Bura is made by Merkan Aksoydan.
2026—
No advertising.
No paid membership.
No paid content.
Instead, there are some writings.
There are the things we have lost.
And there are spaces.
There are certain things Bura does not like.
It is good that no one knows when you arrived here, how long you stayed, or which sentence made you stop.
Your attention is not for sale.
It should not belong to anyone in the first place.
Many things that are free on the internet take their payment somewhere else.
Sometimes from your data.
Sometimes from your attention.
Sometimes from somebody else’s labour.
Is another kind of relationship possible?
Not everything has to be made for sale.
Not everything has to possess exchange value.
Not everything has to become a commodity.
Neither do Bura’s texts.
Nor feelings.
Nor people.
Nothing here is written by predicting what will receive the most clicks and proceeding accordingly.
Besides, being widely read does not make something better written.
Nor does something cease to exist because no one reads it.
Bura does not much believe that numbers are neutral.
To treat what is most visible as important, what is most clicked as valuable, and the words of those most followed as more important—that is not very Bura.
Someone ranks.
Someone measures.
Someone decides.
And more often than not, someone makes money from it.
You may share a text with someone.
You may take a sentence with you.
You do not have to bring it back.
Bura is not certain that it is enough for the reader merely to read.
The reader may leave something, if they wish.
They may report a loss.
They may find something.
They may criticise something.
They may object to something.
They may change something.
Sometimes I do not know what the thing you leave will become either.
Good.
Bura favours blurring the line between producer and consumer a little.
Because this division does not confront us only here.
Some owning while others use,
some working while others decide,
is taken to be the natural order of the world.
But it is not.
Neither is measuring people solely by what they produce, what they buy, or how useful they are.
At Bura, a text is never only a text.
The page is part of the publication too.
So is the empty space.
The link.
The error.
The waiting.
Sometimes a link may lead nowhere.
That is not always an error.
There is no need to publish something every day.
If there is nothing to publish, then there is nothing.
Silence may remain here too.
Bura does not like the idea that we must produce constantly.
We do not have to do more every day,
do it faster,
be more visible,
or reach more people.
Growth is not an end in itself.
When something does not grow, it does not mean that it has failed.
Sometimes it stays where it is.
Sometimes it becomes smaller.
That happens too.
There is therefore no particular reason to bury an old text beneath a new one.
Bura has never quite understood why something written on the internet a few months ago is considered old.
At Bura, not everything personal needs to be explained.
We do not have to describe ourselves constantly, put ourselves on display, and turn ourselves into marketable stories.
A person is not a profile.
Nor is a life content.
Some things may be left to a story.
Some to a lost-property form.
Some by the shore of a lake.
Some may be found by accident.
Some may remain with us.
Bura was not made as an escape from the internet.
In fact, I like the internet.
Bura likes that a tiny thing made by one person can be found by another person on the other side of the world.
It likes that a text can leave its author and wander.
It likes that people who have never met can leave something for one another.
The problem is not the internet.
It is the internet’s gradual transformation into a monopoly of a few enormous companies.
A handful of centres decide where we will stop, what we will see, whom we will find, and who will be able to find us.
There are things we need to change.
We do not have to enter everywhere through the same enormous gates.
There can be small doors and windows opening onto one another. Passing things from hand to hand has not become obsolete either.
Bura’s wish to be read without being measured or quantified does not mean withdrawing from the relationship between criticism and self-criticism. On the contrary, criticism and self-criticism are our gunpowder.
The internet can be not only a place we consume, but also a place we make together.
Perhaps it used to be something like that.
Perhaps it never was.
I do not know.
It will be tried here.
If it does not work, something else will be tried.
Bura is not for sale.
Neither is its reader.
“We pursue what cannot be turned into money.”
— Behçet Necatigil