Turkey's Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım, whose ministerial responsibilities cover the Internet infrastructure, too, spoke about the Internets at a recent conference...
...and hilarity ensued.
He said:
"They have something that they call cloud computing, whatsoever. Now... Everybody puts something there... Then... Somebody takes something, if he needs it, whatever. That's how I understand this system. It may be something different, though. It seems that it is not something systematic. It is all hustle and bustle. Then anybody can take what he needs. This is information technology. If you think too much about it, you may go crazy. You should use it, take advantage of it, but don't think too much about it. Otherwise, you're in trouble. You shouldn't question its reason."
Here is the video of this "mystic" speech:
I was aware that Turkey was not being governed by tech-savvy politicians and bureaucrats.
However, I should admit that I was still not expecting that we were in such a deep trouble about it. Maybe some of them will look into computer classes.
Yildirim's words perfectly shows why we failed in recent centuries: Because our culture transformed in a way to condemn or at least worry about innovation.
You can easily fight this mentality when only individuals are the problem. However, the situation is worse in Turkey, as the long-term presence of such individuals as influential policy-makers made it a systemic problem in politics and state institutions as well.
Take another example:
SGK, Turkey's state institution for social security, has recently announced that its online system would be stopped on October 30th for a full hour at midnight.
Why?
Because they completely turned off their computer servers to set the system clock back to adjust to the summertime switch!
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