Knowledge Commons
HomeAboutGuidesPopularContact

Did We Ever Look at the Same Reality?

The Access Ban, "Shared Reality", and the Reality of Class

Author: Oğuz Demirkapı
Did We Ever Look at the Same Reality?

Did We Ever Look at the Same Reality?

The access ban, "shared reality", and the reality of class

Dear Young Comrades,

The second half of September showed everyone living in this country, once again, the following: you wake up one morning and the journalist you follow, the news site you read, the human-rights organisation you trust has vanished from your screen. It has not vanished, in fact; it is still there in Berlin, in Paris, in London. It is simply not visible from where you stand.

In her T24 column Are we looking at the same reality?, Professor Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu takes up precisely this strange situation: accounts that are "both there and not there." The piece is careful, well-intentioned, and asks an important question from the right place. That is why we take it seriously and find it worth discussing.

In this article we will first grant what İnceoğlu sees correctly. Then we will show where her frame narrows. And at the end we will ask the real question: did the thing we call "shared reality" exist before the access bans arrived? If it did, whose reality was it?

First the Facts: What Happened in September 2026?

So that the argument is not left hanging in the air, a brief reminder:

  • An operation presented under the name "My Family Is Safe," which began on 12–13 September by targeting LGBTI+ accounts, widened from 14 September to the press, human-rights organisations and academics. The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office imposed an access ban on 419 social-media accounts and links on grounds of "obscenity."
  • The list included journalists (Şirin Payzın, İrfan Değirmenci), news sites (soL Haber), women's organisations, Amnesty International Turkey and the Academics for Peace. İnceoğlu's piece also adds Evrensel and Özlem Akarsu Çelik.
  • Then, on 24 September, the X account of Professor Yaman Akdeniz — a founder of İFÖD and one of the most frequently consulted specialists in internet law in this country — was made inaccessible from Turkey under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, on the ground of "protecting national security and public order."
  • The list has not stopped since that day. According to İFÖD's EngelliWeb records, between 26 and 28 September alone the accounts of journalists Ersin Eroğlu and Ali Tarakçı, of Bizim TV, and of a group of journalists, academics and financial commentators were also made invisible from Turkey on the same ground of "national security and public order."

In other words, "national security" walked in through the door that "obscenity" had opened. We discussed this pattern in detail earlier in From Obscenity to National Security: The Anatomy of a Forty-Eight-Hour Wave of Censorship and, along the axis of moral panic, in Whose Family Is Safe?. Morality is always the cheapest ticket of admission for repression; first the most defenceless section of society is targeted, then the list lengthens.

What Does İnceoğlu See Correctly?

Before we turn to criticism, let us give the piece its due. There are at least four strong observations in it.

First, she sees that the form of censorship has changed. In the age of the printing press, censorship was visible: a seized newspaper, a blacked-out column, a closed publishing house. With today's geographic block, in İnceoğlu's words, "even the possibility of knowing what we cannot see can be taken away." This is an important observation. A blacked-out column at least left a scar; algorithmic invisibility leaves none.

Second, she frames the problem not only as the speaker's freedom but as the listener's right. The emphasis on the "right to know" takes the free-speech debate out of the complaints of isolated individuals and turns it into a shared loss of society. This is one of the most advanced points of liberal rights discourse.

Third, she names an asymmetry. The reader in Berlin sees; the reader in Istanbul cannot. Information inequality is set out as a direct product of censorship.

Fourth, she defines "shared reality" correctly. The closing sentence is the most valuable place in the piece: "Shared reality does not mean that everyone believes the same thing. It means being able to look at the same documents while believing different things, to test the same claims, and to reach the source the other person points to." This is not a dogmatic definition of reality; it is a scientific one. As Marxists we do not object to it; on the contrary, scientific socialism itself is built on "being able to look at the same documents." Marx wrote Capital in the British Museum reading room, by reading factory inspectors' reports.

Up to here we are companions on the road. The problem is where the road ends.

Where Does the Frame Narrow?

In İnceoğlu's piece the line that splits reality is geography: Berlin and Istanbul, inside Turkey and outside Turkey. That line is real, but it is not the only line. It is not even the deepest line. There are four gaps that do not make the diagnosis wrong, but leave it incomplete.

First gap: inside the Berlin–Istanbul divide there is a Nişantaşı–Esenyurt divide

İnceoğlu notes that those without VPN knowledge will not even hear of the bans, files it as "technological inequality," and moves on. Yet the real question begins exactly there.

A geographic block is not a wall applied equally to everyone. To climb over that wall you need a ladder: knowledge of VPNs, perhaps a paid VPN subscription, the skill of reading sources in a foreign language, spare time in which to follow the news, and, most important of all, a prior stock of knowledge from which to notice "I cannot see something right now." Each of these is distributed by class.

The plaza worker, the academic, the white-collar computing labourer clears the block in five seconds. For the courier who spends twelve hours a day delivering parcels, the young woman in a textile workshop, the factory worker on a three-shift rotation, the block is in practice absolute. So the access ban splits society not only into "those inside / those outside," but also into "those who can get over it / those who cannot." And that second split sits on top of the class split that is already there.

In other words: the gulf between the reader in Berlin and the reader in Istanbul is reproduced inside Istanbul as well.

Second gap: who throws the switch? Only the state?

The piece has a deciding authority (the prosecutor's office, Law 5651) and it has victims (journalists, organisations, readers). But one actor is almost invisible: the platform itself.

The situation described as "not visible in Turkey but visible in Berlin" is not a state of nature. X (and the other platforms) have a feature called "country withheld"; a company designed this feature, produced it, and placed it at the service of states. An account becomes "both there and not there" thanks to a piece of code written by a software engineer and approved by a board of directors.

Why? Because for the platform company the choice is clear: either it hides an account, or it loses a market of eighty-five million people, advertising revenue, a flow of data. We have all watched how X, which carries "free-speech absolutism" as a slogan, made that choice. For capital, principle ends at the border of the market.

That is why the geographic block is a joint venture between the state and monopoly platform capital. The state demands, the platform implements; the state shares the loss of legitimacy, the platform the loss of reputation, but both win: one control, the other the market. Because the capital side of this partnership is not named in İnceoğlu's piece, the solution is reduced to a rights claim addressed only to the state. Yet the infrastructure of shared reality — the square on which we are speaking — is private property. The owner of the square can shut the gate whenever he likes. We discussed this in Who Holds the Leash on Artificial Intelligence?, through the platforms' power to set the rules.

Third gap: did "shared reality" exist before the ban?

The piece's tacit assumption is this: once upon a time there was a public sphere in which more or less everyone could reach the same sources; access bans are now breaking it apart. This is a picture close to the bourgeois public-sphere ideal Jürgen Habermas described in 1962: a sphere in which reasoning private individuals, on equal terms, debate on the basis of documents.

The strongest criticisms of that ideal have also been on the table for half a century. In Public Sphere and Experience in 1972, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge showed that the bourgeois public sphere systematically left out the worker's real experience — the factory, the exhaustion, the wage — and proposed against it the idea of a "proletarian public sphere." In 1990 Nancy Fraser wrote that the public sphere had never been one, and that those excluded had been forced to build their own "counter-publics."

Looked at from our country, this is not an abstract debate. Long before the access ban, millions of people in this country could not look at "the same documents":

  • Who could look at the inspection reports of the pit in Soma where 301 miners died?
  • Does a company's profitability table and the payslip on which the same company tells its worker "there is a crisis, there will be no rise" rest on the same document?
  • Can a worker see with which data, by which rule, the performance algorithm that sacked her is running?
  • Can a tenant test how the "market" figure on which a rent increase rests was produced?

The greatest information asymmetry in this country is not between Berlin and Istanbul; it is between boss and worker. And that asymmetry is protected not by Law No. 5651, but by the concept of "trade secret," by company law, by private property itself. Without any need for a prosecutor's decision.

So "shared reality" is not being shattered; it was never whole. The access ban divides an already divided reality once more, this time in a form that the middle class and the intellectuals can also feel. That is why the reaction is rising from those sections. That is not a bad thing; but we have to see its limits.

Fourth gap: is reality a problem of access?

Perhaps the most basic limit of the piece is that it reduces reality to a matter of access to information. Yet the distance between reality and perception cannot be explained only by "which document we can reach."

Let us recall what Marx wrote in 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: it is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness. The reality of a family living on the minimum wage — the prices in the kitchen, the debt at the end of the month, the friend lost in a workplace accident — is there whether a tweet is blocked or not. No one is exempted from living it because they "cannot see" it.

But this does not mean that consciousness will be correct of its own accord. That famous observation in The German Ideology comes in here: the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class, because whoever holds the material means of production also holds the means of mental production. Today the means of mental production are not called a newspaper press; they are called data centres, recommendation algorithms, platforms.

Two conclusions follow:

  • Full access, on its own, does not produce shared reality. Even if there were no block at all, each of our feeds would still pass through an algorithm personalised to maximise advertising revenue. On the same platform, at the same hour, two neighbours see entirely different worlds. What we call an "echo chamber" is a by-product of a business model that turns reality into a commodity. The first thing to shatter shared reality was not the state but the attention economy; the state is intervening afterwards on this already fragmented ground.
  • Reality is known not only by being read, but by being produced collectively. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), György Lukács argues that in a commodified society the individual can see reality only in fragments, and that grasping the whole (totality) is possible only from the standpoint of a collective subject, of the class. The individual who reads alone, however many documents she reaches, gathers fragments. Organised labour joins the fragments: it establishes the relation between the accident in this factory and that company's balance sheet, between this rent increase and that construction firm's tender.

İnceoğlu says "the right to know." We agree, and we take it one step further: the right to know remains incomplete without the power to produce knowledge. A right is something you wait for someone to give you. Power is what you produce with your own hands.

Two Frames Side by Side

Liberal-democratic frameClass frame
The line that splits reality is geography (Berlin/Istanbul)The line that splits reality is property (capital/labour); geography rides on top of it
The actor of censorship is the stateCensorship is a joint venture of the state and monopoly platform capital
The problem is the shattering of a once-existing shared public sphereThe shared public sphere was never whole; labour's experience was always left outside
VPN knowledge is a detail of "technological inequality"The ability to get over the block is distributed by class; for the poor the block is absolute
The solution is to secure the right to know against the stateThe solution is for the right to know to reach the workplace, the company, the algorithm as well, and for the production of knowledge to be socialised
Reality is the sum of accessible documentsReality is lived; only collective organisation makes consciousness whole
Its subject is the individual citizen who wants to be informedIts subject is organised labour producing and sharing its own knowledge

Do not read this table as an "either/or." The right-hand column does not reject the left-hand column; it contains it and goes beyond it. A struggle for rights against the access ban must be waged. But if that struggle ends there, we start from the same place at the next ban.

Where Does the Reality of Class Stand?

The class answer to the question "are we looking at the same reality?" is this: no — but the place we need to look is clear.

The reality of class is on the payslip before it is on the blocked accounts. It is in the tenancy agreement. It is on the overtime sheet. It is on the list of workplace murders. A significant part of this reality never appears on any social-media account, and so it never hits any access ban either. It does not hit one, because it is already invisible.

But notice: as the ban list lengthens, names that touch the reality of class directly are also entering the list. Two records from the past week show this plainly:

  • Whose inflation it is. An access ban was placed on the X account of Veysel Ulusoy, founder of the Independent Inflation Research Group ENAG, on 21 September, and on 26 September the account was made invisible from Turkey by X itself. An inflation figure is not an abstract statistic; it is the ground of the minimum-wage bargain, of civil-service and pension rises, of collective agreements. The gap between the official figure and the independent measurement is the gap in the money that leaves the worker's pocket. We discussed a similar gap in TÜİK's labour-force figures in TÜİK: Two Figures, One Country: 8.1% and 30.6%. To decide who will measure inflation in a country is to decide who will define the real value of the wage.
  • The voice of those who organise. Among the accounts blocked on the same day, besides journalists and academics, is trade-union founder Başaran Aksu. The channels through which workers tell their own reality, through which the call to organise circulates, are now also the subject of this list.

And there is a reality that enters no list, because it already finds no place on any mainstream screen. The Workers' Health and Safety Assembly counts workplace murders one by one every month. According to its latest report, in August alone 226 workers lost their lives, and in the first eight months of the year at least 1,509. No prosecutor's decision is hiding that figure from you; a media order that decides whose death screen-time will be allotted to is hiding it.

That is why what we have lived through these past two weeks is, in one respect, instructive. The middle class and the intellectuals are feeling in their own bodies, for the first time, something the working class has long known: your reality can be made visible or invisible with a key in someone else's hand. This experience can be an opportunity for a meeting, not a rupture. But only if this is noticed: the question is not the visibility of an account on X; it is in whose property the tools that make reality visible reside.

And that brings us to the idea from which this site also takes its name: the knowledge commons. So long as the infrastructure on which knowledge is produced, stored and circulated is not in common ownership and under democratic control, "shared reality" will always be a favour left to someone's whim. Social media is not a square; it is a shopping centre. You do not hold a rally in a shopping centre; the security guard will see you to the door.

Concrete Tasks

Dear Young Comrades, for the discussion to be of any use it has to turn into action. The suggestions below are work we can start tomorrow morning, at our own scale. Beside each we have added links showing where to begin. None of these tools is a solution on its own; the value of all of them comes from our using them collectively, in an organised way.

Do not depend on a single channel: follow information without an algorithm

Follow the independent publications and organisations you read not only through X or Instagram, but also through their own websites, RSS feeds and email newsletters. RSS is an old and plain technology that brings a site's new pieces straight to you without passing through any company's ranking; no algorithm decides "what you will see" in your place.

  • A free-software RSS reader that can be installed on your own server: FreshRSS. A union branch or an association can set up a shared reader for its members.
  • Free and open source for Apple devices: NetNewsWire.
  • The RSS address of a site you follow is usually in the form sitename.org/feed or sitename.org/rss. You can follow Bilgi Müşterekleri this way as well.
Let us build our own squares: do not rent out the voice

Organisations, unions, associations should strengthen their own sites and archives; they should learn and use decentralised, federated networks (the fediverse) and free software. Entrusting content to a platform is renting out the voice. On federated networks there is no single company's "hide-by-country" button; each community sets up its own server, sets its own rules, and speaks with the other servers.

  • A start on Mastodon: joinmastodon.org. A non-technical, step-by-step guide: Fedi.Tips.
  • A federated alternative for video: PeerTube.
  • For file, calendar and document sharing inside the organisation, on your own server: Nextcloud.
  • An open-source email-newsletter tool that reaches members directly and runs on your own server: listmonk. An email list is the oldest organising tool that no platform can switch off.
  • To meet the free-software community and get support: Linux Kullanıcıları Derneği.

We discussed in detail why taking this infrastructure out of the ownership of capital monopolies is a class question, together with the role of computing workers in that work, in The Computing Worker's Handbook.

Archive: protect collective memory

Record the blocked content and the decisions themselves. Censorship targets not only today but also tomorrow's memory.

  • İFÖD's EngelliWeb records are the most valuable collective memory in this field. The Kaç Gündür Engelli? page lists more than a million blocked sites with the date of the decision, the authority that issued it and the decision number; the whole data set can be downloaded as CSV. For researchers, journalists, student groups, this is a ready source for telling censorship in numbers.
  • To save an important page permanently: Internet Archive "Save Page Now". Paste an address; even if the page is deleted or blocked, it remains in the archive.
  • You can take part in measuring censorship yourselves: the OONI Probe app tests from your phone or computer which sites are blocked and adds the results to the world's largest open censorship data set. The results are public on OONI Explorer. This is taking back, with our own hands, the possibility of "knowing what we cannot see."
Collectivise digital literacy: extend the ladder to everyone

We said that the skill of getting over the block is distributed by class; changing that distribution is in our hands. Hold workshops on digital security and safe access in union branches, student groups, neighbourhood associations. Let those who know teach those who do not; this too is a form of solidarity. Ready resources in Turkish exist for the workshops:

  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation's self-defence guide against surveillance, in Turkish: Surveillance Self-Defense.
  • A comprehensive digital-security guide for activists and organisations, in Turkish: Security in a Box.
  • Free software for anonymous and censorship-resistant browsing: Tor Browser.
  • An end-to-end encrypted messaging app developed by a non-profit foundation: Signal.
  • If you are a journalist, an activist or a civil-society organisation and you have an urgent digital-security problem, a free support line: Access Now Digital Security Helpline.

Do not design the workshop only as a technical course. Begin by talking about why we need these tools, about who is hiding what, and why. Teaching a tool is easy; winning consciousness takes organisation.

Carry the right to know into the workplace: "Open the books"

While you oppose the access ban, demand this in the same sentence: the worker's right of access to the data held about her, to occupational health and safety reports, to the rules of the algorithm that manages her. The demand to "open the books" is the sibling of the demand to "open the accounts."

  • Article 11 of Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data grants every employee the right to learn which data her employer processes about her, for what purpose, and to whom it is transferred. This right can be used with an individual petition; but when it is used collectively, through a union, it becomes a tool of organisation.
  • An example from the world: Worker Info Exchange in the United Kingdom makes collective data-access requests on behalf of workers on platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, and brings to light how workers are hired, how their pay is set, and how their performance is scored. There is no legal obstacle to our couriers, our warehouse workers, our call-centre labourers doing the same.

We discussed the class dimension of personal-data protection in KVKK's "80s Trend" Warning and Privacy in the Digital Age, and the effect of algorithmic management on courier labour in the Gig Economy Dossier.

Let us document our own reality: workers' correspondence

Revive the tradition of workers' correspondence. Record the conditions, the accidents, the wage theft in your workplace; share them with your organisation. Let us write reality ourselves, without waiting for it to be told to us.

  • The best example of this work in this country is the Workers' Health and Safety Assembly. It records, every month, name by name, sector by sector, the workplace murders that official statistics publish years later, incompletely and in the abstract. İSİG's method — scanning local news, confirming with the family, the workplace, the union, publishing to the public — is a model that can be applied in every workplace, in every neighbourhood.
  • A simple rule for the records you keep in your workplace: date, place, event, witness. Store the records encrypted and backed up (see the digital-security guides above).
Stand with those who are blocked: do not allow isolation

Subscribe to the publications under an access ban, donate, circulate their content through other channels. Getting a blocked account's post to your own circle through RSS, email or the fediverse reduces the effect of censorship directly. Follow EngelliWeb's current records and share the other channels through which blocked journalists and organisations still publish. The aim of censorship is not only to silence; it is to isolate.

Looking at the Same Document Begins with Standing on the Same Side

Let us return to Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu's closing sentence. Shared reality is being able to look at the same documents while believing different things. We agree.

But we add this: who writes those documents, who stores them, who shows them, who hides them? Whose property is the shelf on which the documents sit? Every defence of shared reality made without asking these questions remains well-intentioned but half-done.

In this country workers, women, Kurds, LGBTI+ people, the poor never looked at "the same reality"; they were always shown someone else's. Now, as the walls rise towards everyone, perhaps for the first time we truly share something in common: the experience of being made invisible. It is in our hands to draw from this experience not a defeat but an organisation.

Reality is not shattering, dear comrades. Reality was already divided. Our task is to bring it back together; not by waiting for a prosecutor's decision or a company's good will, but with our own hands, our own networks, our own organisation.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone. For it to belong to everyone, everyone must defend it together.

Sources

Tools and Guides
Tags:#artificialintelligence#reality#media#socialmedia#censorship#turkey#europe#berlin#germany#class#digitalrights

Related Posts

Newsletter