “cybernetic religion” where men “have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine” feels eerie when you think about it in light of today’s AI mania.

Another thing I appreciate in the book is that Fromm provides a concrete list of features the new man and the new society ought to have. This level of concreteness is not something I see often. However, I think it’s not unfair to say his expectations are naive. He has a long list of items including things like “people should take personal responsibility for societal problems” and “rich countries need to be responsible for the prosperity of poor countries”. Reading those, and the book in general, I couldn’t help but think of the old Tumblr meme:

Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

I continued the pending repair work in the new apartment. Last week’s focus was mostly electrical infrastructure which by the way is something I understand but find horrifying, compared to water infrastructure which I don’t understand and find boring.

I’ve finished 2/3 of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? but recently I started to worry that I won’t finish this book in time to write a review for Indieweb Book Club. I hope I’ll finish it this week and at least wrap up the first draft of my review.

I also started reading American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall. Even though I find the author’s language a bit too hostile for a biography, it seems like comprehensive research on the life of Carlos Castaneda and I’m really excited to see what I’ll discover in it.

The biggest highlight of this week might be the newly added dedicated host in my personal infrastructure. After reading Jeremy’s Personal Encyclopedias, I started fantasizing about having my own MediaWiki installation (although I have disagreements with Jeremy’s post, this is not the place for them). In a prime example of yak shaving, this led me to rent a dedicated host on Hetzner to install Kubernetes. Before you roll your eyes, you should know that I write open source software for Kubernetes for a living and this is mostly an excuse to dogfood my own code. For most of Friday, I deployed Kubernetes on a bunch of virtual machines and installed our PostgreSQL and MySQL operators on it. So far I have Miniflux, Linkding and Plik deployments. I had, naturally, a few challenges during the process but I want to write those up for ege.dev.

Yesterday I was on the road to my hometown for most of the day. I’m visiting my grandma for a week. I didn’t take time off from work but I hope to relax a bit here, chill and swim.

Last week was mostly spent working through the minor troubles with the new apartment. I bought two repeaters to fix the wifi coverage and a new TV. Some problematic infrastructure has been repaired but there’s still some work to do.

For at least the last 6 years I’ve wanted to buy a new TV. I finally did it and I was very surprised by how hard it is to pick the brand and the model to buy. My old TV was a model from 2012, so I thought anything would be an upgrade and frugally decided to buy a mid-level LG. It’s the best TV I’ve ever had. Honestly I don’t care if it’s an OLED or not. It’s been so fun to watch the MSI finals on this big screen instead of my laptop.

Speaking of the big screen, I watched Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast (1975). I’ve watched porn movies that are less pornographic than this one. It was unapologetically erotic but I couldn’t really understand what the movie was trying to say. The Beast that lurks in the forest seemed like a satyr from Greek mythology with his comically large and erect penis. But what was the deal with the De Balo brothers for example? Or with Pierre de l’Esperance? Was Mathurin a product of bestiality? At one point the story started to feel like an excuse to shoot teratophilia porn rather than a movie.

We are also watching House of the Dragon season 3. I don’t know about this show, man… After all these years I still don’t understand the thought process behind changing the original story in these TV adaptations. OK, maybe Game of Thrones was something else but what about The Witcher or Lord of the Rings or House of the Dragon? Why do these screenwriters think they can write a better story than such accomplished authors? I think this season is the last chance I’ll give HoTD.

“If you can’t write it, write about it.” I read this advice to overcome writer’s block in a blog post some time ago but I didn’t attach much importance to it. I usually don’t register much of the advice I read online. I maintain a somewhat cynical view of it—I believe such advice is usually written by people who are clueless about the issue. However, I recently experienced firsthand how effective this advice is while struggling to write a review of The Time Regulation Institute.

I wanted to draw a parallel between Ludwig Klages’ philosophy and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s book. After doing some research, I generated a huge list of books and essays I ought to read before writing anything. This, naturally, overwhelmed me. So instead of writing the review, I started venting about how hard it is to write an essay. The title of the post was going to be “I don’t understand how people write essays”. I ended up writing the thing.

Venting about it created a domino effect. Before realizing I was writing the thing, I had put down 800 words without friction. The advice worked and I accidentally rediscovered it from first principles.

I’m aware that, for you, I’m just another rando on the internet. You should take this with a grain of salt. But the next time you find yourself unable to write it, maybe try writing about it.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute is a novel about a (fictional) Institute founded to synchronize every clock in Istanbul, and then in all of Turkey. The book is generally read as a satirical allegory of modernization in Turkey. The Institute is bureaucracy par excellence with its preference for the appearance of work over the work itself and its founder’s motto that “The Institute as a modern organization is going to create its own work instead of working on something concrete.”

Reading The Institute reminded me of a blog post about Ludwig Klages and Nick Land. The author was talking about Klages’ definition of Geist as the adversary of soul (Seele). According to Klages, Geist seeks to capture Seele by counting, measuring, digitizing life. Time is at the core of this dichotomy. Klages distinguishes two types of time: Rhythm and Takt. Rhythm is the time form of living experience; it’s regular as in breathing. Ezan, the call to prayer in Islam, is rhythmic. It occurs five times a day but the times are not fixed. They move with the cosmos. Takt, on the other hand, is punctual. It’s the tick of the clock, the beat of the machine, the sound of industrial production. It’s almost impossible to ignore the parallel with Tanpınar’s Institute¹. Its primary goal is to ensure Takt’s reign over a society that for centuries lived according to rhythmic cycles of the sun.

For Klages, Geist is the desire to measure. The apperceptive cut that severs the moment. The Institute is the embodiment of Geist and the watch is its apparatus. So which comes first, the desire or the apparatus? For the Institute, the answer is the latter. The synchronization of time is not desired as something meaningful. The watch, as technology, is the source of meaning for the Institute. In this context, the Institute can be seen as a Kittlerian reversal of Klages. Friedrich Kittler argues that media precede and produce the ‘spirit’ that imagines it commands them. The Institute fabricates a narrative (“a modern well-ordered society requires synchronized clocks”) and a myth (“Sheikh Ahmet Zamani”) all based on the technology: the watch. There is no primordial will-to-measure; the apparatus produces its own desire. The desire requires a discourse network, and the Institute’s innovation is building that network around a device that previously lived peacefully inside Seele.

The book resists Klages’ prelapsarian nostalgia. The binary distinction of Geist as bad and Seele as good is not found in the book. The time before the Institute, the “old world”, is not pristine Seele. The main protagonist, Hayri İrdal, lives a life full of delusion, superstition, poverty and cynicism before the Institute. Klages was right in his diagnosis of Geist’s onslaught but was there ever a paradisiacal soul to mourn for? The orientalist idea was “the West is the world of Geist and the East is the world of Seele”. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, being a Turkish author, is in the perfect position to reject this naive distinction. Turkey is adjacent to both East and West while refusing to be assimilated into either.

The best explanation of Hayri’s character might be found in one of Tanpınar’s most famous poems: “I’m neither inside time nor wholly outside.” He feels like a surplus wherever he stands. It’s possible to sense this as we read the story directly from his mouth. He’s unable to believe in the fiction while not being able to face reality either. He’s a great example of Lacan’s “les non-dupes errent"—he’s the one who errs the most because he’s unable to fully get caught in the fiction. Even before the Institute, whether in the Spiritualist Society or among treasure hunters, he’s never all in. Halit Ayarcı, the founder of the Institute and Hayri’s benefactor, is his complete opposite. Halit knows the power of the narrative and the effect of discourse. With Halit Ayarcı, the story takes a post-modern turn. With him everything becomes volatile. He doesn’t care if the Institute stands on stable ground or not. For him everything is about controlling the discourse and regulating the optics.

If a modern, well-ordered society requires clocks to be synchronized, then let’s regulate them and fine unsynchronized clocks. Clocks-to-be-regulated immediately cease to be indicators of a modern society and turn into targets in themselves. Halit Ayarcı understands that the metric was always detachable from reality and uses the detachment as his business model. Thus he weaponizes Goodhart’s Law. He also understands that a societal system is not made of people but of communications. The Institute’s purpose is to perpetually produce communications. It only outputs more institute. The Institute, in Luhmann’s terms, is autopoietic. Ayarcı is a cynical dupe—he knows what he’s doing but does it anyway because he never doubts why he’s doing it. He’s cynical in his means but not in his ends.

Ayarcı genuinely believes the Institute is a facilitator of modernization. His problem is that he’s too caught in the fiction. From all this chasing the metric and perpetual communications, a new type of person is supposed to emerge. But the Institute’s only real output is more of itself. The Institute’s projects—even the most useless and excessive ones—are applauded by its members and supporters until the time comes to design houses for its members. Then everyone around Ayarcı turn their backs on novelty. They want something traditional, something safe. Hayri explains this to him: “They’ll support everything as long as it’s someone else’s money we waste.” The Institute is a fun spectacle until it reaches the place they sleep in. They refuse to be objects of the Institute. This devastates Halit Ayarcı and leads him to shut down the Institute.

The harmony produced by the Institute instantly disintegrates at this news. Halit Ayarcı disappears and everyone turns against each other. The harmony is restored when Ayarcı reappears and creates a perpetual liquidation committee. Thus the system metabolizes its own negation. The permanent liquidation committee is autopoiesis at its peak. The system produces a new component to keep going. Dissolution is a task that doesn’t need to be completed; you can always keep liquidating. The committee might be seen as Geist’s machinic repetition or the system’s autopoietic desire to reproduce itself.