Just finished an article by dear Joakim Parslow, who knows this blog well.
I have done some research on the history of the internet in Türkiye, but Joakim goes far past the pre-internet decades, where Cybernetics had some resonance.
The article link is here.
Abstract
Turkey’s 1960 military coup d’état was received by Kemalists in the courts, bureaucracy, and universities as an opportunity to reinvigorate Atatürk’s ideal of a centralized and rationally organized state. This article investigates how a handful of avant-garde thinkers sought to ride the post-1960 wave of reformism by promoting a techno-utopian approach to governance through publications and seminars aimed at state leaders and intellectuals. Cybernetics, they argued, offered a paradigm of adjudication and administration unblemished by association with the ascendant ideologies of the Cold War, whether socialist or conservative, and was fully in keeping with Kemalism. I argue that, although it remained largely at the stage of fantasy, Turkish cybernetics ultimately served as a set of metaphors with which conservative state thinkers from different political camps found common ground, facilitating the shift that occurred within the state during the 1970s away from the rights-based pluralism of the Constitution of 1961 and toward an effort to de-radicalize Turkish society, if necessary through violence.
Early uptake and key figures
Cybernetics was introduced into Turkish public debate mainly in the early 1960s by figures such as management consultant Ali İrtem, who framed it as a universal science that could address Turkey’s “societal ills.”
İrtem popularized the idea that future governance would be carried out by “cybernetic machines,” positioning Turkey as lagging behind the US and Europe if it failed to embrace this paradigm.
These debates unfolded against the backdrop of intense political crisis and polarization after the 1960 coup, which made technocratic and “scientific” languages attractive to parts of the bureaucracy and intelligentsia.
Cybernetics, law, and the state
A striking institutional moment was a 1973 seminar organized by the Istanbul Bar Association on “cybernetics and the use of electronic brains in law,” bringing together lawyers and information scientists to consider how computers might transform legal practice.
Participants discussed both mundane uses (better court record-keeping via electronic databases) and highly speculative visions (predicting future violations of law, automated judging machines replacing courts).
The seminar was influential enough that a larger follow‑up conference on “cybernetics and law” took place in Ankara in 1974 with delegates from the Constitutional Court, the Union of Turkish Bar Associations, the Ministry of Justice, and foreign experts.
“Mechanical Atatürk” and Kemalist technocracy
Recent scholarship argues that this brief cybernetics vogue functioned as a way to imagine a fully rational, self‑regulating Kemalist state—what one author calls a “Mechanical Atatürk.”
Cybernetics was attractive because it seemed ideologically “clean”: it promised a paradigm of adjudication and administration untainted by socialism, conservatism, religion, or Cold War blocs, instead redefining politics as information processing and system–environment management.
This made it appealing to different currents within the state (including some conservative religious thinkers) as a language of unity, synthesis, and order, at a time when society was sharply polarized between left and right, city and countryside, working class and bourgeoisie.
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