With YouTube Banned, Turkish Productivity Soars

Ankara, April 5 – President Erdogan of Turkey ordered access to the video-sharing site YouTube blocked last week, resulting in an unprecedented spike in worker productivity in the country.

Following the uploading of conversations onto the site that embarrassed the government, the president ordered that both the microblogging service Twitter and the video-sharing site YouTube be banned. A court later ruled the Twitter ban unlawful, but upheld the YouTube restriction. While enterprising users can circumvent the blocks through various means, the restrictions have deprived hundreds of thousands of Turks of the diversions they would otherwise use to take their minds off of work, with the result that those throngs of workers have no choice but to engage in their work.

Turkish economic indicators rose over the last week as the productivity figures were released, and Erdogan now says he is considering making the ban permanent. “Initially the blockage of YouTube grew out of concern for the dignity of the government and for public order,” explained the president in a statement. “But it has proven of economic value as well, with office workers in particular no longer wasting hours of their days uploading and viewing the antics of people’s cats.”

Tentative official statistics for the week that straddled the end of March and the beginning of April show an uptick of nearly 33% over the same period a year ago. Government agencies that collect and analyze the data will produce firmer numbers by the end of June that take into account other factors and adjust the numbers to reflect various changes in the workforce since last year that also affect the statistics. But the stark increase in workers simply doing their goddamn job without sharing clips of badly edited conspiracy theory propaganda already has companies and government ministries considering what other online services may be holding back productivity.

“We’re looking at blocking Instagram,” confided an executive at the national power company who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Honestly, do people really think it adds anything to the world for them to photograph their food?” He estimated that such a ban would save 48 million man-hours per year.