Why Do Institutions Still Publish Reports Nobody Reads?
Format has become as strategic as content. Most institutions have yet to adapt. Strategy ecosystem deserves better.
Let us begin with a contradiction. Generative AI is the technology that has reduced the cost of knowledge production faster than perhaps any other technology in human history. A literature review that might have taken a PhD student six months can now be drafted in an hour. A policy brief that a three-person department in a ministry might once have prepared over the course of a month can now be produced in an afternoon with the right prompt. The means of production have been democratized. What the printing press did in 1450, what the personal computer did in the 1980s, and what the internet did in 1995, GenAI has done for knowledge products between 2023 and 2026.
So why are we still producing 80-page reports that nobody reads from beginning to end, documents that few people open beyond the executive summary? Why do the outputs of universities, think tanks, and ministries still look as if they were designed in 2005?
This is not a technology problem. It is a problem of institutional incentives, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.
Andreessen’s Question, Applied to Knowledge Production
In his 2020 essay “It’s Time to Build”, Marc Andreessen argued, starting from America’s failures during the pandemic, that the real issue was not a lack of technological capacity but a lack of will to build. In his view, America was unable to produce masks not because it lacked the ability, but because it no longer believed it could. Bureaucratic bodies, zoning laws, and institutional inertia had created a culture of not doing. The technology existed. The will did not.
Let us apply the same framework to knowledge production. In a world where GenAI has pushed the cost of producing knowledge close to zero, if our universities and institutions still produce in old formats, then the problem is not the tool. The problem is that the institutional reward system still rewards the old format. In many countries, academic promotion still depends heavily on an 8,000-word article published in an SSCI-indexed journal after an 18-month peer review process. Public policy production is still tied to the official report format, signature chains, and institutional hierarchies. Think tanks still publish 60-page reports, even though almost nobody downloads and reads the PDFs.
The real point is that the format is also a mechanism for distributing power. Whoever can produce what, at what length, in which language, and at what speed, gains an advantage. Before the printing press, knowledge production was concentrated in monasteries in the West, in the hands of monks who copied manuscripts. Power belonged to them. The printing press redistributed that power to publishers, then to universities, then to journalists. At each turning point, the institutions that held the old power insisted for a while on the old format, because that format was the source of their legitimacy. Today, academia’s insistence on the 8,000-word article and ministries’ insistence on the official report reflect the same instinct. The format protects the institution’s own reason for existence.
The Second-Order Effect: Who Wins and Who Loses
In the age of GenAI, the real winner will not necessarily be the actor that produces the best idea. It will be the actor that distributes the idea in the right format, through the right channel, at the right speed. This highlights a critical test of institutional strength. What determines whether an institution is alive is not the volume of knowledge it produces, but whether that knowledge affects decision-makers in the real world. A dead institution still produces reports. Nobody reads them.
In the Turkish context, this points to a concrete shift in power. Substack writers, independent podcasters, and small-team “micro think tanks” producing long-form discussions on X/Twitter can experiment with formats precisely because they are free from institutional inertia. For that reason, they generate real impact. Traditional university departments and public institutions, by contrast, are becoming less effective because of their attachment to inherited formats, despite their budgets, titles, and buildings.
This is the knowledge-production version of the argument about will. The problem is not lack of resources. It is lack of courage.
If an institution continues to spend six months producing a policy note that it could generate in three days, all in the name of “institutional seriousness,” then that institution is actively weakening its own future.
Why This Matters Now: A Signal from Five Years Ahead
It is easy to miss today, but will become decisive within five years, that the format of a knowledge product is now as strategic as its content. As AI-supported research assistants from the Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind ecosystems make raw analytical capacity cheaper, attention and trusted curation become the scarce resources. In other words, the winning institution of the future will not be the one that produces the most, but the one that says the right thing, at the right length, at the right moment, and with the highest credibility. Whether through concise, data-rich notes, carefully structured long-form interviews, or daily 1,500-word analyses that readers consistently finish, the most effective independent knowledge products today all share one thing. It’s format discipline, not volume.
If Türkiye’s institutions working on strategic studies, technology policy, and foreign policy miss this transition, two things will happen. First, real analytical capacity, meaning the knowledge that exists in people’s minds, will evaporate before it can be transformed into an institutional product. Second, the format gap will be filled, just as it has been in finance and technology media, by independent, non-institutional, fast-moving individual actors. Over the long term, this will weaken the centrality of the state and academia in the policy formation process. The erosion of institutional knowledge authority is especially risky in a field such as security studies, which operates at the interface between state and society. If knowledge authority is vacated, the gap will be filled by disinformation and amateur “expertise.”
A Call to Build for Türkiye
What TeknoPolitika proposes here is simple but radical. Format innovation must be taken as seriously as content innovation. In concrete terms:
First, a “two-layer product” standard should be adopted. Every long analysis should be paired with a strategic summary that can be read in three minutes. These should be designed as two separate products, not as one merely compressed version of the other.
Second, academic and institutional performance criteria should include measures of impact. How many people read the work, how many decision-makers it reached, and how often it was cited, not only in academic publications but also in media and policy contexts.
Third, GenAI should be used not merely as a production accelerator, but as a format diversifier. The same research should be capable of generating, at the same time, a podcast, a short video, an interactive data dashboard, a policy brief, and an academic article.
Fourth, and most difficult of all, institutions must abandon the equation of “long report equals seriousness.” That equation is a residue of post-print institutional legitimacy.
In the age of GenAI, seriousness will be measured by precision and speed.
When we say “it’s time to build,” we mean the real insight Turkish strategy ecosystem deserves. What Türkiye needs today is a form of building that is less visible but no less critical. Rebuilding the way knowledge is produced, packaged, and distributed. The tool is already in our hands. The question is whether our institutions have the will to use it.
TeknoPolitika aims to be one of the first platforms to demonstrate that will through short, precise, and format-conscious knowledge production.