Supporters of the AKP hold the portraits of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul. Thanassis Stavrakis /Press Association. All rights reserved. In his latest book, The Uprising, “Bifo” Berardi (2012) borrows some concepts from one of the most important figures in the study of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in order to describe the prevailing social impasse: instead of engendering a radical transformation or revolutionary upheaval, systemic disruptions in the social field increasingly consolidate and even give a boost to the power of the dominant paradigm, process, or group.
In the field of cybernetics, Wiener in the 1940’s distinguished between two forms of feedback. Negative feedback, on the one hand, occurs in a system when the received looped data (i.e. information about the results of an action, event, process, etc.) act in the direction of refining or rectifying the preceding results. Considering the socio-economic field, one may speak of the occurrence of negative feedback if, for instance, trade union action against academic casualisation compels the government to ensure secure employment for all scholars. Positive feedback, on the other side, occurs when the system perpetually increases the perturbation from the reference state over time, in a snow-ball effect. Here, one might consider the fact that the recent European financial collapse has actually, against all expectations, not led to a substantial change in European economic policy; on the contrary, it has strengthened the rigor of neoliberal monetarist policies (e.g. drain of common-wealth, cuts, bail-outs) throughout the EU.
On July 17, WikiLeaks made an announcement on Twitter that the organisation would ‘publish 100k+ documents on Turkey’s political power structure’. The hashtag, attached to the statement, #TurkishCoup gave an early idea about the general content of the upcoming release. The next day, it was added that the set of documents, including ‘300 thousand internal emails from Erdoğan's AKP [Justice and Development Party]’, might also reveal some controversial information beyond those relating to the botched and disastrous military coup. Notwithstanding sustained attack and unprecedented censorship, the first batch was put on-line successfully on July 19. WikiLeaks seemed convinced that the ‘mega-leak’ would ‘both harm and help AKP’.
