If you normalize lying, the system's authorization structure collapses too

In Turkey, real estate agents now need an MYK-5 certificate in order to post listings on Sahibinden. In other words, a credential. At first glance, this measure appears designed to build trust. But at its core, there is a different issue at play: transferring trust away from people and handing it over to paper.

Our real priority should have been to believe in a person's word. If we had been able to build a system in which liars were excluded from society and faced serious penalties, we would not need certificates today. Because what would guarantee trust would be character, not documents.

Yet we did exactly the opposite. We normalized lying. We see it every day in TV dramas, in politics, in business life: cunning, evasiveness, and "getting by" are presented as success. Instead of people trusting one another, an order was created in which everyone looks at everyone else with suspicion. Then, to dispel that suspicion, a certificate requirement was introduced.

But here is the problem: the institutions that issue certificates have also turned into commercial enterprises. Some institutions exist solely to sell credentials. On top of that, diploma scandals have caused this trust to collapse entirely. In a country where holders of public office have been able to serve for years on the basis of fake diplomas, which certificate can genuinely inspire trust?

And so the certificate that was supposed to establish trust has itself become untrustworthy. There is nothing left to believe in.

This vicious cycle will continue for as long as we place documents rather than honesty at the center of society. Because where a person's word has lost its value, even the most solid seal remains counterfeit.

The Influencer Concept Degraded by Labubu Dolls

Labubu dolls, despite appearing far from aesthetic and entirely without function, suddenly became part of global fashion. The reason is simple: our eyes grow accustomed to images that social media algorithms repeat endlessly (the Mere Exposure Effect), and we begin to like them once influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers give their approval (social proof theory).

In this way, even ugliness transforms into a kind of "anti-aesthetic capital." Influencers play the lead role in this process; rather than transmitting culture, they simply showcase products on display. Yet a concept that once transformed society through knowledge and ideas has today been reduced to a storefront on the stage of consumption.

What Sam Altman Said, What Was Understood, and What He Actually Means

At a dinner in San Francisco, Sam Altman said, "Yes, there is a bubble in artificial intelligence." The media immediately ran with it as a headline: "the sector is collapsing." But the real message was different.

What Altman was saying is this: investors should not get swept up in small projects with no grounding in reality. The bubble is in those companies. The videos circulating online saying "ChatGPT is finished, delete Perplexity" are exactly that and nothing more.

Let us look at the real picture: even Apple is struggling in artificial intelligence, so expecting a revolution from small start-ups that have emerged with a few cheap tricks is a fantasy. Altman acknowledges the bubble, but at the same time is planning trillion-dollar investments. The message is clear: AI is not finished — do not fall for fake miracles.