Adrien loves to run. And when he runs, he really runs—down the entrepreneurial road, and in a real marathon too. But most of all, he runs against stereotypes. See him once and you'll remember him; I don't even need to tell you which detail of his signature look will stick.

He is worth remembering for another reason, too: his story offers inspiration of the genuine kind. Adrien has lived in Sofia for 18 years, runs a successful video game company that gives work to Bulgarians, has adopted a Bulgarian girl and has gathered plenty of digital stories to tell us.

A Moment from a Fairy Tale

The question of where the color of his beard comes from is unavoidable. He has been asked it hundreds of times and has long had an answer ready—more than one, in fact. “There are many answers to that question, but the short one goes: so that I'll be remembered.”

In a few weeks he'll be in Cologne for the biggest professional gaming event in the world. This year 400,000 visitors are expected, between 50,000 and 70,000 of them industry people. “There's no way to remember that many people—you'll remember a few hundred. But if you stand out, there's a very good chance they'll remember precisely you. Maybe we don't memorize names right away, or the context. But the moment you meet someone, you immediately feel it: I like this person, or I don't. That's the first categorization, the one that helps us survive.”

So the blue beard is not a whim but a tool. And a way to stand out in the crowd.

Adrien didn't start with blue. First came red suits and jackets, then a blond beard, a green one and a purple one. Each version provoked feedback, which Adrien carefully analyzed.

“I think this is version 3 of my brand marketing by now. Just wait for the next ones!”

They Greet You by Your Beard

And yet… Isn't Bluebeard a fairy-tale character—the work of Charles Perrault's pen, though fully worthy of Stephen King's?

In the tale he is a serial killer who takes the lives of his wives one after another, locks their corpses in a secret room and forbids the next wife to open the door. It is one of the darkest texts in European folklore. But not according to Adrien, who reads it quite differently.

“All of that is fake news. The man in the fairy tale is the real victim!” The Frenchman is prepared for this question too, and he is adamant that the last wife deceived her husband. She called her brothers to kill him and take his money. There were no witnesses. People said he was the bad guy, but no evidence was ever presented.

“No verdict. No arguments. Nothing. Do you think that's fair?”

The sentence was carried out by the relatives, the money was pocketed by the relatives, and not a single institution appears anywhere in the story. Rather a thought-provoking subject, given how justice tends to be regarded in our part of the world.

“Bluebeard was misunderstood and deceived.”

Bad Press

Almost without noticing, we arrive at the subject of prejudice, and the blue beard turns out to be a fascinating social experiment as well. According to Adrien, people react to it differently everywhere in the world, and quite tellingly. In London they call out that he looks great. In Paris they accuse him of being a drug addict. In Germany, for some reason, they decide he must be from Berlin. In San Francisco cars stop in the middle of the street so the drivers can shout their approval. In Japan people are frightened, but… very politely. In Thailand everyone wants a selfie with him.

And in Sofia? “People here are a little scared of me, too. They look at me but say nothing. It isn't hostility, it's quiet astonishment—somehow they're just not used to difference.”

Adrien is a Frenchman of Italian descent, a man who takes bright colors as something natural, something he finds missing here. “You walk into Zara in Milan or in Rome and see a men's collection full of color. You walk into Zara in Sofia—same chain, same year, same season. And everything is gray. Don't stand out, don't make an impression. Whatever you do, just don't draw attention.”

Orange Is the Sky

In his view, the reasons for this attitude of ours are historical. Over the years, people who stood out were persecuted, and it goes all the way back to the Ottoman Empire and the notorious idea of the bowed head, from the old Bulgarian proverb that the sword does not cut a head that bows. It reaches the 1990s, with the mutri—the thickset racketeers of Bulgaria's post-communist decade—the mafia and the message the state of the time sent to its own population. “Don't trust the institutions. Everything is rigged. Justice doesn't exist. If you stand out, you'll get screwed. Be discreet. Mind your own business. The game is rigged anyway, because everyone knows someone who knows someone, and you don't know anyone. So keep quiet.”

“Maybe that was true 30 years ago, but it isn't anymore. I'm not an expert, but I've been here a long time, and I think the government and the institutions are a bit cleaner. The problem is that the software has stayed the same while the hardware has changed,” Adrien says. “People are still running the operating system they grew up with. Don't stand out, the system is rigged, you're not part of it, live your life in your own corner.”

Secret Paths

It is precisely this mindset, he believes, that leads to the outdated idea that “if you're smart and have no connections, leave. Start a career in the UK, in Germany, in France. And don't come back.”

Which makes it all the more curious that in his case exactly the opposite happened. As Adrien puts it, he left France for exactly the same reasons Bulgarians leave Bulgaria. “I felt I didn't have the connections in government or in business.”

His parents are art teachers, now retired. His grandparents were farmers. He earned his diploma from a good business school, but saw no prospects in his homeland and looked abroad.

He left in 2005. Torn between Italy and the Middle East, he chose… not the most adventurous option, but Brussels. There he founded his first company and discovered something about himself that would define the next twenty years. “When we started working, we needed a lot of energy. I could feel it. And Brussels doesn't give you energy, it drains it.”

The winter of 2007 was when his patience ran out. The business had taken off, but nothing else was right. “There were roughly six months in which I saw the sun on three days. The rest of the time it was night until 10 a.m., then gray or rain all day.”

Sun and Low Taxes

– these are the two factors Adrien judged most important in choosing his next home. The list included Cyprus and Malta; Bulgaria wasn't on it until friends who also made video games in Sofia called and invited him to take a look at the country.

Adrien came in June 2008 and saw that there was both sun and low taxes here. In Bulgaria he found professional success and love alike. He met his future wife, who is Portuguese. Their son Atlas was born here in 2014, and in 2023 they adopted a girl named Aloha, a little Bulgarian.

Over these 18 years, he says, beyond the taxes and the sun, a great deal has changed. Today he has friends in Portugal, Spain and France who complain that they earn less than they would in Sofia. “Not everyone, of course, but for IT people the scene in Sofia is excellent. And not only that—the infrastructure in Sofia is great, after all: the metro, the trams, the buses, the big boulevards. It's actually pretty good, and yet here we're always complaining.”

So Mysterious and Tender

“I'm not forced to stay in Bulgaria. I can move wherever I like. But since I'm here, it means I've decided to stay.”

One of the things that won him over is the mountain. “You think: damn, I have this problem, I'm having trouble with this employee, I have something to sort out with the kids. Then you look at Vitosha and tell yourself: this mountain has been here for a billion years and will be here for another billion. I'm so small. What I do matters, and at the same time it doesn't. That relaxes me.”

Of course, he is far from liking everything here, and the list of problems begins with higher education. “Its level is very low, and as an employer that annoys me. I have 45 people, and every year I need new people coming out of university. Most of them aren't qualified at all, and we have to start from zero.”

The second problem is the way Bulgaria “sells” itself abroad. Every campaign to attract investors begins and ends with the 10 percent flat tax, and in his view that is a message aimed at the wrong audience.

Human Capital

“If you want to attract Mercedes, Volkswagen, Tesla, Google—the biggest ones—they don't care about taxes. The big players ask something else: how many people can they hire? Can they find 10,000? More like 20,000. That's the main problem—there simply aren't the people.” Adrien felt it most keenly when his business took off and his team had to grow from 30 people to 80. It turned out that the market simply didn't have enough experienced professionals.

At the same time, he believes, we have enormous potential as engineers—we're strong at everything to do with hardware and software; with math, physics and chemistry; with logic and organization. Everything in the world of the pragmatic.

“But the rest is missing—marketing, creativity. It's not that there are no creative people in Bulgaria. That's not it; lots of creative people work at my company. It's just that this kind of talent is considerably rarer, at least in my experience.”

Run, Adrien

We began with running. Since 2015, Adrien has trained for an hour a day, at least six days a week. He started as a way to cope with stress, and not long ago he finished his first full marathon—in Sofia.

That explains why he isn't afraid even… of artificial intelligence, the obligatory topic of any conversation with someone from the tech industry. The Frenchman makes video games and has been reading science fiction for as long as he can remember. He encountered the classic dystopias at just 8.

“Everything happening right now has been coming for 100 years. Yes, at some point computers will become smart. Yes, at some point robots will do all sorts of things. We've been talking to Siri for more than 10 years; it's just become a lot more successful now with ChatGPT. We knew we'd get there, and still there are so many next steps I can't wait for us to take. Right now AI is at once extremely smart and remarkably dumb. It's still very far from launching rockets to Mars. For the moment I can't even get it to process a few simple spreadsheets intelligently enough.”

For Bulgaria, though, AI is a huge opportunity that we must seize wisely. Simply because we are living through a demographic catastrophe, we are shrinking, and our way forward runs through better productivity.

“What I really miss is people being used to difference. In the end, you need someone to drive that bus. And we don't have enough people to do it, because everyone wants to be a Python programmer. We don't have much of another solution.”

“The Baltic states are a wonderful example. They had many structural problems and bet on digitizing the state—today they are leaders in e-government. If we look to the future, with more and more automation and robotization, I don't think it's an advantage for a country like China to have 1.5 billion people.”

Good Luck!

The last question is about his favorite Bulgarian word, and the answer comes without a second's hesitation.

“Успех” (uspeh, “success” or “good luck”).

Because it sounds good to him, but above all because it contains sounds that simply don't exist in French. It was one of those barricades he had to storm syllable by syllable. Along with “всичко” (vsichko, “everything”) and “чудесно” (chudesno, “wonderful”).

“Most often it's aesthetics—a dyed beard as self-expression, a subcultural sign or the result of a bet. Another option is a role: theater, cosplay or a reference to Perrault's Bluebeard. It's rarely involuntary.” That's what Claude told me when I asked why someone might have a blue beard. Yes, it's rarely involuntary, and I'd be curious to learn the details of such a story.

“Differences are what make us interesting,” Adrien smiles. I think so too. It's getting harder and harder to be different, original, unconventional. But also more and more important, and more and more valuable. I'm a little sorry I don't have a beard, but I'll think of something else… or I'll ask Claude. What about you?

Two people stare at each other in total concentration. Each has 45 seconds to identify the pictures that will appear in front of them and win the duel.

I have no doubt that last night you watched the first episode of The Floor, the new and innovative game show on NOVA, one of Bulgaria's main TV channels. If you didn't, it's not too late at all—there are still 12 whole episodes to come. It is a reason to celebrate in itself that a game about knowledge, not scandal, has made it to prime time, and I believe it will be the hit of the season. Rumor (and ChatGPT) has it that I'm in it too.

But we're here for a slightly different digital story, one closely tied to the game. It comes to show us that when we are together, we are capable of miracles. That if people brought together supposedly to compete and beat one another can reach out a hand for something bigger, then our society can do it too.

Do you like to provoke and test your knowledge? Are you looking for meaningful causes to help, knowing for sure that your help goes to the right place and supports something important and lasting?

If your answer is “yes” to even one of these questions, then this Digital Story is just for you!

Let me introduce Quizza! A website we built as volunteers. Where you can challenge yourself by taking any of our many permanent quizzes on all sorts of topics. Where you can face off in a weekly contest against some of the heroes you know from online and offline competitions! And, last but not least, where you can discover causes that each of us stands behind with our own name!

An Optimistic Theory of the Bulgarian Quiz

You have hardly ever seen 100 more varied souls at Sofia's Vasil Levski Airport than on one early morning before a flight to Amsterdam. People “of every age, sex and occupation,” united by the fact that they had dared to challenge themselves in a competition being made for Bulgarian television for the very first time.

What happened on The Floor you will see for yourselves (and I definitely advise you not to miss a single episode). So many colorful and different personalities, so many stories and so many causes. And although in the end there is supposedly only one winner, it turned out that we were all winners, because after the rather demanding and far from easy shoot we came back with new friends, new causes and new ideas.

Do you know what a quiz is? I know, I'm changing the subject abruptly, but The Floor has plenty of unexpected questions and sudden twists too.

The truth is… nobody knows. The origin of the word itself is shrouded in legend. According to a popular story from Dublin, a theater manager named Richard Daly bet that he could invent a meaningless word that within a matter of days would be the talk of the whole city. In 1791, the story goes, he scrawled the letters Q, U, I, Z on the walls, and soon everyone was talking about this strange word.

The story may be dubious, but you'll agree it's a charming one. The word “quiz” appears in print toward the end of the 18th century, but with a different meaning—an odd or eccentric person. Only in 1867 is it first found in the sense of a set of questions to test knowledge.

Strange People

We used to have a different word for the same thing: “viktorina.” A quiz is nothing more than a pleasant way to challenge and test your knowledge. A contest in which you try to solve puzzles—alone or as a team. They can be general knowledge or on a specific topic. Every duel you will see on The Floor is a quiz of sorts, and so is every other popular TV contest built around knowledge.

TV quizzes are a favorite pastime all over the world. It's enough to mention the Russian classic What? Where? When?, the American Jeopardy! or the homegrown Minuta e mnogo (A Minute Is a Lot). But in the online world quizzes come alive with full force on the web as well.

For many people, quizzes happen mainly… in pubs. I mentioned that “quiz” first turned up in old newspapers, so here is one more quote from a press review of ancient, prehistoric times.

“At first glance—a pub like any other. But if you look closely, you see sheets of paper and pens on the tables between the full beer mugs and the fries. And if you watch the people more carefully, you notice them staring thoughtfully at the sheets and puzzling over something that seems very important.”

The quote is from a Saturday feature in the daily 24 Chasa from 2009, headlined “A New Craze: Sport for the Brain in a Pub”. Perhaps you've guessed: I wrote it. In the years since—they have almost come of age by now—far more people have become convinced that pub quizzes are an extremely enjoyable pastime. Today almost every town has its local versions, and in the bigger cities you can choose where to join in with friends every day of the week.

Quiz Vadis?

The people who frequent such places have got used to calling themselves “quizzers,” though in my view we could try a little harder with our word-making.

What sets them apart from the “non-quizzers”? Erudition, perhaps, pretension, experience? I think the only difference is that the former have already discovered how pleasant it is not just to meet friends for a drink during the week, but also to try to get your brains moving together. That way even the beer tastes sweeter…

You may be wondering what all this has to do with the beginning of this story. Let's skip straight to the climax.

The Floor adventure in Amsterdam came to an end (although for viewers it is only just beginning!). And we decided that… we wanted to do something more! Many of the contestants love quizzes, and a good number of them talked about important, worthwhile, valuable causes they would support. So we wondered: isn't there a way to bring all of this together? Then, one word leading to another, we figured out how to make it happen.

Let me introduce Quizza! A website we built as volunteers. Where you can challenge yourself by taking any of our many permanent quizzes on all sorts of topics. Where you can face off in a weekly contest against some of the heroes you know from online and offline competitions! And, last but not least, where you can discover causes that each of us stands behind with our own name!

Bits and Soul

In some contests (in most of them, I'd even say) winning is not what matters most. I confess I wouldn't have guessed that 100 Bulgarians, most of whom had never met, sent off to compete against one another for a prize, could set an example of… community?

Could this be a direction, an idea, a hope that we can bring to life on a larger scale?

The idea for the site came about quite spontaneously. There aren't many places in the Bulgarian online space where you can put your knowledge to the test. At the same time, many people in our community create quizzes, and quite a few of us have an important cause we would like to support.

Can a good idea and a meaningful cause unite people, inspire them?

It turned out they can.

In a time when social networks have torn apart the dialogue between generations and points of view. In a time when authorities are as scarce as public conversation. In a time when artificial intelligence calls fundamental human notions into question…

Could it be that knowledge is what can bring us together?

A Quiz for a Cause

More than half of the contestants from the first season of The Floor are already part of the venture!

The programmers among us took on the site itself, and our designer is responsible for its wonderful look. The copywriters pitched in with texts, and the quiz authors with a huge number of quizzes varied in difficulty, topic, logic, even format, a challenge for anyone! We have quizzes for the most seasoned masters, quizzes for beginners, even quizzes for kids. We have sports and science quizzes, picture quizzes and text quizzes. A quiz for every taste and for everyone with taste!

On top of that, everyone had the right to propose a cause they stand behind with their own name.

Waiting for you already are 69 quizzes with 1,777 questions, contests twice a week and no fewer than 37 causes you can support if you so choose. Behind the venture are 88 of the 100 people from the Floor!

You can see who we are and what our causes are here.

I'm not starting with thanks by name, because here the strength truly lies in the team. In the example, in the meaning.

In the message that when an idea can unite us, we are capable of miracles. Of creating something useful for others. With no thought of profit, fame or personal success.

Is there anything more important?

Now it's your turn.

Come and try our quizzes!

(For fans of The Floor there is a special challenge with 100 questions—one for each of the topics on the “floor.” Score 60 points and you win a certificate!)

Join our contests.

Explore our causes.

Conquer the game!

I'm sure the best is yet to come…

Two people stare stubbornly at rows of neatly arranged, round, flat stones. Just a game, you might say, but it is not that simple—not at all. Because this is not only one of the oldest games we know, but also the most complex. For a long time we considered it humanity’s last bastion, the one place where technology could never overtake us. And when that happened… a remarkable new digital story was born.

It comes to remind us that technology is here both to challenge us and to threaten us. But also to show us new horizons for creating, for making things, for evolving as a species.

Gone

Do you know what outnumbers the atoms in the universe? You might think of the unkept promises of Bulgarian politicians, and Einstein supposedly said that only human stupidity is greater. But there is one more undisputed winner in this race. It has to do with the game we are talking about today, whose name sounds so plain. Mystical and still not popular enough in Bulgaria (that is about to change), go is a whole universe.

You would hardly guess it from the not-so-large board. Nineteen by nineteen possible positions in the classic version, about 2.5 times more than in chess. Yet all of this makes possible some 2.08×10¹⁷⁰ arrangements!

Care to try counting exactly how much that is? It will take a while: we are talking about a number drastically larger than the number of atoms believed to make up the universe—those are on the order of 10⁸⁰.

Not everything simple is brilliant, but everything brilliant is simple. So it is with go. You just place your stones—black or white, much like in chess—on the intersections. The goal is nothing more and nothing less than to surround your opponent’s.

Goliath’s Pebble

As simple as a handful of beans, right? Not quite. The stones are far more regular than beans and… a far greater challenge, not only for people but for technology too. If you don’t believe me, ask your favorite AI model to draw a realistic or animated scene from a game of go. It seems so simple, and yet… the lines won’t be symmetrical, the stones will come in different sizes, and it won’t look anything like the real game.

So what about the competition itself? All of us (older folks) remember the momentous day of May 11, 1997, when the computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and machines officially proved stronger than us at this ancient and globally popular game. But it would take another full 18 years and 10 months before technology could achieve the same in go.

And… so what? Did we stop playing chess after the best human in the sport lost? Not at all.

Did we stop playing go? Not only did we not, the game has reached new, unprecedented heights and is more popular than ever.

Goal After Goal

Will we stop writing once AI starts writing better than the most widely read authors? Will we stop thinking, creating, making sense of things, if algorithms overtake us?

Games are a fascinating lens through which to make sense of the changes technology brings. I have written about Tetris—the game that came from the long-gone USSR to show us that humans are always capable of reaching the next heights. Of setting new records, finding new angles. New forms, arts, paradigms.

For a long time after the chess showdown, go was pointed to as the game in which computers were doomed. The main reason was precisely its enormous variety—the potential moves and positions on the board are so numerous that they simply cannot be tamed by dry calculation, the way it had been done earlier with chess. So machines had to “change strategy”—not just compute possible outcomes, but grasp the logic, look for patterns, enter into the secrets of the game.

Going Deeper

But how can a game with single-colored stones of equal strength and a board woven into a grid be so complex?

If we look beneath the surface, it is much more. It is strategy, and a logic developed over years and generations of players. Anyone can start quickly, but becoming truly good takes years of dedication and serious practice. Just as in chess, the odds that someone who has barely learned the rules will beat the world champion are slim.

Besides the greater number of possible combinations, we are also talking about an immense history. Go is provably 2,500 years old, though some researchers trace it as far back as four millennia. Chinese patience is not to be underestimated, and it was in China that the game truly flourished. They call it weiqi, and they revere it so much that they placed it among the four essential arts of the educated aristocrat, alongside playing the zither, calligraphy and painting.

Going Back

As early as 196 BC, two military leaders—a prince and his general—recorded a game of go under exactly the same rules used today. According to Chinese legend, the game was invented at the dawn of that civilization by the semi-mythical Emperor Yao (c. 2100 BC) and his advisers, to develop the mind and concentration of his somewhat scatterbrained son.

Concentration… the very thing we lose so easily today in the online battle for our attention. Could go be our recipe for getting it back?

Generations refined and enriched the approaches (without touching the rules), until in the 20th century the game reached the Western world and became a popular pastime far beyond the Middle Kingdom. It had arrived in Japan more than a thousand years earlier, as igo.

Today more than 50 million people around the world are thought to play go, with over 20 million active players. Most of them are from China, Japan and South Korea, which explains the numbers, but the continents are gradually expanding (with or without AI).

We are heading toward technology… from afar. The Japanese engineer Masahiro Hara invented the QR code in 1994 while playing go during his lunch break. The board inspired him with the idea of a two-dimensional pixelated code, the kind that now surrounds us everywhere.

Going to War

And here we are, exactly a decade ago. March 9, 2016, the decisive battle. The undisputed world go champion Lee Sedol steps into the final fight that could decide everything. Facing him is AlphaGo—a super-program built specifically for this contest, as its name suggests. It was created by the team at DeepMind, Google’s division devoted to developing artificial intelligence.

Exactly five battles will be played. The man doesn’t know it yet, but he is already doomed to lose this race against the machine too, and by the telling score of 1:4.

The most interesting part happens in the second game. Move 37, everything is going as expected, the two players are outfoxing each other with familiar ideas and strategies… when suddenly AlphaGo plays a completely unexpected, seemingly insane move. The commentators, among them players with enormous experience, immediately note that the machine has made a mistake and handed its opponent a huge opportunity.

Gone with the Wind

Lee Sedol, however, doesn’t think so, and withdraws for nearly a quarter of an hour to find an answer.

DeepMind would later note that, by their estimates, this was a move a human in the same situation would have had a 1 in 10,000 chance of choosing.

Lee fails to recover; the move turns out to be extremely effective. The world champion would later describe how he felt—for the first time he realized that he was facing not a person but something that could think in an entirely different way. And he would not recover as the battle slipped away.

One small nuance that is often overlooked. In the fourth game—the only one Lee won—he too made a legendary, unconventional move that brought him victory. I’ll leave the lessons to you.

Gold Rush

Move 37, though, has become a kind of emblem of the AI revolution of recent years, helped in no small part by the fact that it is a central theme in several of Yuval Noah Harari’s books.

For him, Move 37 is not a sporting detail but a symbol of the big questions of our time. It is one of the reasons the historian-philosopher speaks of AI not only as artificial intelligence but as “alien intelligence,” something foreign to the human psyche and intuition.

Go is the perfect example: a game with a millennia-old culture, schools, philosophies, rules of good taste. In Harari’s metaphor, humans had been circling certain “islands” in the landscape of the game and mistaking them for the whole world. Then along comes AlphaGo and in no time discovers “new continents”—strategies that tens of millions of players had never grasped. Move 37 shows AI’s freedom from the limitations of human minds, which out of habit never “set foot” in certain zones of the possible.

Godzilla

Alongside the enthusiasm, however, comes danger. Move 37 also shows us how impenetrable these systems are. Even after the triumph, the winning team was unable to explain clearly why AlphaGo chose that particular move.

So AI is at once radically innovative (discovering “continents” humans cannot see) and radically opaque (making key decisions without any causality humans can understand). Something, by the way, that we can easily confirm today simply by watching the progress of the field.

According to Harari, today we marvel that AI has discovered a “new continent” in go; tomorrow we will repeat it in finance, art, cybersecurity. But what will we do when systems make decisions in ways we cannot meaningfully verify? While we overlook the dangers…

But who’s talking about dangers? We’re here to play! Because, as Harari also says, Move 37 may be, but does not have to be, the end of human creativity. Whether it will be is up to us.

In the case of go, the association is more than optimistic. After the defeat, people not only didn’t stop loving the game—quite the opposite, it is more popular than ever! Clubs are springing up, online forums too, and more and more professional players are climbing the strict hierarchy of this ancient contest.

Good Will Hunting

What’s more, experts say that human players have broken out of old patterns of thinking in many strategies. After millennia of contemplating the game, huge innovations are emerging!

Which brings us to the cherry on top—AlphaGo thanked its creator for the good publicity by securing him… a Nobel Prize. Demis Hassabis received the prize in chemistry for predicting the structure of proteins. The computer program he used to achieve it is based largely on the work behind AlphaGo. What’s more, it is the first Nobel in the modern history of AI.

Go is an abstract and highly intuitive game that cannot be measured mathematically. Before artificial intelligence entered the fray, when a master made a strong and unexpected move, it was said to be “inspired by the gods.” And true masters can rarely explain such a decision logically; they tend to say they simply felt it.

As a result of the machine’s arrival, opening moves that no one would previously have dreamed of using have become popular. Gradually, even in games between top players, analyses reveal a huge number of ideas that came from artificial intelligence. And it could hardly be otherwise—as with chess, today even the best have in algorithms the sparring partner of their dreams, one to learn from. And one that, almost by default now, is stronger than them. But so what?

An interesting paradox: on the one hand, AI expands knowledge by discovering moves humans had never seen; on the other, it can lead to uniformity when everyone learns from the same “master.”

Good Company

The history of go is full of curious touches, and yet, for all of them, it remains simply… a game. One worth trying yourself, and now you can do so in Bulgaria too! After a long hiatus, at the end of March, exactly 10 years after the famous battle between man and computer, a Bulgarian go championship will be held!

The co-organizers are the Confucius Institute and the Bulgarian Go Association, and the tournament is officially recognized by the European federation. The championship will take place on March 21 and 22 in the Confucius Institute building in Sofia, at 79 Todor Aleksandrov Blvd. The format is open, and players from all over Europe are invited.

But even if it’s too early for you to compete, it’s never too late to try. You can do so with Atari Safari—a group of enthusiasts who in recent years have put serious effort into popularizing the game with weekly meetups. You can find them in Sofia every Tuesday from 6:30 p.m. at “The Grumpy Dwarf,” 3 Pozitano St. Good luck!

You’ll find more information here.

In this life you shouldn't, and can't, only take. If you don't give—in return or entirely for free—you have lived in vain, as the popular hit song goes. Even if we know it, it is worth reminding ourselves often. I hope this Digital Story reaches more people. I believe that if more Bulgarians recognize its lessons, we are all capable of reclaiming the conversation and helping our country flourish. Of fulfilling the great dream of the protagonist and narrator here—that our children will WANT to stay in Bulgaria.

Tenko Nikolov is not only one of Bulgaria's most successful tech entrepreneurs. Starting from scratch, he, SiteGround's founder Ivo Tsenov and their team built a global business—one of the leading technology companies in the world.

He is a visionary who believes in the power of a close-knit team, shared values and “a little healthy madness.” He turns the office into a favorite place for the people who work there, mistakes into lessons, and success into an opportunity to give back to the community. For him, profit stopped being an end in itself long ago; it is a means to do something meaningful—from supporting education and science to investing in “moonshots” that could change the world. Today we have the chance to hear him tell his story of luck, the courage to take risks and the power of setting an example.

Play the video

This piece is based on the conversation I had with Tenko Nikolov at the DEV.BG Leadership Agora event in November 2025 at Sofia Tech Park. You can watch and listen to the conversation here.

Never Grow Up

Pippi Longstocking, you may remember, never wanted to. What will you be when you grow up? To me, this question and children's answers to it say a great deal. So does the way they change from generation to generation.

As a child, Tenko has no clear idea of “what he wants to be” until one day his grandfather gives him his first computer—the legendary Pravetz 8M, the Bulgarian-made home computer of the 1980s. It is a momentous meeting. “The moment I saw the computer, I already knew I wanted to be a programmer,” he recalls.

Computers are a rarity in those years, but Tenko is lucky enough to get a second one—a reward from his parents after he is admitted to the Language High School in Stara Zagora in 1991.

From then on, his interest turns more and more toward technology. And although life leads him down a different path and he never does become a programmer, computers shape his destiny.

The Wheel of Fortune

Ask Bill Gates, if you like, about all the stereotypes surrounding great tech success. The moment we start talking about wealth, we quickly arrive at the image of a straight road paved with luck.

But that is exactly why stories remain the last bastion where artificial intelligence lags far behind. Their strength lies in the seasoning, in the things beyond the words themselves.

SiteGround's story begins modestly and unexpectedly—in a student dorm at the American University in Bulgaria in Blagoevgrad, where a group of friends decide to try their luck in the hosting business. Tenko Nikolov isn't even among them, but he joins very soon—when the team numbers just four people, by then working out of a small apartment in Borovo, a neighborhood in the capital, Sofia.

At that point the venture looks close to hopeless. There is no money; the team scrapes by from month to month. “Everyone did everything. I worked around the clock, my partner Ivo did too, everyone around us worked around the clock.”

Tenko's office is in the kitchen, where his colleague Dima makes pancakes in the mornings.

Never Give In—Never, Never, Never, Never

One Friday the team gathers and his partner Ivo Tsenov says, exhausted: “Well, we tried, it isn't working. It's not going to happen…”

The business simply isn't taking off. It's time to close the company. But since it's Friday, they decide to wait until Monday.

Meanwhile… a small miracle happens. The team is still together, “drowning the failure,” when a message arrives: the first sale has been made. After months of hard but fruitless work, things are finally happening, and someone somewhere has paid for their service! Saturday morning brings… a second sale.

And so on Monday the office is euphoric, and the end is postponed. Yes, we know fate has a sense of humor: a little later a message arrives that the money has been charged back—it turns out the first two “purchases” were made by a fraudster with a stolen credit card.

The joy turns out to be premature. “But that's why we still exist today—because of a failed thief and a wink from fate at just the right moment,” Tenko smiles. The third sale soon follows, and the wheel slowly but irreversibly begins to turn, before rolling at an ever more dizzying speed.

The Wheel of Time

Is success a matter of luck? To some extent, yes, Tenko Nikolov believes, but with an important caveat: “Luck is always part of it. But you have to provoke it. It doesn't work with luck alone, and it doesn't work without it.” A lucky break on its own isn't enough if you don't have the right team beside you and you don't take risks. “Without the right people, nothing works. And of course the right moment matters too.”

How does a fledgling business choose the right people? From day one, Tenko says, they looked for colleagues who thought alike, with the same ideals and value system. Today that sounds like a cliché from an HR post, but at the turn of the century, when this story begins, even clichés weren't what they are now.

At the time Bulgaria has many well-trained engineers and system administrators—many of them self-taught talents capable of working wonders. And that, according to Tenko, is a paradox, because back then the education system isn't capable of training them, and the big companies haven't arrived in the country yet. Still, the talent is there, and SiteGround quickly figures out how to attract it. With an idea and a team, not just with promises of a high salary.

“The hosting business has never been the sexiest venture in the world,” Tenko smiles. So the strategy isn't to lure people with grand promises, but with a different approach. “We tried to attract people by doing things differently, by making them interesting,” he explains.

“Never Mind, I'm at Work”

I'll confess: one of the saddest sights for me is people who don't love their work. Time is our most precious resource, and I can't imagine what it's like to give such a large part of it to something you don't like.

Today's protagonist thinks the same way. “It's very common for people to hate their jobs, and when they get together with friends, the venting is aimed either at their other half or at their work,” Tenko says. “We can't do much about the other half, but we decided to try to change the direction at least when it comes to our employees' work.” At SiteGround, the philosophy that work can be a pleasure arises naturally, not out of a textbook. Today many companies talk about “shared values” and “team culture”—but all too often these remain mere good intentions.

The company grows fast. The first apartment-office in Borovo becomes too cramped once the team passes 10 people. They move to another, bigger apartment. And there, every time they have a problem to solve, Tenko and Ivo go outside and launch into a heated debate. They argue for hours about what to do, and many of their unconventional moves are born on the street. One of them is expanding beyond Sofia—a rather exotic decision for an IT company in those years.

After Plovdiv comes Stara Zagora, Tenko's hometown. Meanwhile, the Sofia team keeps growing, and by 2011 it's time for SiteGround's next step. The age of apartments is over; they need an office in the traditional sense of the word. Here comes one of those fateful street arguments between the partners. They tour buildings around Sofia and come across something that both attracts and frightens them—an entire floor of 3,500 square meters in a modern office building. “It's big,” says Ivo. “It really is big,” Tenko agrees. But an idea is nagging at both of them: “I think we should take it.”

A Big Heart

At first the sight is surreal. Twenty-five people occupy a space that could hold hundreds. “Thirty percent of the office was used as working space,” Tenko recalls, “the rest we turned into… fun.” The two partners decide to invest part of the profit in things that will make their people happy. Game rooms, foosball tables, pool tables, even an indoor tennis court.

Tenko tells a funny story from that time. Coca-Cola Hellenic also has its office in the same building—a corporate giant occupying six floors. One day he runs into its director for Bulgaria in the elevator. “He's in a suit from head to toe, with a tie. He greets me and says frankly: ‘You should know I really envy you. You have the most beautiful office, the happiest employees. And on top of that, you come to work in flip-flops!’”

“People don't need all that much to be happy. Someone just has to think about it,” Tenko says, returning to the story. “We realized early on that it was very important for us to spend some of the money on making our people happy.” He doesn't hide his satisfaction that their example has gradually become the norm.

Give and Take

And here we come to what, for me, matters most in this story. Already in SiteGround's first years, Tenko and his partners begin asking themselves: “What can we do that is positive not only for us, but also for the ecosystem in Bulgaria, for the developer community in general?”

They realize they use an enormous amount of open-source software. It quickly occurs to them that they can build on these projects and give them back to the community. To be not just users but also creators of free software.

Ten years later the results are impressive: 160 contributions to the Linux kernel, millions of lines of code used by programmers around the world. “Today a pretty solid percentage of the internet runs our code,” Tenko notes proudly.

Doesn't this defy the logic of competition and the market? Doesn't it hand an advantage to competitors, who can use the code ready-made?

“Strong competition produces a good product for the end customer,” Tenko says. “We've been weakest as a company when we didn't have strong competition. So if your competitors get stronger—thanks to your code or anything else—you'll get stronger too.” And he adds: “You can't only take. If you do, at some point the apples on the tree run out. If you don't plant a new one, there won't be any left, not only for your children but for you yourself.”

A vivid metaphor, wouldn't you say?

Coding It Forward

This effort to “plant” in the soil of the community proves extremely valuable. At first it's hard—it takes discipline and a different way of working, but the effort pays off. And as the results become visible, the team's confidence grows too. They see that a (then) small Bulgarian company can contribute to the global software ecosystem.

Then comes time for the next step. Tenko and his colleagues start asking: “What else useful can we do?” They want to build on the idea of giving. And so the company's first internal initiative is born: before a Christmas party, Dima (the same colleague with the pancakes) suggests that everyone together support a meaningful cause. She has prepared a list of three ideas for the team to choose from—the company will give employees a chance to donate, and it will double the amount raised.

The result exceeds all expectations—they raise an unexpectedly large sum. They announce the three chosen causes, explain why they matter to society and set out the donation box. “We expected people to give 2–3 leva (about $1–1.70),” Tenko recalls, “and everyone was putting in 50, 100. We raised an impressive amount.

That's how we understood that the problem isn't that Bulgarians don't want to give, but that it's hard for them to do so. Dima had put in a huge amount of work, she had researched dozens of proposals and picked 3 of them. She had checked carefully and assessed exactly where a donation was not just needed but would have a lasting effect. Most people would find it hard to do that work on their own if they decided to give 5 or 50 leva to a good cause. Especially the element of sustainability,” Tenko stresses, “not just giving some money, but wanting something to happen in return for it. That's broadly missing here—people either don't trust, or don't know where to donate, or can't be bothered to check. And that leads to apathy and the nihilistic belief that nothing depends on us and that every cause is suspect.”

The Wrong Way Round

And so we arrive at today, when Tenko has even handed the day-to-day management of SiteGround over to his trusted team. Instead, he is active in running the Za Primer (“Set an Example”) Foundation, which has the important and ambitious goal of supporting causes that make Bulgaria a better place to live in a lasting way. Quite an impressive transformation, wouldn't you say? Among the foundation's main areas of work are education, sport and health.

And since we've touched on sustainability, it's no surprise that education gets particular emphasis. You may remember the Digital Stories series on children and technology—one of the few opinions that unite parents is that today's education system is out of step with the times we live in and needs serious change.

So why doesn't anything much change?

Tenko Nikolov has a firsthand answer: despite hundreds of proposals for changing the education system, very few have actually been implemented. And real change remains as far off as ever. The reason, in his view, isn't a lack of will or expertise, but that everything always runs into the same wall—the institutions.

“The bureaucratic machine is so ossified that a handful of people can stop any initiative,” he adds, and gives a telling example. Unhappy with the food his children get at school, he digs into the subject. It turns out that pupils' food is prepared according to the so-called School Meals Recipe Book, which hasn't been updated… since 1968!

Tenko's team notices that the solution isn't complicated: they propose hiring top chefs to update the recipe book. The condition is that the food mustn't get more expensive—a healthier menu has to be achieved within schools' existing budgets. “An apple instead of a sausage roll.”

The first problem is surprising and, once again, has to do with apples—this time not metaphorically at all. It turns out there aren't enough Bulgarian apples in the country to supply all the schools. The bigger problem, though, is once again the will for lasting change at the national level.

An Insight into INSAIT

Here, however, comes a particularly important and telling example that big change is possible, even in education. I mean the most successful and promising venture in this field in Bulgaria, which would not have been possible in its current form if Tenko Nikolov in particular hadn't put his trust in it.

Sometimes solutions come from unexpected places—through remarkable people with vision and courage. Like Prof. Martin Vechev, well known to readers of Digital Stories.

One of the most important components in building a complex structure like INSAIT is attracting the best artificial intelligence scientists in the world here, to Bulgaria. Beyond state funding, this requires additional money for part of these people's salaries, especially the first ones to start at INSAIT, since they set the level for everyone who follows.

Tenko remembers how, halfway through his meeting with Prof. Martin Vechev, he interrupted the professor and said: “Even if you do a third of what you're telling me, it will change our country a great deal. Tell me, how can we help?”

SiteGround's founders were among the first to put their trust in this ambitious undertaking, and to date they are INSAIT's largest donors, with more than €6 million. This money has been key to bringing some of the world's most renowned artificial intelligence scientists to Sofia in person (such as Prof. Luc Van Gool). Although today INSAIT is supported by the entire Bulgarian ecosystem and by companies such as Google, Amazon, Toyota and many others, SiteGround's initial and continuing support has been fundamental to INSAIT's success.

“You have to be a little crazy and believe that even the impossible is possible. Clearly, without a little madness, it just won't work for us,” Tenko sums up.

Setting an Example, for Example

Can this story be repeated in other fields? Tenko believes it can. “There are Bulgarian professors at top universities. People need to have the desire to do something here. Where there's a will, there's a way.”

It's no accident that his foundation is called Set an Example. Good is “contagious”—all it takes is to show that something can be done, and it will give wings to everyone who follows.

What does someone like Tenko Nikolov dream of today? As it turns out, the same thing I do. “I dream that my children will want to stay in Bulgaria. Right now it's a strange period, and a lot has to change for that to happen.”

But I believe that when people like him set themselves dreams and goals like that, it can't help but happen. It's time for a little more optimism, for reclaiming the public conversation, for shared goals.

And besides, it's true—a person is as big as their dreams. Especially if they have the courage to follow them…

The internet keeps connecting us, and the internet keeps dividing us. But how many parts of our lives have we handed over to technology? We rarely stop to think about it. And the Christmas holidays are the perfect moment to do just that. If you've grown a little weary of festive emotions and laden tables, I've prepared a special Digital Story for you.

Today's heroine found love on the internet. That unexpected spark online took her to England, where she built a happy family. Until, at some point, she and her husband decided they wanted to escape… from a society in which everything happens online and human contact is a relic of the past.

Individual stories make up our shared history, and Daniela Radkova's tale ends in a place that is very special to that shared history. And with causes that are beautifully symbolic, especially for the holidays.

Farewell

How many women do you know who can parachute? Until recently, I didn't know any either. Daniela grew up in the Rhodopes, the mountains of southern Bulgaria, and her path led her to… a military unit in Plovdiv, where she trained as a paratrooper. She says the scariest jump isn't the first one but the second—when you already know what's coming.

The scariest leap into the unknown, however, came later, long after she had left the unit. After a painful breakup with her ex-boyfriend, she was killing time on the internet. Those were the days when Facebook “farms” were all the rage, and she topped them off with movies and random chats with all sorts of people. Only to run into, by chance… a colleague from her army days whom she had not liked one little bit. In the meantime he had moved to England. They exchanged a few words… and then the road carried them so far that it led to three sons.

The small talk grew into an endless chat, and having set out on that road, Daniela walked it to the end. “He suggested, ‘Why don't you come to me in England?’ And, to my own surprise, I answered, ‘Why not?’”

To My First Love

In England, the adventure was only beginning. At first the young couple worked on a mushroom farm. Work permits were required back then, and once they got them, they decided to move on. Their next job was at a kitchen cabinet factory… But can you picture former soldiers, people who had jumped out of planes professionally, standing in one spot doing repetitive, monotonous tasks? Exactly. You can't.

“We were at the second-largest kitchen company in England. We advanced enormously, they respected us, but at some point… the same thing over and over, cabinet, cabinet, cabinet. I told my husband I had to change jobs because I couldn't take it anymore.”

A friend suggested she start as a delivery driver for Amazon. Before long, the pioneer of e-commerce welcomed Daniela's husband too.

“But at some point in England we fell into the same rut as everyone else. You sit on the couch, go to the water company's website, pay for your water, pay for your electricity, your gas. You need pens, you go to the site and order. You need a TV, you go and order… At one point I realized we had no social life at all! We had turned into little robotic figures that went to work.”

And so we arrive at Covid and the times when delivery drivers were the only people who could move among others with relative freedom. (How quickly we forget such supposedly unforgettable things!)

A Dark Cloud Looms

“It was eerie and awful,” Daniela recalls. “Only us drivers were on the road—everyone else was locked inside. At some point I felt I simply couldn't bear it. We had turned into robots!”

“That's when life online grew even more. People started working from home. Every day you pass the same house, drop off some parcel, and watch the children's room disappear, renovations begin, and in its place appears a room with a monitor. Then two monitors, three. People began shutting themselves in completely. They even stopped getting dressed and stayed in their loungewear. They stopped going out. Social life stopped. You pass by every day and see it changing before your eyes. We decided it wasn't for us. That we wouldn't cope with this digital way of life.”

Right around then their second son was born. The parents knew they didn't want him growing up in a robotic daily routine, and that it was time to return to their roots. The family made the big decision in 2022 and parachuted back home, 12 years after they had flown off to Albion.

Patriot

You've probably noticed (ChatGPT certainly would, if you asked it) that the subheadings in this piece are the titles of poems by perhaps our best-known poet—Hristo Botev, the nineteenth-century revolutionary—whose poems, for all that, can be counted on our fingers and toes.

It is Botev's hometown, Kalofer, a small town at the foot of the Balkan Mountains, that is home to Daniela and her family today. The now former (or perhaps future, who knows?) paratrooper runs a little souvenir shop, where we are greeted by a colorful jumble of just about everything except… the most typical local “product”—Kalofer lace. The town's shopkeepers have agreed not to sell the most iconic item, because doing so would drastically cut the number of people who visit the museum devoted to the traditional craft.

Daniela started with an online business, then noticed that the web was full of handmade crafts that simply had nowhere to be seen outside the web.

My Prayer

Back in England she had set up a page for handmade baby accessories. “The problem with online shopping was that you couldn't see these things physically anywhere. Online stores are a great opportunity, but you can't always choose exactly what you want just by looking at a picture. I wanted to make a shop you could walk into, see things, touch them. Look at the colors, lay the patterns side by side.”

So she decided to open a baby shop in Kalofer. But somehow, naturally, slowly and inexorably… souvenirs crowded out the baby accessories. People come to the center of this National Revival–era town and, as they stroll, look for fridge magnets, wooden spoons, cutting boards. The baby shop became a souvenir shop. It still takes orders from people who remember the page from her England days, but that has taken a back seat.

Kalofer had another surprise in store for her. After her eldest son was conceived following a long struggle and with the help of IVF, and her second child arrived at the very height of Covid, again with the help of medication… a third young man unexpectedly joined the family.

And so today the digital detox is a fact. Daniela, who met her husband online and went through the technological alienation on the island, now enjoys a healthy life surrounded by relatives in a small town.

In the Tavern

Why Kalofer of all places? Daniela's husband comes from this picturesque mountain town. And “a person born in the Balkan Mountains or by the sea can never tear themselves away from them,” she says.

Today, being far from the big city helps Daniela and her husband be happy. But that's not all: thanks to those very same technologies, they can do all kinds of things, including… successfully completing a distance-learning degree in England.

Daniela is adamant that education shouldn't be a reason that stops people from returning to smaller towns. “Right now the big brother goes to English lessons, swimming, even football in Karlovo. If one day he decides to study somewhere else, let him try. There are rented rooms. People have always survived that way, but today we seem to have spoiled our children a bit.

At 14 I went to Plovdiv, on my own, to a rented room with another girl who, until then, had lived in the same little village in the Rhodopes, with landlords—an old granny and grandpa. It's nothing so dramatic; back then so many kids managed that way.”

To Her

“In a small town everyone's opinion is always being heard. One person says you're good, and everyone thinks you're good. One says you're bad—everyone thinks you're bad. Someone is always gossiping about what you do, why you do it, how you do it. But that's where the bad part ends. In Kalofer you'll never go hungry or thirsty, or be stranded on the road. Someone will come, help you, take you home. Whenever you need something, even if the shops are closed, there are always neighbors and people to count on. You have work to do—everyone will rush over to help. Call a neighbor at 10 p.m. and they'll give you milk, rice—whatever you've run out of and need.

“I'm very glad we went back to the old ways,” Daniela says. “I really like that more and more people are doing it. They realize they need to dig their hands into the soil and how much energy that gives you. Childhood is completely different here, too. I got out of the habit of locking the door long ago—there's simply no need. My child goes out to play, a whole gang moves around in a swarm, and they have lunch wherever is closest—at our place or someone else's.

In Kalofer it's as if time stopped 30 years ago; modernization is creeping in slowly but can't push out the traditional. There's one ATM in town, and survival is largely a matter of barter. I give you eggs, you give me milk. But there's the other side too—just now an old granny left me a little money ‘to treat myself,’ because I spent 30 minutes ordering things for her from Temu for a serious sum. In the end she was so pleased she didn't know how to thank me.”

Struggle

In recent years Daniela has kept finding causes to devote part of her time to.

Today she is focusing her efforts mainly on two: renovating the town's neglected cinema and getting new books for the town library.

She doesn't meet many kindred spirits along the way, but, as she puts it herself, sometimes happiness loves silence.

She is determined not to give up until she secures a comfortable hall where her children, and those of the whole town, can enjoy a movie without traveling dozens of kilometers. And also to bring back children's and parents' interest in books. The little town's library definitely needs new and interesting titles.

Her family is skeptical, her acquaintances are puzzled, but she is set on reaching her goal and giving the town its new treasures. And Christmas is the perfect moment…, when even the most devoted digital adepts step away from their consoles to share stuffed cabbage rolls with their relatives. If you haven't yet found a good deed to do for the holidays, Daniela's causes are definitely a fine opportunity.

Quizzes, charity auctions, initiatives… Daniela has taken on no small number of ventures, and we can all help her, little by little and hand in hand. Let's look for the beauty of the analog together. If her story has filled you with the urge to help, you'll find more about the ways you can do it here.

Sometimes life online throws up cases we could never dream up, however loose we let our imagination run. Picture it, almost as in a Kafka novel: suddenly ads from Chinese stores start popping up for you… offering you something you know perfectly well you created yourself.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Our hero today is not called Gregor Samsa but Atanas Mihalchev. A photographer, artist and teacher, he has lived in Canada for three decades, developing his art. Besides his paintings—in a colorful palette of styles—he sells small, cleverly designed origami kits for children online, kits that stimulate imagination and dexterity. Kits which suddenly… turn out not to be his.

Have we really found good enough mechanisms to protect copyright online? Will today's hero manage to get back what was stolen from him? Will justice prevail?

Just for a Moment

“I am free and that is why I am lost,” Kafka writes in a work that is not The Metamorphosis. Life online is something like that. The network was born to give us the freedom to communicate, to express ourselves, to hold in our cupped hands the whole sea of information on our planet, so crowded with history and people. And at the same time it made us feel lost, while freedom gradually turned into more of a declaration than a right.

Take copyright, for example—a subject that, alas, in our part of the world has never quite found a good enough definition, one under which writers, translators, photographers, artists, musicians and all other creators are not only adequately paid for their work but can also rest assured that anyone who uses their works without permission will get what they deserve.

Yes, in some parts of the world things are often different, but… the world is an ever-smaller village, and the rules are ever harder to find. Not to mention the context of the coming artificial intelligence and the unexpected ethical dilemmas lurking around the corner, waiting to hit us with full force.

This Wild, Wild West

Atanas Mihalchev graduated in animation directing in Prague. When the changes of 1989 came to Bulgaria, he decided to try his luck abroad—he lived in France for several years, then he, his wife and their two daughters found their future in Canada. They chose the French-speaking part, since they managed better in that language, and since 1993 they have found in Montreal a place where they feel at home. Even when temperatures drop to -15°C, as the artist shows me while we talk.

At first Atanas worked as a graphic design teacher, then he began revealing the secrets of photography to students at the University of Montreal. Since 2015 he has been, as he puts it, “a happy pensioner who deals only with art and doesn't think about business and money.”

Ah, that certainly sounds like an idyll—I wish it on everyone reading this!

But since we started with Kafka, it's clear the idyll will soon change. Which way, I wonder?

Paper Doesn't Burn

I'm repeating myself, but as a happy pensioner (yes, in Bulgaria that sounds strange) Atanas discovered a new art form that drew him in. He often comes to Bulgaria, and the organizers of the annual paper festival in Sofia showed him how many creative possibilities lie in that direction.

“Today paper is seen as a material that works for everything—monumental art, sculptures, all kinds of installations. I started putting more energy there and discovered what an interesting direction paper toys are,” says the artist.

And while we all know what origami is—figures created by folding—in this case it's more precisely kirigami: “kiri” means cutting, and that's exactly how the fruits are made.

In fact, Atanas's interest in the subject was born 40 years ago. During his studies he was given the assignment of designing a paper toy representing a profession, and he created cut-and-glue firefighters. Later they grew into a series, ready to be printed and to appear in Bulgarian bookstores along with tropical and polar animals, but that never happened because of a shortage of paper.

The story continues in Canada. “I showed the paper figures and my colleagues all started persuading me that I should sell them. That's how my company, Jouets Hartiatoys, was born in 2003.
The firefighters put on new Canadian uniforms, and a new collection joined the sets—Farm. Now we offer 20 collections in total.”

Cut and Paste

That's how he came up with the idea of designing kirigami kits for children. It would be good for kids to get up from their computers now and then, and they would be bringing to life something that interests them… So a series of colorful kits on various themes was born. One of the most successful is about fruits and vegetables—children assemble paper watermelons, carrots, pears…

Atanas showed his designs at the New York Toy Fair, one of the biggest events of its kind in the world. And he met serious interest! He signed a contract with a company called Bornelund, named after its Swedish founder, which owns 64 toy stores. It took on the task of distributing the Bulgarian artist's kirigami.

“In the last few years parents have begun to realize that computer games have a neuroticizing effect, and they've started looking again for half-forgotten handicrafts,” says Atanas. “To assemble the paper figures you need skill in cutting, three-dimensional thinking and patience in gluing. Our products aren't toys in the literal sense but a family activity—parents can help with the cutting, and the younger children with the gluing. That's really the philosophy of our product: to bring today's hurried parents and their children together for a few unforgettable moments.”

Borrowing

A happy pensioner, as has now been made clear twice, he got down to work and quickly produced a pilot run of 1,000 kits. Over the following years the origami sets appeared in stores; many of them found their future “assemblers,” while others had to wait…

“There's a mild ban at home—they tell me to stop developing this thing because I've filled the garage with boxes,” the artist smiles. The kits appeared on more websites; their creator himself offered them at Christmas fairs and events, meeting children who would delight in them.

The origami sets found their fans and sold well, until… suddenly, while working at his computer and searching for the online stores that carried his kits, Atanas saw on AliExpress exactly 9 of his collections, including the “paper fruits,” and at an astonishingly low price. But… while they were his, they had been ever so slightly altered, reworked in a rather strange way.

“I look… Good Lord, what is this? These people don't hold back at all.” The origami sets were practically the same, but someone had gone to the trouble of making them look a little different.

“They rephotographed my picture of the assembled products, redrew it, cut it out, and still the whole composition is the same, one to one. The shapes themselves were scanned and redrawn, you can see it very clearly. Here and there there are different lines and arrows—someone put in some effort—but that doesn't change the fact that they stole the core idea.”

Herr Samsa, are you still with us?

For a Lousy Dollar

Good ideas are in the air. But aren't we supposed to respect the author in modern times (at least until ChatGPT came along)? Incidentally, AliExpress lists no author for the origami kits.

So what do you do in a situation like this? “I don't know if it's worth taking any action, because it's an endless runaround. When I looked into it, it turned out that to start a lawsuit you need $20,000, and there's no guarantee I'd win,” Atanas continues.

According to John Grisham, that wasn't quite the idea behind the American justice system, was it? As far as I remember, he too is suing OpenAI for using his works without permission to train its next artificial intelligence models…

The composition of the Chinese version of the origami is absolutely identical. Atanas ordered a kit and was impressed: the quality of both the paper and the printing is good. Except it costs… one dollar. Whatever he does, there's no way he can produce a kit that costs less than 10. And one more thing—he used a promotion and shipping was free, something impossible for a Western store with such a small amount.

Another interesting subject to ponder against the backdrop of trade wars and today's global economic disputes between the world powers.

A Borrowed Life

“Even if you win, they may pay nothing, because they'll say: we have no money. After all, we have to realize that in China some people live on $2 a day,” says Atanas.

Gradually he got used to the idea that his works had been stolen. The online store lets you report that something is wrong with a product on offer, and he did so. So far there has been no reply.

And one more thing. He tells himself that if they copy him, he must be good at what he does. “Gradually I came to feel very flattered, I don't hide it!”

Though in Canada he has grown used to the rules of authorship being respected. “Yes, every little photo carries the author's name, the author gets paid… The other thing simply isn't in their heads! I've asked them what would happen if a police officer stopped me and I slipped $20 into his pocket. ‘Come on, no such thing!’ What do you mean, no such thing? ‘He'd arrest you on the spot and lock you up for bribing a public official.’”

Great Minds

Today looks unthinkable by yesterday's standards. And the future is an ephemeral fiction—I say this as someone who has been gathering Digital Stories for four years now, trying to peek into the near future while knowing full well that it's impossible.

And at the same time it's essential. Civilizations compete, artificial intelligence achieves things that were unbelievable until recently. And we remain humans, for whom the only way to find solutions to big problems is to talk them through.

What is a good idea worth?

Where will authorship and the role of the creator go in times when algorithms create not only indistinguishably but also “better” than most of us?

How will such different civilizations' views of the future meet?

Will we reach the moment when even the West has to sacrifice part of its personal freedom for the sake of the common good?

Personally, I look for the answer in stories. Sometimes the small stories are the most powerful. And you—how would you react if someone or something “created” what you had already created? Is the role of the human as author gone? I'd love to hear what you think.

Viktor Asenov never stops running, always onward toward the next record to conquer. If you happened to come across the remarkable Digital Story of the blind long-distance runner, it hardly left you indifferent. Because it holds many lessons, and it is also a reason to continue the conversation with Viktor. About the everyday hardships of Bulgarians with visual (and other) impairments. About how we should treat them, whether we are attentive enough, whether in Bulgaria we look after their rights.

The last question is rhetorical. I'm sure you, too, have noticed that the buses in Sofia are adapted for people with disabilities. But have you ever seen anyone actually get on one in a wheelchair? And what about websites? Today everything happens online, technology makes life easier for all of us, and it could be so useful to the people who need it most.

But it isn't. How can that change? Viktor and I talked it over and came up with five concrete ideas. For me at least, each of them is a reason to stop and think, so that I, too, can feel useful. I hope it's the same for you…

1. In the Internet's Closet

“In my view, website accessibility is an extremely important topic, and companies across the board downplay it,” says Viktor. It is also a topic that will be talked about a great deal in the coming months—I'm telling you this as a journalist, but also as a front-end programmer.

The European Accessibility Act is a document that sets out why and exactly how all websites operating within the EU must be built so that they are accessible to everyone who opens them with the help of screen readers. This technology is used by people with visual impairments and lets them make full use of today's websites—as long as certain rules are followed. If the programmers building the sites don't pay the necessary attention, the sites become awkward and even incomprehensible for people who open them through screen readers.

Soon that will definitely be the exception. The deadline for websites to comply with the requirements expires in June 2025. The fines are serious, and the topic will come up more and more, since websites often have to make a serious effort to meet the requirements.

But why does it matter? I'll let Viktor explain:

“Right now websites don't follow these rules at all! Banks, shops, across the board. People like me have no other way to use a given site. Technology keeps improving, developing…, and I open the page and can't even use my online banking.”

“For people who aren't IT specialists, I'll explain it like this. We have a warehouse full of stuff, crammed with everything you can think of. We go in to look for something and start rummaging chaotically, because we haven't labeled the shelves and sections properly. In the ‘plumbing’ section we find drawers full of bolts. You dig through the piles and keep pulling out things you don't need. It's the same with improper labeling on websites—everything has to be clearly described: buttons, forms, headings.

For example, we have a form to fill in—first name, middle name, last name, year of birth. If you land in the ‘middle name’ field and its label is somewhere far away, the reader has no way of orienting you. It becomes almost impossible to fill in the whole form.”

Or take images. Obviously, the first thought of any website owner is not to describe every picture so that it's clear what it shows to visitors using screen readers. Yet this is not only extremely useful for them, it's not at all difficult—it can even be automated. As long, of course, as we make a certain effort.

“It matters for people like me, and it's wonderful that companies will have to start following the rules,” says Viktor. “I'm sure plenty of programmers will say to themselves: ‘Do I really have to? Why should I fix some old mess?’ Well, try it. Take a screen reader and you'll quickly see how unpleasant it is to land on a site where the rules aren't followed. And how many pages that applies to in full…”

Sometimes it's hard to judge how well a given site meets the requirements; in other cases, serious inconvenience arises when more complex problems have to be fixed. So I'll take this opportunity to recommend the software company I work for—AIOPSGROUP, which has put together a team with more than a few interesting digital stories (which, of course, I'll tell soon), including people with visual impairments and experienced specialists in precisely this field. The idea is to help exactly when accessibility matters (more on the topic here).

2. Digital Red Tape

After that minute of fully deserved and deliberate advertising, let's go back to accessibility, but in its other forms.

Today we all spend so much of our time online, delegating more and more of our lives to computers. Technology allows for greater accessibility; people with various disabilities can use it ever more fully… but sometimes it takes only a small, thoughtful effort.

Viktor says one such example is voting machines. They aren't designed for the needs of people with visual impairments, and it wouldn't be hard at all to make them so. That way, blind people could vote fully on their own, without having to ask for help and without the risk of voting for someone other than who they had chosen.

In Bulgaria, at least, elections come around often enough… so maybe it wouldn't be hard to give this some thought?

According to Viktor, the same goes for ATMs. All too often the chosen solutions have the user enter data on the screen itself—no buttons, no keypads. Convenient, easy, but… not for people with visual impairments. “It's the same with card terminals,” says Viktor. “The problem is entering the PIN. Usually I have to go and tell it to the cashier so they can enter it for me. It's happened to me—I have people I trust. We go to the storeroom because the front is full of people, and then it turns out there's no signal back there… We enter the amount, go to the back, enter the PIN, come out and pray it connects so the payment goes through. That's modern, but it isn't accessible. It's a problem for me, and for the seller too. Of course, technology is a plus for people, but sometimes it's introduced without proper thought,” Viktor sums up.

Sadly, in his view, there are also serious problems with blind people's access to innovative technologies that could make their lives dramatically fuller.

At the social assistance directorates, they apply for high-tech assistive devices—for example, glasses that describe the surroundings and help with orientation. Or braille displays and printers—all technologies that are very useful but that many can't afford: the glasses cost 8,000–10,000 leva (about $4,400–5,500), a braille printer from 12,000 to 20,000 leva. “So far, so good, but somebody is clearly mocking us. The directorates keep inventing new documents, the conditions change all the time. Right now I'm working precisely on saving this program, otherwise we'll lose the European Union funding,” says Viktor.

3. It Never Hurts to Ask

To be honest, I don't know how to avoid making mistakes in the way I treat people with disabilities. How can I be useful if I meet them? How can I avoid offending them? Maybe you ask yourself similar questions, so Viktor's answer may be useful to you too:

“It's not hard, people don't make any big mistakes. What's important to know is that it's always good to ask: ‘Do you need help?’ If yes, you stand next to me and offer your left elbow. I don't insist on it—if I need help, I'll come and ask you myself, because I'm more of the blunt, no-nonsense type. But a lot of other people don't dare. It's always good if you just ask.

The normal thing is to say when the light is green and when it's red. If you see someone with a guide dog, under no circumstances touch it by the leash before asking whether you may. I, for instance, will let you pet him—my dog will jump up, be happy, want to sniff you, pay attention to you. But there are cases where this can lead to serious problems.

Ask, people! Just ask! Don't worry that you'll blurt out something silly!

The other day a woman stopped me: ‘Could you give me directions in the neighborhood—how do I get out onto Botevgradsko?’ (a major boulevard in Sofia). I stood next to her and pointed: if you turn that way, you'll come out on Todorini Kukli Street. She was obviously having trouble finding her way, so I gave her directions.

There are people who panic when they strike up a conversation with me and only then notice that I'm blind. Relax, I'll explain, I'll even point you the right way. I, for one, will certainly not be offended.”

Talking more, asking more… isn't that the way not only to be useful to people facing various difficulties, but also to solve some of the big problems we all face as a society?

4. Staying on the Line

Moving offline, I can't help asking Viktor, as someone who has traveled quite a lot, what he thinks of Sofia's urban environment. I can guess what the answer will be, and it doesn't surprise me. He has been to quite a few countries in Western Europe—Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, France. He says that although conditions in Bulgarian cities are gradually improving, we are still very far behind them. Still, it's much more convenient in Sofia than in Nepal. “There are places worse than us for urban accessibility… But if we're going to compare ourselves with the Nepalese, that doesn't seem okay to me. There are no traffic lights there, no pedestrian crossings, nothing,” says Viktor.

One of the biggest possible improvements is laying tactile guide lines in the pavement. Tiles, or adhesive strips, with gentle parallel ridges that help people with disabilities get around safely.

How do they work? The lines lead in such a way that a person with a white cane can rest it against them and follow them to a given destination. They alternate with raised dots where there's a fork, and braille signs describing which way leads where.

They would be very useful not only on the street but in shops as well. “This is done abroad and it's definitely a big plus. We're not going to close the mall and rip up the entire floor! These guide lines really work and don't bother anyone,” says Viktor.

5. Out Pops a Dog

A big topic that, according to Viktor, doesn't get talked about enough is guide dogs.

First of all, it's important to know that they should be allowed absolutely everywhere—into a laboratory, a dentist's office, a shop, and every kind of vehicle. There is only one exception, and that's an intensive care operating room. The dogs are specially trained, and it's important that they be admitted everywhere. Yet Viktor says it very often happens that he is refused, and that people make trouble for him in all sorts of circumstances.

These dogs go through very serious, specialized training so that they stay calm and can cope with the complex urban environment, which was not designed with them in mind.

That's why they're trained in Sofia. The aim is for them not to be frightened by loud noises, to know unusual surfaces, to get used to all kinds of vehicles.

“Our dogs are trained to walk even where there's no sidewalk, because that happens often here. Once I was present when colleagues from Australia came to the only guide dog school. And they were astonished, because they didn't expect to encounter horse carts, missing sidewalks, garbage bins on the sidewalks, parked cars. Afterward they said that if the dogs can cope in these conditions, they are definitely among the best in the world.”

“The guide dog school is my great cause,” adds today's hero. “There's only one in the country, and it's funded solely by sponsorship. All over the world such schools are funded by the state, but in Bulgaria, unfortunately, the state has abdicated this duty.”

If you, too, think this cause is important, you can help in various ways. For example, foster families for guide dogs are constantly being sought.

To become one, it's enough to live in Sofia and be able to keep a dog, with no children under 10 in the home. Once or twice a month, on weekends, the foster family has to take the dog to training. Otherwise, it's good for the dog to be walked as much as possible and in as many places as possible—if there's also a cat in the home, that's a plus, because your guest will learn not to be startled by this natural irritant either. It's a plus if the building has an elevator.

And so… it turns out it isn't that hard to be useful to one another. And sometimes small steps can help people with visual impairments a great deal. I couldn't find reliable data on their exact number, but there are definitely more than 10,000 of them in Bulgaria.

And the first step is so easy! Just think. Just ask…

To run until you beat yourself. Sixty kilometers on the steep slopes of Pirin, the rugged mountain range in Bulgaria’s southwest, marathons, ultramarathons on several continents. To ride a bike 600 kilometers along the entire Bulgarian bank of the Danube. And to find the bike-and-run loop around Vitosha, the mountain that towers over Sofia, known as “Vitosha 100” and a favorite challenge of hardcore programmers, “a race for parquet-floor runners.”

That is our hero today—Viktor Asenov, who loves to challenge himself, to run, to overtake and to show what is possible. He graduated in social pedagogy but never managed to build a career, disappointed by the way we in Bulgaria treat people with disabilities.

We can learn a lot from today’s digital hero, so we meet him and ride around Sofia. To talk about the challenges life throws at us and the ones we have to set ourselves.

Did I forget to mention that he is blind? But that doesn’t stop him from chasing records. Or from chasing his dreams…

Now Look…

We are strolling around Sofia, as I said… I just tell him where I need to end up, and he adjusts his earphones, lightly touches his phone, and by the time I’ve opened my navigation app, I can already hear him dictating the ideal route to me, how to get to the bus stop. Then we are quickly on board, and his faithful companion—the Labrador—settles down at his feet.

Sofia’s buses at rush hour can be a challenge for even the most cool-headed passenger. From the colorful company, through the far-too-close personal contact, to the characteristic smells. ChatGPT could write a novel if it took a ride on the 604, but Viktor, who is impressed by nothing, deserves a novel far more.

Because he has seen so much! Ugh, seen… I’ve always found it hard when I have to think about how to be considerate toward someone—is it the same for you? He has never seen anything, at least not in the banal sense of the verb. He was born with severe visual impairments, barely able to make out the shapes of nearby objects, and then even that faded. Today he can only tell whether he is in a dark room or whether a lamp is on. Because back when it mattered, medicine had not yet reached the possibilities it has today for helping people with problems like his.

“Blind by birth, loud and a fighter,”

he writes in one of the posts I came across. But how does he “write,” and where do I read it? I don’t read Braille, unfortunately… But he uses technology to the full—he writes, reads, finds his way, fights, and, as became clear right at the start, can do a great deal more.

For example? Well, bringing home a freezer. From Pazardzhik, a town some 100 kilometers from Sofia. By BDZh, the Bulgarian State Railways. Changing three means of transport. Needless to say, the freezer arrived straight at its destination—the right spot in the family kitchen.

Do you still think it’s worth grumbling when a loose paving tile splashes us on the sidewalk?

Run, Forrest, Run

Actually, it is worth it. Not to grumble, but to not get used to problems. To try to improve things, to change them. Not to resign ourselves.

The rest is vanity. Viktor marvels at how exactly we decide what deserves the public’s attention.

“People get far more excited about things they’ve seen on television or heard are dangerous. And other situations, which are objectively much harder but unfamiliar to them, they play down.”

Fear has big eyes? Something like that. Viktor is surprised that when he crossed the spectacular Koncheto ridge in Pirin, the media reported it as a very serious achievement. Yet when he managed to run his first 43 kilometers in the mountains without a break, on routes that lead over steep rock, nobody paid any attention.

Is it hard to find things hard… or is it hard to define what’s hard?

Nothing is hard, if you listen to Viktor (except, perhaps, the battle with bureaucracy and the fight for reasonable conditions in which people with visual impairments can manage in Bulgaria. But we’ll get to that too).

Will I Run Away from You?

“Danube Ultra” is one of the latest achievements of Invictus Viktor, as his Facebook page is called—“the Unconquerable.” There, he says, nothing is complicated—“you just turn the pedals.” I disagree. I ride a bike all the time, and it takes me two or three months to clock up 600 kilometers, the length of the longest cycling tour in Bulgaria, which he completed on a tandem bicycle with the help of a partner who steers. That isn’t enough for him, though; his next dream is to cover the same distance in just two days and nights.

His running achievements are even more impressive. In recent years Viktor has become well known in running circles for his drive, for his will to keep going. To make it possible, two “pacers” join him—runners in front of and behind him, in constant contact with him, who help him navigate obstacles, where they are and how to avoid them. He constantly hears “rock on the left,” “sharp boulder straight ahead”… That’s how he gets around Vitosha, Pirin…, and also Munich, even the heights of Nepal.

But every run has a start. And preparation. Until fifth grade Viktor attended a specialized school for children with visual impairments. Then his father decided that this way he would never learn to cope with problems and enrolled him in the neighborhood school. At first it was tough—he was used to being treated specially, to getting attention… “Then I pulled myself together. I couldn’t afford to fail, and gradually I started making friends. A mainstream school teaches you things you can’t pick up while staying among people who share the same fate.

There you learn that people will mock you for your disability, that you’ll get help or sympathy. And that helps you grow as a person, get used to life as it is once school is over.”

At that time Viktor lived with his grandmother and grandfather, who helped him with homework where he needed it. They often went to their country house, where his grandfather taught him to use a saw and his grandmother taught him to ride a bike. These skills soon proved useful in an unexpected way.

A View from the Mountain

Because… Viktor met love. He remembers very well the date when he first talked on Skype with the girl who would later become his wife—Kalina, who is also blind. February 21, 2012; he was amazed that anyone could eat ice cream in the middle of winter. She, in turn, wondered how he could saw wood and ride a bike without being able to see.

“Three days later I went to visit her, and on February 29 she came to my school on an exchange visit.

That’s where the teasing started—that I should take her to a pastry shop, for coffee… and that’s how, in physics class, we became a couple.”

Around that time Viktor found out by chance that he had spent his first five years in a home for abandoned children. Back then it was common practice to advise the parents of blind children to leave them, because the institutions would take better care of them. But later his parents took him back. Viktor took the news hard, but gradually came to terms with it.

Why I Ran Away

In 2018 Viktor went to seek the advice of a doctor with extensive experience treating corneal problems. He told him that he roamed the mountains and rode a bike. And he was advised to stop, because it could only harm him.

The young man shut himself up at home, got stuck in front of the computer, stopped running and riding. He lost himself, lost his sense of purpose. Until one evening, when they were away from the city, his wife suggested the two of them go out on their bikes, and through the forest at that. “I was riding ahead of her and calling out to her, because she wasn’t confident enough to go fast down a dirt road knowing there were pine trees along the sides. We’d gotten thoroughly muddy after two hours of night riding through puddles, and she asked me:

‘Now tell me, does not being able to see stop you from riding a bike?’ Only then did I realize what had happened. That the first victory is in your head.”

The first… and the most important. And the hardest. Since then Viktor has known that he must not stop. He progressed in running quickly and unexpectedly. At first he ran only with his guide dog after the bus, then decided to try something more serious. He climbed alone from Knyazhevo, a Sofia neighborhood at the foot of Vitosha, up to the Kopitoto peak. A passing hiker saw him and invited him to try a 5-kilometer run in Borisova Gradina, Sofia’s oldest park.

Some time later he and his wife went their separate ways, but… that’s life sometimes.

Make Haste Slowly

“I resisted a bit, because the event seemed too crowded and showy to me, but I went. We ran it in 32 minutes. That’s how I got hooked on running, started finding races and little by little cutting my times.

I discovered by accident that besides being talkative, I’m apparently also fast.”

Then came his first half marathon, in Nesebar on the Black Sea coast. The running community took to him, he became popular and found it easier and easier to get pacers.

He says his toughest challenge so far has been in Pirin—66 km with 4.4 km of elevation change, constantly climbing and descending. “That course is the hardest in Bulgaria. I’ve done all sorts by now. With ‘Persenk 160,’ the difficulty is the duration. It lasts 40 hours; the best do it in just over 20 and don’t doze off at all—they reach the finish without sleeping.”

That isn’t possible for him; he and both pacers have to stay alert. The person running in front warns him about every obstacle ahead. Because there is still no technology good enough to do it, and that is one of the things Viktor can’t wait for.

The harder it is, the more interesting he finds it and the more he enjoys it. Of the bike-and-run loop around Vitosha he says the only difficulty is not falling asleep; otherwise it’s “for parquet-floor runners.” Not like Pirin, which is marble and granite, constant obstacles and huge elevation changes.

What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye

“Lots of people around the world run city marathons; what interests me is the harder stuff. How on earth do we pull it off? Take the Sofia Marathon, for example. It’s flat, easy… yes, there are potholes, that’s the difference from other city marathons, but they’re nothing like Pirin.

If it isn’t hard, it’s boring. If there are difficulties, you start to think. That’s what makes it a challenge! That’s what makes you feel happy and alive!”

But… what keeps him running?

“On the one hand, the desire to show others! I know the possibilities are unlimited. People can outdo me and surpass me. I want other blind people to outdo me. And then I can ask myself: ‘Well, can’t I do better?’ There’s both—my inner competition with myself and, above all, the desire to provoke everyone else. I’ll help anyone who wants to improve on what I achieve, with my knowledge and experience.”

Mostly because in Bulgaria so many blind people, people with disabilities… and sighted people, and people without disabilities too, never think of inventing challenges for themselves, of setting high, supposedly unrealistic goals. Caught up in everyday life.

Stand Tall!

As for Viktor, he has quite a few such goals. He hasn’t given up the dream of having a child. Nor the dream of finding a job where he feels useful. Despairing of the system, he doesn’t think he has a future in education. Lately he has been doing massages; he found someone who built him a portable massage table he can carry to homes and offices. He hoists it onto his shoulder… and is ready for work. If you want a professional massage along with a conversation with a one-of-a-kind companion, write to him!

Meanwhile, he wouldn’t say no if someone trusted him with a permanent job. He has realized that a desk job is not for him. But he can organize, plan, discuss… I believe him unconditionally, not just because of the running, but because I see how he handles himself on the noisy bus, where people don’t know how to behave around him.

“I dream of finding a job. I want to be useful! But I want it to be something that involves movement. I can organize; I need something I can put my mind into. I love traveling and meeting new people.

Today I do massages in offices. That’s it, at least I have work. I love trying things, experimenting! Come on, people, let’s give it a try! We’ll find out whether it works or not. None of the things I’ve done so far would have been possible without trial and error.”

I don’t just hope—I’m certain someone will trust him. Capable people get nowhere… is the man who can conquer Pirin and Nepal really not going to conquer prejudice?

Up High, So I Can See You…

If a potential employer who will appreciate his skills is reading these lines, I’ll be glad to introduce you…

But I don’t have much time to think about it; Viktor is hurrying ahead with the dog. And setting his next supposedly impossible goals. “Danube Ultra,” not in five days but in under 48 hours.

As well as the bigger one. To create more opportunities for more and more people in a situation like his. We can all do this—make both the real world and the online one more accessible, more open to people with disabilities. That is exactly the topic Viktor is eager to lead us to in the next Digital Story…

This story is part of the first volume of Nashata Koleda (Our Christmas), an anthology edited by Zachary Karabashliev, featuring texts by 17 authors, among them Georgi Milkov, Ivan Landzhev and Nikolay Terziyski. The second collection—Our Christmas 2—includes 21 stories by authors such as Alek Popov, Zdravka Evtimova and Nikolay Terziyski, as well as one more Digital Story.

He’d had enough, and he raised the flaming match. He hadn’t done it since the days when everyone did it all the time. Back then he didn’t think twice either; he galloped from chimney to chimney, smoking away himself. Ah, it wasn’t that long ago at all, people forget so quickly…

He no longer smoked. He had tried every smokeless alternative with avocado flavor and a negative carbon footprint, and none of them was for him. And after every quick cigarette, the letters would start arriving the following Christmas: don’t bring presents to this home if you’re going to bring the smell along with them.

At that moment, smoking was the least of his problems.

He sensed that he was falling behind the pace of the times, that he wasn’t coping with his job. He tried, he made an effort, but something wasn’t right. He left the kids ever cooler gadgets, ever more perfect gaming keyboards; ever more awesome games; ever bigger and plushier stuffed animals.

Nobody cared. Clearly he was out of step with the language of the young, which had been the same ever since he’d taken up this profession. His presents sat there gathering dust instead of likes.

He didn’t feel he belonged on Christmas Day itself. In the whirl of work, it always turned out that something wasn’t right, that he had brought the wrong present, the one described in the letter as an “extension.” It was even worse in the kindergartens. They told him they wanted to become influencers, and he nodded mechanically. He also wondered why they were so keen on getting a phone to make viral videos with, when the last thing any normal person wants is to carry viruses back and forth at Christmas.

It was time for something to change. One of the elves pronounced: “Burnout.” What, was he a matchstick? They explained what it meant, but no, that wasn’t it… after all, he only worked one day a year. It wasn’t anxiety either: his profession was quite rare, with constant demand. There was no way artificial intelligence could take it over; they don’t make them with enough gravitas, they don’t even have beards.

Then it all became clear. He understood that he was behind the fashion or, as the elves explained to him, he had missed the trend. No sooner said than done: at last he would get onto the web, however much he disliked the cobwebs that used to block his way in the chimneys back in the day.

There had been no chimneys for a long time; he had to come in through the ducts of the range hood, and you can be sure it wasn’t easy for him. Times were different, but he gathered his strength to try to catch up with them.

***

At last he managed to get himself a decent connection. The speed kept limping along until he finally figured out what to do, and on the eve of yet another Christmas he wrote a letter to a colleague.

“I’m giving Santa Claus internet for Christmas,” read Elon Musk’s tweet, which was the plain truth, though the followers of the world’s richest oddball, for some reason, failed to grasp its meaning.

But how to begin? He didn’t learn much from the elves: they all had their eyes glued to their phones, and while he questioned them, they scraped at the screens with their index fingers, trying with undisguised annoyance to dodge his questions.

Still, it became clear to him that the road ran through the notorious social networks. And now he sat there, staring desperately at the monitor and smoking nervously…

At first he couldn’t wait to get started!

It didn’t work on the first try. He was led astray by an elf who deflected his questions with an attempt at a joke, and he ended up on Tinder. “I am the best friend of all children! I’m always happy when I find a way to make them feel good,” he wrote in his profile.

He was lucky: the FBI knew who they were dealing with. The agents didn’t arrest him; they simply explained where the error in translation lay, deleted the profile and rounded up everyone who had matched with him.

As for his attempt at OnlyFans, we won’t go into detail.

***

For a while he left the social networks and plunged into the world of modern—so he had heard—digital marketing. He watched a few online courses, defined his target audience, ran an analysis, set aside a budget. He decided to see how things stood when a person looked for presents online… He tried to offer his goods in such a way that anyone who searched the web for something for themselves would get it free of charge if they had been good during the year, but interest turned out to be feeble.

Every kid, small or big, could wish for whatever they liked, but AliExpress and thousands of other sites promised the same thing. He didn’t want money, but it turned out they wanted even less.

The next desperate attempt was Tik Tok. How could the kids not go wild when they saw fresh clips from the toy factory?!

He turned out to be a “boomer,” total “cringe.” His enthusiasm for speaking the language of the young crashed into a wall of hate.

***

In despair, he moved on to LinkedIn. The photo with a tie came out ridiculous, and his profile went unvisited. “I bring joy to children” stood no chance against “Entrepreneur, CEO, startup founder, game changer.”

“Why change games at all? Isn’t there something eternal about them?” he thought.

In the end, the good old man found himself on good old Facebook. The grandpa of social networks turned out to be the wholesome place where he found kindred spirits. He recalled old songs and jokes from those days and quickly fit into the atmosphere. He shared memes about how he had delivered the first present ordered online, by a child named Jesus who dreamed of a gaming joystick.

He spent more and more time online and polished up a professional profile too. “Presents on request, delivered down the chimney!” Dreams come true.

He added kids he knew; most of them had already become fathers and grandfathers, but he knew them in the light of long ago. He felt he was among kindred spirits. He scrolled and read how Goshko, to whom he had brought that cool little train, had become a train driver; Toshko had two sweet kids—like! Mitko, the one with the strange wishes, had gone into politics. And on, and on…

A few days later he took a new phone from the presents fund and never left the network. He would sometimes bump into scrolling elves in the kitchen.

At last he understood today’s people. It was a real thrill to know what everyone thought on the important issues, to surround yourself with kindred spirits, to learn the most interesting news right away.

***

The avalanche broke loose out of nowhere.

“Let us be kind!” he chimed in with a comment on yet another heated political dispute, and the wave swept over him within minutes. Soon he had the strength only to scroll in misery, chain-smoking, tugging nervously at his beard.

“Troll.” What do you mean, troll?! He knew quite a few trolls—you know how it is when you’re a fairy-tale creature. His profile had supposedly been created too recently, he had few photos, and in most of them he looked like Santa Claus. He didn’t take clear positions on the important issues of the day. He couldn’t possibly be for Lapland’s neutrality and for vaccines and wear red at the same time. He insulted people by calling them “elves.”

He looked like Marx—no, like Dostoevsky—no, he looked like nothing at all, the profile picture was stolen. There was no way he could be handing out presents for free; it was an active measure, a fifth column.

Of course he tried to defend himself, but his explanations remained a voice crying in the wilderness. It got even worse when his friends joined in, and the two camps locked jaws in a fierce argument over who Santa Claus was.

Little was left of his beard when the profile was finally blocked for good. He was just staring at the message when a new notification popped up on the screen to remind him what he had been doing exactly one year ago…

He dropped the phone and hurried to the sleigh. He sighed and settled in comfortably. Out of habit, he asked the reindeer to switch their mobile devices to airplane mode for the flight.

“Should I write to the other colleague—Mark—and tell him they’ve made a mistake? It worked out well with Elon…” he thought. But then he decided otherwise. “I have work to do.”

“In December I turn 63. I have seen a lot and lived through a lot. Instead of growing fewer, the problems keep multiplying. I've had two strokes, a malignant tumor and more. In those hard moments there was always one person beside me who, again and again, got me back on my feet and even gave me wings. That person is my wife, Toni. A few days ago I spontaneously wrote down my feelings for her in a few lines. Since I'm neither a musician nor a singer, I turned them into a song with the help of artificial intelligence.”

Powerful stories keep happening in the digital world—because of it, thanks to it or in spite of it. And just as our relationships as people quietly change with the development of technology, there are also those universal plots that survive through time and are reborn with new shades, new details and new inspiration.

More and more often, stories vanish into the feed, unnoticed in the rush of scrolling, of the news of the day. Do we have the time and the frame of mind to look for them? To settle in and read, to get carried away by them, while we hurry on, absorbed in the latest topic of the day?

This is a story about a love that came not very early, but just in time. About the luck and happiness of finding your person. About the dreams we put off, though we shouldn't. About the strength not to give up, even in the hardest moments and in the face of the toughest challenges. At least as long as you have the strongest support of all, that of the person beside you.

We Fall As We Walk

Chavdar Mihaylov looks like a lanky man, and his mind races, online or off. We have to talk over the internet for our chat. The day before, he had once again opened Dir.bg, a Bulgarian news portal, to read the news from Bulgaria—so he could get angry at it, as he puts it—but he stumbled upon the Digital Stories survey on where artificial intelligence is taking us. He decided to fill it in and added something of his own—the very lines with which this story began. And I got curious to learn more. For all of us to dive into his story and look for the lessons in it. Not so much about artificial intelligence as about the human, the universal.

“When I look at my story, I see that it really isn't a standard one. And, of course, an old saying fits it very well: it doesn't matter what happened, what matters is how you tell it,” Chavdar smiles.

His biography is the classic plot of the transition, Bulgaria's passage from communism to democracy. He graduated from the vocational school of photography, then earned a university degree in the same field, and the search for a better future led him to Germany… and so did love.

He was sent there for a training placement, where he fell for a girl from a mixed marriage of a Bulgarian man and a German woman.

Good Bye, Lenin!

It is 1989, change is in the air, and Chavdar, just back home, feels cramped. He starts hatching plans to get to America through Canada. One evening he goes to a friend, a waiter at the Novotel hotel in Sofia, and asks him for a loan of 2,000 leva, the Bulgarian currency, to buy the ticket he dreams of. Everything is worked out; the next day he is to pick up the money and arrange his departure… when the doorbell rings.

It is his student sweetheart from Germany. “She arrives and says, ‘I can't live without you.’ You know how these stories go, right? And I thought it over. ‘All right.’ We tried to live in Bulgaria, but it didn't work out. We lived with my parents, my brother and his family—nine people in a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. For six months we tried to make something happen, to get an apartment. But we realized it wasn't going to work, and we applied to go back to the GDR.”

So instead of the United States, our hero ends up in Germany. By the time they get the papers, though, they no longer need them: November 9, 1989, has come, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and a week later Chavdar and his wife begin their life in the newly united country.

I'd Write a Book of Poems, I'd Dedicate a Verse to You

There he works as a television cameraman, then he is invited to be a freelance photojournalist for an agency whose pictures are used by the biggest German media. He likes the work—they give him equipment to listen in on the police, the ambulance service and the fire brigade, so if anything important happens, he is first at the epicenter.

He gets so good at it that he sleeps with an earpiece in his ear and, from the tone of a conversation he overhears, quickly judges when there is reason to head to the next scene of the crime. He often gets there before the police and the doctors and captures all kinds of human dramas. He says it was then that he formed his main principle in life—above all, to do no one harm. If he is going to cover horrifying events and situations, it will be with delicacy and respect for the victims. At a terrible crash in which children died, for instance, he took a photo that became well known—a little doll lying next to the spilled blood. It was precisely this delicacy, however, that put an end to the job.

Chavdar comes upon a horrific crash. A young man on a motorcycle tried to get around a truck, but the driver didn't see him and swept him away. “I was there even before the ambulance, and I tried to calm the driver, who was in a very bad state. It was summer, hot, and I photographed the blood evaporating, steam rising, only the shoe visible, and behind it the motorcycle and the truck. I immediately call my boss and tell her where I am and what I've shot. And she replies, ‘Shoot his face.’ How can I shoot his face? That's inhuman. ‘If you won't, you're fired!’ And that was that.”

Lisa and Lottie

Every cloud has a silver lining—the Bulgarian chooses to change course and turns to an entirely different field. By an irony of fate, today he works for a company that makes parts for some of the most advanced cars, although he himself knows nothing about automobiles—he tells them apart by color, not by make. Even so, he creates parts for Formula 1 cars and for Koenigsegg, the Swedish carmaker that builds some of the fastest cars in the world. Chavdar has been in the business for 20 years now, designing the molds from which the complex carbon parts are made, and he has made a name for himself.

While all this is happening, one love fades away. He and his wife have a daughter, but little by little they feel themselves drifting apart. They start quarreling over everyday matters and quickly decide the time has come to part.

“The divorce came so suddenly, and afterward I had no idea what I was going to do, I didn't even have anywhere to live. I hastily bought a house on a loan, but in the end I managed to pay it off, and I'm still there today.”

Chavdar greets his 40th birthday alone, unprepared for the new challenges. He tries dating, but quickly gives up, because he realizes it won't be easy to come across someone he gets along with. “I forced myself to meet a few women, and it just doesn't work. It doesn't click! You have to see whether you fit, how the other person thinks.”

And then, most unexpectedly, the most important thing happens: he finds love with a capital L, and entirely by chance.

Montagues, Capulets and Gincheto

Chavdar is in Bulgaria to see his relatives. He tells his mother he feels lonely, that he wasn't ready for the life of a divorced middle-aged man…

“And she exclaimed, ‘Never mind, it happens. Look at poor Toni, she has problems too, she got divorced too.’ Which Toni? It turned out to be the niece of her best friend. When we were young, they had deliberately not wanted to introduce us—I had a notorious reputation for spending all my time in bars. ‘Why, Toni is Gincheto's niece.’ ‘How would I know Gincheto has a niece, why didn't you introduce us?’ ‘We were hiding her from you. Toni is an intelligent girl, a land surveyor.’

I got curious, but my mother wouldn't give me her number. A week later I remembered again and asked her, ‘Say, you know, I haven't called Gincheto in a long time, do you have her number?’ I rang Aunt Ginka and went straight to the point: ‘Give me your niece's number.’ She read it out to me, I called, and we got talking on the phone. At first it was about who had what problems…”

Then the problems lead to solutions. Chavdar finds things in common to talk about with Gincheto's niece. They get talking, and before long he invites her to his new homeland.

There, things don't go smoothly.

It is 2007. Chavdar has invited Toni in December so they can tour the Christmas markets… but that is also the season when his company works hardest on the new cars for the Formula 1 teams… “I talk to my boss and tell him I have to go to the airport, a girl is waiting for me. ‘There's work here, you can't, you have to finish it.’ I somehow manage, I leave, I head for the airport… traffic jam. I was 10 minutes late, I had no time to buy flowers… A complete fiasco!” he smiles.

But then things take off like a fairy tale. And, you know, they lived happily ever after…

Life Is Beautiful

The main problem with fairy tales is that they end. We see the resolution, but were Beauty and the handsomely transformed Beast happy as a family too? Which of the two did the dishes? And what about Snow White and the prince? Did the seven little kids ever finish college?

As for Chavdar and Toni, their happiness is complete. For a few months they talk on the phone, and they see each other in the summer in Bulgaria. And then comes the moment when he invites her to try living together in Germany… Long and happy years go by, and the two of them savor their late love. A few years ago Chavdar was also delighted to become a grandfather, courtesy of the daughter from his first marriage…

But then, as was clear from the start of this Digital Story, came the illnesses.

A stroke. Chavdar is lucky that it happens early in the morning; the doctors come quickly and save him. A second stroke a few months later… “And I'm one of those real men,” he says, never losing his smile. “When something hurts, I lie down at once and don't budge. Toni has to be beside me and ask me five times an hour how I am. I was lucky the strokes weren't severe, but she was the one who saved me. She looked after me constantly. Even when I got back on my feet, she was always beside me, and she still is.”

A few more months later comes another grave diagnosis. Prostate cancer. A quick operation follows, and for a long time he doesn't know whether the tumor is malignant; three months have to pass before he gets an appointment to see a doctor. Then comes hip surgery…

“Medical students could learn from me, I have every kind of problem.”

Angelinka

Love has many dimensions, you'll agree. Since it is there, and it shows, even when we start talking about strokes and hip joints. “Toni is always running around me. We even have a vineyard here, we're going to sell it now, and she works more than I do…”

We come to artificial intelligence. Here we won't interfere—neither I nor ChatGPT—and we'll let Chavdar tell the ending of this long and, to me, beautiful story himself.

“One evening, after two beers and three shots of rakia, I was thinking about my two strokes, the malignant tumor and the upcoming hip surgery. Then some thoughts came to me that didn't rhyme very well, but looked like a poem.

I can't stop thinking about you. Your eyes shine like stars. Your whisper in the night is like a melody… I'm crazy about you…

When I saw you, I didn't know you would bring me love! Now I can't and won't part from you. I love to lose myself in your love…

Love brought you into my life. I can't take any other road… I don't want to live without you anymore, I love you… come… let's fly…

Oh, How Hard It Is to Be in Love at 40

Maybe there comes a moment when we get used to each other and stop noticing many things we used to see. Love starts to fade and everyday life sets in; less time is set aside for the two of us. But then situations come along, as with my illnesses, when you see that the person comes back and is beside you. And then you realize that this is the right person, and somehow you have to tell them: ‘Thank you.’ To show that you see them.

It was important for me to thank my wife; what she does is not something that can be taken for granted.

The next day I read about Suno and tried it right away. This artificial intelligence can turn my text into a song, adding a melody and a voice. I was happy it gave me that chance, because I can't play any instrument and I sing off-key. Finding the right melody with the right voice wasn't that easy, but after a week and 35 suggestions from Suno, I finally got a song I like.

Play the video

Some people think they have to meet the person who will be beside them when they're young. But you never know. I was simply lucky, and so was she. We understand each other, we suit each other. She gives the orders, I keep quiet. When it gets to be too much, I boil over, but we get along very well…”

Cyrano de GPT

When the aches and pains begin, Chavdar decides it is time to fulfill some long-postponed dreams. His first task is to make a list:

• Write a book

• Publish a children's book for his two grandchildren

• Write a song

• Go to the Maldives with Toni

• Make a wood-carved chair

• Fix up his old bicycle

• Buy the drone he dreamed of as a photographer

• See the Great Wall of China

“Stuff like that, things I want to happen to me before I kick the bucket. And one by one, from time to time, everything is happening.”

This year, for Easter, he makes the children's book for his grandchildren. Two little bears bearing their names—Oliver and Mila—get up early and go outside. One of them sees that the bunny has hidden the eggs; they find them and go to the rabbit. Chavdar writes the text, and the pictures are the work of ChatGPT.

“It helped me. I'm very proud of these drawings of the little bears, because they're mine, nobody else has the same ones. This little book is one of a kind for the kids, and they loved it. That was my first encounter with the creativity of artificial intelligence. But in my opinion it isn't creative—people are. AI helps exactly people like me, who can't sing, draw or make music, but have the desire to create something, to make it and be happy about it.”

Wear Your New Clothes, Boys

Little by little he ticks off other items on the list. Our conversation was postponed a bit because he and Toni were in the Maldives. The long-promised drone takes flight too.

“I already had all these dreams at 18. But you never have time, you keep pushing them aside, you always find a reason why you can't get them done, those small personal goals,” says Chavdar. Whereas today he has time, direction and love. And “künstliche Intelligenz”—AI, one of the few foreign words that sneak into his colorful Bulgarian.

“You should do these things earlier, because when you get old, everything gets harder… Before that, there's family, children, work… you have no time for dreams. You're happy when you get home and can sit down for a while to rest. But now I'm looking forward to retiring, to being lucky enough to live a little as a pensioner, so I can finish my list.

If someone gives you a candle, light it. Don't keep it in the corner, waiting, as a keepsake that someone gave it to you, that it has an inscription on it. Just let it burn so you can see it. Because you'll be gone and you won't see it burn. You have to live your life, to enjoy it…”

Love in the Time of Cholera

“The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

‘And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?’ he asked.

Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

‘Forever,’ he said.”

If these last lines mean nothing to you, yet you have read Chavdar Mihaylov's story this far, we definitely recommend asking ChatGPT who Florentino Ariza is.

Sometimes the end of a story comes before its beginning. Sometimes destiny knows its business, but at other times it seems so absorbed in its own feed on its favorite social network that it is nowhere to be found. Yet there will always be these stories. To remind us what being human is, who a person is and what love is. They will be there in the age of artificial intelligence too, I am sure. They will be there even after it.

– Your book filled my soul. What made you so determined to write it?

– A few years ago I took part in a project organized by the Baba Residency, in which a few people, mostly from Bulgaria's bigger cities, went to a village, helped with whatever was needed and spent some time with the older people there.

I ended up with a family in Negovanovtsi, north of Vidin. I lived there with a grandma and grandpa for about three weeks. I got to know their daily routine and

helped around the house… mainly with the cooking, the talking and, of course, the drinking.

I met a lot of people from the area and saw many things I would never have seen if I hadn't left the city. I learned a great deal, and Negovanovtsi became the first village in my book. The idea for the book came from my stay there.

I realized that

these people have so much to tell and to teach us from their lives, and sadly no one has ever listened to them.

I've always loved cooking and eating, so the natural way for me to gather material was to cook with them. It was the one thing they truly loved doing, and it let them relax and tell me about their lives and their philosophy. I saw that not only did they always cook without exact measurements, they lived in a similar way too. I understood there was one common expression that could explain not only their cooking but their way of life. “Na oko.” By eye.

What moved me most was

the simplicity of village life and the enormous amount of joy and contentment people manage to draw from it.

I witnessed extraordinary and constant grief in the life of every person who told me about their hardships, yet they never focused on it… never dwelled on the bad more than necessary. Joy always won out over sadness; however great their sorrow, it never controlled them for too long and always gave way to happiness.

“This dish is the favorite of the lady of the house, and of her husband, who is a great devotee of cooking, but since his health began to decline it has become almost impossible for him to stay on his feet for long. So Baba Daniela has taken the kitchen duties entirely upon herself. She does it with understanding, and with pleasure too.

Meanwhile, alongside his usual reading, the old man has grown more and more interested in a new hobby—woodcarving. A few years ago he turned part of his long-abandoned barn into a true Mecca of carving. That is where he often slips off to work on his favorite thing to carve—decorated wooden cooking spoons. The barn resembles a damp, half-dark cave, but that is how he loves it, and as soon as he steps inside he comes alive at once. He disappears for hours, until he emerges triumphantly with his new creation.

Not far from his carving workshop, in the dimly lit interior of the same barn, Baba Daniela's soap-making corner has found shelter. There she makes bars of homemade soap for the locals. They usually pay her with their own produce or handicrafts—from fresh hen's eggs and homemade wine to knitted socks. I still keep two of her soaps in a plastic bag under the bathroom sink. Three ingredients, all told: pork lard, lye and a little water.”

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

– Do you have any interesting stories about how villagers use technology? Or about its absence?

– You don't come across much technology in the villages. Sometimes one of the children or grandchildren passes an old desktop computer on to their grandparents, but that's it… most of these people encountered modern technology for the first time after the age of 50, and they simply have no interest in it. Besides,

it isn't easy to make sense of all these devices and of our often lazy excuses that we can't live without them.

You reach a point in life when you simply don't need to use such things. And learning how to do it just seems pointless. These people have lived full, meaningful lives and they don't need it.

Many of them are curious about what's happening outside the village and would like to play with modern gadgets. But only for a little while, and not seriously.

Technology is important, it should be there and exist to help these people, but expecting them to use it and understand it is impossible.

– Do people in the villages know what artificial intelligence is? And should they?

– It's a topic that doesn't interest them at all and won't interest them anytime soon. Of course they'll learn that it exists, but it has no place in their lives, or at least none they can see.

Say “artificial intelligence” to them and they'll take it for an evil robot or something like that… which, as it turns out, isn't too far from the truth.

“By ‘computer’ they mean a simple drink of rakia and Coca-Cola. To this day I have no idea why they call it that. It isn't entirely bad, and I have to admit I drink it mainly for its terrific nickname… or at least that's my official excuse.

We go back, and in the meantime the peppers have recovered enough and the last potato has vanished—I don't even ask about it. Baba has crushed a few cloves of garlic with a pinch of salt in a wooden bowl and is cutting the fresh onion into pieces with her small, sharp kitchen knife. Once again she refuses to use a cutting board and instead chops the onion between her fingers—it's simply faster that way, she explains.

She repeats the same with a full handful of fresh dill. Everything goes into the same bowl and is mashed with the pestle from the mortar. A few pickled hot peppers from the jars in the cellar are added, along with a teaspoon or a little more of the brine.”

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

– Can “Baba” give us back the calm of life? Does it run through the “by eye” measure, as a counterweight to the endless rushing, competing, record-breaking?

– Their way of life, their approach to life's problems and dilemmas, can teach us something. When tragedy strikes them, it doesn't depress them, they don't start drinking or taking drugs, they don't rush to the kitchen to console themselves by overeating.

They expect tragedy. They know it will come. Without it nothing would be beautiful.

So it isn't about Baba, it's about how they deal with things. We have to understand that life isn't based on quantity, or even on the quantity of quality… it's based on existence. The quality of existence can't be quantified, it's fleeting. So never think about how much or how often—

think about the miracle and the happiness of simply having and being.

– I read that you've tried the “computer” cocktail. Can you tell us what it is?

– My first “computer” was poured for me in Chelopek, by Grandpa Vasko. He set a short glass in front of me and filled it halfway with rakia from an old, repurposed wine bottle. Once the rakia was in, he slowly reached under the table and pulled out a bottle of cola. He filled my glass to the brim with it. “Computer!” he announced.

He told me that whenever he and Grandma had nothing to do at home, they would pour themselves some computer, then go inside and watch “Walker, Texas Ranger”…

“But she invited me in, and before I could even fold my leg under me, she set a small glass in front of me and poured me white wine. It was time.

Over the next hour we talked about many things. Baba always came alive when she told me about her family. She stressed how her daughter had been the greatest joy of her life until her granddaughter came along, and since then the daughter has been in second place. She told me about the times her grandchildren stay with them, and the adventures they set off on together, and it was obvious how vital they were to her soul and being. It was hard to get her to talk about anything else!

She also shared her passion for singing traditional Bulgarian folk songs, which seems to be a common pastime among all the grandmothers in every village. While in the city most people strive to forget their shared history and embrace or imitate other cultures, here in the villages the grandmothers and grandfathers do what they can to preserve their history until eventually (let's hope) it becomes interesting to the rest of the population locked up in the bigger cities.”

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

– Tell us a story you heard in the Bulgarian villages that we really ought to tell ChatGPT as well.

– During my travels, that hadn't reached the village yet. Artificial intelligence was known more or less, but mainly from science fiction novels.

I don't think it's relevant for the people over 50 in the village… Not yet, anyway.

– Give us a recipe that wouldn't have been possible before the age of technology!

– Every recipe is possible without any electronic help.

– Why are we Bulgarians good programmers? Could that reverse the trend of emptying villages?

– I really don't see a connection. Still, since programmers can work from home, I hope from now on to see more of them turning up in the villages!

“They asked a 90-year-old grandmother from a village what the secret of her long life was. ‘I've never done anything bad to anyone. I'm warm-hearted. I've never slammed my door on a single traveler, I just ask them whether they're hungry and want something to eat. I have no enemies, I don't go to the doctor. I don't hate anyone, I don't hate this world.’ On the subject of longevity, I grasped the connection between food and virtue.

I spent a lot of time going from family to family. I listened to their stories, laughed, ate a little and drank a little. People invited me into their kitchens to help them and to watch them cook with all their pride, love and passion—just like a painter wholly devoted to his work.

What absorbs me is cooking that awakens conversation and inspires love. When it is a reason for people to gather and enjoy the food and the vital moments of being together at the table with their peers, family, loved ones, and even those they don't much care for.

That is where I discovered the beauty and captivating uniqueness of cooking—the recipe becomes yours. Through improvisation and tasting you discover your own style and contribution, just as you can discover your own character in life.

Cooking is born of romance and love, not of contemplating molecules. That is why I try to preach cooking without exact measurements. By eye.

This is not a scientific experiment; nothing happens twice the same way. Cooking is like a one-man circus act. You juggle specific ingredients and circumstances to get your delicious result. You rely on relative or indirect measures—a pinch of this, a handful of that, three seconds of that liquid, a drop of the other, and so on. It all depends on tasting, smelling, touching, and listening too…

It's all by eye.”

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

– Are you optimistic about Bulgaria? We have so many thoughtful people, and yet something is missing…

– How do I put it… Yes and no.

So many things need to change, but sadly that change demands considerable effort and sacrifice. It won't come from lying on your mother's couch, complaining, dreaming, not paying rent and so on.

It will take action, not words. And of course things can change. But would you be ready to sacrifice yourself to secure a better future for your child, or for other people's children?

If not, then the matter is closed, and it's best to just try to be a little quieter while you, and everything, and the thoughts you once had, quickly crumble into the past.

At 80, today's hero went along to keep an acquaintance company while she enrolled to study journalism. On the spur of the moment, he decided to go back to the lecture hall himself. It turned into an adventure that lasted eight years, full of knowledge and stubborn study. A few months ago, having already turned 88, Petar Shoilev received his diploma as a doctor of journalism!

We meet to talk about learning and the love of science, about journalism and the future of how we get our information. About how old age doesn't have to be a grim, sad, lonely affair, but can be the well-earned autumn of life's journey. About how we, too, could have more happy, smiling older people who enjoy their days. And what might Dr. Shoilev's plans for the future be?

We keep repeating that these days a person has to learn throughout their whole life… But how is it possible for someone to be so motivated, to have the strength to study an entirely new field at that age, and on top of that to finish a doctorate with highest honors? Here's how!

The Eternal Student

Music, mechanical engineering, economics, advertising… and finally journalism. Just think how many professional fields Petar Shoilev has passed through. And this from a generation that was used to the idea that you might never change your workplace in your entire life.

True, music never became his professional destiny, although as a young man he loved playing the piano. For a long time he prepared to apply to the Conservatory, until at the last moment he made a sharp turn. He went to what is today the Technical University of Sofia to study mechanical engineering, and after the first year transferred to electrical engineering.

His first job, assigned to him under the socialist system of job allocation for graduates, was at an electric motor factory. Soon afterward, at a Party meeting, he heard the slogan that every engineer should become an economist. “And why not? I figured that if that's what they wanted, why shouldn't I?”

He kept working but also enrolled in a part-time program, and four and a half years later he had a degree in industrial economics as well. He went on to a one-year course in foreign trade before stopping his studies in the higher education system… but only for 40 years or so.

A Man of 88

His professional path meandered in different directions. At the factory, Petar gradually rose from process engineer to shop foreman, and all the way up to head of all 12 shops. But he didn't like staying in one place, even in those far more conservative times in that respect, and soon found himself in East Germany, sent to Berlin to specialize in electrical equipment.

After returning, he spent four years heading the advertising and marketing division of Balkancar—at the time the world's second-largest manufacturer of forklifts. “We Bulgarians were at a very high level in what we did. I think we can be now, too, as long as we have the will,” Dr. Shoilev smiles.

He worked for two years in Moscow, where he helped set up a Bulgarian Technical Center. He ended his career back in Sofia as one of the directors of the new state company Bulgarleasing. That's where 1997 found him, when he reached retirement age and it was time to rest.

All his life Petar has loved traveling the world and meeting new people. He traveled a great deal as a young retiree, too. Sadly, in 2009 his wife passed away, and shortly afterward Dr. Shoilev moved to London to be with his son, who has lived in England since his student days.

Tell Me, Doctor!

So why, then… did he decide to study at Sofia University? Truly by sheer chance. On one of his trips to Sofia, the future doctor of journalism met an acquaintance who was on her way to enroll there. “Will you come with me and see what it's like?” They arrived together, and Petar, quite spontaneously, asked what it would take for him to enroll as well. It turned out that for a master's program it was enough to hold a completed master's in another field with a grade of at least “very good”—and he had several.

Half as a joke, he started attending the lectures and seminars, but he found them more and more interesting. He was pleased with the professors he met, too. “These professors struck me as being at a very high level, and I can tell, I've seen a lot of teachers. Each of them was deeply versed in their field and experienced in what they taught.”

The master's degree came easily (with nothing but sixes, the top grade on Bulgaria's six-point scale), and after he graduated his academic supervisor, Prof. Zdravka Konstantinova, invited him to continue with a doctorate. Over the next four years he passed all his exams, finishing with a dissertation on contemporary political cartoons in Western periodicals.

Will Dr. Shoilev keep studying, or will he start a career in journalism?

There's no exact plan yet, but one thing is certain. Sitting around doing nothing is not for him… “I'm just thinking about how to go on, where to head next. Usually people start writing memoirs at this stage of their lives. I think I should do something that is useful not only to me but to society as well. I'm still thinking it over, I can't say yet what it will be,” our hero shares his credo.

Doctor's Orders

There's so much talk lately about lifelong learning, about how it's never too late to master a new skill or venture into a new field. Stories like Dr. Shoilev's show how sensible that idea is—how this kind of activity can give life meaning and keep a person's spirit up at any age. That's why his advice is worth hearing.

“Some people end up disappointed with learning. In my view, in most cases you study not to remember what you see, but to know where and how to look for it. If something is taught as dry material, if you just have to tick off the required points of a given subject, it can't help being boring. But you have to make what you study interesting for yourself.”

And most important, in his view, is for everyone to do work that interests them. “You may have taken something up, but if you see it's not for you, drop it. That doesn't mean you're not finishing the job or that you're giving up—you're readjusting.”

All Ages Bow to Higher Learning

We reach a topic that matters a great deal to me, and I'm curious to hear the opinion of someone with two degrees more than me in the same field. What will the future of how we get our information look like? Can journalism once again become a respected profession with prospects?

“I think it can, but it's hard. Because either you have to follow the line of the outlet that hired you as a journalist. Or you have to be brave, decide for yourself what you'll say, and see it through. Unfortunately, the media space has filled up with constant lies. And in that situation a journalist has no chance to express himself as an independent figure. You've rightly turned to what you're doing, because journalism doesn't necessarily mean you'll make money from it. You can reshape your journalistic work in a particular direction.

It's a hard profession, and it really is a great challenge to practice it honestly and decently. Journalism has to evolve, and I don't know whether the media will stay as they are or turn into new digital forms like yours. Perhaps the tools for practicing this profession will be refined.”

Study Hard So You Won't Have to Work

And how can we make knowledge and learning a priority, a value? When 40 percent of Bulgarians say they didn't read a single book last year. “It can't be done by force,” Petar says firmly. “In the old days people used to say, ‘Study so you won't have to work.’ That doesn't hold anymore—now, if you want to work, you have to study. Through the demands of the workplace, young people have to know that they need some kind of scholarly grounding.

And that will happen if the work offered to them is paid or rewarded in such a way that better education is valued. When work tasks are tied to science, to training, harmony can be achieved. Otherwise, you can shout ‘Study!’ at him all you like, and he'll think—I can manage without studying, there are plenty of examples of people who become billionaires.”

Still, the most important thing, in his view, remains the ability to find what captivates you, what you find interesting and enjoyable. If you never try to paint, you'll never find out whether you can, whether it gives you pleasure. All I can do is agree, having written my first line of computer code at 33, full of preconceptions, and started working as a programmer a year later.

Youth Revisited

During his studies, Petar got along wonderfully with his young classmates—they swapped materials, discussed current topics, and were on first-name terms. The doctor makes no secret of liking the coming generation and having high hopes for it.

What strikes me most in Dr. Shoilev's story is how far it is from the stereotype—and that stereotype certainly has its grounds. I'm sure you, too, see sad, despondent older people around you… Couldn't that change?

“Bulgarians have an interesting character—they don't much like anyone else knowing what they're doing, and that makes them keep their distance. On the other hand, after a certain age, to talk, to travel, to learn, to start new things, people need to get together. In the Netherlands, for example, older people gather every Thursday to dance, have a bite to eat, and enjoy themselves. In Bulgaria there are no places where you can go and see other people. All that's left are retirees' clubs here and there… but those are more a place where you go to watch the other fellow frowning while you frown too… The idea is the opposite.”

The School of Life

Before we part, I can't help asking Dr. Shoilev about the topic that has been making so much noise lately: artificial intelligence. “I think it will come into use. I don't use it personally, but it helps a lot of people find their way quickly, get information about certain things right away. When it comes to information, I like it. But when it comes to it telling me what to do—no!”

And here I agree completely. Because a man who has so much strength and desire to keep going with his next interesting ventures—and in a way that is useful to others too—has no need of electronic advisers. Only of health, to keep moving forward, and I wish it to him with all my heart!

Computer code that looks like a cooking recipe? Writing programs with the help of… colors or sounds? Programming languages inspired by Shakespeare, by Terry Pratchett and even by Donald Trump? Step off the beaten path and you can find some rather amusing and unexpected touches in the world of information technology.

Programming languages are even more colorful and interesting than human ones. They are not born “naturally” as the result of evolution, but out of their creators' desire to hand everyone else a new tool. One good enough to turn their ideas into the computer programs that drive the world forward today. Yes, there will always be the serious, useful languages (for instance JavaScript, the one I earn my own bread with), the ones used every day and everywhere around us.

But there is also the other side—playful, wacky, unconventional.

“Esoteric” is what we call programming languages that, for one reason or another, are doomed never to become popular. Sometimes they are created that way on purpose; in other cases their developers simply didn't try hard enough and made a product that could never go mainstream. Either way, they can always surprise us. In the lines that follow we'll meet 10 examples of some of the wackiest programming languages out there.

1. Let's Have a Chat

Anyone can make up a sequence of commands for a computer to execute so that something happens as a result… But to talk about a programming language, the most common criterion is called “Turing completeness.” Even some computer games meet it, if only as a side effect. Still, this is the universal test of whether we are dealing with a full-fledged programming language. One that, in a nutshell, can carry out a list of operations within the capabilities of Turing's theoretical machine (you'll find a detailed explanation here).

Those are exactly the esoteric languages we'll be looking for (with one exception). Not mere sequences of commands, but Turing-complete systems that could build a computer application…

That doesn't mean at all that they have to be complicated or packed with features, the way their “real” everyday siblings are. Our first example proves it.

SmallTalk (English for casual conversation, but literally “small talk”)—that is the name of a small language with a big history. How can a language be small, you ask? Like this: here it fits on the back of a postcard:

In the 1970s three engineers—Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg—were working at the Xerox PARC lab. They considered the programming languages of the day needlessly complicated, convoluted and hard to learn. So they decided to create a language whose entire syntax would fit on a napkin.

The original idea was for SmallTalk to be used by children learning to program. But it turned out so successful that by 1995 it was the second most popular object-oriented language after C++.

At the start of the new millennium the American military used it to build military simulation software with more than a million lines of code. JP Morgan wrote its large-scale financial risk analysis system, Kapital, in Smalltalk. The language became a favorite of many other companies in the financial sector, too.

Smalltalk is still here and is believed to have a solid future. It is popular as a good fit for big data analysis, the Internet of Things and machine learning. It simply turned out, most unexpectedly, that sometimes it's enough for everything to be… simple.

2. The Patriotic Programmer

All languages are written in the Latin alphabet, you can't learn programming without English… Well, not exactly (and not only because today you can ask ChatGPT in Bulgarian to write code for you). Esoteric languages are quite varied, even though, of course, in the professional sphere English has established itself over the past few decades as the lingua franca.

Are there programming languages in Bulgarian? If a patriotic government ever comes to power here, it could easily decree that state software must be written in Bulgarian. Luckily, we have solutions. Here's one option: the Logo language.

Yes, its name gives it away: it's used mainly for drawing pictures, and it was created in the 1980s.

You can put it on your CV, and its syntax is quick to learn. Its main purpose, once again, is to draw children into programming, letting them draw on the screen without having to know foreign languages. In Bulgaria, in the second half of the 1980s, national Logo olympiads were held to pick out the most promising kids in information technology.

What does the code look like? You'll like it. To draw a circle, all you have to write is:

повтори 360 (нп 1, нд 1)

край

Here “повтори” (povtori) means “repeat,” “край” (kray) means “end,” “нп” (np) stands for “напред” (napred, forward) and “нд” (nd) for “надясно” (nadyasno, right). In the same way, a square is drawn with:

повтори 4 (нп 10, нд 90)

край

3. Thin Air… with No Pressure

In some languages people argue about how much indentation should precede a command—two spaces or four, a tab or a single space. In others, the most popular of which is Python, indentation actually replaces some of the brackets and arranges the hierarchy of commands.

There is, however, a language… that is just and only empty space. Nothing more. For obvious reasons it's called Whitespace, and everything in it comes down to spaces and tabs.

Because of its defining feature… it's a little hard to show it to you. Still, not impossible. Let's say S is a single space and T is a tab:

S S S T S S T S S S

T

S S S S S T T S S T S T

T

Commands are separated by a new line with a tab, and what actually gets executed depends on the combination of spaces and tabs.

4. Honestly, Everything's Oook

Technology and literature don't go hand in hand? Nothing of the sort! This language will appeal to fans of fantasy and Terry Pratchett. On the Discworld, as they know very well, everything happens on the backs of four elephants, who in turn stroll about on a huuuge turtle, the Great A'Tuin.

This world has a magical university whose librarian is an orangutan who communicates by saying nothing but “Ook” in various intonations.

Well, in our world that same orangutan could have become a programmer, thanks to a language inspired by him and created by the programmer David Morgan-Mar. Yes, he specifies: the language is intended for use by orangutans only.

Ook—that's its name, and it has three commands:

Ook.

Ook!

Ook?

And… it's Turing complete too! In other words, you can do almost anything with it that today's modern programming languages allow, and nobody will ask whether you really are an orangutan.

We leave you to ponder (and practice) the program that delivers the proverbial first message: Hello, world!

And while we're in the literary world, things can sometimes get far more dramatic. Literally—if you choose to program in Shakespeare. Here you can say outright that all the world's a stage and we are all players.

The names of Shakespeare's characters are variables, and whether the numeric values are positive or negative depends on the pairing of two characters in a given scene.

If, for instance, Hamlet has a negative value, you can bring in another character to insult him and thereby flip the sign in front of the number. You can add input and output, in the first case by making someone listen to their heart, in the second by having them speak their mind. As wacky as you like! This wacky:

There you go—even if your English is rusty, you can now boast that you understand the basics of the language of Shakespeare…

5. Chef Programmer

As Douglas Adams wrote, in the third phase of its development every advanced civilization arrives at the question “Where shall we have lunch?” Well, programmers reached that level long ago, as our next guest shows. Chef was created well before the fashion for televised cooking reality shows, and its job is to help in the kitchen. Here is the most standard “Hello, world!” command in this language:

Rather wordy, isn't it?

But fun: the ingredients are the variables being defined, and the recipe itself is the printing function. The different groups of ingredients are also variable types that interact during execution—that is, cooking.

The idea behind the language? To show people who aren't technically minded, and are more used to the recipes of Gordon Ramsay or Penka Cholcheva, a beloved Bulgarian TV cook, that programming is fun.

The “Serves” command, the moment the dish is ready to serve, runs the function.

6. #CantPronounceIt

I don't advise you to try pronouncing the name of the language CLWNPA. Spelled out? Fine! “See-el-double-you-en-pee-ay.”

But what does this acronym have to tell us? Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym. It was created back in distant 1972, and although its name is so colorful, it became popular under the far duller name INTERCAL.

One more thing to remember it by. It's a rather polite language. Instead of bothering to declare that something is a function, it politely asks the computer to create one:

PLEASE DO ,10 <- #1

PLEASE DO ,10SUB#1 <- #176

PLEASE DO ,11 <- #30

PLEASE DO ,11SUB#1 <- #76

DO ,11SUB#2 <- #190

(You'll find a longer example here.)

“Please, dear computer,” followed by bitwise information about what needs to be done. As if back in the good old year of '72 someone suspected that today we'd be so dependent on computers that we'd have to be polite to them (so that Roko's basilisk doesn't come for us).

Of course, the “unpronounceable” one comes from very different times, when the widely used languages were nothing like today's. Code meant for computers looked a lot more like, well, code. Accordingly, it wasn't particularly readable or understandable in a way that made developers' lives easier.

So what is the PLEASE command for? If you're not courteous enough to use it, the compiler works in a special, considerably slower and more fastidious mode. And if you put it on every line, it imposes restrictions again.

This language sometimes simply “blows up” with error E774 or… “RANDOM_COMPILER_BUG.” Even according to the official documentation, this happens completely at random. Think this language is a joke? Maybe, but it meets every criterion for Turing completeness. You just have to be brave (and polite) enough to pick it.

7. Plugged In and Wired

After literature, it's time to peek into the other arts. Music, for example, often finds its way into programmers' arsenal—suffice it to mention jazz and the different versions of the WordPress platform.

Which brings us to the programming language Rockstar.

Want to be a rock star but you're just an ordinary programmer? No problem! This language doubles as a way to write song lyrics. Yes, there's none of the politeness of our previous hero here, nor the drama of Shakespeare—just pure voltage and wire:

The creators explicitly state that leaving comments in the code is strongly discouraged: everyone must find their own meaning in rock poetry. Will you find any meaning in what's written above?

8. Pretty as a Picture

We arrive at the universal world of images. Here we flip the traditional scheme that Midjourney and its kin have imposed on us in recent years—the human draws, and the computer tries to figure out what it's supposed to do. This language is called Piet.

Its creator, David Morgan-Mar, uses bitmaps as input, which at first glance look like random scribbles… or like modern art, judge for yourself:

The code is executed point by point, as if a pointer were moving across the painting itself. Twenty different colors are used, each of them a specific command. Varying brightness is added for the corresponding operations. White positions perform no operations, while black ones signal that execution should stop. The language is named after the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, and if you're wondering why… here is one of the master's best-known paintings:

9. Make Programming Great Again

Now that we know which languages musicians, artists and orangutans program in, we enter politics, especially topical in this year of elections and political upheaval.

Now that we've calmed down a bit, reassured that algorithms won't take programming away from us as a human activity (not entirely, and not yet, at least), it's time… to make programming great again!

TrumpScript (setting aside its political messages) doesn't even pretend to meet Turing's requirements, but it's fun.

It has no floating-point numbers, only integers, because “America never does anything halfway.” All numbers must be greater than 1 million, because small ones are insignificant. External libraries aren't allowed, because all code must be homegrown American. Instead of the usual terms True and False, it uses the presidential candidate's favorites, fact and lie.

Whether the language will last… we'll find out after November 5.

10. Brain Off Grazing Ducks

We skipped some curious candidates for this list, such as ReMorse, which uses dots and dashes in the spirit of the good old Morse code; Taxi, whose code resembles a road map (without necessarily being full of the life advice that Bulgarians associate with that profession); or ArnoldC, which uses only one-liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

We deliberately saved for last (on the assumption that we've already lost the younger audience) the language with the resounding name Brainf*ck, which I won't translate, but which metaphorically refers to mental gymnastics.

It is intentionally difficult, designed so that every elementary task becomes a challenge for the programmer. Competitions are held every year, and according to its fans, once you learn to write code in it, you'll be a wizard in any other programming language you know.

And all of this… with just 8 commands, which once again are enough to make it Turing complete. Urban Müller developed it in 1993 while studying physics; gradually the creation took on a life of its own and earned cult status. For the proverbial “Hello, world!” all you need to write is:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.
<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.——.——–.>+.>.

And so, which programming language we choose today may not even matter all that much. What matters more is whether we have anything meaningful to say online…

Are Java and JavaScript cousins, and if they have nothing in common… why do they have such similar names? Why did Apple pick something as overused as the apple for its name and symbol? What on earth is… Adobe? Or Google? Does Lenovo have anything to do with Lenin?

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” says Juliet, as quoted by Shakespeare. And would what we call Apple or Amazon smell as sweet under another name?

We can only guess. But behind the names of the online world's biggest players there are sometimes funny stories. In the lines that follow, we'll run quickly through some of the most instructive and unexpected ones.

In the Name of Prose

A man lives “for honor and for a good name,” according to Rachko Pradleto, a character created by Ivan Vazov, Bulgaria's national poet. You probably haven't thought about Rachko (not Rachkov, the TV comedian) and his “good name” lately, but you certainly mention often the names whose stories we'll talk about in the lines that follow.

Our alphabet begins with a fairly well-known story, the one behind the name Apple. For a long time the company's founders wondered what to call it, until at one point, as Steve Wozniak tells it, Steve Jobs came back from a trip to a commune in Oregon that tended an apple orchard. They never came up with anything better, and in his biography Jobs says he liked the name because it was “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

And indeed, it hasn't intimidated quite a few million users since then—quite the opposite. While we're still on the letter “A,” let's mention the neat logic behind the name Adobe. The company that looks after Photoshop, Illustrator and many other software solutions for designers and for humanity at large was named by its co-founder John Warnock after the little stream of the same name that flowed not far from his home—Adobe Creek.

What I Call Myself

Yes, names obviously often come about simply because they have to sound good, without excess baggage or negative associations. And ideas pop up from under every stone and tree.

Or in exchange for a fee. In 2001, the company Research In Motion hired a consulting firm to come up with a good enough name for a new service they were planning to launch—a little machine for sending emails, so fashionable at the time.

To these consultants, the tiny keys on the gadget looked exactly like the drupelets of a wild berry. Blackberries, say. And so, through a fresh and accurate association, BlackBerry phones were “born.” Soon the client company itself, which loved the name, renamed itself the same way.

Sometimes the search for a name is quite hard. Have you ever wondered what kind of oracle Oracle is? The project's three founders say they can't reveal the exact etymology, because it comes from a project they had worked on for the CIA just before founding the company.

Christening

Then again, it can be that simple… ChatGPT became a superstar despite a clearly not-very-marketable abbreviation that means something to only a few. Or take OpenAI, who, you could ask Elon Musk, haven't been particularly “open” for a long time.

Let's move on so we don't wander into ticklish territory. Some names are downright wacky by design, Twitter for example. As its creator Jack Dorsey tells it, the company was looking for a name that somehow sounded like the service itself. “Well, when you get a message, your phone doesn't go ‘buzzz,’ or ‘jitt,’ or ‘dinggg’—to us it sounded just like ‘tweet.’”

It's great fun to picture the entrepreneurs sitting there “buzzing,” “jitting” and “tweeting” until they hit on the best onomatopoeic solution.

Hence Twitter, the network that shares “tweets”… which never did become “X-es” after Musk applied his marketing genius with the platform's new name—X. (Or with Tesla—sure, he may try to convince us it's a tribute to the Serbian genius, but judging by some of the ideas in the models, there could easily be a connection with the tesla, the multipurpose adze-hammer so popular in Bulgaria.)

The story of TikTok is similar… Something goes “tik-tok” in there; “linguists” call it “onomatopoeia”—a word that imitates a sound, in this case the notification of a new short clip from your favorite influencer.

Pixar was named by Steve Jobs after a Spanish word for “to make pictures.”

Nothing Bigger Than Google!

Google, as you may know, came about simply to announce enormous possibilities. A googol is the largest number that arithmetic currently honors with a name of its own.

And Amazon? Supposedly at first Jeff Bezos insisted on calling it Cadabra (a pet name from “abracadabra”), but then decided the name absolutely had to start with the first letter of the alphabet, so it would always come first in any search. And then came this word, tied to the name of the Amazon River (Bezos says it inspires him because it's different, exotic and the biggest in the world). And, of course, to “amazing”—“Really cool!”

Nintendo, meanwhile, is a classic Japanese solution—the first syllable means “trusted,” and the rest “paradise.” So when we play, do we land in a “trusted paradise”?

There may not be so many TV sets anymore, but YouTube is… “your television.” Why that is, and how the biggest video platform was supposed to be a dating site—read here.

Entered in the Yearbook

And what's this Skype, and does it have anything to do with the heavens? Yes, definitely. At first they called it Skyper because of what it offered—“Sky peer to peer,” “the sky from user to user.” A metaphor meant to say that communication without a server in the middle between users was now possible, communication that could take off into the clouds.

Viber doesn't come from the phone vibrating, but from the idea that when two people talk, they vibrate on the same frequency. WhatsApp, of course, is a play on the colloquial English “What's up?” and the abbreviation for application.

While we're on ways to communicate… Telegram seems pretty obvious—Pavel Durov takes us back to the days when we dictated messages at the post office so they'd reach our friends in the next town… Curiously, that's also where Instagram comes from—an “instant telegram.” I wonder how many of the people who use them today have ever even seen a telegram?

Facebook is pretty dull too; in Bulgarian we'd call it a “face-book.” In fact, Mark Zuckerberg named his project, meant to connect with fellow students, after the word used for the student directories at Harvard and other renowned universities. Still, it's endearing that he kept the name after his little project turned into a mega-venture that swallowed the whole world.

The same goes for WordPress. Its creator Matt Mullenweg was looking for something memorable and understandable enough, nothing more (and yet more than enough—read here).

The Name List of the Bulgarian Khans

In Bulgarian, the combination of the two words that make up Microsoft—“micro” and “soft”—doesn't sound good at all; you've surely heard the jokes about Bill Gates's possible physical attributes. Actually, the name was suggested by Paul Allen and comes from… “microprocessor” and “software.” Other interpretations we leave to you.

The logic behind Intel is similarly dull—“integrated electronics.”

And Lenovo? Does it come from Lenin, or from laziness, леност (lenost)? Not exactly—the etymology leads to “legend.” In 2002 that word occurred to the project's boss, Yang Yuanqing, who even began using it actively. Soon, however, he saw there were already quite a few ventures with the same name. So he decided to combine the beginning—“le” from “legend”—with “novo,” which in Latin means “new.” The marketing for the transition from Legend to Lenovo cost 32 million dollars.

It Has a Name

Sony also comes from a Latin word, “sonus”—“sound.” Easy to pronounce for people from different cultures.

Since “novo” means “new,” does Sega come from the Bulgarian сега (sega, “now”)? Not at all—it's an abbreviation of “Service Games of Japan.”

The story of how Linux got the name of its rather modest creator, Linus Torvalds, is quite funny. His other “offspring”—git—has an instructive name too, but you can find more about where they came from here.

eBay—created by Pierre Omidyar, the popular online store, which started out more as an auction site, took the name of the consulting company its founder ran. It was called Echo Bay, but alas, it turned out that the domain of the same name was taken and something different had to be invented. Omidyar decided simply to shorten it.

And the competition—does Alibaba necessarily come with the 40 thieves? Jack Ma was sitting in a café in San Francisco when it occurred to him that this was quite a popular name, and he decided to check. He asked the waitress what it made her think of, and she replied: “Open Sesame!” So he concluded that this was one of the few names known all over the world, across cultures. (Speaking of which, that sounds a bit like… Shazam, open up, doesn't it?)

Yahooo!

Sometimes it's downright banal. The question-and-answer forum Quora comes from… questions & answers. The global networking-equipment giant Cisco, as you can tell from a mile away, carries the name of San Francisco, the city it comes from.

Yahoo! sounds like an enthusiastic whoop, and that's exactly what it is. The founders of Google's onetime rival as the world's search engine were looking for a cry that sounded loud, unbridled and rude.

In Bulgarian, ксерокс (kseroks) is more than a brand—it's simply the word for a machine that copies pages. The real Xerox gets its name from the technology of “xerography,” which in turn comes from the Greek words for “dry” and “write.”

This section is for polyglots. Samsung in Korean means “three stars.” Nokia owes its name to the Finnish river Nokianvirta. Wikipedia combines the universal “encyclopedia” with the Hawaiian word for quick, and the story is definitely interesting.

Before we part, it's time for one more interesting group of names—those of programming languages.

Alphabet Soup

First let's tick off the most common case—languages that house abbreviations in their names. Here we find some of the most characteristic solutions from the past, when people apparently weren't so keen on marketing and the main task was for the name to explain the language. BASIC is short for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Roughly speaking—“symbolic instruction code for beginners with many uses.” Another revolutionary language, COBOL, is an acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language—“a general, business-oriented language.”

FORTRAN comes from FORmula TRANslator, and LISP is purely and simply… LISt Processor.

Go, which has made waves in recent years, simply carries the first letters of its creator's name—Google. A rather unusual lack of imagination for that company…

In more recent times, among the most-used languages “named” after abbreviations are SQL—Structured Query Language—and PHP. For the latter you may come across the claim that the abbreviation stands for Personal Home Page, but these days it's more a matter of Hypertext Preprocessor.

Named After Grandpa

Quite a few languages got their names in honor of a person. The most popular example is Ada, named after Ada Lovelace. Lord Byron's daughter was one of the pioneers of computer science, long before computers even existed. Languages have been named after Euler, Turing and other mathematicians and programmers. And not only them—others bear the names of figures like Mozart, Occam, Eiffel, even Orwell.

Among the more popular are Pascal, revolutionary for the 1970s, named in memory of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, and Haskell, bearing the name of one of the pioneers of programming—Haskell Curry.

From the world of mythology and literature come Delphi, Oberon, Oz and Alice.

C, Is That You?

Today's most popular programming languages have a common ancestor—C. Later some of its descendants kept the letter and added to it so you'd feel the difference (C++, C# or Objective-C). There's even a language called C--.

But where does the name of C, so important to computers today, come from? It's a bit banal. Its creators simply considered it the successor to a systems language called B. Which in turn was a simplified version of the language BCPL, to which it owes its name… As you can see, programming languages have rather complicated family ties here, which could definitely rival the plot of a telenovela.

And if we continue with inherited names, it's worth mentioning Ruby, which was simply inspired by Perl. Except that the ancestor has a letter “eaten” from “pearl,” to make it sound fresher…

No Questions Asked, Python

Programmers really are a bit banal, you might say after the examples above. For the finale I've saved a few examples that show the opposite—a sense of humor among the creators of programming languages, skillful in some places, less so in others.

Wondering what kind of python stands behind the name of the most popular language associated with developing artificial intelligence—Python? It's not actually the snake at all. It's “Monty Python”—the language's creators were fans of British comedy.

We've already talked about JavaScript, which got its name at the last moment for purely marketing purposes—so it could ride on the shoulders of the fame of its “half-namesake,” Java. And rather cheekily, since the two were projects by completely different creators, who apparently just weren't very careful about protecting their copyright.

Java from Java

And looking back up the chain… what is Java? At first the language was supposed to be called Oak. But something about it “grated” on the creators (and just as well—in Bulgarian it doesn't sound charming either, you'll have to take my word for it). So they sat down and chatted about a name that would sound cool to them, without necessarily carrying some deep meaning. So the language became Green. That, they decided, was too plain.

So they settled on Java. Programmers drink quite a lot of coffee, you know? That was fully true of this team, which happened to prefer Java coffee, named after the Indonesian island. The rest is history (and free advertising for that kind of coffee and for Indonesia as a tourist destination).

And so, we've been through quite a few stories… Which show that a name may not matter, but it can also pave the way for a venture. Did I miss something important? Which of the stories did you find most interesting? I'd be glad to hear any interesting opinions…

An incredibly powerful phenomenon has been discovered, one that creates a new substance! Not only does it cure even incurable cases of cancer, it will open the eyes of science in so many directions. For instance… lighting up the dark night!

Marie Curie discovers radioactivity, wins not one but two Nobel Prizes and paves the way to the future.

She opens the doors to a new technology that turns out to be unexpectedly successful… Until it becomes clear that we have badly underestimated its dangers. It will cost the lives of thousands of people who were simply trying to earn a living.

Do we know the technologies we trust well enough? Could the much-hyped artificial intelligence, or some other fashionable field of today, prove more dangerous than it looks at first glance?

The most important thing is to stop and think, to reflect, to discuss. To tell each other stories.

Stories like that of the radium girls are worth reading more often. That is what stories are for—to make us question things, to keep us on our guard. Alas, not all that glitters is gold…

Burn to Shine

“My beautiful radium,” Marie Curie called it, and to this day she remains one of the most revered and celebrated scientists to have carried progress on her shoulders. A long time would pass before humanity grasped the full horror her discovery was capable of—that would only hit with full force after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But much earlier, at the beginning of the last century, her invention was everywhere. The Curies did their first experiments with polonium—it starts a nuclear reaction that, however, stops after about a day. Then came uranium… until the ideal new substance was found. Radium, and specifically its isotope 226, has a half-life of 1,600 years! Imagine how many applications that could have!

Within just two years, the power of its radiation to treat cancer was discovered. Compared with what had been known before, the results were sometimes miraculous, and radium became a superstar. Bottles of radium water appeared, radium candy, rejuvenating face creams…

Very quickly another, if more everyday, application came into fashion—watches that glowed in the dark became the favorite accessory! Had there been Instagram back then, you can be sure they would have been a staple of every feed. At the time it sounded like magic… and it was magic, because the dials were coated with an innovative paint based on the Curies’ discovery.

The mixture glows thanks to a cascade of chemical interactions: radium salts are mixed with a zinc compound, and as a result the particles emitted by the radium make the zinc atoms vibrate, which produces sparks of flickering light, almost invisible by day but clearly visible at night.

The glowing “Undark” (“not dark”) watches became especially popular after the outbreak of the First World War. In the trenches, soldiers needed a reliable way to tell the time without a flashlight, which would have drawn the sights of the snipers on the other side. The production of luminous watches became a hugely profitable industry.

Enlightenment

This progress had a very specific face—the U.S. Radium Corporation, which owned mines in Colorado and Utah and was the first to sense the enormous possibilities of this technology. It was the company that created the Undark paint and built several specialized factories where the new watches were made. The largest, in Orange, New Jersey, quickly became the engine of the local economy.

This is how the story of the “radium girls” begins. Hundreds of young women were hired to paint the dials. The work was easy for its time, pleasant, and it quickly turned into an adventure. What’s more, the girls from poor local families not only earned good money, they were lucky enough to work with the most talked-about and healthiest technology of all.

To apply the paint quickly and efficiently, they developed a special technique—after every stroke they licked their brushes to give them a sharp point, so they could precisely paint the tiny numerals and lines on the dial.

Each worker was expected to paint 250 dials a day, working five and a half days a week. They were paid a cent and a half per watch, which came to a weekly wage of 20 dollars—excellent pay for a job that required no particular education. The workers earned three times as much as their relatives toiling in neighboring factories.

Along the way, they noticed one more wonderful side effect—they themselves… began to glow. They smeared the paint on their faces (after all, it was the healthiest cream there was!), until soon several hundred girls could be spotted even on the darkest night thanks to their luminescent bodies…

People began calling them the “ghost girls,” which in turn brought them a rather romantic fame and made them sought-after, delightful company for dancing on Saturday nights…

Paradise Around the Next Corner

Not only did they work with the healthiest substance, but also with the most expensive one of its time—a single gram cost $2.2 million in today’s money.

“Radium will extend human life to 100 years,” read a headline in The New York Herald in 1921.

In one of the sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Lyman Frank Baum included the Horners, who mine radium so that people can line the walls of their homes with it, giving them a beautiful, soft light. “It is also medicine; no one can ever get sick who lives near radium,” one of the Horners explains.

How could the girls have suspected that anything was wrong? At the time, not a word was said about any possible danger. In 1921, at the height of her fame, Marie Curie toured the United States to raise money for further research. Huge crowds greeted her, and she spoke to them about the benefits of radioactivity. The climax came one evening when she pulled a vial of radioactive isotope from the pocket of her skirt and began sprinkling it into the air to show off its soft, ethereal, blue-green glow…

Today, of course, it is easy to marvel at the radium girls’ trustfulness. Alas, dangers are not always spotted in time. Even Oppenheimer, working on the nuclear bomb project, did not know exactly what he would end up with. Not to mention the cautionary tale of Thomas Midgley, who spread across the world not one but two mass-killing inventions—leaded gasoline and Freon—decades before it became clear how dangerous they really were.

The radium girls’ paradise quickly turned into hell. After just two years, they began falling seriously ill in large numbers, and deaths grew steadily more frequent. “Nothing of the sort!” their employers at the Radium Corporation assured everyone—these were coincidences, the deceased had had syphilis…

At the End of the Tunnel

The factory kept running, the brushes kept dipping into Undark and laying their progressive film on the watches. All while the hands ticked away the days of life most of the girls had left. Nearly all of them were between 18 and 22.

By 1924, nine of the girls were dead, and the rest felt an ever more stubborn weakness caused by advancing anemia; their teeth began to fall out.

The corporation’s managers decided it was time to act and hired a team of scientists from Harvard to investigate the problem. In their findings, the scientists described the entire factory as covered in radium dust and the girls as literally glowing in the dark. But also that some unknown, mysterious illness had appeared, bringing a whole series of complications in its wake. The scientists did not note that the two phenomena might be connected—radioactive technologies still had a spotless reputation.

Even so, the corporation did not like the report and forced the authors to remove all information related to radium from the final version.

That same year a second team of scientists got involved, carrying out far more detailed and thorough research and raising a serious stir around the new disease. This caught the attention of the local medical examiner, Harrison Martland, and it was his investigation that led to the inescapable truth—the technology in use was deadly, and all the radium girls were doomed.

So Simple and Logical

Radiation. That is what made the numbers on the dials glow, and it is also what made the clocks tick away relentlessly at the remaining days of hundreds of trusting girls. They turned out to be far more affected than anyone else in the factories precisely because of their habit of licking the brushes. That is how the radium compound got into their bodies, gradually building up in their bones and in all their internal organs, and beginning its destructive work.

Not, of course, according to the Radium Corporation, which accused the medical examiner of biased data, fabricated to damage its reputation.

And although everything was obvious, years would pass before the truth came out. It would take the courage of five “radium girls” who decided to sue the corporation over their deadly injuries. For two years no lawyer could be found to defend their rights—that is how strong the Radium Corporation’s position was. Then another two years went by before the first hearing was scheduled. In that time, thirteen more girls died.

In the courtroom, the plaintiffs did not even have the strength to raise a hand to take the oath. Meanwhile, the corporation kept postponing the trial again and again on every pretext imaginable, apparently expecting the problem to resolve itself naturally…

The 16th documented victim was Dr. Sabin von Sochocky, the inventor who had developed the “not dark” paint.

Eyes Wide Shut

Martland’s investigation carried weight with its irrefutable conclusions, which he published in 1925 in a prestigious scientific journal. The case ended in 1928, after an autopsy was performed on one of the girls—Amelia Maggia, who died at just 25 after four years of work at the factory.

Shortly before her death she began losing weight rapidly, her joints ached terribly, and she complained to her doctor that she could barely move and felt like an old woman. Then, while pulling one of her teeth, her dentist saw with horror that a huge piece of her jaw had come away in his forceps. Severe anemia followed, along with constant hemorrhaging. Her suffering did not last long, and her death certificate stated that she had died of an aggravated stomach ulcer.

Her exhumed bones, however, literally… glowed. Within seconds they left white spots on photographic film, and with a little more testing Martland proved that this was radioactivity.

Martland himself was shocked by the results; he could never have imagined how deadly a technology so popular in its day could be. It emerged that the plants had employed around 4,000 workers; it is not known how many of them worked with the brushes, but 112 early deaths are officially documented as a result of the radiation.

The trial ended with a ruling that the Radium Corporation pay $10,000 to each of the five girls, a substantial sum for the time, and cover their medical expenses. Sadly, they could not enjoy the compensation—worn out by the drawn-out trial, they were at the very end of their strength and died one after another within three years.

Food for Thought

Radioactivity would also take the life of Marie Curie herself, in 1934.

There is no happy ending—sometimes that is how it goes. And yet Martland’s research and the noise around the trial helped put an end to the horrifying Undark and to the other hasty attempts to attribute supernatural qualities to the newly discovered phenomenon. Their data were used in the following decades to establish safety practices in the Manhattan Project, and in all later developments involving nuclear technology. Books and films have been dedicated to the “radium girls.”

“I am not thinking of myself,” said Grace Fryer after the trial, one of the women who refused to give up. “I’m thinking of the hundreds of girls for whom this may serve as an example.”

According to experts, almost everything we know about radiation in the human body we owe to the studies carried out on the suffering women in the years that followed.

After the trial, the American government came under pressure to create a special agency responsible for ensuring acceptable working conditions.

Why is it worth not forgetting such horrifying stories? We humans are the only species that can get burned twice by the same fire.

In the rush of the tech boom, amplified by the speed of everyday life, we often underestimate the risks of every innovation. Whether it is radium, social media or artificial intelligence. And all of this is magnified by a brutal economic logic in which the online giants are stronger than states, and their leaders have to make decisions on which the future of all of us depends.

Shouldn’t we be talking about this more?

Forty-six-year-old Bryan Johnson has already spent more than $4 million to make his body work like an 18-year-old's. He claims it is working. He puts everything into it, going as far as infusing himself with blood plasma from his own son. He believes he is the most measured human being who has ever lived, and that his experiment will change the life of everyone who wants to live long.

In other words, everyone.

Dream or utopia? An obscene waste of money or an idea that could change our evolution? Genius or sheer madness?

“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury asked in song, before he was taken by AIDS—a disease we understand and treat far more successfully today than we did back then.

And who doesn't? The real question, though, is what we do about it, and Bryan Johnson is an impressive example. A multimillionaire and successful entrepreneur, he has devoted himself to a fascinating experiment whose goal is to drastically extend human life. And his guinea pig is himself.

Don't Die!

That is Bryan's motto. Fine, but the task is far from easy, as anyone born more than 130 years ago can confirm, if you ask them. Here he is in front of us, and you certainly wouldn't put him at 46—at most 45.5. I'm joking; he is undeniably youthful.

As the journalist Charlotte Alter aptly noted in her piece for Time, his body looks 18, while his face looks… like that of someone who paid $4 million to look 18. According to his own data, by almost every physiological marker he matches that age, and by some others he is in the healthiest 1 percent of 18-year-olds.

Isn't time the most precious thing, the only resource we can never get back? It isn't a social construct like money, but pure objectivity. Who is the crazy one: the man who uses his millions to pile up more millions… or the other one, who tries to buy himself time?!

And so methodically and deliberately, too. Yes, perhaps beyond common sense, but “the end justifies the means.” That bit of wisdom is attributed to good old Ignatius of Loyola, whose fanaticism is rather reminiscent of Bryan's. Except that you probably don't know the full version: “If the end is the salvation of the soul, then the end justifies the means.”

Bryan's Life

The salvation of the soul? Bryan has no time for that; his obsession is the body. Every second of it is tracked in every possible way. At the risk of horrifying fans of homeopathy: he takes an average of 111 pills a day.

Some of his solutions sound extremely exotic. He wears a baseball cap that beams healthy red light at his scalp, sleeps every night with a small device strapped to his penis, and every day hands in stool samples for analysis…

But really, what good are all the money and all the next technological leaps if we are still shackled to that maximum lifespan, which falls so far short even of the figures in the Bible? Or take average life expectancy—the COVID pandemic crushed it even here in Bulgaria, where it was appallingly low to begin with.

According to Bryan, every action that speeds up aging—from sleeping less than 8 hours to nibbling cookies late at night—is “an act of violence.”

Oh, Wretched Youth

Blueprint is the name of the project organized by the millionaire, in which he himself plays the lead. His condition is monitored at all times by expensive doctors. Every important vital sign is watched with extreme precision. Meanwhile, another team of scientists has the job of following the latest publications, so as not to miss some tiny discovery that might add a minute or two.

It would be convenient if life were an equation and you could just do the math. Decide to add smoking: minus 3 years; drinking: minus 2; following Bulgarian politics: minus 12… Yes, years ago we in the media fell for such convenient explanations, but they don't work, at least not that directly. And still, every day we face decisions like these, which, alas, not even ChatGPT can turn into exact mathematics.

Many other billionaires—from Bezos to Sam Altman—are putting serious money into this field. And Bulgarian scientists have turned their attention to longevity research, too. So why is Bryan's attempt treated by both the media and the public as something eccentric?
The goal is simple. To make the organs of the body work as they do in an 18-year-old—for now in Bryan, and eventually in everyone. Indefinitely. At the moment, Blueprint rates its boss's skeletal system as that of a 30-year-old and his heart as that of a 37-year-old. According to Johnson, this is already a major breakthrough—a clear system that helps you make the right decisions far better than you could intuitively. It tells you how long to sleep, and you comply. It tells you which lunch dish is the healthiest, and that's that… a fitness coach, only for life itself.

The Early Bird Bleats

He usually gets up before 5 a.m.… which makes you wonder why he wants to live so long.

His bedroom is like that of a monk on Mount Athos—no photos, no books, no TV, no phone charger while he's in there, not even the phone itself! Here he only sleeps, and in his view this is a key factor in turning back the clock. The only things inside are the laser generator that rejuvenates his skin and the aforementioned device that tracks his nocturnal erections. Because, according to his team of scientists, their duration is an accurate indicator of one's current state of health. At the moment Bryan enjoys an average of 2 hours and 12 minutes; his target is the average for an 18-year-old—3.5 hours. Things would get a little awkward in Bulgaria's state outpatient clinics if they introduced this particular diagnostic method.

Once up, the millionaire measures his weight, body mass index, hydration level and body fat. Exactly when he provides the other sample we mentioned, he doesn't say. Then he stands in front of a special lamp that imitates sunlight, to set his body's rhythm. He quickly takes the temperature of his inner ear, and then comes the moment for several dozen dietary supplement pills. Anti-wrinkle cream, a face mask… and he is ready in just an hour, which for many ladies getting ready for a formal dinner would even count as quick.

46 Years Aren't Enough

By 6 he is fresh as a cucumber (only with smoother skin) and ready for work. That is—for the next round of measurements and pills. His freshness is surely helped along by the sinister greenish smoothie called “Green Giant,” with secret, proprietary ingredients—coffee, naturally, is out of the question.

Every day he does an hour-long workout at the gym, with more strenuous exercises three times a week. I don't think there's any point in bothering you with the rest of his daily rituals—they go on in the same spirit, and he shares them copiously on Instagram, as well as in the detailed protocols of all his tests, which he publishes on his website. In the first 5 months alone, 180,000 people signed up for his weekly updates.

When You Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil

Blueprint launched on October 13, 2021, which means that in just 2 years he has already worked wonders. “Blueprint is STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) for health,” Bryan says. “My team and I set out to do what no one had done before: to let the body run itself. I carry out hundreds of measurements of biological processes, allowing my heart, liver, lungs and kidneys to tell me for themselves what they need to be in ideal condition.

My mind—a storytelling creature—is not authorized to go shopping, to browse the pantry, to order pizza on a whim, to eat dessert… in practice, to make decisions. My practical and immediate goal is for the 35 trillion cells that make me who I am to work together in the best possible way for optimal health and youth.”

I Am Young, Yet I Remember No Youth

“Most people believe that death is inevitable,” Bryan says. “We just try to extend the time we have left before we die… But that's how it has been until now. I don't think there has ever been a moment in history when Homo sapiens could say with conviction that death might not be inevitable.”

I mentioned that he had infused himself with plasma prepared from the blood of his own 18-year-old son. This scandalized quite a few of his followers, but he quickly stopped the procedure—because, he says, it turned out to be ineffective.

Bryan has three children, now fairly grown up. Their birth and childhood coincided with the rise of the business that made him rich. In 2007 he founded Braintree, an online payments startup that later became part of PayPal, and Bryan walked away $300 million richer. He says, however, that he was unhappy at the time and fell into a depression that lasted 10 years.

My Old Friend

He put on 50 kilograms of excess weight and was unhappy with life. A devout Mormon in his youth, at some point he left the church and divorced. Today his elder son is a Mormon missionary, his young daughter lives with her mother, and his second son lives with him—it is Talmage who became the donor for his father's cause. The two get along great; the 18-year-old even follows part of the Blueprint diet, sparing himself only the anti-aging therapies for now.

Officially, Bryan has no girlfriend (perhaps so as not to skew the nighttime measurements), but recently his marketing assistant, Kate Tolo, joined the experiment. She is 27, comes from Australia, has experience as a fashion expert, and for a few weeks now has been the first “test subject” meant to check how Blueprint works on a female body.

Bryan believes he is single because he is completely upfront on a first date. “Dinner at 11 a.m., bed at 8:30 p.m. No pillow talk, no small talk, everyone sleeps alone. Sex is scheduled. No vacations in the sun, no meat. You have to donate plasma and, no, you are not my top priority.”

Young and Crazy

Every year he makes important resolutions, he says. “My resolution for 2013: invest in technology companies that make the physical world programmable. 2016: found a mental health company. 2020: create Blueprint to explore the defining question of our time: is death inevitable? To create, and make free for everyone, potentially the most powerful health protocol in history.”

There is a resolution for '23 as well: “Don't die. Let's not die. Let's not kill one another, let's not destroy our biosphere, let's not underestimate the importance of aligning with artificial intelligence.”

Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, met Bryan at one of the annual conferences on the subject. “He looked sick. He was pale. I don't know what he's done to his face,” says Dr. Barzilai, adding that he is worried by the idea of having no fat in the body. He adds that combining more than 100 dietary supplements may not be the best idea. If you ask me, he's jealous.

Highlander

How does Bryan himself deal with the haters? “The troll in my head is far nastier than the ones I meet. When I was depressed, my brain kept telling me, ‘Life is hopeless,’ and I had to learn not to listen to it. While people troll me, I play with them. Frankly, it isn't even interesting anymore.”

Bryan has 30 doctors on his team, led by 29-year-old Oliver Zolman. The rest remain in the shadows; so far none of them has appeared in the media. But it is no secret that once Blueprint is perfected, the first eternal youth plans to turn it into a product, a system that will bestow the same eternal youth on mere mortals. It is a fact that not everyone can set aside $4 million for a system of their own. In fact, on the average Bulgarian salary, you would need about 342 years. Assuming, of course, that you don't retire in the meantime.

How much it will actually cost us to secure those years through the system is not yet known.

He promises us that the next version will be free and cheap to follow. Yes, he already sells olive oil with his face on it, but he says profit has never been the goal.

Besides, it isn't clear whether we should trust him before he reaches at least 100 or 200 years. But here we enter questions too philosophical, where artificial intelligence is still better than we are.

122 Years of Solitude

Before we part, let's bring one more character into the plot. You have probably heard of Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived person on the planet (at least until Bryan “beats” her). Born in 1875, she died at 122 years and 164 days. She smoked from the age of 21 to 117 and said she owed her longevity to a diet rich in olive oil, port and lots of chocolate, nearly a kilogram a week. But above all, she pointed to serenity as the main reason for her long life.

She never lost her sense of humor, right up to the last day—when she was already past 120, a journalist told her he hoped to see her again the next year, and she replied: “Why not? You don't look so bad.” “I've only ever had one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it,” Jeanne also used to say.

Well, Bryan is like that too, at least when it comes to wrinkles. And which of the two will prove more successful at stopping the clock… I'll be glad to discuss together after Bryan's 123rd birthday. Until then, as a popular Bulgarian media personality likes to say: “Stay healthy!”

Programming is still more than tempting: you set your sights on it and look for your future in the much-vaunted IT sector…

Our guest today is a programmer with 20 years of experience! He chose this path long before it became fashionable and so alluring. Until he realized he was tired of spending his time in front of computers, and that what he enjoyed most was being among children.

So, defying every stereotype, Bogdan decided to earn his living by looking after kids. It makes him happy and gives meaning to his days. The thought of going back to computers doesn't even cross his mind; for him nothing is more meaningful than the time spent with children…

Isn't it time we rethought a few clichés?

“You Get Up and Keep Going”

I find it hard, I admit. To see a little one who has tripped and is crying, and instead of rushing over to comfort them, to encourage them with words to get up and carry on.

It's not only true for the little ones; life is like that too. You fall and you get up, for as long as you can. Every fall makes you stronger and prepares you for the next time you rise. Bogdan Tsenov's story reminds us of that. I read about him on the site ladyzone.bg and grew curious to talk with him. About children, about new beginnings. About how important it is to choose your own path, the one that brings you pleasure and meaning.

He was drawn to technology from an early age. In 2002 he graduated from TUES, a specialized high school of the Technical University of Sofia whose students leave with everything they need to start working as programmers. Right at that time, however, he ran into a serious health problem. He spent weeks in the hospital, and the doctors were adamant that within five years at most he would be able to move around only in a wheelchair.

But Bogdan decided to get up. And to keep going. Twenty-two years have passed since then; he has been successfully battling his health problems, and not only is he not in a wheelchair, he is perfectly able to look after children and play with them in the park. He put his faith in alternative medicine, and his experience has turned out more than positive.

The Child Within

After high school he went on to the Technical University. But well before he received his diploma, he was already earning his living as a programmer. First he worked in his own company, then he moved to former clients… And so he stayed at the same company for 13 years! “It worked out well, it was stable,” smiles the “retired” IT specialist.

He specialized in technologies built around the PHP language, loved his work and found it opened up plenty of opportunities. Almost the entire time he developed online stores and other complex platforms. And he felt good—which is why he stayed with the company so long. He was the only programmer building the sites, and his bosses valued him. Well, since the system kept working, they had no wish to switch to more modern technologies, even though the software world had meanwhile changed from the ground up.

In the meantime Bogdan found love, and exactly ten years ago his daughter was born. His wife was also in IT, the family was happy, the little one was growing… and then came covid.

My Childhood, Real and Magical

“They locked us up at home to work. We looked at each other and looked at each other, and at some point it became clear that we had to part ways,” he recalls. He and his wife discovered they couldn't go on together, and soon the divorce was a fact. At the same time he felt inside that it was time for a change… He was tired of 20 years of programming without learning anything new, and the stress was becoming too much for him as well. “All that stress affected my health, which I was trying to hold together, to stay away from the wheelchair.”

Freshly divorced, Bogdan was also left without a job, but… his soul was at peace. For a few months he lived on his savings, until the question rose up in all its weight: Where to now? He was fed up with computers; he wanted to be around people, to breathe fresh air, to take care of his health, to have time for his daughter… And yet his experience and education were so closely tied to computers that there seemed to be no way out.

“When have I felt happiest?” our hero asked himself. And the answer came quite naturally. When his daughter was tiny, he spent a lot of time playing with her, watching her grow and learn new things… Couldn't he earn his living doing something like that?

Mary Poppins

“Yes, programmers are well paid, but the pressure is enormous too. Hurry, deadlines, new technologies. I told myself: ‘No, this isn't for me, I need something calmer.’ And what could that be? Children! We get along really well; for me the time with them isn't stressful, I feel great, we play, we talk, we learn.”

The idea came to him while he was visiting his parents. They suggested he seek advice from the woman who had looked after Bogdan himself when he was little. And she was blunt: there is huge demand for babysitters. Contrary to the stereotypes, many families specifically look for men, for one reason or another. Mostly middle-aged, calm, caring toward the kids. Just like him…

He found his first “job” minutes after posting his ad online. At first it was acquaintances who trusted him; then they began recommending him…

Before he knew it, two years had gone by in which Bogdan has earned his living babysitting by the hour. In the first months he went from home to home; gradually he set up a small center, where today he looks after four kids at a time. The new venture is clearly to the liking of his daughter too, who helps out, has fun with the little ones and teaches them new things. She is drawn to acting, and playing with the kids does her good.

A Child's Joy

For now he definitely doesn't miss programming. “The moment I decided to work with children, the first thing I did was make a web page. A babysitter with a website. So I write code for fun, and sometimes my old job calls me for some small fix.”

“As a programmer you create projects, people use them, something remains. But when it becomes an obligation, or you have someone breathing down your neck telling you how everything should be done, at some point it starts to weigh on you,” Bogdan says.

He doesn't rule out returning to the profession one day, but for now he has no desire to. And still, life can always surprise us. “Do you think ten years ago I imagined I'd be working with children?!” he smiles.

His first “client” was a three-month-old baby, whom he looked after by the hour for a year and a half. The children he cares for are younger than six—he decided so because after that it matters that they be in the hands of someone with the proper training. They spend their time playing—when the weather allows, you can often spot him with his charges in South Park in the capital, Sofia.

They learn to draw, to write, to solve puzzles. They read favorite books together. They model plasticine, cut with little scissors, make collages. Despite the babysitter's IT background, there's no electronics anywhere around—no singing toys, no TVs, no phones.

My Dear Little Giggler

“Children are so energizing! Even just watching them grow… One little girl was almost a baby when she started coming to me, and now she can put together a puzzle, draw, write a little. They grow up, and it's such a pleasure! It's like with a website—you start from zero, and in the end you have something good, meaningful, useful.”

But where does the stereotype come from that children should, almost by default, be looked after by women? It isn't hard to trace, but it's certainly worth questioning these days. Bogdan is often contacted by single mothers who want the male role to be present in their children's upbringing somehow.

“Maybe it's harder to be a man in this profession, because you run into people's fears. When you say a ‘male babysitter’ changing diapers, they get scared, and to me that's strange,” Bogdan says. And he goes back to the time when he and his wife had to choose a woman to help them look after their daughter. There were two candidates, and they invited them home to get acquainted. The first was an experienced teacher with a serious résumé… but as soon as she entered the room, the child hid. The second had no special training, yet she won the approval of her direct “employer” at once: the girl stuck to her and they began to play.

Children have a feel for people and are best able to choose whom they feel at ease with, Bogdan is convinced. “That's what matters most, that the child senses it. When they're small—three, four—it's important that they feel good, that they trust this person, and don't feel almost as if they're being punished.”

With Children at the Seaside

That's how a single mother of two kids chose him; the children were quite mischievous and would hardly have been left with an elderly woman. He copes, though, and being an outsider makes it easier for him to set boundaries.

“Very often, when a woman is looking after a child and it falls, she immediately starts wailing: ‘Oh dear God, what happened!’ Whereas it's easier for me to say: ‘Didn't I tell you you'd fall? You get up and keep going!’”

Looking after children who aren't your own turns out to be interesting. “Everything is radically different. My own child can always get under my skin somehow and get what she wants. With someone else's, the emotional bond is very different. The fact that the child is sitting there bawling, throwing a tantrum, whining—it doesn't move me. We go by the rules.”

Anyone who has looked for help with childcare knows how hard it is to find someone you can trust. From his experience Bogdan is convinced that there should be many more good people taking on this role. And men in particular. “Who should go into this profession? Someone who loves being with the little ones, who is gentle and attentive with them—children like such people. I see many people looking after kids, and it's obvious the kids irritate them… That's a problem! Yes, it's tiring, I get tired sometimes too, but you still always have to treat children well.”

Never to Grow Up

And so today Bogdan sometimes… hires a woman to pick his daughter up from school while he looks after the kids entrusted to him.

He is convinced the change came at just the right time, and today he certainly feels happy. “Things fell into place the way they should. The money that came from IT was very welcome. Now that my daughter is older, it's different. That was the right moment for the change. And it is risky—you drop everything you've built and set off to build something from scratch.”

So what does the programmer who chose to become a babysitter dream of? “To keep my peace of mind, my place. To do useful work for someone and at the same time feel fulfilled by what I do. Looking after children gives me all that, and I'd be very glad to keep doing it.”

What is happiness? I have a universal answer. Go to the park and sit down for a while. And watch the children playing their favorite game…

“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my hands…” Blue Scuti mutters, before he realizes he has fulfilled a dream that seemed impossible. Almost four decades on, he has beaten, one way or another, the game we have all played.

Sitting in front of a retro cathode-ray-tube TV, found after countless difficulties, clicking the buttons of a retro controller for 42 minutes straight at more than 20 taps per second… the teenager reminded us that there is no limit to what a human can do.

But how can you beat a game that has no end? And why are this success and the road to it such important news for humans as a species? News about our ability, through cooperation and talent, to keep moving forward… To create, to make things, to find meaning. To give birth to stories.

Tetris is a legend that passes through the generations to give birth to new legends. A week ago we took a stroll through the history of the game that came out of a Soviet laboratory during the Cold War. Today we will look at a brand-new record that has so much to tell us about ourselves.

Oh, the Games We Had Back Then…

Among the thousands of versions of Tetris, perhaps the most popular is the one for the Nintendo console. And even though this is technology that looks ancient today—you can only run it in its classic form on an analog TV—the cult around it has not faded in recent years; it has grown. Ever more fiercely contested tournaments are held around the world.

The players have become astonishing virtuosos. In the classic versions of Tetris, a player cannot beat the game—there is always another level, and another… So how did an American teenager manage to beat it?

The story is full of technical details, but in short: the classic Nintendo Tetris was built to squeeze everything out of the hardware of those prehistoric computer days, when even megabytes were a mirage.

Rolling with a Flourish

In principle, the game speeds up and gets harder until level 19; after that it keeps generating new levels, but only by cycling the colors of the pieces. So over the past decade players have been racing to set records. The speed is truly astonishing—the movements on the screen can barely be followed by eye, and the same goes for the fingers on the controller. Players think many moves ahead, and they also need a certain dose of luck.

For quite a long time it was believed that the record had hit its ceiling. Players stalled around level 50, where the algorithm starts generating pieces in colors that are almost indistinguishable from the background—the developers simply never expected anyone to get that far. These levels are known as “the coal.”

Then the limit became physical: after the 20th minute, players’ fingers simply give out, and that slowed progress once again…

In 2021, however, the new record holder came up with a completely different technique—“rolling”—which everyone uses today. Instead of just pressing the controller’s buttons with his thumbs, he simultaneously pushes the controller up against them with his index fingers, gaining those vital fractions of a second. And so the record kept climbing.

Game Over

And so a new big goal appeared. Programmers trained an artificial intelligence to play this version of the game, and it began reaching unthinkably high levels, until at some point… the game stops. Because of the limited memory and the choices made by the original programmers, those unthinkably high levels contain points that, under very specific circumstances, bring the game to an end. Or, more precisely, freeze the screen.

It was in 2021 that our friend Blue Scuti also began playing competitively. Only 11 at the time, he won tournaments and quickly settled in among the elite players chasing the unthinkable goal: to beat the legendary Tetris.

That is exactly what happened in the first days of 2024. Scuti missed his first chance, then everything seemed irretrievably lost, until… two levels later, he couldn’t believe what he had achieved. After 39 years, Tetris had been beaten one way or another (or at least outsmarted), Scuti became a celebrity, and players began wondering what the next big goals might be.

Play the video

An interesting video (in English) about the technology and the history of the record, and about the next feats in the game that players might chase.

The NeverEnding Story

Here’s an idea. Back in 1992, the mathematician John Brzustowski pondered whether a person could play Tetris forever. He concluded that the game is statistically doomed to end. If a player gets a long enough run of alternating S- and Z-shaped pieces, at some point it will make him lose. But how long would you have to play for statistics like that to catch up with you? And developers could rule it out anyway with a slightly improved algorithm.

“What is a final victory in the game?” Pajitnov asks rhetorically. “Grasp the horror of those words.”

The boy’s real name is Willis Gibson. “Scuti” comes from Scutum, the Latin name of the constellation of the Shield, and in slang it means something big, exceptional.

Scuti plays about 20 hours a week. His family approves of the hobby; they even went to considerable lengths to get him the old-fashioned TV he needed. He reached level 157, a practically inhuman performance in a game designed to go up to level 29!

He now holds the records for the longest game, the highest score, the highest level…

Four Weddings and a Funeral

The fate of this game seems somehow bound up with tragedy. Scuti dedicated the record to his father, who died a month before the kid became world-famous.

Pajitnov also said he was very impressed by the kid’s success, but he made a point of noting that it was not his game that had been beaten, but simply its implementation for the Nintendo console.

Formally, he is entirely right. But something else matters more.

For a quarter of a century now, algorithms have been stronger than us at chess… and so what? Tournaments are more appealing than ever, players keep finding unconventional moves, memorable competitors and fascinating personalities keep emerging. They even give us reasons for national pride, as Bulgaria’s women chess players have done in recent months.

The algorithm long ago beat us at Go too, a game that gave it trouble for a long time (it was a game of Go, by the way, that brought our hero Pajitnov and the Japanese together). Yet today Go is more popular than ever, and stronger players keep appearing…

In times when technology is ready to beat us at more and more games, it turns out that we humans are getting better too. That we manage to find new forms, new directions in which the machine still can’t catch us. Might the same happen in almost every field? Might the progress of artificial intelligence create new forms and help us rediscover art?

Homo Ludens

“The way this 13-year-old achieved his dizzying feat tells us a lot about how the limits of human achievement are changing in the digital age,” writes the cognitive science professor Tom Stafford. And further:

“The achievement is real, but its significance reaches far beyond the world of classic arcade games and those who love them. What Gibson did, and how he did it, offers general lessons about how people learn and how the frontiers of human achievement expand. Gibson didn’t just pick up an old console; he joined a living tradition. There are thousands of players devoted to Tetris on the NES—the platform on which the game was first released in North America.

Much of the discussion around artificial intelligence focuses on the areas where human skills may become obsolete, but it is a mistake to treat human performance as a fixed target. As Gibson’s record-breaking feat showed, we are constantly looking to the outer limits and, in reaching them, extending our grasp.

The lesson is that pushing past the limits of human skill is the result of continuous collective innovation, as well as of remarkable individuals. Humans are a species defined by our capacity to learn, and in the digital age there are more and more opportunities to venture into unexplored territories of performance in every aspect of art, science and culture—including Tetris.”

The Sport for a Peaceful World

“I invented Tetris for my own pleasure. That’s the only way anything can be invented,” Pajitnov smiles.

Recently, in an interview about the big questions of 2024, the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova told me about her meeting with the cosmonauts who returned to Earth a few months ago. She was surprised that instead of technology, they talked about the human side of things, about our future together as a species.

“They wanted to show that when humanity faces a truly important global question that concerns everyone—in this case, the success of that space mission—geopolitical and strategic stories don’t matter at all. Both the Russians and the Americans said: we want to offer humanity the formula for understanding, a model for success, for cooperation. Up there we depend on each other and we really are like brothers.”

Isn’t Tetris a wonderful metaphor for what can unite us? It set out from a country that no longer exists, headed east, and through the East conquered the West… To remind us that we are capable of the next big steps. That we can grow, dream, and as a species use technology fully and consciously. But that is only possible when we are together.

“In the software world, people with visual impairments can find exceptionally good professional opportunities,” says today’s guest. And he proves it with his own example.

He is one of the most active and persistent enthusiasts in the Bulgarian WordPress community, especially when it comes to website accessibility. For two whole decades he has been building web pages with open-source platforms. And now he has also set out on the path of classical programming…

Today Ismail Ismail has two big goals. To help make more of the enormous possibilities of life online accessible to people with disabilities.

And to show that in information technology they can find a very successful professional future.

Open your senses to a rather unexpected… point of view.

Call Me Ismail

Can blind people really program?

Ismail, known to his friends as Esmo, definitely knows what he is talking about. He was born where the Rila and Rhodope mountains meet, in the small town of Yakoruda, and as a baby his life was literally on the edge. He was born prematurely and placed in an incubator… alas, in a time when these machines were still far from perfect. Too much oxygen led to retrolental fibroplasia. Also called simply retinopathy, this diagnosis hides a serious visual impairment—the retina is destroyed and cannot take in visual information.

Our hero was somewhat lucky and did not go completely blind. On paper his sight is 100 percent impaired, but he can still make out silhouettes. What’s more, constant exercise of the eyes is important for preserving his vision, and it was precisely that which steered him toward… building websites.

Seeing Is Touching

Technology drew him in when he was still a kid. While he was in high school, on the threshold of the new century, his parents gave him his first computer, which he used mostly for games.

Over the following years, though, these machines grew more and more interesting to him. And when the time came to choose a career… it turned out that a university degree in computing was out of the question, because back then there were no conditions for young people with visual problems to study it.

So he enrolled in history. The science of the past fascinated him too, and in 2008 he earned his bachelor’s degree at Sofia University.

Alas, he never managed to find a job with that diploma, and that brought him back to computers. While still a student he had been impressed by the first systems similar to today’s WordPress—with the help of Drupal, and later Joomla, he started making websites, first for friends and then professionally.

One for All

When WordPress rose on the horizon, he became one of the platform’s first big fans in Bulgaria. “It’s made to be fast and easy for people,” says Esmo. He was won over both by the chance for anyone, even without much experience, to build their own site, and by the community. The idea of open source, of belonging, of everyone contributing according to their abilities.

He hasn’t stopped to this day. He regularly attends community meetups and has been a speaker several times. He contributes constantly to the actual work as well—most often translating new versions of the platform into Bulgarian, but also “fixing” accessibility-related bugs.

In recent years, checking whether websites are fit to welcome people with disabilities has become another of Esmo’s main occupations. Alas, in Bulgaria there is practically no way to make a career of it, while in the West there is a separate specialty—software quality assurance specialists focused specifically on accessibility.

Lately he has been on his way to fulfilling another big dream of his—advancing into the depths of front-end programming; he is currently taking the JavaScript track at SoftUni, a popular Bulgarian coding academy. Meanwhile he keeps building WordPress sites with the three themes he has specialized in over the past few years.

Look Up

And while Esmo has some residual vision, in his view programming can be a wonderful pursuit for completely blind people too, except that in their case it is more a matter of back-end technologies.

But how does all this work if you can’t see your code?

“When you’re completely blind, you use so-called screen readers—software that returns everything normally visible on the screen in the form of text,” Esmo explains. In recent years, software development around the world has become more and more convenient for people with disabilities. The most popular code editor at the moment, VSCode, is fully adapted to their needs.

It’s no coincidence that there are quite a few completely blind programmers in the West; Esmo knows two Bulgarians working in Germany—a PHP programmer and a Java specialist. And here at home?…

Bulgaria has no official statistics on the number of people with serious visual impairments, but they are believed to be no fewer than 13,000. Barely 5 percent of them have any kind of job, according to the only unofficial statistic I can find online.

Could that perhaps change?

Déjà vu

Because a person surely feels fulfilled and happy when they find their calling, as Esmo’s smile shows the moment we start talking about programming.

“The idea that a blind person can become a very successful back-end programmer needs more publicity!” says Esmo. “Code is just text that gets processed. Modern software is quite advanced. The point is for more people to try!”

What does he think every young blind person should know before turning to programming? “First, that it won’t be easy. Second, that it’s hard, but not impossible. Third, a lot of people are put off by the math—it depends on what you write, but in most cases it isn’t complicated at all. And fourth, don’t give up! It’s hard at the beginning, but then it gets really interesting.” I think exactly the same.

Alas, for now there are no specialized courses for blind people in Bulgaria, but our guest’s experience shows that today it can work out in ordinary academies and universities too.

Steps Toward Accessibility

It is more than clear how poorly our urban environment today meets the needs of blind people—the sidewalks are sometimes an adventure even for a healthy pedestrian. That is why technology has become an indispensable helper for people with visual problems, assisting them with things like shopping online, navigating, and avoiding obstacles.

But if accessibility in the real world is expensive and evidently beyond the means of our municipalities, online it turns out to be just as important—and not nearly as hard to achieve.

Frankly, I had never wondered whether this site was accessible to blind people. Fortunately, my guest confirms that everything is fine; he follows Digital Stories and even asked to tell his story himself, hoping it would motivate more young people with visual problems.

It turns out that checking whether a website is accessible isn’t hard… someone just has to think of doing it.

One Small Step for a Developer…

There are four main screen readers—those developed for Windows and by Apple, and two open-source projects. The software is set up to read a web page’s code according to certain rules, and if those rules aren’t followed, it seriously “stalls.”

“A site is accessible when you can navigate it freely without a mouse, using only the keyboard. It has to follow the rules of semantic HTML, because the tags help the screen reader decide what to read. It’s also important for the color scheme to be legible and high-contrast,” Esmo explains.

How many Bulgarian websites meet the requirements? A few years ago our guest found himself leading a team that checked web accessibility in the public sector, and at the time about 50 percent of the sites turned out to have serious problems. In his experience things haven’t changed much today, because we do have formal requirements in this area, but they aren’t followed, and nobody monitors them. Recently, for the first time, the state e-government agency has had dedicated testers, but according to Esmo their recommendations still remain unresolved.

And… Smile!

Beyond official websites, there are no rules at all. In his view, a good example is Apple’s ecosystem, where every app is checked for accessibility before it reaches customers. “At one conference I watched how Google tests for accessibility—everything goes through a completely blind person, a low-vision person, and someone with a motor disability. They had seven QA engineers testing only that.”

For most websites, of course, this isn’t possible, especially in a small market like ours.

Still, the effort is clearly not great, and it’s worth every owner of a little corner online giving the topic some thought. (If you decide to do so, our guest recommends WAVE Accessibility Tools, Google Lighthouse, or the axe DevTools extension for Chrome.)

A few years ago Esmo found love, and today he is a family man. He keeps building websites, contributing to the open-source community, and taking delight in what he does.

His plans for professional growth are tied to WordPress, while enriching his knowledge with other technologies as well. “I dream of making it as a normal person! Life and health are what matter most; everything else can be achieved.”

And it seems that Esmo’s story confirms that very maxim more strongly than anything…

Twenty-two modern incubators and five ambulances, specially equipped to help premature babies. That is how big today's guest is. Thanks to him, premature babies in many regions of the country have a far better chance of surviving and avoiding complications.

He trains volunteers for situations the state could not handle on its own. He runs first aid courses for children and their parents alike.

He isn't Santa Claus, but he also has a beard and he is also tired, and that is the mood in which I meet Lazar Radkov. Our conversation is for the DEV.BG podcast, where I have the good fortune to host some of the episodes. And this time, many of the words are worth reading.

Play the video

Miracles can be the result of the work of any one of us. Anyone can change the world and the environment around them. And when people brought together by the desire to create find a little support and join forces, they can change their surroundings too. Is this the path that will lead us forward as a nation and pull us out of the role of the poorest and unhappiest?

If there is anyone who can convince us, it is Lazar Radkov.

– Today hundreds of thousands of people collect bottle caps because you managed to inspire them to do it, but how did it start? When did you decide that doing something professionally wasn't enough and that you needed something different too?

– It goes quite a long way back. I was into sports, into coaching. I have a sports club, and my colleagues still pay a large part of my bills. We help people with a more sedentary lifestyle improve their health, their fitness, the way they feel and look. We help them fight the things that hurt. Through that work I was invited to give lectures to schoolchildren and students. I have always had some inner need to give, to be useful with what I do, to help people, to make their lives a tiny bit better.

In 2013 things with the club were going well, but I felt I needed to do more, to contribute. I realized that I was living well, I was happy with my life and with the people around me. And when a person “gets on top of their expenses,” as a nice Bulgarian saying goes, when they pay their bills and have a roof over their head, they're warm, they have internet… On Maslow's pyramid they feel fine, their base is covered.

What's left is to try and do something for others too, for the environment, for the world.

So that we leave it a tiny bit better, more meaningful. It's important to take care of your own well-being and that of your loved ones, but if I'm doing well and living in a palace while all around me there's a swamp and a garbage dump, there's no way I can be happy.

– But why did you turn to campaigns for collecting bottle caps in particular?

– This cause wasn't invented in Bulgaria, and I didn't invent it either. Seven or eight years before us there was a big cause called “Caps in Action”: a boy and a girl collected caps to buy wheelchairs.

A bottle cap is extremely small and simple, it takes up no space. You can easily slip it into your pocket and feel a little better that you're doing something good, however small.

But when many people do it, big things happen. In six years we have already recycled 1.3 million kilograms of plastic!

Probably more than a million Bulgarians take part. More than 95 percent of people don't make any particular effort. Whether you throw the cap into the trash can or put it in the little container makes no difference. You empty the trash can when it's full. The one with the caps you take to the square twice a year, or you leave it in your apartment building and someone takes it. It costs you nothing in time, energy or resources.

But when a person does something tiny, they feel they are doing good. As a friend of mine says, once you've kept the cap, you won't throw the bottle on the street. We feel good, we feel part of something bigger, we feel that we're helping.

More than 85 percent of people who took part in our surveys say that since they started collecting caps, they have also started sorting their waste. Nearly 90 percent notice more litter on the ground, it catches their eye, and every now and then they pick up a piece of trash and throw it away. So one tiny, meaningful thing leads you down a completely different path, more constructive and meaningful: the path of doing good.

– We all have the urge to be useful, but often it's persistence that we lack. What's your recipe for not giving up?

– If I give up, what would I do?

There have been many hard moments. I've talked about some of them; most only I know about. When something burns inside you, there's no way you can give up.

When someone asks me, “I want to start a cause, to help with something, can you point me in the right direction?” I answer, “Why should I point you anywhere, man? Don't you live in Bulgaria? Take a walk, look around, there are thousands of things that need improving, that need support, entire social groups, entire sectors.”

The IT sector is one of the few that work well, because there are almost no regulations.

– Still, how do you start? If I've never done it before, and the idea comes to me to help with something, to be useful, as it did for you, what's the next step?

– I'll tell you about some of the things we do, and then we'll see how you can contribute.

In 2017 we discovered that in many hospitals in smaller towns the incubators were 30 or 40 years old, so we pointed the “Caps for the Future” campaign in that direction. Even the Ministry of Health didn't have that data.

Then my colleagues and I realized that

we are all quite unprepared for any kind of extreme situation,

and during COVID that became obvious after just one week of lockdown.

We have no idea how to give first aid, what to do in earthquakes or disasters, how to avoid violent situations, how to protect ourselves and our loved ones. So I gathered colleagues and we started running trainings like that.

Last year I found out that nobody teaches this to children at school either. At the beginning of the year we launched a first aid training campaign. In the very first term we trained more than 4,000 children, and by New Year I plan for that to reach about 10,000. These are children in Plovdiv, Pazardzhik, Sofia, Stara Zagora and Pleven, and I'm looking for partners in other cities.

A year ago we launched the “Volunteer Clubs for the Future” initiative. We have them in more than 30 towns. The idea is to connect people who are active and constructive and want to meet others like them. They want to do something, but they feel alone.

In quite a few towns it worked out incredibly well: they ran tree-planting campaigns and clean-ups, they went into schools, they organized large-scale clean-ups. Along the way they ignite other people.

The stronger a person's energy, the more it draws others around them.

Another important area: in a big disaster, however well prepared the state is—we saw it in Turkey after the earthquake—there are never enough people, and there have to be trained volunteers for firefighting and emergency rescue, equipped and drilled, who can go out and help on the ground. We already have “Rescue Clubs for the Future” in eight towns. We hold drills and gather equipment.

One more thing we do entirely with our own money is free checkups in villages where there are no doctors. In many villages our volunteers from the clubs for the future, who are medical professionals, travel and do basic tests: we measure blood pressure and blood sugar, do ECGs, all of it in consultation with doctors.

– The list is quite long… I don't know how you find the time for all of it, but there are many paths. When you decide to do good, you can help in many ways: with money, with your time, with training.

– Yes. For example, we raised money and we're going to buy chainsaws. We need people with off-road vehicles, with garages where we can keep these things. We need funds; there are never enough, that's for sure.

Something that has started taking its first steps in our country in recent years is volunteering and civil society. The two are inseparable; one can't exist without the other. Civil society exists when people realize that for anything to change, it has to come from our own efforts. It won't come from the politicians, it won't come from outside, from God.

Yesterday I was in Varna, and a girl was telling me she was trying to gather volunteers. “Very few people, it's hard going.” You don't need many people, this isn't a banquet. You need a few, but motivated ones.

Every change is made not by the majority, but by a small, motivated, well-trained group of people.

With will, with brains, with skills, the people who want to change something somewhere do it. It doesn't matter in what field; you need small, well-coordinated, united groups of people. That's why I try to build units of 10 to 15 people who are like a family, so that when there's an alert, at least half of them go out and respond.

The moment a person enters the world of volunteering, they enter a different dimension. There, people go and do something not because they expect someone to pay them or thank them, not because they expect something in return, but because they know something needs to be done, that it's the right thing. They see that somewhere there's a need, a problem, a shortage, an injustice, and they go and help, giving their time, their energy, sometimes their nerves and their health. Yes, there are fewer such initiatives than in Western Europe, because it's much easier to give yourself to these things when you've made it economically than when you don't know whether you'll manage to pay your bills at the end of the month.

In volunteer circles you can see people giving themselves to something bigger than they are. Even if what they do is a drop in the ocean, they know it has to be done, snowflake by snowflake.

They throw millions, billions of snowflakes, but there is one that finally makes the avalanche.

Things happen through accumulation, through grinding away, through working with other people, and there's no other way, no shortcut.

– In a way, I've chosen my own form of volunteering through telling digital stories. Because I think that's what I do best: start conversations on important topics, make people think. I heard on another podcast that one of your favorite books is Stranger in a Strange Land. So I wondered: don't you often feel like a stranger in a strange land when you talk about these things?

– When a person tries to cultivate a wild wasteland, untilled ground, it's perfectly normal to be lonely at first. Of course, I'm not saying Bulgaria is a wasteland, it's just that we have underdeveloped sectors. In volunteering we only have organizations here and there; you can think of two or three. There are hundreds, but they operate at a local level. It's perfectly normal, when you do things that don't exist or are little known, to feel alone and misunderstood.

I won't lie to you that it doesn't gnaw at me, that it hasn't stung me over the years, but I think in the last year or two I've managed to accept it. Okay, I'm trying to do something that's poorly developed and not popular, but there's meaning in it. When I truly believe something is important and needed, I have an inner motivation; I simply know I have to do it. I won't develop the whole sector, I won't fix the state. But I will do something.

Besides, I love developing new things, building new environments. Back in the day, before I started writing articles on personal training, there were mostly gym trainers who were huge bruisers and gave everyone the same exercises. Competitive bodybuilding suits a very small percentage of people; most people need to feel their bodies, to be able to move well, to perform movements properly. The approach is completely different, both in the training and in the attitude.

I love doing things that aren't popular. The moment they start becoming popular, it gets overcrowded and I turn to something new. I love spending a lot of time alone, spending time in the forest. I live in Knyazhevo, a neighborhood at the foot of Vitosha in Sofia: ten minutes walking uphill or five or six running and I'm in the forest, clearing my head. I avoid thinking of myself as Michael, the man from Stranger in a Strange Land; he was a superman with superpowers. And nobody knows my flaws, my weak and dark sides and my fears better than I do.

– You say volunteering is largely tied to living standards. But isn't it more about national psychology? I've seen many people give their last few leva to a cause.

– That it's tied to living standards is a statistic. But it's also national psychology, a culture that we have to develop and change.

Culture doesn't change by itself, but as a result of the efforts of many people over a long period of time.

Our national psychology was built over centuries and millennia, and it won't change easily. Small changes happen within a decade. It's like a glacier, moving in one direction a few centimeters a year: the culture, the national psychology, the values.

There has to be a vector that keeps pushing, slowly, slowly. People think we'll vote for the right people and they'll come and fix everything… It won't happen. A friend of mine says politicians are the emanation, the quintessence of what we are as a society.

I believe very strongly that civic initiatives can have an enormous influence in changing the way people think. Of course, it happens over a long period; you just have to keep the fire going and hold the direction.

I believe very strongly that in a society there are three main centers of gravity: politics—there's no way around it, man is a political animal—and business, where the goods come from. When the third is missing, these two grow together, and you get monopolies, political umbrellas, corruption. But when the third center appears—civil society—it shifts the point of gravity between the other two and starts to balance them.

– Do you never tell yourself, “It's none of my business”?

– A coach I used to follow, Scott Sonnon, told this story: “When I saw something that wasn't okay, that was broken, that needed improving, as a younger man I would say to myself that somebody should do something. But if I say that, I see myself as ‘nobody.’ I am ‘somebody,’ you are ‘somebody.’ Everyone who sees an injustice is ‘somebody.’ I see this here and now and I can do something—not solve the problem, but do something that makes the situation at least a tiny bit better. Tell people about it, bring people in, and together improve this thing.”

Was anyone aware in 2017 that in dozens of towns the incubators were from the last century? We found out by chance, some volunteers with ideas, enthusiasts, and we started pushing. In 2017, one incubator; in 2018, two; in 2019, 19 incubators. And we replaced them! At the beginning of 2020 we set ourselves the goal that there should be no hospital in Bulgaria whose newest incubator was from the last century. That's now the case.

Then we discovered there were no pediatric ambulances: there were two in Sofia, donated by other causes. In 2019 we announced the campaign; I researched companies, requirements, equipment. In 2020 we donated the first one, and we've reached the fifth. Each of these ambulances serves several provinces, and together they now cover all of Bulgaria.

Now we're going to help several dozen towns in Bulgaria with equipment again. We bought the first off-road ambulance, then the second. We'll buy fire engines so the volunteer units can support the fire service.

I have a small business that pays my bills. I don't drive a Bentley, I don't live in a gated complex in a 300-square-meter apartment; I rent. In 2020 my car was even stolen, and I drive a friend's car; I need to get a new one.

I don't ask much of life for myself; I have the things I want. If I went for a massage a bit more often, I'd feel better. But the problem there isn't financial, it's purely organizational. It's something I've been trying to work on in recent years.

I can't escape my own irresponsibility toward myself.

I believe a person should help where their heart points them. If it's forced, the satisfaction won't be as strong. Let people look for a cause that truly resonates with them.

I learn a lot from the people around me, and I believe everyone can contribute to the people around them, to people in need, if they feel it inside. It has to be right here, in your heart, in your little soul. If you really feel a little flame, a little warmth, and you're wondering whether you can or can't… If you're wondering, do it. If you're wondering, you definitely can!

Watch the full conversation with Lazar Radkov here:

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Just imagine living a whole week without money. None at all—no cards, no banknotes! Now what about a month, a year? Today's hero has been getting by this way for 15 whole summers.

He started it as an experiment—how would it go if he tried to live without money for a year? He liked it so much that he never went back.

You'll say that we here in the Balkans can manage that just fine. And yet, even in our latitudes, nobody can live entirely on sauerkraut and homemade rakia, the local fruit brandy; sooner or later you end up back in the system through benefits, electricity, water… Unlike Mark, who used to be a successful businessman.

And there's more! Seven years ago he took the next step and began living with no contact with modern technology. He says he is happier than ever before. Because he can appreciate the things we once had, unburdened by the problems of modern society.

And you—could you imagine tomorrow stripped of both money and technology? What else does Mark Boyle have to tell us?

A Guinness Without the Guinness

It's 2007, and the 28-year-old Irishman is sitting over a beer with friends when the conversation turns to what divides people. They chat about ecology, about how society is developing… and conclude that money lies at the root of every problem. So can you live happily today without money?

Up to that moment his story is a classic one. Six years studying business and economics, then a prestigious job in Bristol as a manager at a large organic food company. He is more than content with life—not only has he fulfilled every white-collar dream, he also believes he is helping to save the planet. Ecology has been close to his heart since his final year of college, when he came across the film Gandhi.

And suddenly we arrive at that quiet evening of pleasant talk, when the conversation reaches the point that, in today's world, a truly ethical business simply cannot exist. That the way our society is built sets us against one another and destroys nature. “And the main problem is money, the great divider of people,” Mark decides. It dawns on him that he isn't doing enough to make the world a better place, and that the time has come for a radical solution. “Be the change you wish to see in the world”—he recalls Gandhi's famous words.

Rich = Poor?

His first idea is a different one. The Irishman decides to set off on a two-and-a-half-year walk from Bristol to Gandhi's birthplace, Porbandar. With no money and very little luggage. It doesn't work out: he comes back just a month later, having realized that the language barrier won't let him go on. He makes it home with considerable difficulty, but with a clear plan in his head.

His venture begins on Buy Nothing Day, the symbolic antagonist of Black Friday. Of course, before that he has to make a few long-term investments—a solar-powered laptop, for instance. But when day one of the experiment arrives, he no longer has a single penny. He has handed back his bank cards and left himself to fate…

But how do you live without money? What do you eat, how do you dress, what do you brush your teeth with? And for that matter… where do you live, so that there's no risk of the building's cashier—the neighbor who collects the block's maintenance fees—knocking on your door? Our hero faces all these challenges with no certainty at all that he can cope.

He finds his first “free” home by chance. On the very day after he makes the decision for the big change, a girl he doesn't know stops him on a bike path, tells him about the farm where she works and invites him to join as a volunteer. “And is there any chance I could park my caravan there and live in it?” he asks timidly, and the girl replies that it would be wonderful.

The Man and the Money…

“So in just one day I had a place to stay. Three days later I got a caravan from Freecycle—a worldwide organization for giving away unwanted goods. It simply showed that when you commit to something you believe in, ‘someone’ supports you, rewards those actions. I started living off the land, foraging for food, bartering, and dumpster diving when I was in town for the weekend,” Mark says, looking back on those days.

He makes friends with the neighbors; he does them small favors, and they pay him in kind. He also strikes a deal with local restaurants to give him food that's about to go off, again in exchange for a bit of work.

He bathes in the stream, without any cosmetics. He makes toothpaste from cuttlefish bone and fennel seeds. What he uses for toilet paper you can guess if you remember the 1980s (for everyone else—unsold newspapers from the nearby kiosk). He even recalls that, years later, he once found himself wiping with… an article about himself.

He changes his diet, too. He has been vegan his whole life, but once he gives up money he has to give up that principle as well. He fishes three times a week, and when he finds a deer hit by a car on the road, he drags it home and uses every part of it. He lights his fire by striking stones, because he has given up lighters too.

The Millionaire Pauper

Even before all this, he decided he wouldn't rely on fossil fuels for heating. He had worked as a volunteer at a refugee center in Calais and heard plenty of stories from people from Iraq and Afghanistan. “From them I understood that wars happen because of the West's desire to get hold of those countries' resources. I realized I could no longer use fossil fuels, I couldn't be part of a system that destroys families and wrecks nature. That's exactly what money does to us too—it cuts us off from such people, we don't see their faces, their suffering. We don't see how any of it happens, hidden behind the screen of consumerism.”

So what is it about those Phoenician symbols, as Bulgarians jokingly call money, that he finds so distasteful, when the rest of us knock ourselves out for them every single day? In his view, one of the main problems of today's society is that the consumer is separated from the process of making the product. He doesn't know how much human labor goes into producing the things he uses, and he has stopped valuing both the labor and the people. If we grew our own food, we wouldn't throw away a third of it. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn't throw them out when they need repainting.

“When you have money, you don't need neighbors, you don't need anyone. You can buy everything, pay remotely. You shop at the supermarket from someone who doesn't know your name, who doesn't care whether you're a good person or whether you do anything for the community. When you have money, you don't need to live by any principles or respect people,” Mark explains.

Freeconomy / Freak-onomy

No, don't picture him as a modern-day version of Saint Ivan of Rila, the tenth-century hermit who became Bulgaria's patron saint. Boyle quickly makes plenty of friends in the area. Little by little he also learns to travel without money.

It gets even easier once he becomes well known. A year goes by, the experiment ends, but… he has liked it and decides to carry on. He reflects that for a whole year he hasn't been ill, thanks to natural produce and clean air. He has felt calmer than ever before, back when he thought about work, loans and purchases. Yes, his girlfriend supported him at first and then left him, but… that was her call.

He says he surprised even himself with what he turned out to be capable of. From a man who filled his days with spreadsheets and had never touched a shovel, he quickly becomes a skilled grower, gets used to foraging, develops unexpected skills.

“At first it was terrifying and hard, but by the end of the first year I somehow found myself more fulfilled, healthier and calmer than ever.”

Dirt Cheap

“For the first time I felt how connected and interdependent I was with the people and the nature around me,” Mark writes. “Ideas like these only get into a person's arteries, tendons and bones when he physically realizes how his own health depends entirely on that of the vast web of life. I found that my security no longer lay in a bank account but in the strength of my relationships with the people, plants and animals around me. My character replaced sterling as my currency.”

He gathers his experience in the book The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living. The wordplay is an English one and means “free economy.” The book quickly becomes popular, he starts getting invitations to lecture all over the world, and he is given a column in The Guardian. Later he will write three more books and gather admirers in 162 countries. He will compare notes with other “moneyless” people such as Heidemarie Schwermer, whose story deserves a telling of its own.

In his third year he partly gives up his “moneylessness.” He agrees to manage the funds coming into an account from sales of the book, but only for purposes that support the venture. Otherwise, to this day, exactly 15 years later, he has no money of his own, not even a wallet.

Don't You Mock Me, Little Millionaire

Of course, there are haters too. “I understand them perfectly, because I grew up that way myself,” he says. “From the moment we're born, with the very best intentions, our parents and teachers instill in us that we must be successful. That we must earn money, because that's the only way to be successful. But it isn't so, and my experience proves it.”

The Irishman often repeats that life without money is nothing new, that money is in fact a construct that has existed for only a small part of 200,000 years of human history. Well, historians reply that some form of monetary exchange has existed for almost all of our 5,000 documented years.

Gradually Mark delves deeper into environmental issues, and in 2015 he publishes the provocative book Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, in which he describes how the political and economic system has brought us to the point where climate change is irreversible and environmental measures merely palliative. So it's time to replace the three “R”s of today's care for nature—reduce, reuse, recycle—with the far more radical resist, revolt, rewild. We can only guess whether the book ever reached Greta Thunberg; she would certainly approve.

Millions Know No Laws

And despite his radical calls, he goes on doing only the third, but systematically. In 2014 he returns to Ireland and, with all the money he has earned from book sales, buys land and builds his new home on it with his own hands. There is also a large open space, though, where he invites anyone who shares his principles to come.

And so we reach his next big step. Back in Ireland, he finds the latest villain of modern society—technology. In his view, although it was created to bring people closer, it has long since become yet another means of dividing them.

So one morning in 2017 Mark wakes up without his beloved laptop, his last link to modernity. And here the change surprises him with how good it is for him.

Since We're No Longer Friends

Despite the abrupt transition, Mark keeps writing books—by hand. For a few years he also keeps up his column in The Guardian, sending the letters by ordinary mail, and his editor selects and prints some of the most interesting reader responses. Of course, there is plenty of irony in the fact that even this message from the anti-digital man reaches you thanks to those very same digital technologies.

Contrary to the stereotype, he says he hasn't chosen “the simpler life,” but quite the opposite. “It's quite complex and made up of thousands of simple things. Compared to it, my old life in the city was fairly simple, but it was made up of thousands of complex things, like smartphones, power sockets and plastic. I was bored doing the same thing day after day, using complex technologies that, I suspected, bored the people who made them too. Living without running water, electricity or machines, my life has certainly become more complex. I don't idealize the past, or the future. I have lived both with technology and without it, and I know which brings me the most peace and fulfillment.”

And still—what does he miss most about technology? Match of the Day and his parents' voices.

Rolling in It

And yes, in case you're wondering, he has found a new girlfriend.

Another thing he missed in the early days was the music of Joni Mitchell and David Bowie. But he says that today he has replaced it with birdsong, and that reminds him how we have turned art into passive consumption rather than an inner need. “We consume our entertainment instead of taking part in it with our whole hearts. We have become consumers of everything…”

Somewhere around here the experiment finally turns into a way of life. It continues to this day… although his last media appearance was a few months ago, so he may have given up, and the letter announcing it may still be on its way, if it was entrusted to Bulgarian Posts, the national postal service.

“People often ask me how I manage without technology. To me that question is more interesting than the answer; I do thousands of little things,” Mark says. “No two days are alike. Today, for instance, out of tree trunks blown down in the forest by the wind, I built a rack for smoking trout and venison—I have no fridge, and I store the ‘surplus’ in my neighbors' bellies. The next day I made a fence for the horses. In the morning I finished paving the path to the house, then I worked a reindeer hide that I'll one day make into clothes or something useful. The sinews will serve me as thread.”

Tyger, Tyger

“When I decided to give up technology, my biggest worry was that I would be cut off from family, friends and the rest of society,” Mark recalls. “But it turned out to be exactly the opposite. Now I keep in touch with the people I care about through letters, and writing them provokes a completely different level of thought and expression compared with email or text messages. I have never been more sociable with my neighbors and loved ones than since I gave up social media. Lots of people come and stay at the free hostel we run. I have come to value quiet time for reflection with the landscape and the wildlife as much as time with people.”

Mark found out about Brexit only several months later. When his latest novel was finished, he had to interrupt his “hermitage” for a little while to type it up on a computer. He remembers that moment as horrible.

“Poverty is a funny thing,” our moneyless hero muses. “It is always defined financially and always measured against what others earn. It's possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially classed as poor. You can also be very unhappy despite earning a high salary. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, no matter how much they earn, while others, who are content with what they have, will always feel abundance. Most of the poverty in the modern world is not material but spiritual—a state of mind in which satisfaction comes only from the pursuit of material gain.”

100 Million or a Single Lev

So what are the lessons? Mark is adamant—he doesn't believe that everyone could live the embodiment of what his critics call “anarcho-primitivism.” He simply lives the way he feels he should.

“My biggest lesson so far is that while I was busy with my little things, species were disappearing faster than ever, and social injustice was growing exponentially, putting more and more money into the hands of those least inclined to use it for the common good,” he says.

“We cannot stand by and watch industrial civilization push the great web of life—including us—to the edge of the abyss. Democracy is meant to hold power to account, but in a world of propaganda, nine-to-six jobs and political and economic illiteracy, democracies fail to do so. When that happens, activism has to step in.”

My Two Cents

“Now is the time to be brave. We must stop the machine's advance into the natural world, using every effective means. Otherwise, before we know it, we will witness the devastation and loss of all the beauty that still remains. If we allow that to happen, we will deserve our fate.”

Of course, there's no need for us to become Luddites today, and it would be hard to live a full life that way. Technology is everywhere in our daily lives, but every such perspective that makes us think about it is endlessly useful. About our digital and our real connections, about face-to-face relationships with the people we love. About the price of the conveniences we so easily surround ourselves with, letting in along with them division, social injustice and the other unpleasant sides of the digital world.

Mark's choice is certainly not for everyone… but it's worth thinking about. The next time we throw ourselves into the frenzied Christmas shopping for things we don't need. When we try to win someone over online with hate. Or simply when we sense it would do us good, even for an hour, to switch off the phone and go outside…

As a boy, Kevin Mitnick was curious, but puzzles and chess left him cold; he preferred a rather different kind of problem… Before he even came of age, he was convicted of hacking, a crime that at the time didn't even exist in the law books.

Soon he would become the most wanted hacker, “Public Enemy No. 1” (according to the New York Times) and the FBI's greatest challenge. Only to land in prison again, and to walk out as the savior of companies from online criminals.

A life like a movie, you'll say. And films have indeed been made about his life, but… only about part of it. In July 2023, Kevin Mitnick passed away, seemingly having finally found happiness, though he narrowly missed living to see his first child.

The man who coined the term “social engineering,” the teacher of today's hackers and of today's cybersecurity specialists alike, lived his life like a movie worth watching from beginning to end. The way he himself would have told it—the most wanted and most talked-about hacker in history…

Home Alone

Kevin's parents divorced when he was very young. To support him, his mother worked almost around the clock. And from an early age he cared less about playing with friends than about discovering new things.

He loved to travel, but in the 1970s that was anything but cheap for a family like his. So at just 12, Kevin “hacked” the system for the first time. Back then, the Los Angeles bus network used a fare system much like the punched paper tickets Bulgarians knew until only yesterday—except that there the “secret” lay not in the ticket itself but in how the holes were “arranged” on it. With careful planning, the boy managed to find a whole pad of blank transfer slips, then persuaded one of the drivers to show him how the punching system worked, claiming it was for a school project…

The result: Kevin soon had slips for every bus line and began roaming the city at will. For the first time he had pulled off an “attack” we hear more and more about today—social engineering.

The Hacker-in-Chief

“Before long I had memorized the schedules of every bus in the system,” Kevin recalled. “It was an early example of my surprising memory for certain kinds of information; to this day I remember phone numbers, passwords and other things from my childhood.”

Another thing that drew him from an early age, and that would soon emerge in full force, was magic. “Once I learned how a new trick worked, I practiced, practiced and practiced until I had mastered it. To some extent, it was through magic that I discovered the pleasure of fooling people.”

In high school he got hooked on “phone phreaking”—breaking into the telephone system. Back then all communication ran over the familiar analog lines, and this is where we find the prototypes of today's hacking. With various tricks, the kids got themselves free calls they couldn't otherwise afford. The time came for the “magic” to be put into practice—Kevin quickly learned to pass himself off as someone else and get exactly what he was after.

A Gang with a Traitor

He became a virtuoso—creating unlisted phone numbers, calling from other people's numbers, listening in on and cutting off conversations. He grew used to handling complex technical questions; as he himself put it, at the height of this part of his “career,” kid though he was, he knew the phones and the network better than any technician.

Then came the age of computers. The first network he hacked was his own school's. And although he could have bumped up his grades, he didn't. What interested him was the approach to reaching the goal, the process, not the benefits he might reap. Something he would keep explaining for the rest of his life…

In 1980, at 16, Kevin made his first serious break-in, gaining access to the computers on a large company's network. He was part of a group of hackers at the time; they were given away after a typical teenage love drama, and he received his first sentence—three months in a juvenile detention center.

When the Internet Was Young

Then the wheel turned, and although the hacker kept getting better at his craft, the weak link almost always turned out to be someone else. In 1987 he was betrayed by his friend Lenny DiCicco—the two had carried out a string of hacking attacks together. When the FBI came, Kevin asked Lenny, with genuine curiosity, why he had turned him in. “You're a danger to society,” replied his friend of yesterday.

This time Kevin had a skilled lawyer, who argued that his client suffered from a severe addiction to computers, and that the addiction was to blame for the crimes. As a result, the sentence was just a year under lenient conditions.

After he got out, the most active period of our hero's life began. Within days, for some mysterious reason, the phone number of the officer assigned to monitor him was blocked, the judge who had sentenced him woke up locked out of his bank account, and all the data on his case vanished from the court's mainframe.

Bonnie and Kev

Several times Kevin landed jobs as a programmer, but his fame quickly caught up with him. His record stint was at the 20th Century Fox studio—a full two months.

After yet another short spell in the cooler, he decided to try to finish his studies at a new college, where he met the beautiful Bonnie. She impressed him so much that… he hacked her ex-boyfriend's phone to prove to her that the man was cheating on her.

The romance took off; they even started working at the same company… when the police once again sensed he was up to something and seized the hard drives from his home. Guessing what the officers would find, Kevin and Bonnie hastily got married, which legally freed her from any duty to testify against her husband. The marriage lasted… right up until the next time the hacker ended up behind bars.

Mitnick the Beatnik

Where is the line between legend and truth? We'll hardly ever know. Either way, in the early 1990s Kevin became a legend, and he would stay on his pedestal as the most skilled hacker in all of computer history.

He denied a huge share of the episodes he was accused and convicted of. Several times he said he had quit hacking for good, but something always happened to knock him off balance. In the 1980s it was his breakup with Bonnie, and in 1992 his brother died. Kevin had supposedly given up hacking by then and was doing paid consulting, but the news devastated him; he briefly lost 45 kilograms and then… disappeared.

After a series of hacking attacks, he was placed on the federal wanted list. He stayed in hiding for three whole years, living under a false identity. And “working” hard, diving into the technology of mobile phones.

On Christmas Day 1994, however, he made a fatal mistake. He broke into the personal computer of cybersecurity specialist Tsutomu Shimomura, just to mock one of his leading rivals. He even left him an audio file full of insults. But someone else laughed last: Shimomura joined the FBI team on Mitnick's trail, and on February 15, 1995, the hacker was arrested.

“Despite the myth of Kevin Mitnick created by the media, I am not a malicious hacker,” Kevin later wrote. “What I did wasn't even against the law when I started, but it became a crime after new legislation was passed. I kept going anyway and got caught. But the federal government's treatment of me was based not on the crimes, but on making an example of me. I did not deserve to be treated like a terrorist.”

Hacker Won't Peck Out Hacker's Eye

This is where his mythical status was born. During the trial the authorities did everything they could to demonize him. Shimomura, together with John Markoff, wrote the book Takedown, which became a bestseller and the script for a box-office film. Markoff, in turn, was a journalist who had also joined the manhunt and described it on the front page of The New York Times in grandiose terms. The US Department of Justice itself called Mitnick “the most wanted computer criminal in United States history.”

Meanwhile, a mass campaign for his release got underway. Kevin's “colleagues” hacked some of the biggest websites, plastering them with slogans that he had been framed, that he was a scapegoat.

The trial dragged on, and when it finally came to a verdict, the sentence was five years—but the hacker had already served four of them. Which is downright symbolic: had the original charges been upheld, they would have cost him… 300 years behind bars.

Hold My Hat

Kevin walked out of prison as a pop star and made the most of the new role. For three more years he was barred from using electronic devices, so even when he appeared as… a CIA agent in the modest series Alias, he had to use a fake computer prop.

Then the probation period ran out, and Kevin went back to hacking, but from the other side. In his “trade,” “black hats” are the ill-wishers who attack systems in order to abuse them, and “white hats” are those who test security to help companies. Well, with the arrival of the new century Kevin changed his hat (as far as anyone knows) for good. In the last years of his life he founded his own cybersecurity consulting company, became a leading expert on the subject and a popular speaker. In the end he found love again in fashion designer Kimberley, who soon took the surname Mitnick.

By then he was even helping the police. In a small town in Michigan, a phone terrorist surfaced and began a series of bomb threats. The sheriff contacted Mitnick, who explained in detail what data to request from the phone company, and the 15-year-old prankster was soon caught. “Don't thank only me, thank Tsutomu Shimomura too,” Mitnick smiled. With a large dose of irony, because Mitnick accused the journalist Markoff of using entirely made-up facts and creating a wildly exaggerated image that he never managed to escape. And Shimomura, completely undeservedly, got cast as the shining hero.

Final Customs

For nearly a year Kevin fought pancreatic cancer before passing away in July 2023, at 59, just short of the birth of his first child. Leaving behind him the legendary image of the mythical hacker.

Does he deserve it? Undoubtedly. If only because throughout his life he never got rich and never cashed in on the huge breaches he had pulled off. Of course, they were by no means harmless: the damage from the crimes he was convicted of alone exceeds $300 million, and many believe his overall “contribution” is many times larger. Motorola, IBM, Nokia and Sun Microsystems are just some of the companies he managed to “crack.” The list is rounded out by NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And yet… there was a great deal of art in his “work.” He could step into all kinds of roles to gain access to his next target. He became an employee who had forgotten his password, a technician in need of assistance. He even got the better of the FBI's phone network, monitoring communications between the agents hunting him. For him, hacking was always a challenge, an adventure—on both sides of the hat.

“Some people get out of bed every morning dreading their daily work routine, as if they toiled in salt mines,” Kevin wrote. “I've been lucky enough to enjoy my work. You can't imagine the challenge, the reward and the pleasure I felt. I honed my talent in the art called ‘social engineering’: getting people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do for a stranger—and pay me for it. It wasn't hard for me to perfect it, because my father's side of the family has been in sales for generations, and the art of influence and persuasion may be an inherited trait. When you combine an inclination for deceiving people with the talents of influence and persuasion, you get the profile of a social engineer.”

Hack to Basics

“Anyone who loves playing chess knows that it's enough to defeat your opponent. You don't have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile,” he said. What would he advise young people interested in hacking? “Don't follow in my footsteps. Get good at using virtual machines and all the available tools. Dig deep into system administration and the fundamentals before jumping into security.”

“As long as computer code exists, there will be vulnerabilities,” the mythical hacker reassures us in one of his many books.

“What I became convinced of is that it will always be easier to manipulate people than technology,” he said. “Companies spend millions of dollars on protections, encryption and devices, but that money is wasted. None of these measures addresses the weakest link in the security chain—people. Besides, any technology is vulnerable to attack if you have enough time and resources.”

The Trickster

His role in recent years almost feels a bit dull: the wise, battle-scarred figure who looks after… security. Considering that he himself invented and popularized the most common types of attacks in use today.

As he put it himself, “my job now is like Pablo Escobar retraining as a pharmacist.” Rather colorful, wouldn't you say?

Just like his explanations that he did something that wasn't even forbidden back then and undeservedly became the black sheep. In the end, he simply never managed to escape his love of magic. Something there is less and less of in our lives, and in the computer world…

May 12, 2017, the day that could have put an end to the internet. The computers of Britain's National Health Service begin to collapse one after another. They stop working, and an unambiguous message appears on the screen: “Ooops, your files have been encrypted! Send between $300 and $600 in bitcoin to the following address to unlock the machine…”

The problem quickly snowballs into an avalanche. Some 70,000 devices go dark—not just computers, but scanners, refrigerators that store blood… all the medical equipment! The lives of thousands of people are at risk.

At the same time, the attack is unfolding all over the world. The WannaCry virus, which entered Bulgarian meme folklore under the absurd translation Искаплаче (Iskaplache, “wants-to-cry”), becomes the most powerful cyberattack in human history. In a single afternoon it causes between $4 billion and $8 billion in damage. What's more, because of how and how fast it spreads, it threatens to infect every device connected to the internet within a day.

It is stopped, in a most unexpected way, by a likable curly-haired Briton of Jamaican descent. At just 22, he becomes a celebrity in the cyberworld. Until, a few months later, he ends up in an American prison facing charges that could bring him decades behind bars.

The story of Marcus Hutchins is something between The Count of Monte Cristo and Crime and Punishment for the digital age. About the rise and fall of the boy who saved the internet (and thousands of lives) before he came face to face with the mistakes of his past…

Mother Cries

Waking up after a loud party in Las Vegas, Marcus will see a black van in the yard, just like in the movies. “It can't be the FBI, it can't be that obvious,” he will think. And later, when two neatly suited men approach him at the airport and show their badges, he will still believe they have come to gather information about the devastating WannaCry, the virus he stopped a few months earlier. Except he will hear a single word—“Kronos”—and he will understand that the demons of the past have returned. And that it is time to answer for the mistakes of his childhood…

Speaking of childhood, Marcus's great passion back then was to get on his surfboard and ride the huge waves. For years he won the surf lifesaving competitions that are popular in some parts of England.

His mother, Janet, is a nurse born in Scotland. His father, Desmond, works in social services, has experience as a firefighter and comes from Jamaica. The two met in a London nightclub, and it was in the suburbs of the British capital that their two boys were born. Marcus was 9 when the family moved to a stone house in the middle of a livestock farm just a few miles from the west coast of Britain.

Life on the farm turns out to be exactly the idyll they expected, and the children get used to a daily routine close to nature. Marcus is a bright kid. He doesn't have many friends, but, as his father says, he grows up with a very keen sense of right and wrong. He falls and breaks his wrist without making a sound, yet cries inconsolably when their landlord, the farmer, has to put down a sick calf.

The future hacker doesn't have many friends; he stands out with his height and his exotic looks in a place inhabited mostly by native-born Brits.

British Evenings

As often happens with the heroes of the digital age, that is precisely what steers him not only toward surfing but also toward technology. From the age of 6 he is drawn to the family computer; a year later he can take it apart and put it back together, fills it with strange programs, and soon starts writing them himself. As he will later say, programming becomes for him “a portal to a world where you can build anything you want. With no limits at all!”

At school, while the others are learning word processing, he is learning to write programs that get around the restrictions so he can install whatever he likes. At 13 he gets his first computer from his parents… or rather, the parts he picked out to assemble it himself. As his mother puts it, by then the computer has become “a complete and boundless love” for Marcus, who leaves it only for the surf.

Before he knows it, though, the boy feels he has learned everything he wanted, and the familiar programs bore him. And that is when he takes the step that will shape his future more than any other—he creates an account on a popular hacker forum…

As usual on a slippery slope, it all starts quite innocently. The forum gathers teenagers discussing how they've managed to crack the security of the popular MSN Messenger. One of the visitors describes software he has written, disguised as a picture, which, once opened, sends itself to everyone on the contact list and thus reaches a huge number of people. “Wow, look what programming can do,” Marcus thinks at that moment. “I want to be able to do things like that too!”

I Shot The Sheriff

At only 14, he makes his debut on the forum with a simple password-stealing program… He does astonishingly well for someone with no experience, managing to break the protection of the most popular browser of the day—Internet Explorer. The browser supposedly encrypts the passwords it saves, but the underage hacker gets around the protection. His program “reads” all of the user's passwords and sends them to his email.

The others on the forum are impressed, without the slightest suspicion that they are dealing with a kid. He says that back then it never occurred to him he was doing anything wrong. He didn't even think about what the stolen passwords might be used for. “I just felt, ‘Wow, what a cool thing I've made!’”

The first wrong step comes very quickly. One day his school online account is blocked and he is called in to explain himself. He is accused of organizing a cyberattack that irreparably damaged an expensive server on the school network. Although Marcus denies it to this day, the odds that it was a coincidence are slim…

Just then the family moves to an even smaller village, and he gets a room on the second floor, separate from everyone else. That is where his career develops—one that will cut him off from the world for a long time… before bringing him worldwide fame.

Marcus moves to another, more professional forum, where users brag about their ability to break into all kinds of systems. The minimum skill required to be admitted is having your own botnet—controlling thousands of devices whose owners have no idea, and directing them at servers to overload them until they stop working, the so-called DDOS attack.

Cry, Child, Your Father Is Innocent!

And there he is: a curly-haired 15-year-old in the middle of the idyll of the deep British countryside, already running his own botnet of 8,000 computers. He gains access to them by hiding a malicious script in torrents; users open them suspecting nothing and join the network…

But again, it's important to note: Marcus, both then and later, clearly pulls off his hacks because he can. His aim isn't to steal or to cause harm; he is simply using his skills on yet another intellectual challenge.

Somewhere along the way, however, lies the fine line that sooner or later is bound to be crossed.

At first Marcus chooses a relatively legitimate business that still brings him some income. He rents servers and provides the hosting his fellow hackers on the forum need. When asked point-blank whether he'll host phishing sites, he replies: “No problem! Anything goes, except child porn.”

A year later he has had enough of botnets, and of hosting too, because of all the dealing with unhappy customers, and he turns to what lies closest to his heart—developing attack software. And here we arrive at the story that will eventually lead him to the FBI…

Dr. Faustus

Marcus has built a solid name among hackers when a man going by the handle Vinny contacts him with an ambitious proposal: to create hacking software with a wide range of capabilities. Vinny would sell it and the two would split the revenue. That is how the program UPAS Kit comes about, named after the upas tree, whose sap the people of Java used to poison the tips of their arrows.

The business takes off very quickly—and not only the business. Marcus grows close to Vinny, and for his 17th birthday receives from him a gift: an assortment of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Our hero is more than happy with life. He creates programs that interest him, feels in demand and makes good money. His parents have no reason to doubt that he works as a freelance programmer; they have long known how good he is with computers. He has no need to think about what his program is used for, since every month several thousand dollars land in his bitcoin wallet.

Yes, young as he is, he already has experience covering his tracks and staying anonymous, something vital in this line of work. And yet he makes the mistake of giving Vinny his address so the special gift can be delivered.

Viral Spiral

After this success, Vinny comes back with his next proposal: a second version of the software, this time with a keylogger added—software that lets hackers capture everything the victim types on the keyboard. And also the ability to inject malicious code into the forms on websites.

The purpose of both is clear—they were the most widespread hacking tools of the time for stealing payment data. Vinny proposes to Marcus that they put into their clients' hands the ability to drain their victims' money.

Well, this is where a light finally goes on in Marcus's head that he is about to cross the line. But he doesn't have much of a choice—he refuses, and Vinny threatens to give his address to the police and expose him as the creator of hacking software. Even so, our hero holds firm. In the end the two seem to reach a compromise—Marcus will build all the other features of the software they discussed, but not the ones related to bank theft.

So a few months later, UPAS Kit 2.0 appears on the “hacker market.” It turns out Vinny has secretly hired a second person to add the features he wanted. Soon afterward the kit reappears under a new name—Kronos. It's a play on Zeus, a piece of software popular among cybercriminals. And an allusion to Greek mythology—the name of the Titan father who devoured his sons until Zeus was finally born.

This malware quickly becomes a market hit, and then a legend. And it is precisely the word “Kronos” that Marcus will hear from the FBI agents in Las Vegas seven years later…

No Woman, No Cry

The young man is sensible enough to simply pocket the money and cut all ties with Vinny. Over the following years he remains active on hacker forums. He starts his blog, MalwareTech, where he publishes detailed technical analyses of different types of malware—how they work and how they can be stopped. He begins carefully analyzing some of the most dangerous botnet groups and even develops countermeasures. He manages to get inside their software and show which computers have been drafted into them without their owners' knowledge.

All of this wins him his first legitimate job. Salim Neino, owner of Kryptos Logic, a small cybersecurity firm in Los Angeles, is impressed by the blog posts. He writes to him with an invitation to jointly develop software that checks whether a given computer has been pulled into a botnet and warns its owners. He offers him $10,000 for the project, and Marcus, guilt-ridden over his past, is so driven that he builds the first version in a few weeks.

That, in turn, earns him a permanent job, now entirely as a “white hat”—the cybersecurity term for hackers who hunt for problems so they can be fixed. And the young man is now earning more than he did in his best days “on the other side.”

Barely 20, he works relentlessly and manages to stop serious hacking attacks. He takes down the first big new-generation botnet, one that has added a huge number of so-called smart devices to its arsenal. Not just computers anymore, but cameras, phones and GPS units, skillfully hacked so that at their new master's command they can wreak havoc. Marcus manages to stop the first such group, but instead of turning it in to the authorities, he simply writes to its creator telling him to stop.

The Rich Also Cry

“Throughout my career I've found that few people are truly evil; most simply don't think about the effect of their actions,” he writes in the blog post describing his successful operation.

Which brings us to the moment when Marcus, now 22, takes a whole week off for the first time….

Around noon on May 12, 2017, the administrators of Britain's National Health Service sense that serious trouble is brewing. One by one, thousands of devices start locking up, and the problem snowballs. It very quickly becomes clear that countless countries are affected and that this is the notorious virus still known today as the largest-scale cyberattack in the history of the internet. WannaCry…

It gets its name because it irreversibly encrypts sensitive information on computers and saves it as files with the .wncry extension.

Who Laughs Last?

It will later emerge that its creators were North Korean hackers who used a particularly dangerous module built for the purposes of the US National Security Agency. The NSA's high-tech spy tool had been stolen and turned into a weapon that looked utterly indestructible and capable of infecting literally every computer on the network..

And perhaps it would have, had Marcus Hutchins chosen not to dabble in hacking but stayed on his surfboard off the remote shores of England…

“It was like watching the moment before a car crash. We knew something deadly was coming that would cost many people their lives, and there was no way to stop it,” says Josh Corman, a leading cybersecurity expert. “It looked like WannaCry was ready to spread into the US health care system. If that had happened, a huge number of people would have died. Our worst nightmare was coming true live.”

Laughing Through Tears

Within hours, the systems of the German railway company Deutsche Bahn, Russia's Sberbank, the carmakers Renault, Nissan and Honda, universities in China, police departments in India, the Spanish telecom company Telefónica, FedEx and Boeing are all hit. In a single afternoon, the data on nearly a quarter of a million computers is destroyed.

Fortunately, it doesn't last until evening. Around 2:30 p.m., after a walk around the village, Marcus happens to sit down to eat in front of his computer, only to see that the internet is on fire. “I picked a hell of a good week to take off work,” he writes on Twitter.

Within minutes he has received a copy of the malicious code from a colleague and starts feverishly studying it. His lunch is still in front of him as he uses the program to simulate an attack on a virtual machine in his bedroom. Purely by chance, literally for an instant, he sees the malware send a request to a very strange address online: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com.

Marcus has gained quite a bit of experience, and although he isn't sure exactly what this is, he knows it isn't random. So he quickly sets out to trace the site and… it doesn't exist. So he decides to simply buy the domain and see what happens, what kind of request will arrive from the infected computers.

Four seconds after 3:08 p.m., Marcus registers the site with its not-especially-catchy name for the princely sum of $10.69.

Champagne and Tears

Suddenly the terrifying WannaCry… stops. The War of the Worlds. Marcus abruptly starts receiving a huge number of requests to the site from all the infected computers around the world, but the virus stops spreading any further. It simply turned out that its creators had made a mistake: if the request went through, the code stopped running right there…

When he realizes what he has done, Marcus leaps joyfully from his chair and, for once, goes to boast to his family. “Well done, dear,” his mother says, and goes on chopping onions.

Over the next few days come furious attacks on the server, trying to take it down and thereby set the monster free again. But Marcus already understands what is going on, and he has powerful allies. For a whole week our hero never sleeps more than three hours at a stretch while making sure the site holds. “We knew that if that domain went down, WannaCry would restart,” recalls Salim Neino, Hutchins's boss. “Within 24 hours the virus would have hit every vulnerable computer in the world.”

It remains a mystery why, over the following days, the creators didn't release a new version with this small flaw fixed. Months will pass before analyses show that the culprits were North Korean hackers, though of course their homeland denies it. Many will speculate that Marcus himself was the creator, and that this explains the miracle of the sudden end, but plenty of arguments will pile up that this simply couldn't be the case.

The Truth and Nothing but the Truth

Meanwhile, he is becoming a global superstar. Overnight, 100,000 people follow him on Twitter. Thanks to the tiny photo on his blog, the neighbors recognize him, and the family home is quickly besieged by journalists. Over the following months he is forced to leave his comfortable refuge to enjoy his fame. He tours international events, telling how he managed to deal with the terrifying virus… until one morning we reach the long-awaited encounter with retribution for his earlier mistakes.

August 2017, just three months after the great triumph. The previous evening Marcus spoke in front of 30,000 people at the world's biggest cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Around 7 a.m. he sees the van with agents outside the door, but tells himself that kind of thing only happens in the movies.

A little later he heads to the airport, where he notices that nobody asks to check his computer. Instead, a little while later in the waiting area, two men in suits approach him. And after the introductory small talk, after they show their badges and get down to business, the very first word makes him understand that they haven't come to ask about his great success—the fairy tale is over. “Kronos.” Then they put the handcuffs on him.

Months in American jails follow, but Marcus has already earned a worldwide reputation, and a huge number of cybersecurity specialists rally to his side. Leading lawyers take on his defense free of charge.

Until Proven Otherwise

Still, there isn't much they can do, because the young man has nothing to deny. At the very first interrogation they show him a printed chat he knows well, in which he describes details of his venture. He makes a full confession.

Several weeks in jail follow, until his lawyers get him released under certain restrictions. What torments him most isn't that he came to the city of his dreams only to land in jail, but the feeling of betrayed trust. “All these people were writing to the FBI to say, ‘You've got the wrong guy.’ And that was heartbreaking,” Hutchins says. “The guilt was a thousand times worse than what I felt about Kronos.”

He is tempted to tell the whole truth on his blog, but his lawyers talk him out of it. In the spring of 2018, nine months after the arrest, prosecutors offer Hutchins a deal. If he agrees to reveal everything he knows about the identities of other hackers and malware authors, they will guarantee he won't go back to prison.

Marcus refuses. He agrees to plead guilty to only two of the ten charges. Even those are enough to put him in prison for at least 10 years, but the decision is in the judge's hands.

He has the good luck to land before an old-school judge, who notes that he has been on the bench for three decades, during which he has sentenced more than 2,200 people. “I appreciate the fact that one can consider the dishonorable conduct at the heart of this case against what some describe as the work of a true hero. In the end, that is precisely what makes this case unique,” says Judge Stadtmueller before announcing his decision.

And He Became a Man

“At the same time, if we don't take measures to protect the security of these wonderful technologies we rely on every day, all of this has the potential to cause incredible chaos.”

The case ends with a suspended sentence. The judge weighs our hero's contribution against the damage he caused and decides that his moral debt has been canceled. Almost two years after the first arrest, Marcus walks free and returns to his parents. And to his work—protecting the online world from “the bad guys.”

Must every crime have its retribution?

“There's a misconception that to be a security expert you have to dabble in the dark side,” Hutchins later advises. “That's not true. You can learn everything you need to know legally. Stick to the light.”

But had he followed his own advice, would he ever have ended up in the role of savior? Sometimes simple explanations don't work. And that is exactly when the time comes for powerful stories, like that of Marcus Hutchins…

This piece is based on Wired's in-depth feature on the subject.

March 23, 2016, could have been an apocalyptic day in the history of the digital world, one unlikely ever to be repeated. Netflix, Facebook and Spotify were just a few of the countless sites that suddenly turned out to be… impossible to maintain and update.

Why? Twenty-eight-year-old programmer Azer Koçulu had simply deleted 11 fateful lines of computer code.

But how can an unknown programmer block the sites of global giants? Why, in today's strange online world, do enormous multibillion-dollar projects unexpectedly turn out to rest on the shoulders of volunteer enthusiasts? And what made Azer so angry that he unleashed the butterfly effect in its most terrifying form?

Sometimes the smallest, seemingly harmless lines of code change the whole program…

A Backup Never Hurt Anyone

The digital story of JavaScript—the programming language is a fascinating one: it was created in just 11 days and… sometimes it shows, even though it has come a long way since. It became the life force that paved the paths of today's internet as we know it. Where we once downloaded programs for just about everything and installed them through the operating system, today almost everything happens in the browser.

The change came more quickly and imperceptibly than we could ever have guessed… And everything can come crashing down just as quickly, as the story of today's hero shows.

The rise of web applications coincided with another important phenomenon in the software world—the mass arrival of open-source software. The pioneer was Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and Git, and over the past decades a huge part of today's software industry has come to rest on programs that are open and freely shared.

This is especially true of the JavaScript world. Its most popular platform is called NPM, and it holds literally millions of projects that a programmer in need can use. Everyone is welcome to leave their own bits of code, which, one way or another, can then be used by everyone else.

Haste Makes Bugs

This system works in a more than impressive way. New libraries keep appearing all the time, and the most successful ones are downloaded and used by developers millions of times a day.

What's more, projects of this kind gradually grow into enormous towers of Babel, because software libraries rest on one another, each new one using a little piece of code from the ones before…

Which, at some point, for all its convenience, can turn into a problem. Exactly as in the story of Azer Koçulu.

Many people joke that to create a new project with all the modules you have to use, you pile up gigabytes in the node_modules folder, which at some point weighs more than the Universe… but that, in the end, doesn't affect end users and is definitely the smaller problem.

A Word Spoken, a Bug Thrown

The bigger risk is surely security, which becomes ever harder to track when you rely on a sea of code. And that is exactly what the episode with the migrant from Bulgaria's southern neighbor, Turkey, reminds us of.

From an early age, Azer Koçulu was passionate about the ideas behind open-source software. Alongside his main job, he had a hobby of sorts—creating libraries and uploading them to NPM, giving them to other programmers.

Some of his projects enjoyed serious success, and he found it satisfying. By the infamous March 23, 2016, he had published no fewer than 273, some of which were used hundreds of thousands of times a week. And that's exactly when he received an email that made him furious…

It came from Bob Stratton, a patent specialist at a company called kik. Azer had created a small software library with the same name, and to avoid any confusion, the lawyers were asking him to rename his project.

Whispers Wreck Websites

You know how things in online communication sometimes escalate fast, right? Well, a few emails later, Azer was breathing fire and brimstone, with a vocabulary that a character in a Serbian film would envy. He flatly refused to rename the library, even when offered $30,000. He said his idea was different and that commercial interests should not lead the way in the field of open source.

Having read some interesting things about his close relatives, the patent lawyer realized this approach wasn't going to work. So he decided to go straight to the organization that could help him.

Although NPM is an entirely noncommercial platform, it has an owner company that looks after the rules and the infrastructure. That is who kik's patent lawyer wrote to, and he evidently managed to impress the recipients, because this time, instead of a colorful reply, he met with agreement.

Azer received a new email, this time from NPM, informing him that his library had been removed over copyright issues. Is that so? Outraged that the platform had given in to blackmail and trampled on its own rules, he deleted all 273 of his libraries in a single move.

Drop by Drop, a Bug

Which brings us to the afternoon when thousands of programmers around the world got the same error—some library almost none of them had ever heard of couldn't be loaded. That meant they were blocked in their work, and some who had the bad luck to be pushing their new code to users at that very moment found themselves with completely broken sites. And all of it because of a single one of Azer's projects.

But how could no one have heard of the missing little library when, in the month before, it had been downloaded by no fewer than 2,550,569 programmers?

How could everyone have used his code without ever hearing his name? How had companies like Netflix, Facebook and Spotify ended up trusting outside software that could even do unsuspected harm?

The answer, once again, lies in the pyramid of today's web software. Everyone relies on external libraries, which in turn rely on earlier ones… in a huge cavalcade of mutual dependencies.

Azer had simply pushed the first domino… “This just broke the internet,” reads the comment that collected the most cheerful reactions on the subject on GitHub, the platform for programmers.

Measure Thrice, Code Once

Well, the same thing happened with Azer's work. It turned out that a huge number of the most widely used applications relied on precisely the smallest of all his 273 projects—called Left-pad and consisting of… 11 lines of code:

If you've even dabbled in programming, you'll quickly see that this is an elementary function that literally anyone with a basic knowledge of JavaScript could write in minutes. And yet, instead of writing it themselves, some of the most popular libraries holding up the web had decided to use it ready-made.

Most of the trouble came from the fact that Left-pad was at the time part of Babel—a very important and widespread library used to “translate” code so that older browsers can read it too. Babel is used practically everywhere. The list included the sites of Facebook, Netflix, PayPal, Yahoo, Spotify, Reddit, Slack and LinkedIn.

And so… the “online apocalypse” was quickly averted. The first working fix appeared 42 minutes after the problem was first mentioned. Less than two hours later, a new package with the same name had been uploaded to NPM, which solved the problem at once.

The Fool Isn't the One Who Eats the Bugs…

Then came the post-match analysis. Azer, kik and NPM all went into explanation mode to tell the community what had happened, and the picture quickly became clear.

Azer said he had gotten angry because “this situation made me realize that NPM is someone's private land where corporate is more powerful than the people. And I do open source because ‘power to the people.’” He asked for forgiveness from everyone who had been affected, but said this was exactly the opportunity needed to talk more about how decisions in the community should be made by the community itself, not by centralized institutions.

The more important questions, however, remain. Had it been a far more complex piece of code, it could literally have blocked the work of millions of programmers around the world and threatened almost all of the biggest sites.

Does the idea of open-source software still sound so tempting?

Strike the Code While It's Hot

Fortunately, it turns out to be more magnetic and more effective than ever. And cases like this one are exactly what prove it.

Because the community, which includes an enormous number of specialists, can react quickly and solve a problem like this. Today Azer is a decade more experienced, he has racked up serious successes as a programmer, he has a simpler haircut, and maybe he has even forgotten that he once very nearly “broke the internet.” But the lessons of this case led to stricter rules about who can delete a code library and how. Today that would take much longer, and everyone using it would be warned in time to take action.

So when the commercial element is eliminated, miracles can sometimes happen.

Open-source software reigns as never before. Because it is one of those not-so-numerous examples that bring us back to the original idea of the internet. The chance to be united, equal, to help one another… If only we could learn to do the same on social media.

These days we keep less and less of our important information with us—our files, photos, documents, archives. The physical storage media are gone—floppies, discs, flash drives; the size of your hard drive no longer matters, everything important is in the cloud now. It's so convenient! No risk of losing anything, access from anywhere. The companies take care of security, and it's all so reassuring…

The companies?! Yes, today we rely on data in the cloud, using space that is almost always handed to us by one of the online giants. If we don't get carried away, it's even free, generous enough, fast, secure. But is that really down to how much they care about us?

Our data, as we've discussed before, is the most expensive resource in the online world today. And by handing it over to the cloud, we turn ourselves into even more conveniently and reliably manipulable units. What's more, at any moment whoever runs the cloud can change the rules, and suddenly we could lose our entire archive.

The Great Schemer

To be left without all our children's photos, to lose documents vital to our work… suddenly, in one fell swoop.

Kim Dotcom is not a website, nor is he the next heir to the North Korean dynasty or to the Kardashian clan. But yes, that is also the name of his website. And his life is a roller coaster—first a hacker, then a mega-successful entrepreneur. Then comes a period as a multimillionaire and another one… as a criminal doing everything in his power to escape American justice. And somewhere in between comes his role as a defender of freedom online.

It's time for one of today's most colorful and least-known digital stories, as unexpected and instructive, as vivid and dynamic as its protagonist.

John Doe Dot Com

I turned my name into a domain—karamanev.me. But I have to admit it's far, far more original to do the reverse, as our hero did, born with the rather dull name Kim Schmitz.

The author of an album that reached the top 8 in New Zealand, and of films. Founder of an internet party and father of six. A hacker and a bon vivant, an unrivaled whirlwind, a tech genius who has a great deal of important things to tell us.

Looking at the cheerful big family on his Instagram profile, hardly anyone would guess that today Kim is in the thick of a ten-year battle for justice against the American authorities, one in which he seems to be on the side of right. Nor would you have guessed it from the beginning of this story.

He was born in 1974 to a German father and a Finnish mother. At 16 he committed his first cybercrimes, and at 20 came his “debut” arrest—for selling stolen phone card numbers. Somehow naturally, as computers went mainstream, Kim moved on to that kind of fraud—and kept at it for a whole decade. In 2003 he was convicted in Germany of embezzling funds online and spent five months in prison before walking away with a 20-month suspended sentence.

When the Internet Was Young

He became famous in the '90s after boasting to the German media that he had hacked the websites of NASA, the Pentagon and Citibank. He went by the name Kimble—the hero of a 1960s TV series, later brought to the big screen by Harrison Ford. It turned out NASA had no idea he had hacked them, and the journalists had fallen for his bragging without knowing how to verify the claims. But… is there such a thing as bad publicity?

Then he bought and sold companies, and his fortune grew. At one point he had to go live in Thailand, fearing a judicial investigation. Even so, he was briefly arrested there too, introducing himself to the authorities as “His Royal Highness King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire.” Could he have been inspired by the kompir—the potato from the Bulgarian town of Samokov, so famous in Thailand?

He stepped into the spotlight in 2001 with his company Kimvestor, which sold ultra-luxury goods. During the Formula 1 race in Monaco, the principality's monarch at the time, Prince Rainier, was a guest at a party on his 73-meter yacht.

A documentary about the illegal Gumball 3000 rally shows Herr Schmitz driving a Mercedes at 240 kilometers per hour and having a blast while the police pull over one of his rivals. He's also into video games and for a long time held first place in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 rankings among more than 15 million players online!

The Good, the Bad and Kim

I did say there would be dramatic twists here, didn't I? It's only 2005, and our massive hero turns into a superstar and a multimillionaire! At the dawn of cloud technology, he and some friends created the hosting service Megaupload. Six or seven years would pass before the big players caught on to how important file sharing in the cloud was. Our Kim, meanwhile, sensed that computers and networks were now fast and refined enough to let you keep your information on secure remote servers without worrying about it.

Well, with one caveat in this case: other users had access to the files too, and a monthly chart of the most downloaded files was published… And, as you can guess, the top spots went to the biggest box-office blockbusters of the moment, something Hollywood would never forgive Kim for.

By then he was a superstar and began flaunting his wealthy lifestyle in every way possible. It was in 2005 that Kim Schmitz departed for good, and, even on paper, Kim Dotcom was born (albeit weighing around 130 kilograms). Neatly laundered and dried of his criminal past (as we'd put it in our parts of the world), he became a beloved tech guru and a frequent guest on the most-watched TV shows.

Megaupload quickly became a mega-sensation—it was the first service of its kind, one that would pave the way for others, while the rules of the game were still being written. The interest was enormous: at the peak of its popularity the platform reached 180 million registered users and 50 million visits every day. A full 4 percent of all internet traffic in the world was tied to the site of this larger-than-life character at the epicenter of the venture, which made him world-famous!

Herr Flick

2012 didn't turn out to be fatal for the world, despite the predictions of the Maya and their fans. But it did for MegaUpload. One of the most successful sites suddenly found itself in the crosshairs of the American authorities.

One sunny day, every user of the file cloud who tried to access their files was greeted by a friendly notice saying the American authorities had ordered access to the page blocked. Everyone who had decided to upload their family photos or favorite music there lost access to them for good. Because Dotcom and his empire of media superstars had become a target of the authorities.

Those were the romantic days of the internet, when the authorities, at least in the US, could still afford something like that, for better or worse. Those days slipped away almost unnoticed, at the moment it turned out that the mammoths could decide whether the sitting American president had the right to speak. Since then, the most dramatic scene involving the tech giants has been Musk walking into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink.

At Home with the Dotcoms

Far more dramatic was the scene of the commandos who turned up at Kim Dotcom's mansion in New Zealand. An idyllic country unaccustomed to such scenes—years later its prime minister himself would have to publicly apologize to our hero for the unjustifiably rough arrest, after which he ended up in prison.

“Helicopters, rifles, special forces, vicious dogs and 72 cops terrorized a family that's no threat to anyone,” Herr Dotcom later sang in a music video devoted to the episode. “We were shocked by the unusual arrest for unintentional internet copyright infringement brought by the US, which isn't even a crime in New Zealand,” he recalls.

Whether Kim landed on the faraway island because he anticipated such a turn of events, we can only guess. Still, a certain hint in that direction may be the fact that three of his closest co-creators of MegaUpload also happened, by some coincidence, to be in New Zealand at the fateful moment for the company.

Kim says he chose the place for the peace and the clean air he wanted for his children. He settled on the island in 2009; before that his main home was in Hong Kong. To this day he holds German and Finnish passports and says he is more American than the American authorities who have hounded him. According to wagging tongues, each of those places was chosen because it was far from Western justice.

Stop, Thief! Cries the Thief

Think Bulgarian justice is slow? Well, from 2012 to the present day, New Zealand's still hasn't managed to decide whether to extradite our hero to stand trial in the US. The heirs of the Maori clearly aren't in a hurry.

Only months ago, 11 years after the large-scale operation, two of Kim's colleagues struck a deal with the prosecution. They pleaded guilty, agreeing to serve out token sentences in the idyllic country without the risk of being sent back to their native America. The fourth defendant died of a fatal illness. And Kim keeps fighting the justice system.

Not that he's wasting his time in the meantime. He created Mega—as the name suggests, a service similar to Megaupload (with the flashy domain me.ga, no less), which he launched with a spectacular show featuring equally spectacular dancers. He shot songs and music videos giving his own version of how the case unfolded and of his innocence.

He tried further businesses, such as his own cryptocurrency trading platform, which raised very serious funding before declaring bankruptcy.

He founded an internet party, which won 1.42 percent of the vote in New Zealand's 2014 parliamentary elections. Alas, even though around that time he earned the prime minister's official apology, it did nothing for his electoral rise, and four years later his share of the vote had sunk far behind the decimal point.

And yet today he never stops flaunting his wealth and his life. The idyll he has built, now with six children. And although he split with Mona, the mother of children number two through five, he found love again in yet another future mother—and all six kids were conceived through IVF.

Kim Jong Com

“I'm not a pirate, I'm an innovator,” our hero likes to repeat. And those words raise another question for me, about tech leaders. Is it right that so much of our future today depends on people who reached the top of the tech food chain not only because of their skills and morals? Like Kim… or Musk, or Sam Altman—the list is long.

The charges brought by the US authorities certainly didn't paint him as the most exemplary citizen. Besides copyright infringement, the list included financial fraud, racketeering and money laundering. You can ask Assange or Snowden—once those institutions decide to make you look blacker than the devil, they know how to do it. And yet… evidently the evidence isn't quite as convincing as it ought to be, given that Kim still enjoys his freedom.

He is adamant that he didn't break the rules and that this was simply the natural evolution of communication on the internet. “Megaupload was created as a service that lets you send large files, because email had limits, and it still does to this day. The popularity and the initial growth were tied to that. The company wasn't created with the idea of becoming some kind of pirate paradise. If the American government says we are a mega-conspiracy, a mafia that built a criminal network of pirates, they are completely wrong. Their goal was to shut the project down under Hollywood's influence and then figure it out as they went along. By trying to hack the legal system.”

“I'm not evil, you know? I'm a good person. Everyone who knows me likes me… The prosecutors need to sit down at the table, come to their senses and settle this. Because I'm not going to give up. I'll fight to the end. And there's no chance they'll win, because I know I'm innocent.”

Megagame

Besides not shying away from showing off the luxury he lives in, Kim says that today he is a champion of a free internet and of how data is stored. Because we place far too much trust in the biggest companies without being sure how they will use it.

And it's true—we upload our files wherever and however we happen to, we build archives without bothering about what will happen to them. It's convenient to be comfortable. You can ask Kim, too, and not only given his rich life experience, from hacker to billionaire to criminal.

And since we now live in a world of information and big data, this way we supply an enormous volume of information, which is also the most valuable resource for ever more advanced artificial intelligence. From there, one of the usual big questions is whether this makes us easier to manipulate in all sorts of ways.

“There's a danger that the internet will be colonized by a handful of companies or governments. When that happens, the free flow of data will stop and innovation will be stifled. We must not stop fighting against that!”

The Dotcom Bubble

“After tech companies censored the sitting president of the United States, it's a sign that the biggest ones are increasingly getting involved in politics too,” says Kim Il Sung's namesake. “It's natural to ask what they want to get out of it—they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but with some purpose.”

His optimism that the situation will change for the better thanks to technologies like blockchain is intriguing. “There's no way a single project can change the way we communicate. It has to be a network for the people, by the people, open source, decentralized, and I think that's the future. In my view, the tech giants are making a big mistake by underestimating the power of open source and people's willingness to switch to something else.”

Could he be right?

Meanwhile, our data in the cloud sits somewhere, on a physical server that has backup copies, but… could something happen to it without our noticing? That is the subject of the next digital story, as big as Kim and very important…

Four pairs of mice are released to live as they please. With an abundance of food and water, far from danger and disease. Ready to conquer a vast territory… A mouse paradise!

They start breeding like rabbits. Their numbers soar, doubling every 55 days. By all appearances they are living their best lives and savoring every moment. A year later, 620 mice live in “paradise”!

Until suddenly something inexplicable happens—many of the rodents turn aggressive and start wounding each other for no reason. Then the males grow lazy and indifferent, and the population of the mouse kingdom imperceptibly begins to shrink… until it all ends in total collapse.

Could this be a sign of where the natural course of our own life here on Earth is heading?

Researcher John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment, carried out half a century ago, has become a huge source of reflection from the 1970s right up to the age of Facebook.

Hello, Big Brother

People haven’t stopped talking about it to this day. Scientists find many gaps and inaccuracies in the experiment, which cast doubt on its results as well. And yet the basic patterns, along with the big philosophical and social questions the experiment raises, keep looking more and more relevant.

How does the experiment unfold? Can we learn anything about people from mice, or is the comparison a stretch? Are the questions posed by Universe 25 more relevant than ever in the age of TikTok and artificial intelligence? The incredible story of Calhoun and his rodents is worth telling, even if “only” to make us think about our future as a species…

So, Universe 25. July 1968: the four young mouse families move into a wire enclosure at the US National Institute of Mental Health. The experiment is led by the biologist John Calhoun, who in previous years had made a name for himself with a series of large-scale behavioral studies on rats. This time, however, he chooses their relatives—mice—for the experiment that will make him famous.

The setup is built from 256 large boxes, each able to hold 15 mice with room to spare. They are equipped with water and food dispensers and everything needed to build a nest. Calhoun says his goal is to create a utopian, ideal place for mice. One where they have absolutely everything they need, where they are even oversupplied and can do nothing but enjoy life.

By his calculations, the space is large enough for 3,840 of Mickey Mouse’s cousins to live in bliss, and the food they receive would be enough even for 9,500!

All Mice to the Assembly

And of course, at first things unfold idyllically. The four couples enjoy life in paradise; Calhoun calls this period Phase A. If you haven’t been in that role yourself, you can surely imagine teenagers raised at home by strict parents, left for the first time to do whatever they like in a huge mansion, and in pleasant company at that…

So we soon reach Phase B, the moment the first pups are born. And true bliss begins—they are fruitful and multiply. From partying we move into conscious idyll! The number of mice doubles every 55 days (given that their pregnancy lasts 20 days and a mother gives birth to an average of 20 pups).

Interestingly, the trends are uneven—in some of the litters… or “mousters,” 111 pups are born, in others only 13. According to Calhoun, this depends on how active the males are.

Gangsta’s Paradise

Then… comes the more interesting part. Day 315: everything turns around, and Phase C begins. Population growth slows sharply and, as Calhoun writes, a strict social hierarchy develops.

At the same time, an ever-larger group of young males appears that fails to fit into the system. They are pushed by the others to the periphery of the former mouse paradise. And they certainly don’t look like inhabitants of Eden—they are bitten all over, their bodies covered in bloody wounds. Calhoun calls them “the outcasts” and explains the phenomenon by longevity. In the idyll of “paradise” there is no natural selection to push the males off the top of the hierarchy—here the “patriarchs” live longer and won’t let young rivals take their place.

In this phase the “outcasts” grow bitter and show more and more aggression, often for no reason at all. After all, resources are still more than plentiful: 620 mice live in the “neighborhood,” and there is room for at least five times as many.

Meanwhile, the female members of the commune become increasingly skilled at fending off the bullies and, as a result, also turn aggressive… but, inexplicably, not only toward the aggressors but in general—including toward their own young. The birth rate drops drastically, and mortality among the young rises. There are even cases of cannibalism. (In some places you may read that homosexuality also becomes much more frequent, but this is absent from the original paper.)

Still, the number of mice keeps growing, reaching 2,200—well below the maximum that “paradise” could house.

King Rat

And so we reach Phase D, when the mouse Sodom and Gomorrah unfolds in all its horror. Calhoun himself uses a biblical allegory for this moment, calling it “the phase of the second death.” The first comes when the spirit and society are destroyed and keep living only by inertia. Then it is only a matter of time before the second arrives to finish off the physical body. For this period Calhoun also introduces another term that has become popular in the social sciences: “behavioral sink.”

The number of a new type of male mouse rises sharply—the scientist calls them “the beautiful ones.” They no longer have wounds or scars; they simply live. They don’t fight for females, don’t argue over territory, don’t do anything except eat, sleep and groom their fur. Gradually the ladies stop paying them any attention at all, the birth rate falls to zero, and three years after the start of the experiment, life in the mouse paradise comes to an end. There are 120 mice left, all past reproductive age. In their mouse refuge, they are forced to watch the sunset of paradise lost in their hopeless old people’s home…

A few months before this happens, a colleague of Calhoun’s moves some of “the beautiful ones” and some of the ladies to a new home, but it changes nothing. Evidently, after “the first death” they have lost every instinct to continue the line, to be happy, even to survive.

Mish-Mash

And so Universe 25 (named because it is Calhoun’s 25th behavioral experiment) comes to an end, only to become a legend.

In the 1970s, overpopulation becomes a fashionable topic for the first time. That is why Calhoun’s experiment falls on fertile ground, and when he publishes his study in Scientific American, the media quickly pick up its main message.

The researcher’s specialty is ethology—the branch of science that studies animal behavior. But his big and much-disputed idea is that, if we observe the development of other mammals, there is no logical reason not to see principles that apply to humans too.

We’re just social animals, aren’t we? Or, in Harari’s newer definition, “simply hackable animals.”

Mousing Around

It’s worth saying a little about Calhoun’s earlier experiments, too. As early as the late 1940s, he raised rats in a fenced area of 930 square meters, where their numbers could have reached 5,000. And yet the population peaked at 200 rodents, then stabilized at around 150. The rats didn’t spread out evenly but gathered in colonies of 12 or 13—according to Calhoun, this turned out to be the optimal size for a social unit in which a hierarchy can develop.

Then, in the late 1950s, he settled rats again, though not so spaciously. He divided 48 animals into four groups of the “optimal” 12, with the two end groups having no contact with each other.

It was precisely these two poles that were conquered by strong males, each gathering a harem of 8 to 12 ladies and driving the other males toward the middle. And there the bacchanalia began—aggression, frequent fights, beating the young, a complete lack of desire for sex…

Long live Jordan Peterson, you might say. Never mind that this isn’t about his beloved lobsters. Or perhaps it’s food for thought on topics like totalitarianism, democracy…?

A Michelin Star

Over the following years, the fame of Calhoun and his experiment grows. But so do the criticisms. First and foremost, against the idea of drawing direct associations between human society and a biological species so different from us. Against his use of unscientific terminology and his failure to meet the strict requirements for documenting an experiment.

Some of the objections are more than convincing. For example, his records note that when Phase D sets in, the mouse paradise is still cleaned only once a week—so it is entirely logical that infections would develop from the leftover corpses. Infectious disease is indeed another argument against the experiment. According to his critics, Calhoun didn’t track or document carefully enough the health of his test animals, which may well have been wiped out by a pandemic virus.

The scientist also admits that in summer they lived at temperatures above 32 degrees Celsius, which definitely affects behavior in this species.

One more criticism sounds more than serious. Calhoun didn’t document in detail the origin of the first eight inhabitants. He writes only that they came from a certain laboratory, and that’s it. In that case, though… they were most likely related to one another anyway. And if we picture the following years, in which the mouse society grows explosively but within the genes of just eight little animals who, on top of everything, are relatives…? The consequences of inbreeding were known to science long before Game of Thrones. Genetic mutations are certainly one of the very likely explanations for the degeneration of life in “paradise.”

Mice and Manuscripts

What’s more, from Calhoun’s day to ours there have been… thousands of similar mouse colonies. Yes, for better or worse, scientists still rely heavily on the cute rodents, both for testing new drugs and for a range of other scientific tasks. And such societies grow and flourish without anyone seeing a trace of “outcasts” or “beautiful ones.” The bigger “farms” “produce” up to 10,000 mice a month!

All in all, the scientific community is quite skeptical of Calhoun’s conclusions, yet they keep parading through the media, today in the role of yet another dubiously confirmed piece of life wisdom shared on Facebook.

So much for the joy for Jordan Peterson, too, because according to his forerunner, the path to our salvation as a species isn’t tradition and conservative beliefs. “Our success as humans so far has been due to the fact that we have honored deviation more than tradition,” Calhoun says. “Changing the stereotype has always held a slight edge over conforming to it. Now we must diligently seek out those creative deviations from which the next step in our evolution will emerge. This may guarantee us an endless future, in whose realization we can take part.”

Could that have turned out to be technology?

Click

When the experiment was presented, some media outlets didn’t hesitate to predict that, if we applied the results to human society, our end as a civilization would come around 2010.

“The Earth is overpopulated. Someday we’ll be 5 billion! How will our mouse paradise overflow when there are more of us!”—such were the media leitmotifs of the 1970s that helped make the experiment famous.

And yet we passed that fateful threshold before the end of the 1990s. Today we have even reached the next milestone—there are now eight billion inhabitants of Earth…

And where has technology taken us in the meantime? We not only have as much space as we want, food, cocktails… By “we,” of course, I mean the inhabitants of the countries of the Northern Hemisphere; alas, in the south things look different.

But even in the oversupplied part of the world, the “golden billion,” where the end of history had supposedly arrived, we manage, for all the present-day glitter of modern societies, to end up in wars, to hate and kill each other with impressive dexterity and originality… Even for the most developed countries, a solution like nuclear war, which could literally wipe us out as a species, is still on the negotiating table.

Zorro the Mouse

What’s more, it is precisely in the most developed countries that the birth rate is falling, the population as a rule begins to shrink, and it seems the only remaining solution is immigration from the still lagging parts of the world…

As Musk says (and no one could accuse him of not doing his part in this direction), the biggest risk facing humanity is the population decline looming very soon…

Statistical projections show that we will reach 9.7 billion in 2064, after which the number of people will start to fall, to around 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

And overpopulation may not turn out to be a problem after all—today, if we didn’t fight each other, our Earth could easily feed many more people.

Maybe the problem isn’t overpopulation? Maybe it’s the invented values of consumer society, which in our mouse friends take the form of oversupply? The convenience of having everything your species has grown used to valuing, in quantities that far exceed your needs? If we assume that, as far as food goes, we overcome it one way or another, how exactly are we coping with our oversupply of gadgets, of communication, of information?

The Kitten Who Read Books

What if we add to all this the social changes on the way, which we don’t like to talk about? With professions disappearing, with ideas like universal basic income.

And then there is technology’s knack for supposedly bringing us closer while making normal communication ever harder, depriving us of natural human warmth, creating alienation in its illusory happiness.

Could it be that, in the end, despite the progress of technology, beneath all the gloss of modernity, we remain simply instinct-driven mice? Anyone who reads the story of the mouse paradise without prejudice would find some parallels with our development as a species…

Calhoun’s explanation is, of course, too simplistic and naive, which made it, first of all, convenient for the media of the time (and for today’s social media, too). But that doesn’t make the fate of Universe 25 any less instructive, as long as we don’t take it as science. It is certainly instructive, even if only as a metaphor.

Because today, only stories help us think about who we are, what we are. And where we are going…

“I have a dream…” Neno begins, a little unsure of himself. He and Krisi have climbed the hill with the sweeping view of the Valley of Roses and of the farm-to-be. “To grow blueberries. Will you be by my side?”

“Yes, 100%!” she answers without a second thought. “I had no idea what I was getting into…” Krisi adds today.

Both of them work in the world of information technology. He is a programmer, she is a project manager. Today, together, they own 4,700 blueberry bushes, whose remarkable taste delighted hundreds of buyers this summer. They also tend 5 decares (a decare being 1,000 square meters, so about 1.2 acres) of roses, alternating dailies with digging, and conversations about data science with conversations about agronomy.

Sometimes life really is a bed of roses; it only takes courage to appreciate it and rethink it. To believe in your dreams. And to forget about stereotypes…

Roseberry fields forever

“Tomorrow I’m taking a day off… I’m buying a tractor,” Neno once said, and his boss, what else could he do, replied: “Okay!”

Information technology has become a field that offers plenty of opportunities to all kinds of people. A “field” only in the metaphorical sense, supposedly… But not for Krisi and Neno.

She is from Lyubimets, a small town in southern Bulgaria; she studied abroad and quickly climbed the career ladder of her profession—project manager. He is from the village of Osetenovo, and while he was piling up years of experience as a programmer, he nursed a big dream of going back to the village, back to the land…

And he worked stubbornly to make that dream blossom. Step by step he built the plan for a farm where he would grow two very different crops—roses and blueberries. He thought over which plots to use, exactly how to care for the plants… and while work went on, so did life. Then came the pandemic years, when the love between Krisi and Neno sprouted, only to burst into full bloom.

Blueberry Hill

The two have just finished their first full season with both crops. In late spring the rose harvest was good, and then came the blueberries’ turn.

And speaking of the fragrant fruit, it is Neno’s great dream. For many years the programmer has been curious about how to grow this supposedly familiar crop so that the berries turn out thrillingly sweet. The result: after securing a plot, he bought varieties unknown in Bulgaria as seedlings and… hundreds of enormous pots. He filled them with the acidic soil in which this fruit thrives best—it is no accident that its usual home is the mountains. Although the practice is almost unheard of in Bulgaria, it is widely used around the world and has proven itself in the field.

Since they don’t own the land, they can rest easy knowing they can move the pots if the farm ever has to find a new home. They grow about 20 varieties to see how each one develops. Five or six are the main ones, making up most of the stock; they stand out for their large size and their different flavors—some are sweeter, others less so. All the other varieties are there for experimenting, for trying out different solutions.

“We want to see how well each one does and when it ripens under our conditions, because what the book says is one thing and what happens right here is another,” says Neno. The idea is to combine varieties so that the season lasts as long as possible, offering customers different versions of the delicious fruit.

A Rosy Future

Quite a programmer’s approach, even an engineer’s, wouldn’t you say? Our heroes think so too. Neno’s idea is to take the best ideas and carry them back and forth between the two very different worlds they live in…

At work, Krisi is in charge of a team of data processing specialists. At their last in-person meeting she gave each of them a jar of jam and told them what she does in her free time. They responded with genuine interest, impressed not only by the story but by the taste. A colleague from India told her he has relatives back home with farming experience and would help if they ever decided to set up a farm there too.

The name came almost naturally—RoseBerry brings together the roses and the blueberries. As a flourish, the logo also features a bear, to appreciate the two fragrant crops. And not only that—above the village rises a spot called Mechi Kamak, Bear Rock, which became the venture’s mascot.

As a specialist in managing people, Krisi is usually the one closest to the workers. Is it harder to work with programmers or with rose pickers? “They’re all people!” she replies.

“My team is 17 people, wonderful, but not easy at all. It’s the same with the rose pickers. Everyone has pluses and minuses—very different people, with different pasts, different cultures. Two different worlds! You can’t compare them. They think in completely different ways, and meeting both universes enriches you a lot. Above all, you have to be human with the others, whether you’re facing a programmer or a rose picker. Because in the end it all comes down to people!”

A Mossy Beard

And where do the roses fit in? The two IT specialists actually started their farm with them. The traditional local crop has paid them back; they have a long-term contract for the sale of the rose petals. This also gives them peace of mind about the future—with two crops, even if one suffers for some reason, the other will help them get through the hard times.

The 4,700 blueberry pots already fill all 14 decares of the plot. Very soon they plan to expand the land for both crops and are negotiating with landowners near Osetenovo. The difficulty is that the plots are small and often split among many heirs who struggle to find common ground.

And so this year, when the farm ran at full capacity for the first time, interest was so great that at one point the two had to stop taking orders. Many people learned about them from reports on Nova Television and on the YouTube channel Boho Soulz.

Play the video

Sweet Dreams

Others simply find them through social media, which Krisi actively cultivates. “On YouTube lots of doctors found us; on TikTok, people who were just curious whether these huge blueberries would be any good; on Instagram, followers get a glimpse of our everyday life. Facebook is for the somewhat more settled crowd—parents with small children often come from there,” Krisi says.

She takes the orders and insists on speaking personally with every customer. That way she learns what drew them in, and many stories are born. A young mother told her she had great trouble introducing solid food to her baby, and the only thing that helped was their blueberries. “With us everything is trial and error, and I listen to my customers. When I call and someone says, ‘But you’ll send me the big sweet ones, right?’ I know what they prefer; others go for the tarter ones.”

“Lots of people wonder why we bother with online sales, why we put so much effort and money into packaging and boxes with our logo. Only we know what it costs us. ‘Why go to all that trouble? Take it to the wholesale market, sell the whole lot and be done with it!’ Yes, but that’s not the point. We want to sell the product, but with meaning! And that’s exactly what we add—the idea, how we do it, our story, our life! You’re doing your job and making money either way. But put a little meaning into it!” Krisi says with emotion.

“The idea is for people to see who we are, who stands behind this farm, how we work, how we produce this product, and to know that they’re buying it from us.”

The Blueberry on Top

“Product, marketing… and then you have to keep as many customers as you can. At one point things were moving so fast… Neno told me: We’ve done so much in no time that we can’t even stop to catch our breath, take it in and see what we’ve done and what we’re doing!” Krisi smiles.

Demand keeps coming; they have already been offered the chance to export to Scotland and to distribute through one of the big retail chains.

Although the season is over, the work goes on, because soon it will be time for blueberry jam.

Both of them talk about how good the physical work is for them, alternating with the hours at the computer that their main jobs demand. After a particularly stressful meeting, Krisi grabs the spade, and half an hour later she has forgotten all her worries.

They have many more ideas—for example, selling rose petals as a natural fragrance, or organizing events. But, as they themselves say, working in IT has taught them to go step by step.

But how do they find time for everything? With difficulty. They have to turn down invitations to see friends, for instance. “How can we be out with someone at 10 p.m. when the next morning we have to get up at 5:30 a.m. and be at the farm?” Krisi wonders.

Agile with a Shovel

“We didn’t try to do everything at once,” Neno recalls. “I had a picture in my head of what had to happen over time. We get the land—done, we have it, we have lease contracts. Just like in programming: it moves from the ‘In Progress’ column to ‘Done,’ and you start the next thing. I think that’s the key to success—doing something big in two years with just a few people.”

Which brings us to another big opportunity that technology offers. The daily care of the blueberries is fully automated! The farm uses software from the Bulgarian startup Ondo Solutions. “I set up a program on my phone, telling it which sector to water at what time, for how long, and what to feed the blueberries there. It saves me a huge amount of time and optimizes the whole process. It also saves a lot of water, which is extremely important too,” Neno adds.

According to the young farmers, the risks from here on are minimal. The pots and the growing system give the plants everything they need, and there are anti-hail rocket stations near the village. “We talk nonstop about what to improve. And if we spot even one weak point, we try to fix it,” says Neno. “We tested the water so we’d know what to feed the blueberries afterwards, we regularly test the fruit itself, and we consult an agronomist.”

The Name of the Rose

One of the biggest challenges is finding workers for the busy season. So far it has mainly been people from the village pitching in, but as the venture grows they won’t be enough. “That’s another reason for growing two crops—first we pick the roses, then the blueberries, and that way we extend the period in which we can provide work for people,” Neno explains. Since they became popular, many people have written to offer to help with the picking, including from abroad. And what might happen if it turned into a form of team building for their colleagues from the IT world?

Neno’s goal is to leave everything else behind in a few years and devote himself entirely to the farm. Krisi will more likely keep going on both fronts. “I love mixing lots of things and building on them. That’s why Neno and I complement each other—I’m a bit more the person for communication, for the modern stuff. While he is the root; he grounds me, pulls me back and brings something real to all the purely digital things,” says Krisi.

When things are done with love and meaning, no dream is impossible. The story of our two guests proves it. As Krisi puts it, “farming is sweet and fragrant work…”

This piece won the grand prize in the “True Stories” category of the prestigious Web Report 2024 awards. More on that here.

It is my pleasure to introduce Isus Kostov! To his colleagues he is simply “Jesus,” and to me he is a powerful example of how a person can defeat his surroundings, prejudice, even himself, to reach what he dreams of. However distant, even impossible, it may seem.

His road begins in a Roma ghetto, and today he is a software engineer at a respected company. He taught himself online and never gave up, starting from a school he often attended hungry, in shoes with no soles. By now he has built up serious experience in the profession.

“The most valuable thing programming has given me is, without a doubt, freedom,” Isus says. “It gave me the chance to get out of the difficult situation I was in and to build a life in which I’m independent and can help my family.”

His next goal is to inspire more kids to chase their dreams. Not to give up when they are held down by their surroundings and their circumstances.

And what might happen if stories like this changed the attitude of both our society and the IT sector toward these children?

Gavroche’s Little Brothers

You may have heard people call Lozenets—the upscale district of Sofia, and the seaside resort of the same name—“Luxozenets.” Well, the not particularly witty joke does not apply to the neighborhood of that name in Stara Zagora. The third-largest Roma neighborhood in the country has around 10,000 residents and is not all that different from Fakulteta in Sofia or Stolipinovo in Plovdiv, the best-known Roma ghettos in Bulgaria. There are some better-kept streets, but a good part of it is the “classic” ghetto, run-down and abandoned by the world and the state. This is where Isus Kostov grew up.

His family was no different from the rest. For a long time they lived on nothing but his grandmother’s pension, and often had no money for food or electricity. Not infrequently the four of them lived by candlelight, and at one point even the candles ran out. For almost the entire year, the “bathroom” was just jugs of water left out in the sun.

For a long time Isus went to school in boots with no soles, and, as his own “invention,” he pulled bread bags over them so they would stay at least relatively dry.

Romance

“I didn’t like the good nights or the good mornings. And thoughts started to come—how do I make my life better? What do I have to change so that tomorrow I can buy food? For me and my family, because family means everything…,” Isus recalls.

I met my present-day fellow programmer online, and I was immediately struck by how correctly he writes—his commas certainly land in better places than in most of what turns up in my feed. It turns out that, although he had not read a single book in his life so far, at school he was lucky enough to have a teacher who taught him to write properly. Her name was Mariyana Hristova, and she and some of her colleagues chipped in for new shoes when they saw his wretched boots.

“Roma face many obstacles, including discrimination, poverty, and poor access to education and health care,” Isus says. “As a result, many young Roma face hardships that limit their opportunities. The other reason is that we’re a rather spineless people—we always leave the hard things for later.”

John the Baptist

At first, that is how his progress with programming went, too. At 17, Isus was doing track and field, and through the sport he met a friend who was studying to be a software engineer. He and Yoan grew close, started visiting each other’s homes, and Isus became curious about what programming actually was.

He began watching courses online, quickly got hooked, but… almost immediately gave up.

His family had spent two years in Italy, so he had fallen behind in school. So, while still in ninth grade, he started working at McDonald’s—studying in the mornings, then working 8- or 12-hour shifts.

By twelfth grade he was at a factory making rubber seals. He worked hard, trained hard, studied programming languages… And in the end it simply became too much. Right around then he got his driver’s license, started working as a van driver, and decided he didn’t need to learn the difficult material.

“Okay, I got it—it’s hard, I can’t be like Yoan. I’m dumb, and that’s that. I accepted that this was as far as my capacity went,” Isus says. Fortunately, he quickly gathered the courage to try again.

“I’m driving my van, but I’m thinking…, maybe I have more potential than turning some steering wheel? I’ll go back to programming. I sank my teeth into it, and a few months later I could make basic websites.”

Golgotha

At that point Isus decided that the right way forward was a university degree. He enrolled in software engineering in Gabrovo, but… quickly became convinced it wasn’t going to work. “Within three months I realized that place wasn’t for me. I’d already lost two years because of Italy, and now another four years at a university where it didn’t look like you could actually gain knowledge, especially about programming… I couldn’t afford that.” So he carried on through his own efforts…

As many people in this profession know, the hardest thing is landing your first job. The young man decided to walk into a company in Stara Zagora in person and ask about an internship. He was lucky: the boss saw him and began asking him basic questions. Isus did quite decently, but… not well enough. Disheartened, he gave up for the second time.

A few months passed, the van grew more and more boring, and he decided to try again. But this time he would apply only after building a portfolio. He wrote to various companies offering to build them a website for free and… surprisingly many of them agreed. One satisfied client even sent him a sweatshirt with the company logo by courier, along with 200 leva (about $110) as a gift.

Now that he had something to show, Isus managed to find his first job. He spent six months learning the trade, then worked for a while at another company. Although he already knew quite a lot, he found it hard to settle anywhere for long, mainly because his English wasn’t good enough.

Jesus Kostov Superstar

That is how he ended up interviewing at a French company whose owner was not exactly best friends with the language of Shakespeare either. But he appreciated what the young man could do and gave him a chance. And Isus repaid him. It turned out they got along just fine in less-than-perfect English on both sides.

On his first day at work he showed up nervous, and the boss asked him: “Isus? And what do people call you for short? Aysus?” “Jesus is better!” he replied, and the ice was broken.

Today he is 23 and already has a fair amount of experience behind him. He is even developing his own project, a text-messaging platform, with a former colleague.

He says he advanced in the profession without spending a single lev on lessons or courses—only with the help of more experienced colleagues, of friends, and… of videos uploaded to YouTube by Indian programmers.

“A lot of people can learn to program if they have the desire and the determination,” says Isus (and I completely agree). “You don’t have to be a genius or have a university degree. What matters is being persistent and never stopping learning. Besides, I don’t think everyone should become a programmer. It’s a field that requires a certain kind of thinking and an interest in technology. Every person has their own unique talents and passions; the most important thing is to discover them and follow them.”

A Tale of Two Cities

That is exactly what Isus has never stopped doing, and today he is his family’s pride and earns enough to help them.

What was the hardest thing for him at the start? “Taking the essence of the two worlds I live in and combining them into one. It takes a lot of emotional energy and a great deal of empathy. I’ve been rejected by Bulgarians because I’m a Gypsy, and by Gypsies because I’m ‘pretending’ to be Bulgarian. You fight to be respected on opposite fronts.”

In Isus’s view, prejudice is one of the big problems that keep many Roma from succeeding.

“I used to be ashamed to leave the mahala, the Roma quarter, and talk to Bulgarians because of the reputation that had already been built. However decent and educated you are, along with the color of your skin you carry that reputation, and people almost always have prejudices. But it’s a double-edged sword—either you sink into the ghetto under the pressure, or you build a strong character.”

That is why he believes the road to integration has to run from both sides. “Most likely, whatever the state does won’t help as much as the Roma themselves starting to believe in themselves a little, having some self-confidence, however hard that is. To stop suffering and holding themselves back because of others.”

Play the video

In 2019, Isus had the idea of becoming a vlogger and recorded a video of a typical day of his—from classes at school to work at the factory—shortly before he turned to programming for good. He is thinking of making a sequel soon: how has his daily life changed since then?

Taking Up His Cross

So change is more likely to come from Roma children themselves. “But the key moment that decides which way a child will go isn’t tied to any specific event. It’s more of a process with a number of factors. The love and support they get from their family. What hardships they’ll face and how they’ll deal with them. Their education, classmates, friends, the crowds they’ll end up in.”

Isus puts it quite clearly what qualities he thinks a kid needs to head toward programming. In his view, the career suits people who feel fulfilled after solving a problem—whether in the everyday world or the virtual one. People who can adapt, who are patient, and who like teamwork.

“Don’t try to learn everything at once,” Isus advises the next kids who set out on this road. “Start with the basics by choosing one programming language, and then gradually expand your knowledge. Practice makes perfect. Work on small projects and tasks to reinforce what you’ve learned. There are countless free learning materials online that can help you. Don’t neglect this valuable resource.
Mistakes are part of the learning process. Don’t lose heart—analyze them and learn from them. Join programmers’ forums, groups and meetups. Share experience and knowledge. Be persistent. Keep a balance in your life. Stay curious.”

Thy Neighbor as Thyself

As you can tell, he thinks in a rather algorithmic and structured way, and it is not at all hard to see how, given that, he succeeded in the software world. Isus thinks about his future the same way. “Ever since I managed to overcome the many obstacles, I see the world of technology as a field of endless possibilities. The things I’m striving for are: developing my skills, helping the community, creating my own projects, and a balance between life and work.”

More than sensible goals for a 23-year-old young man, wouldn’t you say?

Isus and I say goodbye, and I keep thinking how good it would be if stories like this reached more kids, in the ghettos or in the palaces, in Lozenets or in Fakulteta. And more enterprising people, who would recognize that in both places we can find plenty of hidden talent—in programming or elsewhere. That every child deserves a chance and a right to happiness. That the decades of Roma inclusion go by, and the inclusion is nowhere to be seen. While the road to it runs through stories, through talking and understanding, through the human, which is greater than anything else…

This piece was prepared with the assistance of the PeterBest YouTube channel and Georgi Petrov.

Do you know who the first astronaut from Africa, the second most populous continent on the planet, was?

Let Google or ChatGPT answer that one; I will tell you who it could have been. Because of all the eternal stories, there is one we underestimate most often. Let us saddle Rocinante, greet an illegally young Dulcinea and chase the windmills of the Solar System!

The renowned hidalgo Don Quixote, a few centuries later, is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, the inventor who… very nearly beat the US and the USSR in their battle for space!

Jason and the Astronauts

October 30, 1964. Time magazine reports on yet another African country that has won its independence. The recent British colony of Northern Rhodesia wakes up one morning as independent Zambia, led by Kenneth David Kaunda, “the son of a Presbyterian preacher and a former teacher who plays the guitar, does not smoke and is a teetotaler.”

“Zambia: Tomorrow, the Moon” is the title of the enthusiastic piece, written in the spirit of Bulgaria’s own Dela i dokumenti (Deeds and Documents) features of the same years. It tells in detail of the history and geography of the newborn country, of its people and its economic prospects. But why the Moon? The answer comes only in the last paragraph.

“During the independence celebrations, only one notable Zambian failed to share the general enthusiasm. He is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a grade-school teacher and director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, who claims the festivities coincided with his space program’s efforts to beat the US and the Soviet Union to the Moon.

Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, among them a plump 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, because that is the only way humans can walk on the Moon.”

Check with a Pawn

How does a serious piece in a respected magazine end in such a surreal way?

Well, over the following years Edward, who had made up his mind to go to the Moon (and then to Mars), became a darling of the Western media.

And how could it be otherwise?

Just picture it. The US and the USSR are pouring enormous sums and concentrating their efforts at the height of the great space race, while our friend Edward is convinced he will beat them both.

Twelve Angry Men

He set up his space center on an abandoned farm 11 kilometers from the capital, Lusaka. The training of the 12 future Afronauts included rolling down a hill inside 200-liter oil drums—which, according to the Zambian von Braun, was ideal preparation for life in weightlessness and then for the trip back to Earth.

“I also make them swing on the end of a long rope,” he told a reporter. “When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope. This produces the feeling of free fall.”

The “Afronauts,” as Nkoloso himself christened them, wore uniforms of green satin jackets and yellow trousers, because “when we are not space cadets, we are the Dynamite rock band.”

The first goal was the Moon, and the next, of course, Mars. And after that a star station named after Edward’s dog, Cyclops.

The Gods Must Always Be Crazy

The rocket meant to carry them to these lofty goals was named after President Kenneth David Kaunda. D-Kalu 1 measured 2 by 3 meters, was shaped like a drum and was made of copper and aluminum. It was scheduled to blast off into space on the national holiday itself, from the central Independence Stadium in Lusaka.

It never became quite clear what exactly the Afronauts were training for, since the only passengers planned for D-Kalu were the first African woman to travel to the stars—Matha Mwambwa, the 16-year-old mentioned by Time—and Edward’s aforementioned best friend, Cyclops.

On the second stage, toward the Red Planet, they were to be joined by two specially trained cats and a Catholic missionary. Who, in Edward’s words, would unobtrusively present the advantages of his religion to the locals and thus help Zambia become “the dominator of the Seventh Heaven of Interplanetary Space.” All without showing excessive roughness toward the natives.

Edward Scissorhands

At the same time, the Zambian Korolev—as in Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program—invited UNESCO to join the program with a grant of 7 million pounds. He sent official offers to his great rivals as well, the space programs of the USSR and the US. He also invited private investors into the program, which he valued at $1.9 billion.

According to some sources, he did not receive a single dollar; according to others, he got back a check for 10 rupees sent by an Indian child moved by the venture.

And although he was open to help from his colleagues in the two great blocs, Edward said he was taking no sides and would keep his progress secret even if he received the funds. “You cannot trust anyone in a project of this scale. Some of our ideas are far ahead of those of the Americans and the Russians, and I will not let anyone see my rocket plans,” the Afronaut warned.

Zambezi Dream

Sadly, the story has no happy ending. Even before 1969 came along and Edward lost the race to the Moon, unforeseen events took place. Whether or not as part of the training, the first Afronaut woman in space turned out to be pregnant and, since she was still a minor, her parents took her home.

“My astronauts thought they were movie stars. At one point they wanted to be paid,” Edward complained. “Two of my best men took to drink a month ago, and I haven’t seen them since. Another of my Afronauts joined a local dance troupe.”

Little by little the other cadets lost their motivation and left the project, and Edward, without enough support, found himself forced to suspend it for the time being. With the idea of one day resuming his crusade toward the sky.

So, we have had our fun with this surreal plot, but… how serious were the intentions of our Zambian Don Quixote? Was it naivety of cosmic proportions, an attempt at easy money, a peculiar sense of humor? Or perhaps… a different kind of crusade, one for justice?

A Land the Size of a Human Palm

Don’t expect a clear-cut answer. Still, here are a few more facts about our hidalgo to round out the picture.

From an early age Edward was raised on the idea that the country he lived in deserved independence from Great Britain. Even so, he fought for 4 years in the Second World War as part of the Northern Rhodesian British forces. That is why, shortly before his death, he would receive a prestigious Soviet medal for veterans and would even be given the rank of colonel.

He founded a small school where he taught illiterate kids, but the British authorities closed it down. It was precisely this that drove the future conqueror of space into the struggle for his people’s freedom, where, they say, he sometimes showed himself in a less than flattering light. For instance, by leading a group that kidnapped the wife of a British bigwig. But then… it’s not as if Gotse Delchev, the hero of the Macedonian-Bulgarian revolutionary struggle against the Ottomans, didn’t do the same—just ask Miss Stone, the American missionary his men abducted in 1901.

Those days produced other amusing stories too. To avoid being discovered by the British, he sometimes disguised himself as a woman. Once he was so pleased with his disguise that he went around asking the soldiers who this Nkoloso was who was causing them so much trouble.

The War of the Worlds

He organized some of the largest protests against the colonizers. He even spent two years in prison.

The long-awaited independence allowed him to step back into the role of teacher, but, it seems, he was already bored. So he decided to create the National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, which later came to include the Afronaut venture. At the time he also championed the rights of local traditional healers, who, in his view, ought to have the same working conditions as doctors practicing Western medicine.

That he enjoyed well-deserved respect is shown by the fact that after the collapse of the space program, Edward was appointed special representative of the president. His task, moreover, was to work actively to help neighboring peoples who had not yet won their independence.

And wouldn’t it make sense to… put these two motifs together—the fight against the colonizers and the space program?

Over the past decades, the story of the Afronauts has been told often, with an undisguised note of mockery, even by the most respected media in the world. And yet it seems to be something more, as the remarkable article in The New Yorker by Namwali Serpell, a Harvard professor of English literature of Zambian origin, makes clear.

Play the video

Who Doesn’t Know Dulcinea?

The scholar set off on Edward’s trail to uncover what lay beneath the surface of this story, which has become a kind of symbol of her homeland.

The professor dug through numerous documents and letters, and even came across one in which Edward writes to the British queen, urging her to look into the state of the prisons in the empire.

And she reveals to us an exceptionally intelligent man who, even at a fairly advanced age, decided to study law and finished the degree. By no means was he a simpleton who would believe that his homemade rocket would conquer Mars so he could win the locals over to the cause of Catholicism.

“Zambian irony is very subtle,” writes Prof. Serpell. “We don’t have ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ We have two ‘yeses,’ and one of them means ‘no.’”

Could this be where the answer lies?

“Well educated, a veteran of the Second World War, a key figure in the resistance against colonialism in Zambia”—that is how Edward’s son, who bears his name, describes him, and the picture is completed by similar words from many other people.

Zamunda Banana Band

Today we might call the show Edward put on for the Western media skillful trolling—media that arrived with their prejudices about this part of the world. Ready to laugh at the expense of the primitive Zambians, largely illiterate and yet dreaming of space.

Because the project is also a metaphor. For the ugly colonial history of the whole continent, for the Western man’s conviction that he is the center of the Universe.

Has much changed since then? Yes, there are no Afronauts today, but inequality and prejudice are still here, and they show no sign of flying off.

A small example: the world is global and high-tech now, isn’t it? In 2020, 94.6 percent of the inhabitants of North America had internet access, compared with 39.3 percent of those in Africa. And, of course, there is no need to open the subject of hunger and the lack of a future.

Even so, for the Western man the fate of five millionaires who ended up in a submarine of their own free will is a drama, while hardly anyone even hears about a ship that sank off Greece at the same time, with 700 African migrants vanished without a trace.

Meanwhile, the Afronauts have become a pop-culture symbol too.

At the Tip of the Spear

In his last years Edward worked as a security officer at an industrial company. “This is too lowly a job for me, I don’t feel like talking about it,” he told a Zambian reporter in one of his last interviews. In it he spoke far more eagerly about his space adventures. “I have not given up on this project,” he said. “I still have a vision of the future of man. I still feel that man will be able to travel freely from one planet to another.”

Does the astronaut Matha Mwambwa regret that she turned to family life rather than to the Moon? Her trail goes cold. Nor can we ask Edward: he flew off to the sky on March 4, 1989.

So what, the Afronauts never made it to the Moon? Well, Fyut the Little Devil, the imp of children’s stories, did it, as we know. As for whether the Americans made it too, you will meet plenty of skeptics, you know how it is…

And still, Edward’s story is so beautiful. Because dreams are never ridiculous, and they are always worth chasing. Because a person really is as big as their dreams…

– What do you attribute the fact that Bulgaria ended up in first place after 20 years of international linguistics olympiads to? Good preparation, strong students, tradition?

– It's a combination. I think there are strong students everywhere. We can't say there aren't any in America or China. But

first you have to find them, then you have to fire them up, and finally you have to prepare them for the international level.

So it's a combination. Tradition comes into it too, because to get kids excited about this competition, you need lots of schools of thought. Most of the mathematics high schools and quite a few of the language high schools in Bulgaria have extracurricular work in linguistics.

We have national seminars and competitions. That creates an atmosphere that motivates the teachers. The pay is nothing to write home about, so it's important that there's something else that gives them a kick.

It's the same with the students. They value the chance to get into a good university afterwards, to have their success serve as a recommendation.

The second thing that motivates them is the party.

Making new friends, traveling.

We organize far more interesting events than other olympiads I've attended. Maybe that comes from the fact that my teacher, Prof. Ruslan Mitkov, had another hobby—he was a DJ.

When I started organizing the events, I got in touch with one of his DJ colleagues to invite him, and he snapped: “You linguists will never find a DJ in Bulgaria! You took the best one we had!”

As for the teachers—Ruslan understood very well how important it is to bring such a motley group together. There's no hierarchy, no financial motive; the point is to see your colleagues, to visit interesting places together…

– What won you over to linguistics personally?

– I got hooked in 9th grade at the English Language School in Sofia. My teacher, Prof. Ruslan Mitkov, walked into a math class and gave us a linguistics problem. He said: “Whoever finds this interesting, we're starting a club.”

A few of us went; some stayed, others quickly gave up. Later, as a university student, I decided to start such a club at the English Language School myself, because in the meantime Ruslan had moved to the United Kingdom.

In 1998 there were no competitions at all in Bulgaria. Those were dark years, and education had fallen into complete decline. Three of us teachers got together—from Sofia, Varna and Ruse—and for two or three years we went to competitions on our own.

– How did the national team come about?

– In 2003 the first international olympiad was held in Borovets, a ski resort in the Rila Mountains; I wasn't involved in organizing it.

Soon after that we began preparing more competitions and selecting a national team.

The process hasn't changed to this day. There are two stages—a national competition and an olympiad. The points are added up, then we invite the 16 best students to a two-week camp. At the end we run two tests, add them to the earlier results, and

the top eight become Bulgaria's national team.

In the beginning, the team leaders were the two teachers with the most qualified students. Since I was teaching at the Sofia High School of Mathematics, I was among them almost every year.

Later we decided that the team leader has quite a lot to do—register the country and the language, pay the participation fees, look for sponsors. At the Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians we decided there should be one person who serves a term as leader of the national team, with the second being the teacher with the most students. That's how it is to this day. And I've been elected leader for a third term.

– Why do people often say the competitions are in “mathematical linguistics”? Is that wrong?

– It isn't correct; they're just in linguistics. The “mathematical” part was added for formal reasons.

Linguistics is the science of language. We talk about it when the subject is not a single language—that's called “philology”—but several: the connections between them, their development, language groups and families, similarities and differences, changes.

Mathematical linguistics is just one branch, which was very popular in the second half of the 20th century. With the very first computers and programming languages, two big questions arose: can a computer understand human, natural language, and can it translate?

That's where mathematical linguistics comes in—a discipline that describes linguistic phenomena using mathematical methods.

That model, however, never really worked. The best-known example is from Canada in the 1980s. They developed software that translated a restricted language—only weather forecasts, from French into English.

Today's translation programs don't use mathematical methods; they rely on neural networks. They're fed information and find the patterns on their own.

– What do the problems look like?

– Every olympiad problem is solved through logic; you don't need any math. You get a text in an unfamiliar language—whether it's one longer passage or separate sentences or words—along with a translation into a familiar language, in this case Bulgarian. Based on these translations, the students have to draw conclusions about certain phenomena in the other language and translate new sentences to show they've understood.

No math at all, pure logic!

Usually the problems look for phenomena that don't exist in a language the solver knows. For example, Slovenian has the so-called dual number. In Bulgarian we only have singular and plural, while there they have a form for exactly two objects of a given kind. That can make for a not particularly difficult linguistics problem. To spot it, you don't need any math. You look, you think, you underline, you organize it in a table. And that's it!

– How seriously do the big countries take the competitions? I'd imagine that in any field they set their minds to, they could invest more resources than we do and turn out stronger?

– Every country approaches it differently. The big question is where there's an initiator to push the whole thing forward. Nowhere in the world is linguistics a compulsory school subject—it's there at universities, but not in secondary education.

The question is whether the local organizers manage to make a good selection and go through the whole chain—find, fire up and train the students.

In the US this worked thanks to a Bulgarian who, sadly, passed away a few months ago—Prof. Dragomir Radev.

He built their national team; the US and Canada select their teams together.

Dragomir put an enormous amount of effort, drive, connections, time and a little piece of himself into making it happen. There are people like that in other places, but not everywhere. That's my explanation for why there's no progress in China, for instance—they ought to be beating everyone. Since they do it in math and informatics, if they sent the same students after two weeks of training, they'd crush us, if not the first time, then by the third. And they've been taking part for quite a few years now and don't perform well. Maybe there just aren't enough driven people…

– Even so, it's astonishing that we're first in a field like this. Especially against the backdrop of our education system.

– We're first in one of the rankings. There's no official international ranking; this one is from Wikipedia, but it's accurate—we checked it. By total number of medals, for example, the US has more than us, and also if we count medals relative to participations. In medals per capita, we're indisputably first. It depends which ranking you look at.

– To me it makes sense for this one to be authoritative—after all, that's how countries are ranked at the sporting Olympics too.

– What amazed me was the reaction. When I posted it,

I wouldn't have expected 7,600 shares on Facebook! I didn't believe that was possible.

I don't know how nobody has called to offer me a job as PR for the Council of Ministers or some big company.

– Maybe we need something to be proud of, even though patriotism has lately become a touchy subject. Truly very few posts can collect that many shares—and with a positive charge, at that.

– Our education system really is in a sorry state. But, first, these are students from mathematics and language high schools, which are many times better off than the rest of the system.

And second—the problem lies in the very idea of secondary education in Bulgaria after the end of socialism, in this democracy we supposedly live in… I don't see much democracy, but never mind.

The idea of the Western education we aspire to is not to support outstanding students, but to have a solid foundation without too many holes underneath.

Before that, during the Cold War, every talented child was specially nurtured.

If someone was seen to have talent, the system itself supported and promoted them. There were all kinds of opportunities, an established structure. The Western model doesn't have that, and the reason isn't a bad one. There, too, a gifted child will find support, but it comes from the private sector. If you rely on business, things are less stable. A crisis hits, and the first thing to have its funding cut is initiatives like these.

– Yes, but the system also fails at the basic task you mention—providing a foundation. The proof is the schools where every single graduating student got a flat 2, the failing grade, on the matura, Bulgaria's school-leaving exam.

But there's another divide too, between children for the humanities and children for the sciences. I, for one, had to turn 33 to find out that I could program too. Is it right for such a stereotype to exist, or does a field like yours show there's no basis for it?

– That's quite a complicated question. Splitting students into tracks exists in most countries, and there's a tendency for it to happen ever earlier. The idea is that a student studies more of what's close to them, what interests them, and doesn't waste their time, roughly speaking.

If someone plays the violin perfectly, they can become Mincho Minchev, Bulgaria's great violin virtuoso, without solving quadratic equations.

Whether it's right or not is a very complicated question, because many people, like you, reorient themselves at some point long after they've graduated.

But there's something else where education is breathing its last all over the world—the idea that you learn something and then apply it for 40 years. That's how it worked in 1900, when the world barely changed over those 40 years. Now there isn't a single field where that's true, never mind the IT sector. Medicine? What about cars? What's stayed the same after 40 years? There's a computer inside, nobody lets you touch it, it's full of sensors. Back in the day you could replace everything on your Moskvitch yourself.

The entire education system has to change from the ground up.

– Who does better at linguistics competitions—the “humanities” students or the “tech” students?

– I can't speak to tracks, but the kids from the mathematics high schools definitely stand out.

– What becomes of the competitors afterwards? I assume everyone who's made it onto the national team has no trouble getting into prestigious universities.

– They get into universities, but, to me at least, that's not what becoming of someone means. They're very different. Quite a large share of them work with information technology in one way or another. A few continue with linguistics, but there are some. Their profile is no different from that of successful students from the mathematics high schools.

Not that many leave the country—far more did in the 1990s.

– And how have the generations changed over the 20 years you've been preparing competitors?

– I'm someone who really hates the idea of “Ah, what students we had back in the day, and look at this lot now!” Come on, enough!

But there really are differences. Back then they were much more disciplined and more obedient. They came to the courses; now they come if they want to. Homework—they do it if they want to. However,

that doesn't mean they're not sharper or don't do well. The results show it.

Education has changed too.

Interestingly, their relationship with music has also changed. Today they've had a phone in their hand since primary school; they're never alone. They no longer feel the need to put on some music and listen to it deeply. To have nothing else to do, to have 10 cassettes they can listen to.

They smoke and drink a lot less. Twenty years ago, when you went on a trip or to a competition, the first thing you did was get drunk. It's not like that anymore; all the policies restricting smoking and alcohol apparently do have an effect on young people.

They've become more self-assured, more open in the good sense.

They have opinions and are ready to defend them. Before, of course, they also thought and didn't keep quiet. But now I hear their opinions and arguments far more often than I used to.

– As large language models advance, will the skills from linguistics competitions become more valuable, or will algorithms take over these tasks?

– Ted Malchev, who has just graduated, won a silver medal and is heading to Harvard, took part in a research project on software that solves such problems. That kind of thing can probably be done; the question is who needs it. These problems aren't a real challenge for the science of linguistics;

their purpose is to assess a certain way of thinking in young people.

And I don't think making software that does it for them would have any practical use.

– And what about decoding rare or dead languages? In one of Ted Chiang's stories, aliens arrive and the biggest challenge falls to the linguists, who have to decode their way of communicating.

– Artificial intelligence helps. But can a linguistic problem be solved with a program? It doesn't seem likely to me. Languages fall into two types—those we already know everything about, and those we know almost nothing about. The latter are the ones that had no writing; the language dies, and what we'd need to reconstruct it isn't a computer but a time machine. We try reverse modeling from descendant languages, but there's no guarantee we're right, and that isn't science.

Phenomena in languages don't happen on command; they have their rules, but you can't apply reverse engineering.

Can artificial intelligence decipher some unknown scripts? I doubt it, because there aren't many undeciphered scripts left—and those are the ones with the least data. That kind of technology helps when you have huge volumes of information.

– Where do you think it's heading, the fact that we've all started communicating so much in English? That we've turned it into the global lingua franca…

– Language is a natural phenomenon; it can't be controlled. It changes, it develops. It's alive! We all know how our grandparents spoke—we don't speak that way. Leave aside the foreign borrowings; you won't hear anyone say “кому е нужно” (komu e nuzhno, an archaic “to whom is it needful”). You'll understand it if you've read Bulgarian literature from 150 years ago, but that's as far as it goes.

Another example: how the big differences between dialects, between the speech of Western and Eastern Bulgaria, disappeared.

Our grandmothers, who traveled far less, spoke very differently depending on where they grew up. You can still sense it in young people—some sounds and words are pronounced differently—but the differences are much smaller.

The other example of

how language can't be steered artificially is the full definite article. Nobody has ever spoken that way!

Sofroniy Vrachanski, the 18th-century cleric and writer, invented the completely artificial rule that it should be written after the doer of the action. (In standard Bulgarian, a masculine noun takes the “full” article -ът/-ят when it is the subject and the “short” -а/-я otherwise.) The truth is that in one part of Bulgaria people said “-at,” in another “-yat,” in a third “-ya.” Every country needs to merge its dialects into a standardized language, which is why the norm is what it is. It took hold, but nobody speaks that way! Most people can't even manage to write that way. Students haven't got a clue how to apply it, and I don't blame them. It's so unnatural, downright superfluous.

There are other similar cases in history. French words have such wacky spelling—one sound is written with four or five letters—because monks were paid by the letter. So beaucoup has eight letters and only four sounds.

Is that good or not? We can't stop it. Language develops. There are state norms; in our case they're set by the Institute for Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

– These are all important topics for Digital Stories too—our withered word-coining, spelling and the notorious full definite article. Heartfelt thanks, and good luck at the next competitions! I hope you hold on to the lead and extend it!