Today ~42 million people are voting for the new government in Turkey. 14 political parties and 699 independent candidates.

New York Times says “Election in Turkey May Be a Watershed“. Unfortunately a conservative coalition will form the new government. But there will be independent leftist representatives against Muslim bourgeois. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

UPDATE

AKP won the elections. This is another sign for the rise of Muslim bourgeois in Turkey. Independents got more votes (blue color on the map) compared to the past elections but not as much as expected in Istanbul. Unfortunately, the rising leftist candidate Baskin Oran couldn’t make it.

The Turkish TV channel NTV released a great real-time elections visualization tool. I watched these maps as the votes were being counted on sunday night. It was quite nice to see the emerging destiny of the Republic of Turkey as a movie.

1st party AKP’s distribution.

2nd party CHP’s distribution.

3rd party MHP’s distribution.

Independents’ distribution.

Source of the images: NTV

I am currently having Oolong Tea and I felt I should post something. It’s been a while. This is going to be a whatever comes kind of post.

I sometimes feel like I am not interested in anything when I hit the network. You know all that news, stats, things, books, art works, discussions, links. I suck all that stuff and the network hits me back, makes my stomach bad. That’s why I drink ooolong tea to feel better.

I recreated Nam June Paik’s 1961 recipe “Composition for Poor Man” in Brent’s new initiative Promiserver, a server for writing and evaluating experimental micro-contracts. The original recipe goes like this:

Summon a taxi, position yourself inside,
request a long ride, OBSERVE THE METER.

And here is my version:

if taxi_arrived
   if in_taxi
      success "request a long ride"
   else
      breach "position yourself inside"
   end
else
   "summon a taxi"
end
success "OBSERVE THE METER" if taxi_moving

We discussed visual artifacts in the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. It is going to be exciting since Detroit is the birthplace of US techno.

Today I played with the ruby screen scraper library WWW::Mechanize. It is quite handy and fast if you want to programmatically browse the web. Who doesn’t?

Tim O’Reilly asks “What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?“. It means “A Stock Market in Life“. I designed this market so that in the future when public spaces have hit counters like web sites, the exploitation of our life becomes visible, so debatable.

I think in the future everybody will know every other person in the world. You go out for a dinner, from the waitress to the taxi driver, the policeman, the chef, other people sitting in the restaurant, the speaker on the tv, you know all of them, say hi to everybody. Zero degrees of separation. Super rhizomatic society. Fully contagious. Do we need cell phones? Internet? Is it peaceful? Do we need to organize anything?

I should better go sleep.

View from my friend Mey’s balcony, Istanbul.

This is a contribution to the discussion started with Trebor Scholz‘s “A critique of sociable web media” email on the IDC mailing list.

So what can we do against networked exploitation?

I think an obvious strategy is to exploit those exploiters. Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) and Amazon Noir are good examples for finding the holes in sociable web media systems and using the holes for reverse exploitation.

I think another strategy is to stay in context for collective action while all those sociable web media giants are fighting with each other for your attention (aka attention economy). There are many ways to stay in context such as email lists, forums etc. and all that social software actions as Trebor Scholz mentioned: commenting, tagging, ranking, forwarding, linking, moderating, remixing etc. Tools and environments for such actions are mainly provided by giant corporations, and under US laws, one who aggregates information owns it. But we can make our own web services for staying in the context, just like the way we can setup and maintain an old email list technology.

So this brings in the discussion of “open service provider”. As open source software development communities demonstrate, we can collectively create value independent from the capitalist exploitation. If we are in the software-as-service era, support and use open service providers as much as you support open source software. It is very important to intensify and redirect our collective techno-cultural production to a territory that is formed more by individual’s free-will than capital’s interests. But of course making one open alternative for each commercial-social web tool/environment is not all that relevant, it sounds just like making the free version of MS Office. So open service providers can use existing techniques but I think they should invent new types of interaction and aggregation for the good of the community.

I use software-as-service strategy in my artwork. They are not commercial services nor utilitarian. I believe that building an open service is closer to making a cultural product than making a commercial one. As Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble puts it here, the relation of the creative expression to social processes is as important as the materials, processes, and products.

Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) project is the powerful critique of the networked monopoly Google. GWEI website is currently censored on Google search indexes. Give them a link in your website so that people can reach the project.

Image from Hans Bernhard‘s presentation.

Ok I got the “things you didn’t know about me” virus from Sascha, here we go:

1. In September 12, 1980 in Turkey, when the government was overthrown by the military, I was 4 years old. Right after the coup, it was not allowed to walk on the streets. I remember walking with my mom to buy some bread and a soldier asking us where we were going.
2. I wanted to be a ninja when I was 9. Worked hard for a while until I fell from a tree. Then my dad brought me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum from his office.
3. I used to keep an experimental diary when I was 18. I was starting with the literal story of the day, then writing semi-random words one after another. The whole thing was semantically random but phonetically nice to read. Unfortuantely, I lost all those hand written papers while moving here and there.
4. I changed my mind about being a civil engineer when I saw the career path diagram at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. For a second year student, it was going to take around 10 more years to become a licensed professional in Europe. I decided not to follow any path dictated like that. After a while, I found my self in the Internet industry.
5. The Openstudio currency “Buraks” was Kelly Norton’s idea.

I am tagging Kelly, Brent, Luis, John, and Mako.

Sascha Pohflepp posted an article on Brian Eno‘s talk at The University of the Arts Berlin. I like the last comment on “making” things:

In the past, you took things apart and studied them, but an even better way is to make them. When Craig Reynolds studied the flocking of birds in 1986, he decided to simulate flocking. It only took three simple rules (separation, alignment, cohesion) to be perfectly recreated inside a computer. Suddenly, by trying to create lifelike behavior, we understood something about life itself.

Birds, bees, ants and all that beautiful natural complexity comes from the bottom up. Simple rules among the participants (e.g., ants) construct a complex system. This is ok. If there is a binary opposition between natural and cultural, what does it mean to simulate cultural systems?

You’ve probably seen the new Time Person of the Year. Olia Lialina recently posted this image in the nettime list, she points out that with “You” Time address one particular person, a man they left in front of a personal computer a quarter of a century ago. I think by saying “You control the Information Age” Time hides who is in control and clearly represents the new conservative view about the world. Obviously people who create systems for “you” is in control in this post-digital networked world.

I saw this great wall writing the other day in Cihangir. It says “If I don’t understand a technology, I call it laser!” And of course an anonymous “I love you” at the bottom right.