Few pages on the Bulgarian web offer original, unadulterated content that makes you laugh… even if the smile is a sour one, born of the irony of Bulgarian reality.
Samuil Petkanov is the creator of the website Ne!Novinite, roughly “The Not!News,” which since 2009 has been serving up its version of “the news as it could have been.” He produces parody journalism that is nonetheless so real that… well, I don’t need to explain anything, you all know what kind of online institution Not!News is.
And what does its creator think of the way we get our information? Does he manage to predict the future? How is it that we are all experts on influencers’ nose jobs and cryptocurrency fluctuations, and where is this taking us?
In the spirit of Digital Stories, which already has an interview told in short stories and a conversation with a cat, this won’t be just a talk. Scattered among the questions, on a gray background, you’ll find our parallel rapid-fire interview… in Not!News. The first half of each one is mine, and the punchline is Samuil’s.
– You must often read a news story that sounds like Not!News. Do you have any funny examples?
– Every day. Whenever something absurd pops up in the country or around the world, people start messaging me and tagging me with either “I didn’t know you worked for outlet X now” or “these guys stole your job.” I’ll use this lofty platform to declare that it’s annoying, and I’m writing down on a little slip of paper everyone who does it.
– Which piece of Not!News did the most people take for real?
– I don’t know. Fooling people isn’t my goal.
My first goal is to cheer them up by refracting reality through Not!News.
My second goal is to get them to start checking the sources of the information they read and not to trust too readily, even when they come across something that panders to their attitudes and views. And my third goal is to use the 25th frame and a particular arrangement of punctuation in my texts to manipulate the world’s population so that all the french fries end up being mine.
– Has a piece of Not!News ever predicted the future? Has something you joked about become fact?
– Yes, to some extent it happens fairly often. Sometimes the “predictions” are rather convoluted, like Nostradamus’s—we can fit current events to old posts. But there are very specific ones too. For example, in the spring CSKA, one of Bulgaria’s biggest football clubs, appointed Lyuboslav Penev as coach, and a few days later I wrote that he had failed to win a single game (because there hadn’t been a match) and they had fired him to bring in Stoycho Mladenov. Well, the switch did happen a few months later.
– If it were up to you to make one piece of Not!News you’ve written come true, which would it be?
– There are many. But I’ll name a recent one—Fandakova, the mayor of Sofia, hires Borisov, the former prime minister, as a security guard at City Hall because his money has run out.
You won’t believe it! It turns out vaccines…
don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays.
– I think you’re the best person to ask: which topics get Bulgarians worked up online?
– Several a day.
We may not be good at multitasking at work, but at following and being experts on several things at once, we are magnificent.
I can discuss influencers’ nose jobs, the rescue operation for a stranded ship, cryptocurrency fluctuations and the vaccine issue in the time it takes to drink one morning coffee.
– In that sense, are there any topics on which we don’t feel competent enough?
– No.
The more incompetent we are, the more competent we are.
Think how often we see a comment that begins with the words: “I don’t really understand this and I hope I’m wrong, but….”
– And which topics make us curse most furiously?
– Mostly we curse in our heads. Next—when the target of the curse can’t hear. After that—when they can hear but can’t answer back, say if they’re playing a match and we’re in the stands, or we’re passing him or her in our cars. We rarely curse face to face, and then we make sure we have numerical or qualitative superiority. For example, a little while ago I cussed out a stink bug.
– I think we’re very far behind when it comes to online jokes. Apart from you, the rest is almost all imitation. Even the “Classic Bulgarian” meme is a Serb. Why? Is that just what online humor is like, standardized, uniform, or are we not creative enough?
– Unfortunately, the tendency to be imitators or, at best, to adapt something to local taste isn’t limited to humor. It’s in the arts, in cooking, in architecture. But I don’t agree that there’s only me or that I’m anything special. The point is that
many people give up on making something of their own, since it’s faster and cheaper to copy
or to take something foreign that has already achieved the desired result, and you really risk a lot less. And I’m an idiot who still insists on sharing dumb jokes that only I get. But they’re mine.
We won the Nobel Prize in Literature! The author…
copied Mark Twain and signed his own name.
– Can you explain why online people love reading horoscopes so much?
– Because they’re the children and grandchildren of offline people who love reading horoscopes in newspapers.
– Does real news have a future?
– Of course. We live in times when there is more real news than ever, at least in quantity. In two minutes we can find out what’s happening in some godforsaken town in Chile. The problem, though, is that
the media developed too fast, and we haven’t built up habits of our own
to help us judge what’s true, what’s a half-truth, and what’s been taken out of context to serve a particular end. Even I sometimes get fooled or fail to look at something critically enough, even though sifting, sowing and fabricating quasi-news is literally what I do.
– Are there people you respect too much to put them in a Not!News bulletin?
– I don’t think joking and respect contradict each other. Let me start from afar—people respect their parents, their family, their close friends most of all. And I, at least, joke about all of them. True, most of the people who become the subject of Not!News are strangers to me, but
I always ask myself—would I say what I’m writing to the faces of the people I’m writing about? And my answer is yes.
I realize that some public figures, most of them in positions of power, may feel slighted at becoming the target of satire, but I usually take my cue from the news. And most of those cues are produced by them.
Jesus is Bulgarian! The facts prove it:
He doesn’t like Bulgarians and is better appreciated abroad.
– Why aren’t you in politics?
– I haven’t yet run my own life in such a way that I could step out and say: “Look what I’ve achieved, let me run your lives too.”
– You write about “the news as it could have been,” but it seems to be more from the point of view of what you wouldn’t want. If it really were up to you, what would “the news as it could have been” look like?
– It would be naive to say I imagine a world embroidered with honesty, joy and kindness, with no natural disasters, illness or suffering. But if someone weighed down by the real news reads one of my posts and starts looking at life and the world around us with a pinch more cheer, let them buy me a beer.
– What would you write if you weren’t writing Not!News?
– Last year I published a book of absurdist and science fiction stories, Garvanat, koyto mozheshe da spira vremeto (The Raven Who Could Stop Time). Now a more substantial literary effort on my part is on the way: a novel about homegrown, and not only homegrown, mythological and fairy-tale heroes.
– That will be quite something to read! You’ve gained plenty of experience in that direction… You’ve been creating Not!News since the early Paleolithic, since 2009. Which topics have vanished from the media stream in that time, and which have taken their place?
– It’s normal for all sorts of topics to rise and burn out over a dozen years. Very often they rise again like a phoenix, but
for several years now nobody has restarted the debate on smoking indoors
and I hope to use this platform to remind the TV channels to invite guests to have a row over it, because you can’t live like this.
Plot twist! An artificial intelligence found out it was Bulgarian… and immediately explained how things really work in the world.
– Have people become at least a little more literate in the way they get their information over that time?
– They’ve become more confident in their literacy.
But at the moment we’re seeing a kind of collective information puberty
—when someone settles on a particular station and mindset, gets angry at everyone else, and no form of reason can convince them that they’re not entirely right. The good news is that after puberty there are several more phases, and shortly before collective senile dementia we’ll be in brilliant shape for taking in information.
We’ve made a deal with the Macedonians! They won’t drink on days whose names contain Ъ, the Bulgarian letter missing from the Macedonian alphabet.
– So will audiences eventually learn, en masse, to check information? Or will they give up trying?
– It’s possible. Maybe in a generation or two, once those of us who consumed traditional media in their old, pre-internet form have died out. Not that there was no disinformation or sloppiness back then. But back then the trust lay in the fact that someone who was being paid for it had selected, checked and reported. Now we have to learn that the media are racing for clicks, and the mass click isn’t all that influenced by the quality of the information.
– In that sense: do you believe the media have a future?
– Yes, until someone invents another tool to satisfy our thirst for gossip, our urge to be connected, our curiosity, our desire to explain to ourselves what has happened to us and why, and what lies ahead. Our media have already caught up in speed, so they connect our entire present world instantly.
But the discovery and settlement of new worlds lies ahead
and it will be interesting to see how that affects them.
The first day on social media has been recorded without anyone… sending you an old joke.
– Do you think this topic is connected to the “great success” of vaccination in Bulgaria?
– Our low rate comes from our extreme distrust of institutions. And that comes from the fact that
institutions here are either corrupt, or sloppy in their work, or fail to communicate properly.
Often all three. We’re more inclined to trust a dubious potion with unclear ingredients, recommended by a friend of a friend who bought it from an old woman in Gigintsi, a village near Sofia, and gave it a good review, than our health institutions, which contradict each other anyway.
– Will the day come when you publish a piece of Not!News and nobody takes it for real?
– No. There is
a special type of person with a strange fetish for not reading even the headline to the end before rushing to comment.
I’m just looking for a way to capture their energy and turn it into electricity, so I can get even richer than I’ve already gorged myself.
A Bulgarian startup set off… 100,000 triple-bang firecrackers to push the Earth farther from the Sun and avoid Global Warming.
– Which media outlets are your biggest “competition” in creating Not!News?
– The other media are my inspiration, not my competition. I hope that someday there’ll be a news parody here in Bulgaria I can compete with over who comes up with the funnier take. It would do me good, because at times I get rusty.
– How do you always manage to find a sense of humor even about news and topics that visibly anger, infuriate and depress you?
– I’d go mad otherwise. Or maybe I already have. But in reality, whether I get worked up over everything or take it with a smirk makes no difference at all—Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide in about 4.5 billion years, and that will certainly mess up the belongings of a lot of people rushing out the door because they’re late.
Exposed! The creator of Not!News is… about to give birth to a badger.
– Where is the line between a sense of humor and rudeness online?
– Sometimes there isn’t one. We don’t even need to look at a case where A jokes about B. A and B can both be watching C’s joke, and A laughs for three days while B doesn’t like it, finds it in bad taste, takes offense, threatens to sue, takes up arms and begs his God to do something, because if He keeps sitting idle over this joke, B will have to personally wipe out half the planet.
– You never advertise anything… how do you monetize your success as an influencer?
– I go through the Commercial Register and tell every company that I’ll film myself smearing their products or services on my bare belly button on my OnlyFans channel. They don’t even check that I have no such channel and immediately shower me with money.
– Jokes aside, who are the meaningful Bulgarian influencers?
– There is no such animal as a meaningful influencer.
Either you’re famous because you do something, can do something, know something and are somebody, or you’re famous for being famous.
– Isn’t it time for Not!News to conquer the world?
– That will happen when we discover an alien civilization to which we’ll sacrifice influencers so they won’t eat the good people.
