Eren Soyak

startup founder @lifemote, instructor @Bogazici_CmpE, nerd, dad, BS/MS/PhD @NorthwesternU, @RobertCollege

[Taylor Smith @itstaylorsmith9]

if you live in Europe and want to understand how an election is actually stolen in 2026, look at what happened in Istanbul yesterday.

in March 2024, Sinem Dedetaş won the district of Üsküdar with 49.9 percent of the vote, ending three decades of conservative rule.

Üsküdar is not just any municipality. it is the neighborhood where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's private residence is located. for the palace, having an opposition mayor govern the streets outside the president's front door was an intolerable humiliation.

so look at the five step machinery the state used to take the mayor's office back yesterday without asking a single citizen to vote.

first, prosecutors arrested Mayor Dedetaş in late July and suspended her from office.

when the elected municipal council voted to replace her with an opposition deputy, an administrative court intervened and annulled the result.

ahead of the rerun, four opposition council members defected to the ruling party. and the day before the vote, police detained two more opposition members, holding them in cells so they were physically unable to cast their ballots.

in the secret ballot, two remaining opposition members voted for the AKP candidate. their identities remain unknown.

the ruling party won the seat 23 to 19, seizing the municipality back through court orders, police vans, and a secret ballot.

from his prison cell in Silivri, Ekrem İmamoğlu responded with a single question: do you think you will be at ease when elections in Turkey have lost all meaning?

western diplomats still fly to Ankara, point to long lines at polling stations, and praise Turkey for having a vibrant electoral democracy.

they fail to understand that in 2026, autocrats do not need to stuff ballot boxes on election day. they arrest the winner, annul the replacement, jail the council members, engineer the defections, and let the secret ballot do the rest.

elections in Turkey are no longer canceled.

they are just rerun until the palace gets the result it demands.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Ten years after the majestic, globally significant, yet betrayed NO Referendum of the Greek people – a personal message:

On 5th of July 2015 the Greek people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to say a big, beautiful NO to the Big Business and Big Finance who, through their centre right and centre left political representatives, were demanding of the Greek people that they shoulder the costs of the banking crisis which Big Business and Big Finance had caused, with the result that hundreds of millions of people in Europe and America were crushed under mountain ranges of banking losses which governments then turned into public debt, before shifting it to the shoulders of the weakest of citizens through universal austerity – the working classes, the poor, the elderly, the young, the women, people who lacked the power to defend themselves from the powerful plucking the very moneytree whose existence they denied.

Churchill once said of the battle of El Alamein that, before it, the Allies had never won but that, after it, they never lost again. I could say something similar about that splendid and, at once, tragic day, of the Greek NO Referendum ten years ago today – the day when 62% of Greek voters ignored the financial terrorism of the European Central Bank (which had shut down the Greek banks to blackmail voters to accept the terms of surrender they were dictating to the Greek people). That same day when my former comrade, the PM I was serving as finance minister on behalf of the Greeks who were resisting, trashed their verdict and defected to the Big Finance and the Big Business in the name of the left.

Before that day, before the magnificent NO Referendum outcome of 5th July 2015, and during the months and years leading to it, we could not imagine losing in the long run our fights against the Big Finance and the Big Business that blew up our social economies in 2008.

But after it, since the PM I was serving under overturned our people and betrayed their referendum verdict, we cannot imagine winning ever again, at least not in our lifetimes, against the Big Finance and the Big Business whom the betrayal of the NO Referendum helped recover.

It was THAT significant a day. It was THAT significant a defection.

Now, I know it is not the done thing to sully the spirit of one’s fellow travellers, one’s comrades, to say things like that - to surrender in public to the admission not only of the size of our defeat but also of the possibility that we may not win again for the foreseeable future. Alas, now is the time for honesty – for without honesty amongst rebels no rebellion worth its salt can be staged.

Indulge me friends, fellow travellers, comrades. My point is not to bring you down. My point is to acknowledge where we are not just in Greece, in Germany, in Britain, in Europe but globally. To take stock properly of our situation globally not to mourn nor for some perverted sense of inverted glory, certainly not for gain, but for the simple, stubborn hope of rising again.

Somewhere to the North of where I am talking you from, the killing fields of Ukraine are devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Where is the Peace Movement to stop this? Nowhere really. Instead Europe is sinking fast into Military Keynesianism, with large majorities in our parliaments voting for unspeakable amounts of new debt to go to weapons of mass destruction we neither need nor can afford – and certainly weapons that people with the slightest of sense left in their hearts and minds should not want.

Meanwhile, needless to say, from my southeast, from the scorched land of Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifts on the wind. Yes, we have staged magnificent marches on our streets. Yes, our people have marched to Gaza, other comrades risked life and limb to sail to that coastal war crime scene. Yes we have made it possible to speak of the genocide without being treated as buffoons. Yes, we have shifted public opinion. But, nothing is changing on the ground where Palestinian life is eradicated at a steady, at an unbearable rate, or in the corridors of power.

Where are the sanctions on Israel? Where is the UN Peacekeeping force that should have been parachuted in to stop the genocide in its tracks? Nowhere. The only people that are hounded are people like the UN’s Special Rapporteur, my friend Francesca Albanese, for daring to report on the political economy of genocide. Why has Brazil, Spain or Ireland, countries whose governments have been supportive of the Palestinians not joined the Hague Group that our Progressive International has brought together to isolate Israel? What are they waiting for?

Friends, fellow-travellers, comrades, at the risk of saddening, maybe even angering you, I shall say it again: Since that NO referendum was overturned ten years ago, today, by the left’s own leadership, we are losing at every front.

Who is winning? Not the liberal authoritarian establishment – Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz. No the pro-genocide radical centre they sensationally unpopular. Even if they are clinging onto power for the time being, they are thoroughly discredited, despised even.

No, the winners nest elsewhere in even uglier echelons of the political spectrum. Have you not smelled its smell? Can’t you smell the fascism in the air? Can’t you feel its sour, metallic taste clinging to the back of your throat?

What happened to our great hopes? Remember Woman-Life-Freedom? The whispered three-word promise Kurdish heroines carried like a fragile beacon in their hands, a promise that until recently seemed to shimmer just within reach?

Well, take a look at the triumphant Donald Trump on the one hand – yes, he is winning on every front – and the pathetic Kamala Harris, or the even more pathetic Hillary Clinton, on the other. Between them, willingly in Trump’s case, they created the manosphere’s unyielding juggernaut, which trampled upon Woman-Life-Freedom, as if these precious little words, had never been spoken at all.

Authoritarianism, that most insidious of plagues, has crept into every sinew of life. Along with the smell of pollution in the air, microplastics in our oceans, the insidious power of cloud capital hardwired into our brains, delivering our minds to the whims of our new techlords – this New Global Ecocidal Hyper-Exploitative Ruling Class is entrenching itself as the new order, its cold grip tightening with each passing day.

I don’t know about you but, speaking personally, on this, the 10th anniversary of our Great Victory which was turned overnight into the Great Betrayal, it is ever so easy to surrender to the feeling, the sensation, that my political struggles, fuelled by a fierce and unyielding hope, are taking me from one defeat to the next, making me feel like a character in some twisted simulation, doomed to repeat the same futile actions over and over.

BUT, I shall not surrender. And nor will you!

Acknowledging our defeats, the overwhelming strength of the monsters in power, and the magnitude of the task, needs to be done so that we ground our disobedience, our activism, our sacred campaigns for Humanity and for Nature, on solid ground.

So that we learn from the past, from what happened to the brave Greek people 10 years ago to this day, focussing with laser sharp precision not only on the economics and the politics of what needs to be done but, much more so, on the greatest solvent, the ugliest enemy, of solidarity: The tendency of our own side, our own comrades, to be lured by power into defecting to the other side – to the oligarchs who are ever so eager to co-opt us, to co-opt our leading figures especially.

So, on behalf of DiEM25, today, the 5th of July 2025, exactly 10 years after the Greek people’s majestic, betrayed, but inspiringly courageous NO – that ethereal revolutionary little word – a word redolent of the only Freedom that matters, the freedom to turn down exploitative, extractive deals. On this day, I bid you farewell.

Battle well, and let us all, grounded on facts, work joyously to devise acts that make the fascists, the radical centre, the genocide practitioners and the purveyors of all types of exploitation lose their sleep at night so that the many can dream again.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Öğrencilerimizin yanındayız.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Cloud capital versus AI - What DeepSeek’s spectacular success means for technofeudalism & the New Cold War

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, this week changed the global AI landscape, not to mention caused $1 trillion losses in the New York stock exchange and the NASDAC. In the process, it demonstrated the difference between cloud capital, which drives technofeudalism onward and upward, and AI-services, which were always a bubble waiting to burst. What remains to be seen is DeepSeek's impact on the New Cold War between the US and China which, from its beginning, was motivated by the clash between US and Chinese cloud capital.

DeepSeek is China's response to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Its models perform as efficiently as their US counterparts. The difference is that DeepSeek is offered for free, making money only by selling services to developers - not to the public – at a fraction of the price OpenAI charges!

The gist of DeepSeek’s arrival on the AI scene is a sudden transition from proprietary to open source technology. It is, therefore, no great wonder that, the moment DeekSeek became the most downloaded app on the Apple Store, it pulverised the market capitalisation of the, hitherto overinflated, US Big Tech companies.

But how did this happen? How is a private commodity suddenly being offered for free? And does this mean that technofeudalism is in trouble?

To begin with it is important to note AI was never a proprietary technology in itself. The underlying code has always been open source. What made AI quasi-private was the way these models were trained using huge amounts of privatised (that is stolen from us) data. A leaked Google memo in 2017, that was widely discussed in the industry at the time, but also widely refuted, explained:

"If an open source LLM trained for a few million dollars outperforms the effectiveness of proprietary models... There will be no firewall to safeguard OpenAI either."

DeepSeek pierced the US AI companies’ bubble by decommodifying the results of the model’s training, shifting them from behind a paywall to the public arena. Within days, developers around the world started building their own models on top of DeepSeek's.

This is was the nightmare for US Big Tech's AI service providers who offered the results of prompts as a commodity, in the form of subscriptions. DeepSeek-type applications can now produce high-quality translations for free and, in so doing, undermine companies specialising in, for example, translation services, such as Germany's Deepl. In the broader scheme of things, this means that the morsels of cloud capital that Europe owns has lost its market value.

Nevertheless, and this is a huge nevertheless, it is only AI-as-a-commodity that has lost its (grossly exaggerated) value. In sharp contrast, cloud capital utilised not as a commodity producing piece of tech but as produced means of behavioural modification is not at all threatened by companies like DeepSeek. And since technofeudalism is powered by cloud capital working that way, rather than commodity-like AI services of the ChaptGPT type, our technofeudal order is not threatened by competitors such as DeepSeek.

To help understand the difference between cloud capital and AI-based commodified services it helps to compare and contrast Alexa and ChatGPT. Alexa is not offering you a commodified service. It is your free pretend-slave. Unlike ChatGPT you do not pay a subscription to Amazon for the right to order Alexa to order you milk or to switch off your lights. Instead, you train Alexa to train you to train it to know you so that it wins your trust with good recommendations so that it can modify your behaviour – ‘encourage’ you to buy a commodity from https://t.co/pVBQHFjLIO, with Bezos retaining up to 40% of the price you pay (as a cloud rent). In short, the work that Alexa performs for you is not a commodity, unlike ChatGPT which works to sell you a commodity. In other words, ChatGPT is subject to market competition, to the likes of DeepSeek, but Alexa is not. This is why OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker, is seriously damaged by the emergence of DeepSeek but Amazon is not.

Thus, my basic point: Cloud capital is in a league of its own, beyond market competition from DeepSeek-like upstarts, because its power lies in its capacity to modify our behaviour and remove us from any market (e.g., to shift us from real markets to cloud fiefs like Amazon and Alibaba).

In conclusion, cloud capital’s capacity to drive technofeudalism is not challenged by companies like DeepSeek. Only companies like OpenAI, which invested so much and so foolishly in providing a commodified service, stand to lose enormously. Yet another sign that capitalism is dead at the hand of cloud capital while technofeudalism is going from strength to strength and, as it does so, fuels even further the New Cold War between the US and China which in my book, Technofeudalism, I have explained away as the clash of the two huge concentrations of cloud capital: the American dollar-denominated super cloudalist power and the Chinese yuan-denominated one.

Speaking of this New Cold War, which I have argued is mostly fuelled by the clash between American and Chinese cloud capital, I wonder what impact DeepSeek’s success will have on the US government. Silicon Valley and Washington DC had convinced themselves that America had a huge AI lead over China. Now, a tiny Chinese company has destroyed that confidence by producing on a shoestring better AI tech than Sillicon Valley had imagined possible. I can almost hear the whirring inside the heads of people in power on both America’s East and West Coast thinking that if the Chinese can do this out of the blue, what else can they do tomorrow? It is reminiscent of the Sputnik moment, isn’t it?

It will be interesting to see how Trump reacts to this threat to companies American AI companies, especially since Elon Musk understands, and has spoken out against, the folly of commodifying AI services rather than going full on technofeudal.

These are interesting times, in the traditional Chinese sense of the phrase.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

RIP Noam Chomsky 🥲👋🏻

[metin cihan @metcihan]

6 yıl önce bugün, ağır yaralıyken evinin önüne bırakıldı. Konuşamıyordu. Ona ne olduğunu anlatamadı. Son kez babasının elini sıktı ve 11 yaşında hayata veda etti.

Sizden ricam, bugün, bir kez daha #RabiaNazaNeOldu diye soralım.

Çünkü Rabia Naz'a ne olduğunu hâlâ bilmiyoruz.

Onu unutmadığımızı ve bu ölümün aydınlatılmasını istemekten vazgeçmeyeceğimizi gösterelim.

Polis ve savcı işini yapmadı. Önce intihar süsü verildi, sonra soruşturma dosyası kapatıldı. Kimse yargılanmadı.

Babası bir dedektif gibi çalışarak intihar olmadığını kanıtladı ama failleri araştırmak yerine düzmece bir belgeyle ve alelacele bir mahkemeyle babasını akıl hastanesine yatırmaya çalıştılar.

Dosyayı örtbas eden güç her aşamada tüm aydınlatma çabalarını bastırmayı başardı.

Bugün 6 yıl oldu. Rabia Naz hâlâ adalet arıyor.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Furkan’ın durumu bu değil, ama yeri gelmişken söyliyeyim çünkü hala yeni modemlerde bile görüyorum — ev WİFi’ınız WPA/WPA2 ise şifreniz çok kolay çalınabilir. Hemen modeminizin altındaki etikette yazan şifreyle modemin arayüzüne girip WPA2 veya WPA3’e değiştirmenizi öneririm.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Bir telekom mühendisi olarak çok üzülerek öğrendiğim bir olay.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Konuyla ilgili iki noktanın altını çizeyim. Türkiye’deki çoğu İnternet bağlantısı CGNAT arkasındadır, yani aynı IP adresi birden çok abone tarafından kullanılır.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

@esesci @gorkemcetin Robotech evet 🥹

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Bir TETAM üyesi olarak bu gelişmeleri çok üzülerek takip ediyorum.

[Tuna Tugcu @tuna_tugcu]

Gerçekten üzülerek söylüyorum ki Rektörlüğün açıklaması gerçek olmayan bilgilerle dolu. +++

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Gerçekten ne diyeceğimi bilemiyorum. Bunun nasıl bir mantığı, nasıl bir dayanağı olabilir?

[Tuna Tugcu @tuna_tugcu]

İşte bu oldu @say_cem Hocam. Çöp poşetlerine doldurdukları eşyalarımızın bir kısmını cumartesi sabahı Kuzey Kampüse taşıyorum.

3.000 m2lik araştırma merkezimize el konulup 45 m2lik alan verildi. Şimdi 3-4 tonluk araştırma tankımızı sığdıracak çöp poşeti arıyorlar. +++

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Wow 😍

[Product Hunt 😸 @ProductHunt]

Wow buyers in this digital salesroom to close deals faster.

[Arwa Damon @IamArwaDamon]

You might be hearing analysts compare the Israel assault on Gaza to the US-led coalition assault on Mosul to clear ISIS in 2016-2017 or Falluja in 2004. I’ve been in both those battles for extended periods of time & I’ve covered their aftermath.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

Büyük tebrikler Cem Hocama, başarının kazanıldığı iklimin zorluğunu hayal etmesi bile güç!

[Boğaziçi Üni. Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü @Bogazici_CmpE]

Bölümümüz mezunu ve emekli öğretim üyesi Prof. Dr. Ethem Alpaydın ile Prof. Dr. Cem Ersoy 2023 yılında Academia Europaea üyeliğine davet edilen akademisyenler arasında yer aldı. Bu son derece prestijli üyelik için kendilerini tebrik ediyoruz.

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

#1000KereSoyledik
#KabulEtmiyoruzVazgecmiyoruz

[Can Candan (@cncndn.bsky.social) @yunusunbabasi]

#1000KereSoyledik
#KabulEtmiyoruzVazgecmiyoruz #BoğaziçiYönetilemiyor

[Eren Soyak @ErenSoyak]

#1000KereSöyledik

[Medyascope @medyascope]

Prof. Dr. Ünal Zenginobuz (@zenginob): "1000 kere söyledik: Bu tür hoyratlığı, pervasızlığı, üniversiteyi yok etmeyi, bize düşman hukuku uygulanmasını kabul etmedik, etmeyeceğiz. Vazgeçmeyeceğiz, sonuna kadar mücadelemizi sürdüreceğiz"

@cakir_rusen

[Medyascope @medyascope]

Prof. Dr. Ünal Zenginobuz (@zenginob): "1000 kere söyledik: Bu tür hoyratlığı, pervasızlığı, üniversiteyi yok etmeyi, bize düşman hukuku uygulanmasını kabul etmedik, etmeyeceğiz. Vazgeçmeyeceğiz, sonuna kadar mücadelemizi sürdüreceğiz"

@cakir_rusen

[Philosophy Matters @PhilosophyMttrs]

Punk philosophy

[mahirgra @mahir_gra3]

Bu afiş de Akbelen mücadelesi için.

Limak Holding'in ve iktidarın saldırılarına karşı köylüler yıllardır ormanları için mücadele veriyor.

#AkbeleneDokunma #AkbelenDirenişi