June 4, 2013

In the press conference conducted after he met with President Abdullah Gul, Bulent Arinc criticized the sharing and tracking the information about the resistance against AKP going on in the country for almost one week over social media. Saying “Actually there are means showing how democratic we are and it’s possible to shut all them down. It’s possible to deny access”, Arinc implied “you are able to use the Internet and social media because we allow it”.

However denying access to the Internet completely is not that easy. Moreover, it’s not relevant to how democratic AKP is or whether AKP allows it. The reason is that in today’s world, denying access to the Internet means essentially paralyzing not the resistance; but the international economic connections, banking and stock markets that are such a source of pride. A significant portion of the information flowing over the Internet is financial and commercial information.

In this case, how should we interpret that Bulent Arinc emphasizes that Internet access can be denied? This question can be answered looking at the current structure of media and Internet’s contribution to similar popular resistance movements that took place recently.

Media, or more correctly mainstream media organizations have been in the eye of the capitalist accumulation of the capital for a long time. Bosses of media are among most strategic actors of the capital through their investments in both media and other sectors. In this condition, mainstream media organizations, as top players of the culture industry, have not been able to meet their commitments of constituting a medium for true and rational social discussion and circulating the information providing people to understand the world outside for a long time. The content provided by mainstream media is formed by the rule of capital which is against labor and ignores public benefit.

That the democratic struggle rising all over the country for almost one week is completely ignored by even news networks is only one of many clear and up to date examples of the final situation of the commercial media system. In these conditions, it’s inevitable that people shift to publications on the Internet and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. This situation has been concrete in the recent developments in Egypt and Tunisia, in the street protests of the people of Greece having affected by the global financial depression and in the student protests in Spain and UK against cuts in budget for education and rising tuition fees.

Internet resources and social networks enabled the circulation of information about these resistances and protests which is instantaneous, directly from the spot and not filtered by traditional media or government offices. The importance of this contribution is obvious considering the examples like Egyptian official’s attempts to deny access to the Internet, their shutting down the mobile network service in Tahrir square and three days of Internet blackout in Syria in November 2013.

Bulent Arinc uttered threats of censorship, monitoring and blacklisting using expressions like “we don’t shut down the Internet since we are democratic” and “those giving orders connecting from a server in America” just because he saw the reality and power of this contribution. Today as AKP, Arinc uses the language of the people they once accused of oppressing their people and openly declared dictators, defends anti-democratic means.

It should be reminded to him here that:
People who construct a building have the knowledge of both demolishing and getting out of that building. Those communication networks over which they run their “strong” economy are built by workers and engineers resisting on the streets today. If required, alternative means of communication can quickly be launched by them!

AKP government created a media which has never been such partisan and dependent in Turkey before. However, media workers who have prepared the news preserving the legitimacy of media until now, despite everything, and have been caught in the middle of their paychecks and conscience are out there on the streets with the resisters!

Resisters can create other means of communication among themselves in the absence of the Internet. The history of resistances includes countless examples of this. But how can the government maintain the financial markets that it painstakingly fostered and is running with “casino logic” without Internet?