Artificial intelligence is more than just a technology; it acts as a new tool reshaping how humans perceive themselves and society. During this transformative process, how much do we truly understand AI, and what meanings do we attach to it? In this interview, where we examine not only AI’s functions but also its impact on us and seek answers to many compelling questions, Communication Scientist and Academic Ufuk Eriş responded to our inquiries.

Mustafa Burak Avcı: Welcome, Professor Ufuk Eriş. Your recent contributions to the field of communication, particularly your research on artificial intelligence, have gained recognition. Could you share a bit about yourself?

Ufuk Eriş: It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say recent times. Because when I suggested that topic for my PhD, it was 2002. I wasn’t born into a computer-equipped home. My first encounter was in 1996 at the Computer Research and Application Center. There, I had a chat via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) with someone living in America, and I never believed that the other person was a real human. Then years passed, and I saw how technology changed people’s perspectives and thinking patterns. In 2002, I wanted to address the topic of hacker culture in Türkiye for my doctorate proposal. At that time, there were very few hackers in Türkiye, and the only well-known one was Tamer Şahin. He was featured in newspapers as the “Pajama Hacker.” It was written that he hacked the Ottoman Bank, but back then, even if hackers existed, there weren’t many places to break into. That’s why we faced a lot of difficulties with the jury.

Finding someone related to this topic was quite difficult. There was a sociologist, someone from human resources, an industrial engineer, and a communicator. It was very hard to explain my problem to them. There are people called hackers, and when I said they could break into here, they would say, “So what if they do?” Our laws weren’t even prepared for this. When you connect remotely to someone’s computer, it is considered theft. In theft cases, you take a piece of property, and that property is no longer there, but if you copy it from a database, it remains there you’re just making a copy. I have also witnessed such a significant transformation in the law.

Deniz Benzer: When you announced your doctoral topic 20 years ago, the situation you experienced is happening today with artificial intelligence. With the same sense of unfamiliarity and excitement you felt when writing your doctoral thesis, what similarities or differences do you see between that and the excitement people have towards artificial intelligence today?

U.E: Every new technology excites thinkers or those pondering this issue. The reason is always our troubles. Looking at Karl Marx, he examined the society he lived in and said something wasn’t going well. He saw that people were unhappy, researched the cause, and proposed a method to analyze societies. But what is his concern? We are not very happy in life, and the environment isn’t happy either. Nowadays, people who write and talk about every new technology wonder if it could be a cure. I think, unlike the hacker discussion era, in the age of artificial intelligence, people are only interested in its sensational aspects. No one asks which of our problems it could solve. They only care about what more artificial intelligence can do. For example, if an A.I. can do ballet, why would someone who has nothing to do with ballet culture get excited? The sensational approach is misleading. I can say for sure that in no period of history have people been so hopeless about future generations and linked their hopes to something non-human. Think about it: they said Jesus would come, and he was human… They said future generations would do this, and they were human too… We always believed that our own kind would do something good in the future. Now, that belief is gone; we talk about what artificial intelligence will do in the future, how it will be. We tend to project solutions to our life problems onto technology, which reflects a techno-chauvinist attitude.

“First, we see the word ‘robot’ in Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots. The word literally means slave or forced labor in Slavic languages. In the story, robots rebel and suppress humans. The question ‘Will robots take over humans?’ actually stems from the concept of rebellious slaves.”

M.B.A: There’s also an effort to alienate artificial intelligence tools. Strange philosophical questions arise, such as whether AI could be smarter than humans as individuals, or whether it would be considered human if it were on par with a person.

U.E: At a time when the possibility of humans competing with artificial intelligence is being discussed, and while such advanced technologies are being produced, a world where news is still about men who kill their divorced wives should make us think: Should our real concerns be what artificial intelligence can do? This is the culture’s surrender to technology. In the past, culture dictated and limited the use of technology. We can give the example of the samurai sword. Not everyone can wield it, and when you do, you must adhere to certain ethical codes. One of our folk songs beautifully says: ‘The invention of the rifle ruined the virtue.’ Because to use a rifle, you don’t need years of samurai discipline and culture.

When you buy a rifle, just pulling the trigger is enough. Every profession has its own cultural codes, but such things are no longer in place. You don’t need education or an ethical code to pick up a pen. When you pay, you get your computer and use it as you wish.

M.B.A: Today, you don’t even need talent; you just prompt and can have anything drawn.

U.E: It seems like we don’t really know much about what we call artificial intelligence. There are the powerful and the powerless. What we talk about is like a utopia. I always say, “Utopias turn upside down and tell the stories of the problems we face today.” Let’s say you ask the housekeeper who comes to clean your house, “If you had the means, what kind of life would you imagine, what is your utopia?” Her answer would be, “I wish I had a husband who doesn’t drink, and that he wouldn’t hit my children, for example.” At that moment, you immediately understand her everyday worries about her life. Now, if you look at the utopian narratives about artificial intelligence and read them in reverse, and see what people expect from it, you’ll realize the real problems they face today. If someone is curious about whether artificial intelligence will do this or that, they have a problem in their daily life related to it. In the past, wars would start and end, but now we experience prolonged, low-intensity conflicts that never seem to end. People still die. We are in the digital age; today, the AI robot Sofia is granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. It won’t be given to you or me. So, the question that should be asked is, “Will artificial intelligence provide a solution to inequality among people?” When we evaluate the moral panics developed around robots, you also understand whose fear this is. First, we see the word “robot” in Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots. The word literally means slave or forced labor in Slavic languages. In the story, robots rebel and suppress humans. The question ‘Will robots take over humans?’ actually stems from the concept of rebellious slaves. The main issue is that those who manage these things whether under the image of a robot or not force certain people to work for much less pay, and they fear rebellion. The core motivation behind thoughts like a robot uprising or artificial intelligence turning humans into this or that is this fear.

M.B.A: There is always a current agenda regarding artificial intelligence. So, what are its cultural impacts?

U.E: Culture is no longer something naturally produced by people as it used to be. The term “degeneration”, which we refer to as cultural decay, comes from the fact that animals in Anatolia that have lost their reproductive ability are called “Yoz” (biggot). A degenerated culture loses its ability to renew and produce itself. So, what happens then? It’s like a diabetic person who can’t produce insulin and starts getting insulin

“Nowadays, all of this is considered outdated. But what is new doesn’t stay in the air; it comes from the ground. Did the bourgeoisie, the working class, and class confl icts emerge when Karl Marx spoke about them? Even during the cave era, there was a conflict between the strong and the weak.”

injections from outside. After a while, they become dependent and lose their ability to produce it themselves. Everyone used to sing folk songs, good or bad, or write poetry for the girl they loved. But now, as people start to import poetry and songs from outside, they begin to lose their ability to express themselves. The reason for this, according to the Frankfurt School, is the Culture Industry. Before the rise of the internet, this was all lost.

M.B.A: Today, habits have changed, consumption has accelerated, and production methods have evolved. What do you think about this?

U.E: Society has changed, and the social approach has changed. For example, Yusuf Atılgan’s work Aylak Adam (The Loiterer) entered a competition. At that time, there were very famous novelists like Yaşar Kemal on the jury. However, the work did not win the competition. As socialist writers, they said, ‘This bourgeoisie’s self-concern, they’re not talking about a problem or poverty.’ Today, almost everyone knows Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam. It became popular after the 1980s. Because now individuality begins to take shape, and, in a way, the individual becomes a customer. After Turgut Özal’s presidency, even our purchasing mindset changed. In the past, people would save money for a while to buy a television; they didn’t know the concept of installments. Now, people might wonder how they don’t know the concept of installments, because we quickly get used to the way we live, and it feels as if it’s been like this for a very long time.

M.B.A: Actually, with the rapid acceleration of consumption, we also lost the habit of saving cumulatively.

U.E: People now think there’s no need to accumulate things. They ask, “What’s the point of saving?” I used to download songs from the internet and listen to MP3 players. Now, my nephew tells me, “Why are you downloading these? They’re already in the cloud.” In the past, when you bought a car, it was considered a lifelong purchase, and people would give it a name. Now, it’s said that you need to change your car frequently. But this widens the gap between us and objects. People renting homes don’t even want to hammer in a nail because they don’t accept it. If you accept it, it’s hard to let go, so you end up buying something new right away. For example, you throw away every soda can you drink immediately, but you can’t easily throw away the last soda can you shared with a friend or a loved one. Someone has touched that can, and you can’t throw it away. But this situation is dangerous for the system; if you can’t throw it away, you won’t buy a new one. In short, while there are such problems in life, it’s important to see how artificial intelligence responds to them. We don’t see this in the market; people in daily life genuinely think that A.I. has a human-like intelligence.

D.B: Professor, actually, Alan Turing’s test is very important in this context. Could you tell us a little about it?

U.E: In the Turing test, a human participates, and on the other side, an artificial intelligence or robot is placed. The human asks the machine questions. If the responses make it seem like the machine is not artificial intelligence, then it passes the Turing test. But there is also John Searle’s Chinese Room example as a counterpoint. In that scenario, there is a closed room with only one window. Inside, there are some signs and instructions. You are told to look at whatever sign is shown through the window and find the corresponding instruction. Outside, a Chinese man is showing the Chinese Kanji words to the participant. The person inside the room, who does not know Chinese, finds and removes the sign that matches the question. Does the person inside the room who removes these signs know Chinese? No, they are just following instructions. Nowadays, all of this is considered outdated. But what is new doesn’t stay in the air; it comes from the ground. Did the bourgeoisie, the working class, and class conflicts emerge when Karl Marx spoke about them? Even during the cave era, there was a conflict between the strong and the weak.

D.B: After all, artificial intelligence provides us with information, and we try to measure how intelligent it is. What do you think is the level of intelligence of that artificial intelligence? Why do we consider it to be intelligence? Where does the information provided by artificial intelligence stand in the hierarchy of knowledge?

U.E: There is no zero point in IQ, which is referred to as intelligence, for example. In an IQ test, it measures how quickly a person can solve a problem or how quickly they can find the optimal timing and compatibility between purpose and means. The Frankfurt School calls this “subjective reason” or “instrumental reason.” It is a characteristic of human intellect but not the whole thing. Instrumental reason only looks at establishing a relationship between goals and means. There is also objective reason, which not only establishes the relationship between purpose and means but also questions the purpose itself.

Instrumental reason appears, for example, during Hitler’s era. When officers who inflicted various tortures on people were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, they said, “We only followed orders.” There was both means and purpose involved there. You did what was told, but isn’t the choice to do or not do it yours? Did you ever question its purpose? Currently, the most sought-after type of reason is instrumental reason, which can do what it is told very quickly and efficiently, but we do not elevate the reason that asks, “Why am I doing this?” In fact, questioning reason is what makes humans understand and interpret reality, and it helps us position ourselves accordingly.

D.B: So, should we define artificial intelligence as instrumental reason?

U.E: Of course. We constantly talk about artificial intelligence, which is a very sensational word for those who don’t know. In reality, there is a huge gap between the way artificial intelligence is described and its state in the laboratory. Every new technology can make us ask, “What is a human?” again and push us to take a step forward. Nietzsche also refers to the “Übermensch,” meaning a person who struggles with themselves. Like the phoenix, first burning and then rising anew from its ashes. Objective reason is only concerned with how fast and how many goals it can score in a game. But winning a rigged game is very difficult. The referee is biased and bribed. Since you don’t think about the game itself, you don’t notice these things, and when you fail, you blame yourself. Just as you think the problem is personal.

M.B.A: Actually, the data that artificial intelligence feeds on is a product of societal production. There is already a data algorithm that develops from what people produce. They seem to be getting their nourishment from an invisible source, as if drawn from nothingness.

U.E: Never. In fact, artificial intelligence largely feeds on garbage, on free data from the internet. This means that A.I. can think, but it can only do one task at a time. Then it can move on to another task. Because we now see life this way, we are losing the other side. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess, but it can’t get up and bring a glass of water. Yes, maybe it would beat you at backgammon too, but when it wins, it’s happy, and when it loses, it’s sad. We are trying to get A.I. to solve the world’s problems. To end wars, to solve inequality, to prevent crimes. But the thing is, don’t fight, don’t hit. Why don’t you take responsibility yourself? While living with the idea that we can make it do everything, we lose our human side. Recently, they asked A.I. Sophia, “What do you think about the future of the world?”

So, humans are no longer confident about their intelligence. People are becoming increasingly anxious. We fear that artificial intelligence will take away what makes us who we are. That’s why we keep asking it, “Will it do this too?” To put it simply: you have a lover, and they are unique because of a distinguishing feature. If you take that feature away, they become just like everyone else. Even if that lover remains physically present, they are no longer truly theirs. The existence of that lover is gone. That’s why one of the fundamental questions technology poses to us is: “If they take away what makes us us, will we cease to be?” On the other hand, because we’re so curious about this, we constantly try to make it do the things we do. We keep trying to understand “What is the natura humana?” and instead of thinking of it as a tool that can solve our main problems, we sit and discuss its sensationalist aspects.

D.B: Today, when we look at the internet and artificial intelligence, do you think the realm of freedom has disappeared?

U.E: I think it mostly gets lost. But it will be what we make of it. For example, the last word used for social media is “brain rot,” meaning brain decay. Fifty years ago, they called the television “the idiot box.” It’s the same old story. They say, ‘Old wine in a new bottle.’ Basically, nothing changes. We used to call social media “the Fifth Power,” the fifth force after the Fourth Estate, which is the media. It was supposed to improve the quality of so-called democracy. But I think it still has the potential if we use it properly. We need to look at why people delegate tasks they themselves are responsible for to artificial intelligence. Why do people retreat from decisionmaking mechanisms? Because it’s believed that A.I. will make better decisions. Maybe even in investments, and perhaps in political choices in the future… Why? Because it chooses the more efficient and profitable option. But for humans, truth, efficiency, and profitability don’t always align. This is true even in the founding of our country. Atatürk and his comrades wouldn’t have relied on A.I. for their efforts. It’s not feasible. The shoes are worn out, and they have holes. There’s no food, no weapons. How many places have they been attacked from? Ignorance is present. Most of the educated have died. The army is exhausted. If it were up to A.I., accepting a mandate from America would have been the most logical, efficient, and profitable choice. But we didn’t choose that. To give a personal example, the person you love so much probably wouldn’t be recommended to you by A.I. Most likely, they are the person you shouldn’t be around. Let’s identify our true problems and avoid relying solely on artificial intelligence to solve them, risking failure. Instead, the new generation should ask, ‘How can we eliminate inequality among people? How can we undo the damage affecting our environment? How can I contribute to the benefits of others beyond myself?’

M.B.A: Thank you very much for coming and providing us with valuable information, sir.

U.E: Thank you very much, everyone. It was a pleasure for me too. Kasparov against IBM’s Deep Blue computer, 1996 ai & society

Artificial Intelligence: The Alienation of Society yazısı ilk önce Context Dergi üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Prof. Nurdoğan Rigel, one of Türkiye’s leading communication scholars, explores the foundational approaches and critical turning points in communication studies. Her account spans from the establishment of communication faculties in Türkiye and the urban sociology tradition of the Chicago School which played a significant role in shaping the discipline to the American years of Theodor Adorno, an influential figure of the Frankfurt School who paved the way for critical theory.

Aslı Şen: Welcome, Professor Rigel. It’s wonderful to have you with us. Could we begin by getting to know you a little better?

Nurdoğan Rigel: I completed my bachelor’s degree at Marmara University, followed by my master’s and doctorate at Istanbul University. Back then, first-year students were required to do an internship. I started mine at the Turkish News Agency (THA) with great enthusiasm. Once I joined the agency, I grew to love journalism even more, as you realize you’re learning far more than what is taught in the classroom. At the time, the Turkish News Agency was regarded as the best training ground for journalism, second only to the Anadolu Agency. Of course, you learn the profession the hard way. Ultimately, you cannot expect the managers and editors at your workplace to act as mentors; they are under constant pressure to deliver news on time. They are systematic and professional, while you are in the position of a novice, hoping for guidance. In fact, my first news stories often ended up in the trash. Our editor would cross out the parts he disliked with a red pen and throw them away. I would wait for him to leave for lunch, then retrieve the stories from the trash to examine his edits and notes. I taught myself how to write news that way. I learned everything how to gather, conceptualize, and organize a story through that process of trial and error, a real “baptism by fire.” Back then, at university, we mostly took classes from business, economics, and law professors; the field of ‘communication’ did not exist yet. We had only one or two lecturers from TRT or the Cumhuriyet newspaper, and they rarely attended classes. We were essentially emerging from an intellectual vacuum, and we had to fill that void through our own efforts. Every Tuesday and Thursday, foreign magazines arrived at the agency. I learned a great deal from them, particularly Newsweek and Time. Even just scanning the headlines in those magazines builds a significant body of knowledge a realization that truly hits you years later. Moreover, this environment forces you to develop reflexes: to think, read, and write at lightning speed. That muscle memory develops over time. It is a process you don’t notice while you are living it, but you realize how it shaped you years later, when you look back or when asked about it by others. Once that happens, you can never truly leave journalism.

Mustafa Burak Avcı: Professor, what led you to pursue a path in academia?

N.R: While I was learning so much at the Turkish News Agency, I found I couldn’t tear myself away from the university; my intellectual thirst was still very much alive. It was through the late Toktamış Ateş, a prominent professor at Istanbul University’s Faculty of Economics who frequently visited the agency, that I learned about the establishment of the Institute of Social Sciences. I wasn’t about to miss that opportunity, so I applied immediately.

Following my master’s and PhD studies, and I realized I had grown to love Istanbul University even more. Perhaps the influence of the distinguished professors from the law, political science, and business faculties played a role.

At the time, it was clear that Public Relations was closely intertwined with the field of Business School. The academic language of the other disciplines was quite challenging; law, as we know, has its own dense syntax, and political science, while somewhat more accessible, was still demanding. International Relations remains my great love, and because I approached it with genuine passion, political science became easier to engage with. Yet, I could never bring myself to like law even though I knew I had to master its language. Business Administration and Political Science ended up being my favorite areas of study. You see, back in that era, the field of communication science didn’t yet exist in Türkiye. The disciplines were structured as follows: Journalism and Public Relations, and Radio and Television; cinema was added later on. I pursued my master’s degree in Public Relations and Journalism. My master’s thesis was titled, “The Impact of Mass Media on Elections.” The story behind this thesis is quite interesting; in journalism, we have a practice known as pulling a quote. You extract a specific element from the content. Since a journalist must write a headline, they immediately pull out a key point from the text to use as the hook.

“Park was also the first to view the city as a laboratory and to recognize that communication functions as a form of social control. Communication is, in essence, a system of control that operates so subtly you hardly notice it.”

Robert E. Park, 1930s

One day, I came across the term “Political Advertising” in an editor’s column in Newsweek. “That’s it, I’ve found it!” I thought. I decided to base my thesis on this topic. However, there were no available resources on the subject at the time. While I was wondering how to proceed, I attended a fourto-five-day conference in Istanbul as a reporter. A multitude of professors were there political scientists, media and communication scholars… We were there to cover the event, but my mind was occupied with questions for my thesis. There was one particularly significant figure present, the kind of person who possesses a magical touch they might not realize the impact of their influence, but they leave a lasting impression. Betül Mardin was one of them. She was the pioneer of Public Relations in Türkiye, and she was at that very conference. She looked quite stern, but she was an absolutely wonderful lady. I approached her and explained my predicament. one day she called me to her office. “I will bring you an article from Time; you will see that political advertising is right there.”

I honestly thought that someone so incredibly busy and preoccupied would have forgotten all about me. But no, she hadn’t forgotten at all; she had actually brought the article. In essence, that article became the cornerstone of my work. It was a concept that existed globally, yet here, one had to struggle just to uncover it. Indeed, by the 1983 elections, advertisers led primarily by Man Ajans began to enter the fray. At that time, I went to interview Eli Acıman, and he had told me, “Forget about journalism, kid; come join our agency.” I was so intent on becoming a ‘great journalist’ that I declined. I hadn’t yet realized how much creativity and intelligence advertising demanded, or how much it could have contributed to my development. That remains one of my regrets.

I managed to complete the thesis somehow, and it became the very first study in this field in Türkiye. After that, I realized I had become someone who was constantly in pursuit of new concepts. I then pursued my Ph.D. in Radio and Television. After completing my master’s degree in Journalism and Public Relations, I decided to switch perspectives and see what I could learn from the other side of the discipline. My doctoral thesis examined how satellite and cable broadcasting technologies would lead to significant legal challenges, as they would either render existing laws obsolete or simply outpace them.

I used the Gulf War as a case study. I later adapted this thesis into a book titled The Electronic Renaissance (Elektronik Rönesans). Subsequently, I published several other books, including Media Lullabies (Medya Ninnileri), Dream Blindness (Rüya Körleşmesi), News, Children, and Violence (Haber, Çocuk ve Şiddet), and News in Message Design (İleti Tasarımında Haber). Afterward, I had the opportunity to experience three American universities, and these institutions contributed significantly to satisfying my intellectual hunger.

Robert E. Park and Clara Cahill Park, at Chicago Campus.
University of Chicago Photo Archive, apf1-06709.

“Though rarely acknowledged, one of the most pivotal figures in Chicago was Jane Addams, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She led a massive charitable institution and was the primary source of support for the University of Chicago faculty most notably Robert Park in their urban studies.”

The main campus of the University of Chicago, where Robert E. Park
conducted his academic work (Hyde Park, Chicago).

The first was Florida International University (FIU). Compared to others, it had a modest library, yet it was where I first witnessed that libraries did not have to close at five o’clock; they operated 24/7. It felt like a place where you could simply live and never leave. Because I would stay in the library until midnight, my closest friend became the campus police officer.

I still remember sitting down and crying when I counted 360 references for my thesis at FIU. While back home we could find virtually nothing, here, even in a small-scale university library, I could access 360 sources directly relevant to my thesis. That was the moment I realized that the core of the matter had long been settled elsewhere.

Afterward, I went to Texas A&M University. When I joined the doctoral courses on “Digital Storytelling” I saw that two professors could co-teach a single course: one week it was taught by a professor from Computer Science, and the next week I taught it from a discourse-based perspective. It is not exactly easy to conduct a course like that in our system; here, professors would often clash over turf. However, there was no such friction there. I learned a great deal from them as well.

Then there was Brandeis University in Boston another institution that contributed immensely to my development. I supervised a few theses there, too. These experiences likely led me to view communication studies through an American perspective. Of course, years later, one sees one’s own academic trajectory crystallizing. Self-discovery is a process that takes years. Essentially, I found myself shifting from a Francophone perspective to an American one. This was not something I did intentionally; it was a natural byproduct of the fact that the data and information were originating from that source.

During this process, I realized that I was delivering course content heavily rooted in the American tradition of communication studies. Throughout this time, I developed 24 distinct courses. Among these, there are two that I regret most not having had the chance to fully implement: Media and Diplomacy and Communication and Space. You will notice that when I designed the Communication and Space course, I drew heavily on the Chicago School.

Jane Addams with children at Hull House, 1930s.

A.Ş: How did communication studies emerge, and why is the Chicago School significant in this context?

N.R: When you trace the foundations and history of communication studies, you inevitably encounter the Chicago School. They were working primarily on sociology, barely realizing that they were laying the groundwork for what would become communication studies. The key to understanding this transition lies with Robert Ezra Park. If you examine Robert E. Park’s biography, you see he possessed a robust background in journalism. The moment a journalist steps into the realm of sociology, everything shifts. It is recounted in one of the articles about him: while his doctoral students were resting, exhausted from their separate research assignments, Robert Park approached them and famously asked, “How can you sit there? How can you just sit when the city is in constant motion?” This reaction is essentially a journalistic reflex. City reporters are never meant to stay seated. Even in today’s age, you cannot simply sit at a desk and ask Google or ChatGPT, “What is going on out there?” You must be right in the city, the very place where events unfold.

Robert Park’s journalistic instinct stems from this. Park was also the first to view the city as a laboratory and to recognize that communication functions as a form of social control. Communication is, in essence, a system of control that operates so subtly you hardly notice it. The reason this discipline emerged in Chicago is that, at the turn of the last century, the city was a site of profound chaos.

Take Upton Sinclair, for instance a journalist who penned the novel The Jungle, which exposed the horrific working conditions in meatpacking plants. I remember putting the book down after only a few pages, thinking, ‘I cannot go on.’ You simply cannot bear the weight of such reality, yet this was the daily existence for people in Chicago at the time. As a journalist, Sinclair faced intense backlash for documenting these truths. Then there is John Steinbeck, whom we all know well. His Cannery Row similarly depicts the crushing poverty of that era. When you think of “America,” your mind immediately goes to Hollywood; you see no trace of destitution, only a magnificent way of life. You are conditioned to believe that is the reality, but these authors insisted that it was not. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath does exactly the same; he was a ‘narrative journalist’ who laid bare the misery in California. Sinclair and Steinbeck were the pioneers who broke the silence on this poverty. However, that is where the media’s control mechanism kicks in. If you read Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, you notice a staggering contrast. Suddenly, the narrative shifts from an America of misery to one of beauty, wealth, and five-star luxury. These stories were serialized in Travel magazine before being compiled into a book, and it is highly likely the editor told him, “Forget the misery; tell us about the beauty.” And just like that, America transforms into the sanitized version we know from Hollywood.

Thus, the Chicago School, together with Robert Park, positioned communication as a mechanism of social control. Though rarely acknowledged, one of the most pivotal figures in Chicago was Jane Addams, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She led a massive charitable institution and was the primary source of support for the University of Chicago faculty most notably Robert Park in their urban studies. In fact, Jane Addams was the first to treat the city as a laboratory, even before the university did. She dedicated her life to helping street children, single parents, and the marginalized, striving to alleviate their suffering. Although her name appears in few textbooks, she is of profound significance. She meticulously mapped the city’s crime patterns, focusing on which neighborhoods reported the highest rates, the root causes of these offenses, and potential remedies. Addams made these issues visible by analyzing their causes and solutions, while Robert Park translated these into academic language and established them as an academic subject.

However, Park’s work does not aim to generate solutions perhaps because he does not view the core purpose of academia as problem-solving. When we begin to formulate our thesis regarding the Chicago School as the foundational element of communication sciences, two concepts emerge: should the field be approached through the lens of the “Sociology of Communication” or “Media Sociology”? These are not synonymous or interchangeable terms; the Sociology of Communication is a macro-concept, whereas Media Sociology is a micro-concept. When you examine the field through the lens of the Sociology of Communication, the sociological influence is far more pronounced. This is why I believe the Chicago School and the Sociology of Communication should be discussed in tandem. When viewed through the lens of Media Sociology, however, the landscape changes. This concept only gained prominence in the 1960s, as the full impact of television following the Second World War remained largely unrecognized until that decade. It was only after the late 1960s that this influence truly began to be felt. For instance, when the series Dallas began airing in Türkiye in the 1980s, we noticed that the streets were completely deserted during its broadcast. This was quite an anomaly for that era, especially in a city like Istanbul, which is bustling 24/7. Back then, people structured their entire schedules around Dallas. It aired on Thursdays, I believe, and we would deliberately avoid making plans for that evening. Dallas serves as one of the primary examples of how the media transformed everyday life. It demonstrated to those in power how everyday life could be controlled or ‘colonized,’ if you will by media narratives. Whether you label it as power or a control mechanism, the effect was the same.

“When I first started teaching, a student of mine once told me: ‘You are trying to teach us so many things, but first, teach us how to think.’ That was a profoundly important lesson for me. So, how do we teach that? Through critical theory.”

This brings us to Jürgen Habermas’s concept of “communicative action.” The idea of the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ ultimately belongs to Habermas. If we set aside the Sociology of Communication for a moment and look at the public sphere through the lens of communicative action, we see that these two concepts are foundational and highly adaptable across every domain of communication. Years ago, at a conference, I suggested that the public sphere had essentially morphed into a private sphere. Other academics did not receive this well at the time. But look at us now are we not living in a “private sphere” on social media? Everything that was once intimate and private has become shareable, and this is done entirely with the individual’s own consent. Much like Chomsky’s concept of the ‘manufacture of consent,’ we are participating in this transformation of our own free will.

Foucault’s conceptualization of the “confession” reveals a specific power dynamic, and we have effectively embraced the power of social media, voluntarily confessing our lives to it. We wander about in a perpetual state of confession, and within this framework, our daily lives continue to be as Habermas would put it “colonized”  We are being colonized, quite literally. And we do this unconsciously, under the guise of mere entertainment. But has the experiential mechanism of communication ceased to function? Certainly not. The control and surveillance mechanisms identified in Chicago persist; they have simply mutated. In the past, this control was managed through censorship, propaganda, political communication, and traditional media editorial systems. None of those mechanisms are necessary now. Because we have already granted our consent; we have accepted this regime and allowed it to exploit our data and our very identities. Consequently, we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of Habermas’s concepts within a new, emerging paradigm.

Theodor W. Adorno, one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School

Shoshana Zuboff, a retired professor from Harvard, conceptualizes this phenomenon as “surveillance capitalism.” Sherry Turkle, also from Harvard, coined the term “alone together.” They were among the first scholars to recognize how social life and technosociology were being reshaped by the rapid evolution of communication technology in the 1990s. It is no coincidence that these scholars emerged from Harvard. While few of Sherry Turkle’s books have been translated into Turkish, her seminal contribution to the field remains the concept of being “alone together.” Indeed, we are becoming increasingly alienated, transforming into atomized and isolated individuals. We do this willingly, wholeheartedly, under the illusion that we are enjoying ourselves. And yes, perhaps people actually are having fun.

I was watching a game show the other day. One of the contestants was an influencer who, by all accounts, seemed sensible and had a background in health sciences. When the host asked about her ultimate dream, the girl replied, “I want to be famous.” The host, who was quite sharp, responded: ‘My goal in life was simply to do what I love most. I believe that when you do what you love, you inevitably become well-known because you excel at it. Why did you reverse the process? These days, it seems everything starts from the opposite end. How do you become famous now? Through a couple of one- or two-minute clips you post on social media. The late journalist Mehmet Ali Birand used to refer to this as “the man on the street.” It is impossible to ignore how the very demographic captured by that phrase those whose sole ambition is to “become famous” has come to occupy the absolute epicenter of the system. By seizing power, they have turned the entire structure upside down, starting with democracy itself. It is plain to see how this reversal is pregnant with dangerous consequences.

For instance, early news research and media studies were characterized by an inherent elitism. This is where the ‘discourse elites’ stood out against those at the bottom of the discursive hierarchy. Even a superficial glance at traditional news sources revealed that discourse was exclusively manufactured by elites, namely political, economic, or bureaucratic figures who controlled the gates of information. However, if you look closely, starting in the 1990s, ‘third-page’ tabloid news gradually migrated to the core of the media ecosystem. The very sources Birand labeled as “people on the street” have now come to dominate the landscape via YouTube, the internet, and social media. In other words, as the former underclasses of discourse began to dictate the system, less and less space remained for the intellectual elites who were once the custodians of scientifi c and cultural knowledge. This is because the system now services a world engineered not to educate, but to entertain.

If we navigate life purely in the present, without a single thought for tomorrow, we are living under grave danger. If we look for the genesis of this entertainment-centric narrative, the answer lies in “self-help” literature. The foundational ethos of personal development is encapsulated in the phrase: “Now, today, here.” The very moment you anchor yourself solely in the “here and now,” you effectively wipe your memory clean. This tyranny of the present decimates the future while completely erasing the past. Do you retain any meaningful connection to the past? Not at all. I just shared my own life story with you. In that trajectory, there was a relentless pursuit of deeper knowledge and aspirations for the future; there was a perpetual desire to learn and to teach. None of this was bound to ‘today’ it was entirely projected onto the future. Nowadays, however, because an exorbitant amount of energy is invested in the present, our daily lives are colonized, and this tyranny of the immediate is eroding the fabric of society. If we navigate life purely in the present, without a single thought for tomorrow, we are living under grave danger. When we are told that everything in our lives is going swimmingly, that is precisely when we ought to be deeply suspicious. There is even a book titled Only the Paranoid Survive. In this contemporary landscape, we are practically forced to be paranoid. Something is quietly being stripped away from us, even as we are urged to invest more and more of ourselves. We need to pause and reflect. But because we have forgotten how to think in the midst of all this noise, we cannot even manage that.

“After all, Adorno is someone with very little zest for life, who takes pleasure in nothing. You cannot expect someone who uses critical theory as ‘I will criticize everything, I will look at everything from a negative perspective’ to create music that inspires enthusiasm. He uses music solely for his elitism.”

When I first started teaching, a student of mine once told me: ‘You are trying to teach us so many things, but first, teach us how to think.’ That was a profoundly important lesson for me. So, how do we teach that? Through critical theory. And critical theory arrives with the entire corpus of the Frankfurt School. The foundational figure of this thought is Theodor W. Adorno. He is, without a doubt, the toughest nut to crack in the entire field. I recently came across a quote about him that I absolutely loved: ‘The greatest favor Adorno did was to disabuse readers of the notion that they are always smarter than the author.’ That is classic Adorno. In other words, he is implying, ‘You cannot compete with me neither in knowledge, nor intelligence, nor in your worldview.’ There is this distinct aura about Adorno that says, ‘I am brilliant, I am erudite, I am elite, and I don’t really care to accommodate you.’ Ultimately, he is saying you have a great deal to learn from him but only if you possess the patience to endure the first hundred pages, much like navigating an Umberto Eco novel.

(SPOT) So, how do we teach that? Through critical theory. And critical theory arrives with the entire corpus of the Frankfurt School. The foundational figure of this thought is Theodor W. Adorno. For example, Max Weber’s three-and-a-half to four-month journey to America fundamentally transformed sociology. It shifted the entire paradigm of European sociology and demonstrated just how pivotal religion is as a societal element. Yet, this American influence is stubbornly downplayed by the Frankfurt School, particularly by Adorno. It was only toward the end of his life, in a 30-page essay, that he finally conceded America’s profound impact. Without America, after all, the Frankfurt School would not have survived it saved their lives, quite literally. When Adorno returned to Germany, the Americans were understandably furious, thinking: ‘We rescued you and your colleagues, and without a shred of gratitude, you tore us to shreds by labeling us a “culture industry.”’ Had Adorno not witnessed that reality firsthand, he could never have conceptualized the ‘culture industry.’

Foucault, in his work on the ‘intellectual gaze,’ posits that true intellectual vision is only possible when one examines their own world from the outside. By experiencing an alien environment, you gain the rare vantage point needed to look back at your own society objectively. As long as you remain submerged within it, you are blind to its contours; you cannot map its coordinates. But once you step outside, the mind is forced into a comparative state, which is precisely what catalyzes dialectical thought. Consequently, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School owe the evolution of their paradigm to their exile in New York and, subsequently, California, where during their stay, they deliberately insulated themselves within a sort of intellectual ghetto.

(SPOT) By experiencing an alien environment, you gain the rare vantage point needed to look back at your own society objectively. As long as you remain submerged within it, you are blind to its contours; you cannot map its coordinates. But once you step outside, the mind is forced into a comparative state, which is precisely what catalyzes dialectical thought. Perhaps this is also fundamentally linked to Jewish education. Ultimately, Hebrew contains no vowels; it consists entirely of consonants, and a text cannot resonate without someone to vocalize it. The individual who provides that vocalization eventually emerges as the leader of the community. Through their erudition, their ability to decipher the text, and their capacity to narrate it, a structure reminiscent of shamanism takes shape; they regard their language as their true homeland. Language transforms into a sanctuary. When Adorno returned to Germany, he gave an interview. When asked, ‘Why did you return to Germany?’ he famously replied, ‘I did not return to Germany; I returned to the German language.’ In that single sentence, you can feel the immense suffering he endured over those eleven years of exile. He returned to his language because Adorno was a thinker who wrote from the station of the ink.

Max Horkheimer acted as his father figure. He rarely commands the spotlight, yet it is fair to say that without Horkheimer, Adorno could never have truly become Adorno. The tight-knit enclave they established among themselves in California kept them anchored and ensured their collective survival, driven by a mutual dependence that was both intellectual and material. Furthermore, there is nothing more notoriously difficult in academia than co-authoring a book; yet, during the creation of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is evident that both thinkers possessed such a symphonic alignment of thought that they could virtually complete each other’s sentences. There was absolute equilibrium between them. Operating and writing in a second language is a harrowing endeavor. No matter how brilliant you are, it takes at least four to five years for the cognitive dominance of your native tongue to recede, and Adorno actively resisted that erosion. German was the very matrix that generated the intellectual Adorno. Consequently, he does not look favorably upon English, which he regards as secondary. Nor does he look favorably upon the place. Sometimes his friends criticize him: “Did you see this light in the sky in Germany? Why are you pushing American life so far away?” He replies, “There’s a lack of landscape.” That’s what surprises me. How can there be a lack of landscape in America? What kind of landscape could he possibly have in mind? He has the landscape of German cities in his head. The first thing you notice when you first go to America is the excess of light. The country has a completely different kind of light. His friends even get annoyed with him, saying, ‘You didn’t see this kind of light in Germany.’ But California’s scenery was supposedly insufficient… For instance, if you look at Jean Baudrillard’s America, it’s a sociologist’s America through and through. Adorno’s America, however, is just exile for him. Yet that exile saved your life; it was through that popularity there that you became ‘Adorno.’ Had he stayed in his own country, he would likely have been a failed musician or musicologist. The things he attempted to write about music were not well received anyway. After all, Adorno is someone with very little zest for life, who takes pleasure in nothing. You cannot expect someone who uses critical theory as ‘I will criticize everything, I will look at everything from a negative perspective’ to create music that inspires enthusiasm. He uses music solely for his elitism.

Of course, they all have that rigorous German education in their backgrounds. They owe their perspectives, their critical faculties, and their entire way of thinking to German discipline. In fact, Communication Studies also owes a great deal to German roots. We don’t place much importance on this here, but when you look at it, that academic and cultural cultivation whether from a place of exile or somewhere you went to learn creates very significant differences in you.

Deniz Benzer: You mentioned that Adorno’s view of America was negative. When we look at Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, we see that they also criticize Germany at one point. What are your thoughts on that work?

N.R: Unhappiness isn’t something that leaves Adorno anyway; wherever you go, you carry it with you. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a first-year undergraduate study. After that, it should lead you to Negative Dialectics. Don’t you need a German education to rethink the Enlightenment? Otherwise, you can’t really imagine an American thinking about the Enlightenment and examining it within that framework. That’s why that German education or perhaps that continental European education is necessary. After all, by the age of twenty, the entire body of macro-knowledge has already formed in these people. After that, it moves toward choosing a direction and producing results. Of course, we must not forget that there is also the impact of the trauma seriously experienced there. The transformation of dialectics into the negative in fact, these two volumes need to be taken together. You can’t just read The Dialectic of Enlightenment and stop there. You have to complete it with Negative Dialectics. Because one was written in America, while the other was written in German upon his return. It’s impossible to create an Adorno framework without seeing both of those. But you can criticize it from this angle: there is discourse, but no action. All of his students criticize him this way. Don’t get mad at Adorno, there’s nothing to be done. It’s clear that we still learn a great deal from every text, every sentence of his…

Not everyone has to be a man of action. Academics have their own personalities, too. Some thinkers have been both men of discourse and men of action. I am also interested in the personalities of thinkers, and from what I can see, an activist character would never have emerged from Adorno. I wish everyone could be like that, but they don’t have to be. Take Herbert Marcuse, for example he’s one of them and a man of action. No one ever told him, “You’re still involved in this stuff even in your 70s.” These people are also the intellectual fathers of the ’68 generation.

The students are angry with Adorno for that reason, too: “We’re here in the squares because of you, with your ideas, but you still aren’t coming out.” Adorno doesn’t feel forced to do this. You don’t have to go out into the square. Learn, think, speak; continue your action in another way. You don’t have to be in the streets. But no one ever told Marcuse, at his advanced age, to “wander around the squares.” It’s entirely a matter of character. We all have a character, an inner drive. Something is pulling you toward it. That driving force is an innate character. If you have siblings, you know that no sibling follows another. They’re all different. There’s a formula from above. I believe in it. We’re all born with that formula, and we strive to fill it out. So don’t be angry with Adorno. He was born that way. There’s nothing to be done.

From Chicago to Frankfurt: The History of Communication Studies yazısı ilk önce Context Dergi üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

İbrahim Berkan Karataş, Sociologist, explores the evolution of capitalism into cloud capitalism, the workings of algorithmic forgetting, the dynamics of the rentier economy, Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and how the digital age has reshaped our daily memories. Inspired by the call to overcome left-wing melancholia and to see the cloud as a shared resource, this insightful discussion features İbrahim Berkan Karataş analyzing the systemic changes brought by techno-feudalism to contemporary society.

Sıla Gündüz: Hello, and welcome. Could you introduce yourself?

İbrahim Berkan Karataş: Thank you for the invitation. I am a PhD candidate in sociology at Marmara University and currently finishing an advanced master’s in Digital Humanities at KU Leuven, though the disciplinary labels matter to me less than the seam where they join: the seam between the empirical study of data and digital systems and a critical theory of the present. What brought me here is a kind of stubbornness, a refusal to grant that anything in the social world is ever merely technical. Behind every interface there is a question of property, of who owns the infrastructure through which we now think, remember, labor, numbers, and speak to one another, and who is made to pay rent for the privilege; behind every promise of convenience there is a question of power, of how domination has learned to present itself as a gift one would be foolish to decline. I try to read data and digital systems against the grain, as sedimented social relations and never neutral givens, and I am drawn above all to the points where the conceptual and the material refuse to come apart, where a single design decision turns out to be a tacit argument about how a person ought to live, or where the vocabulary of innovation dresses up a very old story of dispossession and ownership.

Mustafa Burak Avcı: “Techno-Feudalism” is now widely discussed in academia and in everyday conversation, and we chose it for our magazine’s theme. Before we begin, how does Yanis Varoufakis’s idea of techno-feudalism help us understand the world conceptually? What are your views on it?

İ.B.K: Let me begin by granting Varoufakis his due, because the diagnostic achievement of Techno-feudalism is real and should not be dismissed directly. His central claim is that capital has mutated into what he names cloud capital. This mutation has evicted capitalism’s two organizing principles, markets and profits, from the centre of the system and pushed them to its margins; in their place stand digital platforms that look like markets yet operate as fiefdoms, and a return of rent, specifically the cloud rent that must be paid for access to those platforms. The conceptual gift here is that the argument makes visible something the more cautious vocabularies leave implicit: the personal, quasi-extraeconomic character of the dependence we now live inside. When the App Store levies its thirty per cent, Varoufakis is right to hear in it the cadence of ground rent and not the cadence of competitive profit; when he describes us as cloud serfs producing, for free and outside any labor market, the content and data that valorize the platform, he has named a genuine novelty in the circuit of accumulation.

My reservations begin precisely where his periodization begins. To call this the death of capitalism, to posit rent against profit as the sign of a new mode of production, is, by the measure of Marx’s own categories, a category error, and here Evgeny Morozov’s “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason” lands its strongest blow. For Marx, feudalism names a mode of production defi ned by a specific mechanism of surplus appropriation; rent, in the third volume of Capital, is not the opposite of profit but one of the forms in which surplus value is distributed among the propertied classes, a point Ernest Mandel extended with his analysis of technological rents as surplus profits internal to capitalist competition. If rent has always been a modality of surplus-value capture, then its return to prominence signals capital’s reorganization, and not its supersession. I find Cédric Durand’s account more rigorous on exactly this terrain: in How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism he grounds the phenomenon in the political economy of intangible assets and intellectual monopoly, arguing that capital has tilted from production toward predation, that the digital boom fuels a rentier economy because the control of information has become the most powerful means of capturing value. That formulation keeps us inside a recognizably capitalist logic even as it registers the feudal coloration of dependence and personal domination. so my stance is straightforward: techno-feudalism is indispensable as diagnosis and contestable as periodization; I keep the cloud capital, I keep the cloud rent, and I let go of the funeral for capitalism.

Berra Çalışkan: The techno-feudalism framework is approaced from various angles, often shaped by political agendas. Some see a new structural crisis or a distinct phase of capitalism; others believe it will alter social relations, change capitalism’s stages, and introduce a new mode of production. What is your perspective, and how do these debates, in both realpolitik and academic circles, affect the phenomenon itself?

İ.B.K: The disagreement you describe is, at bottom, an argument about periodization, and I fi nd it clarifying to hear three distinct answers folded inside it. One answer says we have genuinely crossed a threshold into a new mode of production; this is Varoufakis at his boldest in his 2023 book Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, and parts of Cédric Durand’s How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism can be read in the same key. A second answer keeps us fi rmly inside capitalism and treats what we are living through as a new phase or regime of accumulation built around platforms and rent; this is the terrain mapped by Nick Srnicek in Platform Capitalism and by Brett Christophers in Rentier Capitalism, and it hardens into an open refusal of the feudal vocabulary in papers like Nick Gane’s “Capitalism Is Capitalism, Not Technofeudalism” and Jeremy Gilbert’s “Techno-Feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society” the latter weighing the two labels against each other and settling on platform capitalism.

“If the left declares capitalism dead, it risks abandoning its most original and effective weapon, the anti-capitalist political-theoretical apparatus built around the wage relation and surplus value, and chasing the shadow of a ‘New Middle Ages’ that the right can colonize just as easily.”

The third answer is more cautious than the other two, and it is the one I find most honest: it speaks of homology and not identity, conceding that the present rhymes with feudalism without having become it. Robert Brenner gives this its sharpest expression in his essay “Escalating Plunder” where he reads the post-crisis bailouts as “predation as a precondition for production,” an upward redistribution of wealth carried out by directly political means; the symptoms recall the feudal past, prolonged stagnation, a parasitic elite fattened by the state, the immiseration of the many, and yet, on his account, capitalism still very much rules the day.

Evgeny Morozov

Even Evgeny Morozov, otherwise merciless toward this feudal-speak in his paper “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” registers this Brennerian instinct as the defensible core of the whole quarrel. I situate myself between the second and third positions: what lies before us is a mutation of capitalism around intangible assets, intellectual monopoly, and rent, and not the arrival of a successor system. Now, to your sharper question about the effect of these debates on the phenomenon itself. The label is never innocent, and this is where the realpolitik enters the picture. Morozov’s political worry deserves to be taken seriously: if the left declares capitalism dead, it risks abandoning its most original and effective weapon, the anti-capitalist political-theoretical apparatus built around the wage relation and surplus value, and chasing the shadow of a “New Middle Ages” that the right can colonize just as easily. Against this, Jodi Dean offers the most generous defence of the feudal vocabulary in her essay “Same As It Ever Was?” and in her work on neofeudalism and communicative capitalism; her point is that the non-capitalist dimensions of the relation, expropriation, domination, force, have grown strong enough that the fi ction of free and equal actors meeting in the labor market no longer holds, and the feudal metaphor names that reality of dependence with a clarity the antiseptic term “platform” conceals.

The debate, in other words, is a strategic battlefield: if the diagnosis is feudalism, the political horizon tilts toward a bourgeois-style revolt against rentiers; if the diagnosis is capitalism in a new key, the horizon stays fixed on the socialization of the means of production, which now means the socialization of cloud capital. I prefer to keep that second horizon in sight.

B.Ç: On Varoufakis specifically, techno-feudalism promises a narrative in which class struggle and social relations are reshaped. How should this mechanism be interpreted? When economic actors deploy both political and economic pressure, what is the appropriate way to interpret “digital serfdom,” and how would you approach analyzing this problem?

İ.B.K: The interpretive key is Varoufakis’s own distinction between the cloud prole and the cloud serf, and I would read it alongside Tiziana Terranova’s older but prescient concept of free labor and Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias’s notion of data colonialism. The cloud prole is the waged worker driven to physical limits by cloud-based algorithms, the Amazon picker whose tempo is dictated by a non-corporeal entity incapable of empathy; here, as Varoufakis honestly concedes, almost nothing is new that Marx had not analyzed in his chapter on piece-wages.

“The cloud prole is the waged worker driven to physical limits by cloud-based algorithms, the Amazon picker whose tempo is dictated by a non-corporeal entity incapable of empathy; here, as Varoufakis honestly concedes, almost nothing is new that Marx had not analyzed in his chapter on piece-wages”.

The cloud serf is the rest of us, producing, outside any labor market and without a wage, the behavioral raw material that the platform then valorizes. The mechanism that reshapes class struggle is the fusion you highlight: economic coercion (the rent extracted from vassal capitalists, the thirty per cent) is welded to extra-economic coercion (the capture of attention, the corvée of unpaid content), so that the site of extraction migrates from the wage relation alone to the totality of social life rendered as data.

My analytical approach refuses to let this dissolve the proletariat into a metaphor. The serf and the prole are both inside surplus-value relations, even if at different moments of the circuit; Couldry and Mejias are useful precisely because they insist that data colonialism appropriates life as raw material whether or not it takes the form of labor, which keeps the question of value open without abandoning it. So I would interpret digital serfdom as predation, in Durand’s sense, layered onto exploitation, and not substituted for it.

The error to avoid is the seduction of the feudal image, which can tempt us into thinking that because the user is not waged, the user stands outside capital (a move reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s theoretical intervention vis-à-vis Jean Baudrillard in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: what appears to have escaped capitalism must instead be re-situated within capitalism’s own logic); the user stands at a newly opened frontier of capital, one that Marx’s category of primitive or ongoing accumulation, the enclosure of a commons, illuminates far better than any nostalgia for the manor.

Sıla Gündüz: How does this transformation permeate everyday life? Do the economic mechanisms of technofeudalism lead to a shift in how the average person thinks? Could daily life be re-produced in a completely different way through the tools of this transformation?

İ.B.K: This is, in fact, the question that my own empirically grounded research seeks to answer. In “Three Modalities of Algorithmic Forgetting” I argue that the transformation reaches everyday cognition through the infrastructures of memory, and that it does so not through spectacular surveillance but through banal, OS-level features marketed as convenience. I trace three modalities.

Microsoft Recall enacts over-capture: by screenshotting everything, it saturates the record until events drain of meaning, and forgetting is displaced into a private chore of filtering and self-management. Google Ask Photos enacts curated retrieval: it selects and omits by opaque criteria, so that traces remain stored yet, when not surfaced, slip out of practical reach, a condition I describe, following the erasure-studies vocabulary, as a form of operative erasure. Apple Journal enacts preemptive guidance: its prompts steer inscription toward gratitude and the wholesome before the record is even formed, which is forgetting at the point of writing.

The cumulative effect answers your question about how the average person thinks. We are moved from narrative memory, in Paul Ricoeur’s sense, toward what I call query memory: get the fact, retrieve the photo, move on, with the unexpected and the antagonistic unwittingly de-ranked. Bernard Stiegler would call this a transformation of our tertiary retention, the externalized supports of thought; Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and Eva Illouz’s emotional capitalism name the affective register in which a sanitized past becomes the condition of remaining functional. The thinking of the average person is thereby narrowed, oriented toward wellness and efficiency, and stripped of the capacity to recognize memory as a field of struggle. As for your final question, whether daily life could be reproduced otherwise, my answer is emphatically yes, and this is the whole political stake of the argument: these are design decisions, and design decisions are contestable. The depoliticization I describe is an effect of engineering, not a law of nature, and what engineering has narrowed, collective action can widen again.

“Han’s psychopolitics, for all its diagnostic acuity, carries limited empirical scope; his achievement subject tends to reflect the pathologies of an elite Western academic milieu more faithfully than it captures the lived conditions of globally precarious populations, and his sweeping declarations (‘the Other is completely expelled,’ ‘society is completely transparent’) trade nuance for emphasis.”

S.G: How accurate is it to interpret today through Byung- Chul Han’s perspective? Can the transformation of social relations, techno-feudalism, and psychopolitics together form a correct conceptual framework? Can these two frameworks generate a chemistry between them?

İ.B.K: There is a real chemistry, and it is worth stating with precision before I qualify it. Varoufakis and Durand supply the objective structure, cloud capital, intellectual monopoly, the rentier economy; Han supplies the subjective form, the achievement subject who exploits itself in the name of freedom, the society of positivity that expels all negativity, the transparency that becomes domination. These are two faces of one process, and read together they describe both the cell and the prisoner who has learned to love it. Varoufakis even reaches Han’s terrain in his own idiom when he writes, in the chapter on the death of the liberal individual, that techno-feudalism has produced persons who are possessed and not possessive, persons whose focus has been stolen; that sentence could sit unaltered within psychopolitics.

This chemistry holds true only under one condition—a condition that forms the central claim of my Constellations paper (see “Toward a Critique of Critique: Paradoxes of ByungChul Han and the Dialectic of Despair and Possibility”). Han’s psychopolitics, for all its diagnostic acuity, carries limited empirical scope; his achievement subject tends to reflect the pathologies of an elite Western academic milieu more faithfully than it captures the lived conditions of globally precarious populations, and his sweeping declarations (“the Other is completely expelled,” “society is completely transparent”) trade nuance for emphasis. So the synthesis becomes a correct framework only if Han’s subject is re-grounded twice over: re-grounded in political economy, so that the self-exploiting subject is understood as the correlate of the rentier structure and not a free-floating mood, and re-grounded empirically, in the actual infrastructures, the Recalls and Journals, through which psychopolitics is materially enacted. Absent that double grounding, the marriage of techno-feudalism and psychopolitics produces a beautiful elegy and very little analysis.

Elif Başlantı: How does psychopolitics find its place within this transformation? Could it be a structural result of the techno-feudals, whether precariats or cloud proliferating developing since the 2008 crisis? What is the relationship between the self-exploiting person and both technofeudalism and the rentier economy?

İ.B.K: You have named the chronological hinge correctly, and it lets me make my central theoretical move. Han insists on a sharp distinction between prohibition and compulsion, and he refuses to call self-exploitation a form of internalization, reserving that word narrowly for the absorption of negative constraints. I argue the reverse. If we shift attention from the source of compulsion to its function, neoliberal subjectivation reveals itself as a positive internalization, an affective self-binding, together drawing on the adjacent frameworks of Lauren Berlant and Nikolas Rose, in which subjection is lived as autonomy and domination is sustained through the very desire to optimize oneself. The subject internalizes not a “no,” but an affirmative injunction to thrive, and that is what makes the regime so resistant to the older grammar of resistance. Now place this against 2008, exactly as you suggest.

Varoufakis’s account of the post-crisis settlement, socialism for the financiers, austerity for everyone else, an investment strike, permanent stagnation, asset inflation, produced two things at once: the rentier structure of cloud capital, funded by the central banks’ money, and the precarious subject who must curate the self as a brand to survive a world that offers no fenced-off refuge from the market.

Psychopolitics is therefore the structural correlate of the rentier economy and not a parallel cultural symptom. The cloud serf who self-optimizes is producing the behavioural surplus, in Shoshana Zuboff’s term, most fully developed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, that the cloudalist captures as rent. The self-exploiting person and the rentier are the two ends of a single relation: one labors without a wage and experiences it as self-realization, the other collects the rent and calls it a platform.

“As David Harvey argues in The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, the bailout transmuted catastrophe into upward redistribution, and the platform now transmutes the user’s every lapse, every search, every idle scroll, into rent.”

B.Ç: The new rentier economy has turned economic failures directly into instruments of power. Where does the obligation to pay rent on platforms, without owning any means of production, position itself within Byung-Chul Han’s established relationship of power and divinity?

İ.B.K: Han’s theory of power is most acute where it observes that power, at its most effective, does not coerce against a will but acts through it, smoothing and not breaking, operating through permission and seduction; the “free” power he describes governs by saying yes, by enabling, by occupying the place of the unconditioned. The platform rent you describe is the exact realization of this.

The user pays in attention and data, owns none of the means of production, and experiences the arrangement as gift and as freedom, never as extortion; one is granted access, and the granting feels like grace. This is why the theological register you invoke is apt and not merely ornamental. The platform sits in the position of the divine in a precise structural sense: it is the unconditioned condition of participation, it cannot be petitioned or appealed to, and when it casts you out, as Varoufakis observes of the worker fired by an algorithm, you fall into a Kafkaesque spiral in which there is no human face behind the verdict.

I feel Jodi Dean’s communicative capitalism provides us with a political reading: circulation itself becomes the trap, since our contributions are captured as so much undifferentiated flow whose very abundance forecloses political efficacy. And the conversion of failure into power that you name is, for me, the most damning continuity with 2008: As David Harvey argues in The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, the bailout transmuted catastrophe into upward redistribution, and the platform now transmutes the user’s every lapse, every search, every idle scroll, into rent. Han gives us the phenomenology of why this feels like devotion; Varoufakis and Dean give us the structure of why it functions as extraction. Both are needed, and neither suffices alone.

S.G: According to Han, we are in a transformation where we voluntarily share data and collaborate with algorithms out of a desire for exposure. In this environment of voluntary disclosure, how are platforms transforming individual self-presentation; can we truly say our participation in daily and social life is “free”? Where does the society of positivity stand in this situation?

İ.B.K: Self-presentation is now governed by a double bind that Varoufakis describes with great economy: the young person is taught to treat the self as a brand and, at the same time, to be judged on the perceived authenticity of that brand, so that every post becomes a calculation about which of one’s possible “true selves” the average online opinion will reward. The word “free” fails in both of its senses, and the failure is instructive. Our participation is free of charge, and yet it is paid for in the free labor that Terranova theorized, the unwaged production of the very content that constitutes the platform’s most valuable stock. And our participation feels free as in autonomous, and yet it is compelled, through the positive internalization I described, so that the compulsion arrives wearing the mask of self-expression.

The society of positivity is the affective regime that makes this unfreedom feel like liberation. Han’s smooth surface, the like, the expulsion of the negative, the dating-app reduction of the Other to a narcissistic mirror, is the cultural form in which the rentier capture of the self is rendered pleasurable. My own work supplies the micro-mechanics: Apple Journal’s gratitude prompts are positivity at the level of the inscription itself, steering the diary toward the sunset and the workout and away from the argument with the boss or the protest one attended. What I add to Han, and what I think a critical reading has to add, is that positivity is not merely a Stimmung; it is a productivity strategy, since the platform’s algorithms optimize for the rents that flow more copiously from contentment and engagement, and, as Varoufakis grimly notes, sometimes from hatred too.

B.Ç: At the breaking point where the individual fully internalizes the system’s failure, can Han’s “voluntary servitude” be organically connected to techno-feudalism’s “digital serfdom”?

İ.B.K: Yes, and the connection is organic and not merely analogical, though I want to mark its knot carefully. The hinge is the old motif of voluntary servitude, La Boétie’s question of why people fight for their subjection as if for their salvation, refracted now through Han and Varoufakis. The cloud serf’s unpaid labor and the achievement subject’s self-exploitation turn out to be the same act under two descriptions: the subject reproduces, for free and with enthusiasm, the cloud capital that dominates it. Han explains the libidinal economy of this, the desire that binds us to the chain; Varoufakis explains the property relation, the brute fact that we do not own the means through which we produce and communicate.

I insist on holding both, because each guards against the characteristic failure of the other. Han alone risks a subjectivism in which everything becomes a matter of affect and the question of ownership evaporates; the chain dissolves into a mood. Varoufakis alone, in his stronger moments, risks an economism in which the subject is merely a function of the rent mechanism. The organic connection is therefore real on one condition: that the libidinal account never be permitted to dissolve the objective property question, and that the property account never be permitted to forget that domination today operates through desire and not against it. Voluntary servitude and digital serfdom are simply the inside and outside of the same wall.

S.G: How should we interpret the relationship between Fast Theory and “story-selling” that you directed at Byung-Chul Han, from the perspective of algorithmic hegemony? Does the algorithmic attention regime not only subjugate the masses but also bend the very critical theory that opposes it to its own logic of circulation?

İ.B.K: This is the reflexive turn of my Constellations paper, and your second question states its thesis more sharply than I did. By Fast Theory, I mean the condition under which critical thought is obliged to conform to the imperatives of immediacy, circulation, and commodification, a condition Hartmut Rosa theorizes as social acceleration and Pierre Bourdieu anticipated in his portrait of the “fast-thinker” who produces marketable concepts on demand. Story-selling is Han’s own term, from The Crisis of Narration, for the packaging of thought into consumable insight, and I turn it back on him with what I hope is fair respect. The paradox is this: Han’s near-annual, swiftly translated output, the more than twenty slim volumes each built around a single evocative concept, enacts the very acceleration he denounces; he risks becoming, in Knepper and Wyllie’s phrase, a “publishing zombie,” and his signature notions, the burnout society, the achievement subject, risk hardening into critical commonplaces drained of analytic precision by sheer repetition.

My translation-velocity data was meant to make this visible, the high-tempo transnational dissemination of a critique of cognitive saturation that becomes entangled in the circuits it indicts. So my answer to your decisive question is yes. The algorithmic attention regime does not only subjugate the masses; it bends the critique that opposes it toward its own circulation logic, and there is no clean outside from which one might escape this. Even radical critique, in order to be seen or heard, must accommodate the tempo it aims to resist; this is the structural dilemma, and I name it, after Heidegger, a kind of Verfallenheit of theory itself. The conclusion I draw is not despair but a task: we need a critical theory of accelerated critique, one that can hold the diagnostic force of a thinker like Han together with a lucid awareness of the conditions of its own production. To refuse that reflexivity is to let the attention economy write our theory for us.

E.B: In your study “Three Modalities of Algorithmic Forgetting,” how does the loading of mental functions onto applications such as Microsoft Recall, Apple Journal, or Google Ask Photos, the delegation of thinking and execution to artificial intelligence, and the complete entrusting of personal data to cloud capital, affect social relations and the fundamental functions of humans at their core? Where does the human-freedom relationship stand in this transformation?

İ.B.K: Three modalities, one political drift, and the drift is depoliticization. Let me state the mechanism in each case, since the differences matter. Over-capture, embodied by Recall, records indiscriminately and thereby saturates and flattens; its forgetting comes from overwhelming volume, and it converts the collective, structural question of surveillance into an individualized technical chore, recasting the subject from a political actor into a personal risk-manager of their own traces, a self-responsibilization in Nikolas Rose’s sense. Curated retrieval, embodied by Ask Photos, naturalizes absence through opaque selection; the trace persists in storage, yet what the system does not surface drops out of practical reach, and because the omission is invisible, it cannot be contested. Preemptive guidance, embodied by Journal, steers inscription toward normative positivity before the record exists, which is Brian Massumi’s logic of preemption applied to memory and Paul Connerton’s prescriptive forgetting enacted in advance. The effect on the fundamental functions you ask about is a narrowing of the mnemonic horizon. We move from narrative memory, which invites interpretation and lets unexpected and antagonistic elements surface, toward query memory, which is instrumental and incurious; memory ceases to be a field of struggle and becomes private mood management, and the political self capable of recalling injustice gives way to a privatized self oriented to wellness and efficiency. This is, at the level of memory, precisely the death of the liberal individual that Varoufakis describes; our focus is not weakened by some failure of will, it is stolen, co-opted by infrastructures that profit from our distraction. As for freedom, I want to end this answer against the grain of my own pessimism, because the empirical record forbids fatalism. These systems fail and are contested: Recall provoked an uproar over its plaintext screenshots and was pulled and re-engineered; Ask Photos was quietly paused because its curation could not reliably surface what users wanted; users revert to classic search, refuse the prompts, name the overreach. Following Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation, the return of system-bound objects to common use, I read these refusals as small but genuine cracks in the edifice. Freedom here is not a possession we have lost; it is a practice of contestation that remains open.

S.G: Does this psychopolitical passivity in everyday life completely eliminate the possibility of a structural social transformation? Is politics nowadays only reproducing itself in a way that feeds the attention economy? How do you see Byung-Chul Han’s critique here? Could the end of political solutions and promises of democratization be imminent?

İ.B.K: Here I must stage my clearest disagreement with Han, in the spirit of immanent critique and not dismissal. Han’s strong thesis is that burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive, that revolution has become impossible, that no proletarian messiah waits in the wings because the subject is already enmeshed in the systems it might oppose. I read this stance through Enzo Traverso’s diagnosis of left-wing melancholia and Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholy: a critique” so lucid that it paralyzes, that comes to reify the very loss it laments, enclosing itself in a hermetically sealed negativity. I refuse the closure on three grounds, each of which I have argued in print. First, the diagnosis has limited empirical scope, modelling the world on a particular elite experience of exhaustion. Second, it ignores the fugitive moments of refusal that the historical record keeps producing, from the Arab Spring to the global climate strikes to encrypted solidarity networks and the ironic subversions of meme cultures, which complicate any purely pessimistic picture of digital life. Third, and most fundamentally, it confuses a genuine difficulty with an ontological impossibility. Is politics today largely captured by the attention economy, reproducing itself as circulation that forecloses action? Yes, and Jodi Dean’s communicative capitalism is the indispensable name for this: the endless contribution of messages that feels like participation and functions as foreclosure. But capture is not abolition, and a relocation of the political is not its end. I do not believe the end of democratization is imminent; I believe its form is being displaced from the institutions we inherited toward arenas we have not yet learned to occupy, and the urgent task is the rebuilding of collective subjects capable of acting at the scale of cloud capital. Han sees the depth of the impasse with rare clarity, and that clarity is a gift; the danger is only that he aestheticizes the impasse into a destiny.

M.B.A: Given that these rent mechanisms and the transformation of social relations lead criticism to become paralyzing, what you have described as a “left-wing melancholia,” where is the way out? What should we focus on to find a solution to the structural crisis caused by this shift?

İ.B.K: Let me answer constructively, because the whole point of my critique of melancholy is to earn the right to a way out. Against the melancholic attachment to a lost world, I would marshal the warmer current of the tradition: Ernst Bloch’s concrete utopia and his “not-yet,” the anticipatory consciousness that finds the seeds of the future in the tendencies of the present; Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias, emancipatory designs tethered to institutional imaginaries of transformation, since, as Wright warns, a critique without such imaginaries becomes a diagnosis without remedy; and Terry Eagleton’s distinction between hope and optimism, his insistence that authentic hope is militant and underpinned by reasons, acknowledging structural intransigence even as it insists on enacting alternatives. I would even read Han’s own late turn generously here: The Spirit of Hope reframes hope as a “waiting without guarantee,” and read against the grain of his fatalism, that posture can be salvaged as a muted form of Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness, an attentiveness to what remains unexhausted.

The focus, concretely, follows from the diagnosis. If the structure is rent and cloud capital, the answer is the socialization and democratic governance of that capital, and here Varoufakis’s constructive program, for all my disagreement with his periodization, deserves to be taken seriously: the reconfiguration of property rights toward one-employee-one-share, the central bank reimagined as a monetary commons with a basic dividend, and above all the termination of the attention model through a Bill of Digital Rights and a micropayment platform that would let us refuse the bargain of free services paid for in unfree labor. To this I would add the living movements that already prefigure it: Trebor Scholz’s platform cooperativism, the construction of data commons against the data colonialism that Couldry and Mejias urge us to resist in Data Grab, and the patient organizing of the cloud serfs and cloud proles who, contrary to Han, have not vanished as political subjects. The one path I would foreclose is Varoufakis’s occasional drift, shared with Han’s later work, toward a fatalistic hope that excess will undo the system from within, a waiting for collapse that is not the same as organizing liberation. The task, I believe, is to carry his incisive negativity together with a renewed and militant imagination, so that critique becomes the negative ground from which a reasoned hope can grow, and not the elegy that mourns the future before it has been fought for.

S.G: Thank you very much for your time. We are extremely grateful for your contributions to our new issue.

İ.B.K: The pleasure was mine. As I take leave, I would like to tell your readers that diagnosis is the easy part. The real task is to refuse the melancholy it invites and turn the cloud into a commons through reasoned praxis.

Critiquing the Critics of Techno-Feudalism: Calling off Capitalism’s Funeral yazısı ilk önce Context Dergi üzerinde ortaya çıktı.