Atakan Selvi

Atakan Selvi (born December 13th 2011) is a Turkish hacker, activist, political organiser, and videogame designer. He is best known for his suspected role in the Palestinian Spring and his association with Five of Swords (FoS).

Born in Datça, Selvi became involved with political hacktivism in 2025, leading to repeated arrests by Turkish authorities. In 2029, he began to design videogames, leading to experiments with electroencephalographic (EEG) control schemes that have contributed to the research around affective perception feedback (APF).

After aiding political groups with their countermeasures to state surveillance and facing accusations of having founded FoS, Selvi fled Turkey in 2038 and became a fugitive. He surfaced in 2041 and faced charges of sedition, with a “high likelihood” that he played a key role in the liberation of Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation. Selvi was also a person of interest in several investigations of Adira.

Early lifePermalink

Atakan Selvi was born on December 13th 2011 in Datça, Turkey to Şemsettin Selvi, a fisherman, and Lalegül Selvi (née Rüzgar), a marine biologist. They met when Lalegül was part of a research team that had hired Şemsettin’s boat for a field expedition.

In 2018, Selvi’s mother left him and his father to join the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the Syrian Civil War, leading to her death during Operation Peace Spring in 2019. Although he struggled with his mother’s decision, Selvi has stated that he does not blame her for leaving, and that he “understands what drove her.”

Taking an interest in coding at an early age, Selvi taught himself several programming languages by watching tutorials on YouTube. In 2024, he performed his first hack, defacing a subpage on the website of Turkey’s Ministry of the Interior. After slowly escalating his cyberattacks, Selvi was arrested on July 2nd 2025 when he hacked the website of the Grand National Assembly and left a message to commemorate the Sivas massacre. Selvi has faced arrest by Turkish authorities an additional eleven times between 2025 and 2041, and claims that he has been the victim of police brutality.

Videogame designPermalink

Unable to enter university, Selvi moved to Istanbul in 2029 and started working various jobs while programming and designing his own videogames in the roguelike genre, having been inspired by playing Caves of Qud. In 2033, Selvi began to experiment with OpenBCI, using the platform to create his own multielectrode headset and designing game mechanics around methods of electroencephalographic (EEG) feedback and control, though always combined with some physical or tactile element of interactivity.

After fashioning additional EEG headsets to support multiplayer games, Selvi organised weekly playtesting sessions, which grew increasingly popular among his friends. At some of these sessions, Selvi noted that attendees began to experience uncharacteristic moods and attitudes, particularly during moments of intense in-game action. When researching this phenomenon, he found that it was the subject of early research after it had started to occur in unrelated experiments with networked brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

Eventually, Selvi was able to reproduce the phenomenon in his playtests, making him the first to reliably do so. At the request of a neuroscientist friend, Selvi shared his OpenBCI modifications and the source code of his games to GitHub, which enabled further study of the phenomenon and ultimately identified it as affective perception feedback (APF) in June 2035. Having experienced APF for himself, Selvi described it as “feeling like having empathy towards someone else’s plea.”

In 2036, Selvi worked with Liam Young on Hidden Tracks, a short film about Istanbul’s underground music scene and its use of the city’s abandoned infrastructure. The entire 23-minute film was rendered using EEG captures from Selvi’s visual cortex as he moved around Istanbul, earning him the credit of the film’s director.

Young had planned to use artificial intelligence (AI) upscaling techniques to enhance the generated footage, but no longer felt the need when he found that Selvi was able to maintain focus to such a degree that the images were “imbued with an affective quality that worked well with the film’s subject.” ^[1]

HacktivismPermalink

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Throughout the 2030s, Selvi became involved with various grassroots movements opposed to the Turkish government, assisting their members with countermeasures to state surveillance and providing infosec support. In 2034, Selvi was arrested and held for a month on suspicion of being a member of RedHack after the group claimed responsibility for leaking the identities and personal information of Turkish police informants. In 2035, Selvi’s apartment was raided by Turkish police, resulting in the destruction of his BCI equipment.

In 2036, Selvi’s involvement with Hidden Tracks and its EEG-based visualisation led to charges of brainjacking, which was linked to his work on APF. Young came to Selvi’s defence, stressing that all individuals in Selvi’s point of view were aware of his EEG equipment and had consented to being recorded.

In 2038, Selvi was pulled off a train in Germany and detained by German authorities in connection with cyberattacks perpetrated by Five of Swords (FoS). As a result of the publicity surrounding Selvi’s removal from the train, as well as a 2034 blog post in which he discussed using tarot readings to guide his game designs, he is considered to be one of the founding members of FoS, which is named after a tarot card. Though Selvi has admitted to taking part in several FoS operations, he claims to have had no hand in the group’s creation, which remains a matter of international dispute.

Palestinian SpringPermalink

After the death of his father in October 2038, Selvi left Turkey against government orders and became a fugitive. Selvi’s whereabouts and actions leading up to the Palestinian Spring in 2041 were the subject of several investigations, with the consensus that there is a “high likelihood” he played a key role in the liberation of Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation. ^[2] On June 3rd 2041, two days after international pressure forced Israel to relinquish control over Palestine, Selvi surfaced in Datça, where he turned himself in to local police. He was transported to Istanbul and served ten months of a five-year sentence for sedition.

Selvi’s purported role in the Palestinian Spring is attributed to several factors:

• Between 2038 and 2041, Selvi was spotted in several countries where preparations for the Palestinian Spring were known to have taken place, including India, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Tunisia. Selvi is believed to have been responsible for developing secure channels, organising with activist groups, and coordinating the creation and distribution of neural colloids.
• There are allegations that Selvi acquired colloids from the illicit market, including shipments seized by Second Advent in the United States (US), and that he used funds that were funnelled through intermediaries implicated in the 2041 Deutsche Bank accounting scandal.
• The Palestinian Spring was mainly carried out as a collective decolonisation effort that began on May 15th 2041 with a broadcast of “the lived experience and suffering of the Palestinian people.” This live data was created by a mesh network of implanted colloids, allowing Palestinians to document their physical and emotional distress outside of the media blockout and without the knowledge of their Israeli oppressors. The heavy use of APF in the broadcast in order to “let the world see and feel the pain of Al Nakba so that it may finally end” has been called out as a connection to Selvi.
• As the Palestinian broadcast went live, six remotely operated UGVs were deployed across the Palestinian territories. The UGVs lacked offensive capabilities, as their purpose was to act as shields and mobile broadcast towers, and were piloted by neurological control. ^[3] Analysis of the firmware used by the UGVs revealed parts of Selvi’s OpenBCI code, though he has pointed out that this code has been available on GitHub since 2035. Additionally, two of the UGVs were named Kebikaj and Baltaqa, which also occur in Selvi’s games.

Association with AdiraPermalink

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Upon his release in April 2042, Selvi resumed his videogame design work, which he had been looking forward to after learning about “the potential of colloids.” He remained politically active, campaigning against Turkey’s adoption of G6 and refusing a G6 colloid implant. He also appeared in various international panels and speaking engagements alongside Efua Amankwah-Crouse, Cory Doctorow, Laura McDonald, Sofia Peña, Bertrand Truyens, and Joshua Whittington, among others. When asked about the Palestinian Spring, Selvi always replied with non sequiturs.

In 2044, Selvi moved to Brussels, Belgium under an assumed name due to an increase in harassment from Turkish authorities, which he has attributed to a “politically motivated campaign from Turkey, Israel, Zhupao, take your pick, same difference” in an effort to give FoS “a human face to prosecute.” After reportedly making use of a collocidal to disable his colloid implants, Selvi joined an urban farming community and worked with youth centres to organise videogame design workshops.

On October 15th 2045, Selvi was arrested and turned over to the Chinese embassy in Brussels, where he was questioned about his connection to Adira and various unclaimed cyberattacks attributed to the elusive hacker. In December 2045, Selvi took part in a crowdsourced FoS investigation of leaked Zhupao data, which had revealed the existence of Adira as an active term in G6’s search engines. ^[4]

In 2046, Selvi moved to Costa Rica, where he currently lives in Palenque, an ecovillage outside Quepos.

Personal lifePermalink

In 2044, Selvi met Anse Daems at an urban farm in Brussels, who recognised him from a World News Wire (WNW) profile on FoS. They developed a relationship and moved to Costa Rica in 2046 after a mutual commitment proposal.

See alsoPermalink

• Palestinian Spring
• Five of Swords

ReferencesPermalink