– You were the youngest anchor in the history of Po sveta i u nas, you became one of the most recognizable and longest-serving faces on the air. Then suddenly you “disappeared” and went off into the world of technology. Why such an abrupt change of direction?

– I decided to try something new. After investing half my life in journalism, and in television in particular, I think I gave plenty of chances both to myself and to television itself. At some point I decided our relationship had run its course—we took what we could from each other, we gave what we could, and I moved on.

The interesting thing is that only after I gave up this thing I had poured my entire youth into, all my dreams, all my love and strength, did it turn out that I hadn’t been making television at all, but something much more, something much bigger.

It wasn’t just television, and it wasn’t just journalism either—it was exploring people and telling stories.

Since I left, people often ask me whether I miss it. No, because that’s what I’m still doing.

For me, the definition of television is “I connect people.” And “I tell stories.”

– Stories are what survives—from the days of the caves all the way to the age of artificial intelligence. It’s no accident this site is called what it is.

– Looking back, and now afterward too, I keep doing the same thing I’ve done all my life. I’m driven by the same interests that have driven me all my life.

My mother tells a story from when I was just a few years old. Times were freer then, and she had let me out to play in front of our apartment block. I vanish, she goes looking for me and finds me on a bench with Stoyancho. Stoyancho is an 80-year-old grandpa, and the two of us are sitting there talking, telling each other stories.

Somehow that makes me realize I’ve been doing this my whole life, and television is just a platform. I changed the platform, but I keep doing the same thing.

– Then again, it’s quite an addictive platform. A lot of people find it hard to tear themselves away.

– The truth is that television changed a great deal over the 20 years I was in it.

I understood that largely when I went into the tech business, which no longer watches television, because the entrepreneurs are young.

And many of the successful entrepreneurs were abroad during my professional peak. When I started working with them, I always seemed familiar to them from somewhere, but they couldn’t quite say where. When it came up and I told them, they apologized for not watching television. And they immediately asked me why I had worked there—“it’s not really needed anymore, nobody watches TV.”

I had to explain to them that when I fell in love with television and pledged myself to it, it was something prestigious, relatively well paid and, most importantly, everybody watched you. You had everyone’s attention. These days that’s nowhere near as true.

– It depends. If we look at the statistics, a lot of people still watch it after all, though not always the traditional way—online, selectively. Yes, fewer people switch on the TV at 8 p.m. to watch the news, but the news from there reverberates, we discuss it, and it’s at the center, whether we’re talking about reality shows or politics.

– That’s true, but the way television is consumed and distributed has changed a lot since then. Before, you had to find the right topic, the right person, put them on at the right time, when the right viewers would be watching. It was a small miracle to get the best product, but also the best impact, to get a quality product. A lot of planets had to line up in space.

Now good things exist on their own, and they find you. Pieces of quality television find you, even though the ritual of everyone sitting down at 8 p.m. to watch the main news is gone.

Yes, people watch television, quality things keep spreading, but television doesn’t have the power it once had.

– I watched something similar from the front row with the decline of newspapers. When I was starting out as a journalist, 24 Chasa, one of Bulgaria’s biggest dailies, had a circulation of 200,000, and whatever was on its front page set society’s agenda.

– Yes, a lot depends on the function of television and the mass media too, because they used to exist as the main channel of communication—first for information, then for analysis. In my view, part of the reason television stations lost their viewers and their public influence is that for too long they kept, and perhaps to some extent still keep, playing the role of information suppliers.

But these days information is everywhere. It’s in your pocket, in your phone. You don’t need to watch an hour of news to hear the four minutes that interest you.

You no longer watch television so much to get informed—you’ve known the news since the morning, since your first coffee, because you open your email and there it is waiting for you. Rather, you watch the way it’s presented, “which way the wind is blowing,” what the interpretation is and on which outlet, because however murky media ownership is in Bulgaria, it’s clear to you which outlet plays for which team. In that sense,

what interests you is how the news is presented, not so much the news itself.

– But that, and I repeat it often on this site, is in my view the source of a huge share of our problems as a society today—that we have no central platforms, no gatekeepers of the kind the media used to be. So that balanced, quality information reaches you, and you don’t lock yourself in your own bubble and live in a world completely different from your neighbor’s.

– That’s right,

for me, commentary matters far more these days than news reporting.

In fact, national television stations were created after World War II for the purpose of channeling information. To rebuild society, to control information. And so that everyone would have one common platform bringing them together. Today that is very different.

In one interview I was asked: “What era would you like to live in?” My answer was precisely the moment of the television pioneers, when you invent things. Every step you take to the side is something new, a discovery. And second, it’s the moment when you have the audience’s full attention.

When I took it up, it was still largely like that. But

these days everything in television has already been invented.

The other problem, if we follow the thread of audience attention, is that these days everyone creates content and nobody consumes content.

Can we survive sustainably in a model like that?

– I don’t think we can. That’s how public conversation breaks down—when everyone creates and nobody consumes in volumes big enough to make it worthwhile for anyone to create something better.

– Right now we live in the kingdom of copying, of the shallow, of the fast. Our content is “junk.”

With all the assistive systems we have, including AI, anyone can fool themselves into thinking they understand something.

Or do you not need to understand something to get a job done? Fine, but only up to a point.

Nobody becomes a master that way. To become a master, you know, you have to put in 10,000 hours, 10 years, time and effort. These days we’re always looking for shortcuts, the direct route.

But shortcuts don’t create masters. It’s the other way around. Masters create shortcuts.

My problem is with the audience’s attention, that nobody can concentrate anymore. I can feel myself changing, and all of us changing, because of the whole rhythm of content creation, the whole assault our minds are getting from every direction.

We’re losing patience. We’re losing the ability and the desire to stay somewhere, to stop, to read a longer text. Not just to hear the wise sentences of the person we’re talking to, but to understand the context behind them. I believe that what we did on BNT Taxi is still the most important thing today.

Not so much what you think, but rather why you think it, and also who you are. What’s the context of your position? Who are you, and what do you represent as a piece of the social puzzle, so that we can have some kind of dialogue?

If you try something like that now, you get irritated. You want to know the what and the how right away. And the real mastery of narrative, of a story, a film, a book, is to create context.

What does every good story do? It takes something insignificant at the beginning and gives you something deeply significant at the end. Only, to build up meaning around something insignificant, you need context. And here I like to give the example of Titanic, which is already archaic. At first glance it’s a film about a ship sinking. At second glance it’s a film about love. At third glance…, and this is the interesting part for me, Titanic is a film about a pendant that means nothing in the first shot and everything in the last.

Why? Because of the context. That is exactly what we’re losing these days—both in telling and in taking in.

– Strong stories struggle to break through, because of everything you’re describing. Context and detail, depth, the ability to build a picture, to get out of the cliché. At the same time there are podcasters, internet influencers, people with huge audiences. Who, however, are rarely held responsible for their content.

– That’s exactly the paradox. People from my new circle say they don’t watch television. While at the same time everyone is trying to produce television at home, from their room, from their phone. Everyone makes podcasts.

We don’t value journalism. We have no respect for it, and at the same time everyone is trying to be a journalist.

It’s a very interesting paradox. One problem is that this only feeds the echo chambers, and the other is that to capture attention you have to be extreme, whatever the topic, and distort.

I’ve thought a lot about why podcasts succeeded, and still largely succeed, as an alternative to television. Considering that, if you look at it professionally, it’s the opposite of television. A podcast is “talking heads,” something television has spent years trying to avoid. It’s long, specialized. So why do people seek it out?

Because it’s specialized content for a specialized audience that can consume it whenever it’s convenient. When you’re on television, when you’re making BNT Taxi and you have to show nine minutes to the whole of Bulgaria, that’s an enormous commitment.

On the air of the traditional media, the more numerous and diverse the viewers you’re creating content for at once, the more objective and balanced you have to be. That deprives you of the “at any cost” flashiness of the internet and podcasts. That’s precisely the difference, and it’s why it’s much harder to manage to be interesting and watched on national television than in a podcast.

– I really like the metaphor about food, that what you choose to read is what you feed your soul. That’s why this question, which dates back to the 1990s, matters to me—when the level of the media drops, how can the process be reversed? Should we follow the audience, or should we educate it and bring it together? Can we somehow break out of this circle?

– I have friends at the Association of Bulgarian Animation Producers… Together with BESCO, the Bulgarian Startup Association, we tried to help one of their causes—changing the laws so that better films could be made. One of their leaders is convinced that

the moment will come when we return to calm conversation, to reason, to attention, to the person in front of us.

Because these days everyone wants to have their own say and doesn’t want our opinion. They listen to the other side only to see where they can jump in and say: “But wait, let me tell you.” That’s social media.

It’s the mirror on the wall, literally! “Tell me, who’s the fairest of them all?” That’s the world we live in.

We’re blinded by ourselves and have no regard for the other person. And the algorithms of social media exploit that. They sell us self-satisfaction. And we are self-satisfied; the other person isn’t needed.

Years ago I had to help a girl with an essay about what the Berlin Wall was. We built it like this: if there were an art installation depicting it, I would put up a piece of wall with mirrors on both sides, back to back. For three reasons—first, because a mirror doesn’t let you look through it, to see what’s hidden behind. Second, because a mirror shows only your own truth. And third, because a mirror shows you exactly where the wall itself is.

When the internet appeared, the hope it brought was that it would be a window onto the world. Instead it turned into a mirror.

– In my view all these processes are happening precisely because of technology and the haphazard way we embrace it. Both you and I in some sense went over “to the enemy’s side,” moving from journalism to technology. Why did you choose that particular direction?

– I’m a humanities type; I look for the future of humanity in the past, if anything. That’s what we do, those of us from the Classical High School, Sofia’s school of ancient languages and cultures. We look for values, the world of Plato and his ideas, the things that never change, regardless of conditions and conventions, regardless of platforms.

In the end, technology is whatever we want from it. We want to serve our vanity, our flaws, our human and animal needs, to find something that delivers them to us in the best possible way.

Why did I go into the tech world specifically? Here’s the story: BNT gave me the task of making a documentary about the Bulgarian tech sector. During the interviews I was extremely and sincerely impressed by the people I met. I had no idea such people were still around, which was strange to me—I worked with people every day. I’m a journalist.

I’ve met thousands of people in my work, year after year. And suddenly personalities appear whom I thought had left Bulgaria long ago.

People who believe they can be world-class. People who believe tomorrow can be better. People who won’t give up.

That impressed me a great deal, and that’s why I followed the people. They’re the kind who have worked on themselves; they’re educated, capable, they’ve tried things and they don’t give up, however hard it gets.

I like that idea, that cause—to tell everyone what I had just discovered and what had surprised me so pleasantly. Success stories, instead of the story of yet another truck crash.

– For me, too, it’s a great cause and mission to tell stories about technology, to provoke some kind of public dialogue. Alas, to be honest, I don’t think we’re succeeding. This sector remains cut off from the rest, and its stories don’t reach everyone else—at least that’s how it seems to me.

– I do think there’s been a huge change over the past five years, since I’ve been watching society from this side too. The media have changed as well; they’ve started paying more attention to these kinds of people. There’s good news, there’s inspiration, and many young people decide they should take this path, because it’s worth it, because it’s possible.

You can be a normal person, you can be a successful businessman without being a thief, a killer, a dealer, without walking around with 20 bodyguards.

– And still, it’s not enough. Take artificial intelligence: supposedly it’s talked about constantly and everywhere, yet we don’t arrive at any more meaningful public conversation. The reasons, in my view, lie in everything we’ve discussed so far. Somehow technology feels cozy staying apart. That’s my sense of it; it may not be true.

– If you have that sense, it may be because these are, after all, global companies. Bulgarian politics still isn’t interested in this sector and doesn’t understand it—unfortunately, and fortunately. Our politicians haven’t reached the world-class level that, thank God, the Bulgarian tech sector has managed to reach. I’ve tried to motivate successful entrepreneurs to talk in the media about success, about meaning, about technology. One person told me: “Whether I tell my story in Bulgaria doesn’t interest me, I work with the whole world.” Yet a few sentences later the very same person said: “But if one child hears me, gets inspired and believes, then it makes sense, and I’ll do it.” Many of them don’t go public in a centralized way, but they tour high schools, go out to the provinces and inspire a lot of young people.

I think this is happening, and if there is some kind of vacuum, perhaps the problem is rather that it isn’t centralized enough—as a medium, as a channel, as a platform, as a stage, as an association of people who would like to do it.

As for AI, it’s changing constantly, all the time. Perhaps the people working in the tech sector are themselves so busy right now trying to understand it and predict where it’s going that they have neither the time nor the focus to explain it to others.

– But there’s room for all of us in this conversation, because the future of all of us depends on it. Yet few people in the rest of society are aware of the big changes. They haven’t gone through the quiet moment of horror I felt when I realized readers couldn’t tell my story from one told by AI. Have you thought about such a moment—as you said yourself, your great skill is telling stories; what happens if a program does it better?

– Our brains are used to turning everything into pictures and situations. We remember and believe with our feelings.

Even though machines understand exactly which buttons to push to engage me emotionally, they don’t understand emotions.

The other day a friend played me a hip-hop track he’d ordered from an artificial intelligence, since I’m a fan of that style of music. Somehow you sense immediately, and I mean immediately, that the stew is oversalted. As someone who has worked with voice, sound and intonation for 20 years, I instantly noticed that the rapper’s voice had both a rasp and a buttery richness at the same time, and it’s anatomically impossible to have both. Each creates style and pleasure for the listener’s ear, but the stew was oversalted; there were too many cool things in it. That’s the sense of measure. I’ve heard that

the devil’s favorite weapon is doubt, and the devil’s curse is losing your sense of measure.

What we have and carry within us is tied to context. As we said, shortcuts don’t create masters—masters create shortcuts.

Measure is our refuge. Perhaps it’s exactly what will bring us back to the old way of understanding, but maybe at the next level. I don’t want us to go back to the caves, because technology helps tremendously in every respect.

No, no, I don’t want us to go back to the caves. I want us to go back to the human being.

– What's the point of traveling the world to write about matches when you could just watch them on TV?

– They are two different sports—football live and football on television. At the moment

sport is developing more as a media product than as a competition.

Everything is done with an eye to making it more attractive to a wider circle of people.

It's no accident that Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez said their biggest rival would not be other teams but TikTok and Netflix. It's very hard to hold young people's attention on one thing for that long—to sit through 90 minutes of football. But when you're in the stadium, that question doesn't arise; the atmosphere immerses you in something completely different.

Watching football on TV or on various platforms has its advantages, especially with live multi-match coverage, when you have five or six games and the broadcast cuts to whichever stadium something interesting is happening in. That has its own inner dynamic, because uncertainty is added.

– Unless you're a die-hard fan watching your own team…

– Exactly, then those options can't possibly interest you.

Years ago all the games in a given round were played on the same day, at the same time. Now, because of television, they're scheduled one after another. If a foreigner comes to Sofia, in two or three days he can see two or three matches. And if you're truly devoted in front of the TV, it means sitting down at noon and not getting up until midnight. You just switch channels.

More and more people reach a point of saturation, because football is gushing out from everywhere.

But

for me at least, there's nothing better than being in a packed stadium.

Fans of one team, of the other, neutrals. An atmosphere builds that for an hour and a half tears you away from everything that torments you in daily life.

– Absolutely! I would love to be able to take my kids to matches without worrying, because that is the sport, not the thing that will be fighting Netflix and HBO. But apparently that's not what pays the bills. What do you think the future of this competition with the platforms will look like?

– It's a battle between the new and the old. When, in 2014, at the World Cup match between France and Honduras, a goal was awarded for the first time with the help of goal-line technology, it was seen as some kind of evolutionary step forward.

Football is a far more conservative game than, say, tennis, which had perfected Hawk-Eye by 2006. And very different from Formula 1, which is a sport-as-technology in itself. There, without the technology, we'd be back with Fangio in the 1950s.

I expect the new Formula 1 film with Brad Pitt to inspire a lot of people to turn to that sport. There is definitely a crisis of big names there. Before,

there were more pronounced personalities like Schumacher, Häkkinen, Coulthard, Montoya, and back then technology took a back seat.

Now the drivers' individuality doesn't seem to matter as much as how the car has been developed.

And then football got VAR. The curious thing is that it was first used officially in the Australian league… Australia isn't exactly considered a football nation, but they decided to try it there. And then there's the technology where, after the referee watches the replay, his conversation with the video assistants' room is broadcast live—that already has an element of reality show. You hear them talking and how the decision is argued.

All to reach the point where referees first have to explain to TV viewers and fans in the stands why a goal was disallowed or why it stood. Or what was introduced at the Club World Cup: cameras showing the referees' point of view.

The direction football in particular has taken, as the most commercial sport, is more and more reality elements. To fight Netflix, HBO and all the other platforms, you apparently have to provide content that isn't just sport.

– And then social media comes into it…

– I consider it the biggest enemy of sports journalism. For footballers, the media aren't what they used to be.

Everyone can now communicate directly with their followers through photos and comments. They don't even have to do it themselves; they have a team that runs the profile. So

journalists are now seen as some kind of pests who wait for you after the match for an interview when you're not in the mood.

The same clichéd things you can just say on Facebook, on Twitter.

– Only polished, because you have a team writing them. And you don't even need to string three sentences together, which often isn't within your intellectual capacity anyway.

– Absolutely! Besides, as a classic book put it, “everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others” when it comes to the media. Television is king. The channels holding the rights to the leagues have exclusive access to players and coaches after the match. And usually, so as not to be fined,

most of the protagonists give an interview to those outlets and then simply walk past the rest.

You sit for 40 minutes just to watch someone come out and wave at you. Meanwhile, influencers are also now filed under “sports journalists” and get exclusive access.

You see that a given influencer has 300,000 followers, while the outlet you write for has a potential audience of 30,000. Who are you going to give access to?

– It's a very sad trend, because the responsibility influencers and journalists carry is so different—whether we're talking about sport, technology or anything else.

– In top-level football, as the Club World Cup in the US showed too,

the idea is rather to accumulate as much money as possible, which is supposedly distributed to everyone,

while, naturally, the richest will get the most.

Quite a few people, besides complaining about an overdose of football, are looking for something alternative, something that reminds them of the '80s and '90s. That's why, strange as it may seem, lower-league football in England enjoys enormous popularity.

We'll see how the trends develop, but the general direction is that way.

FIFA, UEFA, the big players are looking for every possible way to capitalize on football's popularity, to open new markets.

Women's football is the next link in the chain. UEFA launched a program to invest €1 billion in it by 2030. The women truly deserve it, because over the years they have endured a great deal of mockery and humiliation. But it's yet another sign that

money will play an ever more important role.

– Indeed, we're heading toward more and more reality—cameras, first-person stories, ever closer coverage. And we come back to what you said about Formula 1, which I see in every sport: fewer athletes who are remarkable personalities, who come with genuinely powerful stories, an intriguing path, charisma… Isn't that a strange paradox?

– There are always interesting stories, as long as you know where to look for them.

– Definitely!

– But there's also the other way technology affects sport negatively. Yes,

right now is the best possible time to be an active athlete, and a footballer in particular.

Technology helps coaches and scouts constantly monitor anthropometric data and metrics—speed, stamina, quickness. That's what all those modern vests are for, measuring every indicator in real time.

That's how footballers are selected now. The days of watching videotapes, DVDs and highlight compilations are long gone. Every team is looking for a specific profile, the player it needs, and that saves a lot on scouting. But on the other hand,

it largely robotizes the whole process.

Clubs produce a certain type of player who has to meet certain physical characteristics, while

individualists are looked down on, because everything has to happen at high speed, you have to get rid of the ball quickly.

In England, for example, the pace is dizzying. Most elements are mechanically built in, and imagination is somehow missing, and that becomes more visible every year.

– Alas… Is that what makes you travel to write about matches in more exotic places, less popular, less commercial?

– For me, football is something different.

211 countries are members of FIFA, while the UN has 197.

In other words, it's easier for a nation to be recognized as a football entity than as a political one.

Football is always bound up with social processes, with public life, with politics.

It's definitely not just a sport in which 22 people kick a ball around and others watch them.

The chance not to focus on just one league or one country, to see all the different nuances, is what can enrich not only your sporting knowledge but your general culture too.

Once upon a time, World Cups and European Championships were clashes of cultures, of nations. Little by little, football became globalized. Luxembourg, for example, was an underdog for many years, until the immigrant communities, especially the Portuguese one, started taking part and the profile changed. New players appeared with a completely new mentality, foreign to the nation itself.

Right now everything has been melted down

and only in women's football can you still see such differences, because in purely evolutionary terms it hasn't reached the level of the men's game. It's still at the level of men's football in the early '90s.

These days little kids support Barcelona, Real Madrid, Liverpool. Nobody bothers with the local league if it isn't competitive enough,

when you can switch to any channel you like and watch high-quality football. There are, however, countries that have kept that culture. Take Serbia—they don't play some out-of-this-world football, but you're either Partizan or Red Star, and until recently the stadiums were full for the derby.

– Isn't it suicidal that the identity of different countries is being lost? As you said, everyone wants to be fast and efficient, but maybe it's more valuable when the Italians have a strong defense, the Brazilians are technical and the English rely on crosses…

– On the one hand, yes, it really is being lost. If everyone becomes the same, it will still be attractive if they're at a high level, but you'll only be able to tell who's who by the color of their shirts.

The other way of thinking is that in sport, winning is always what matters most—titles, success. And today it matters even more, because it comes with serious money. Prize funds are at levels nobody even dreamed of back then. Especially in club football, it's a

food chain where you have to qualify regularly for big competitions to get the corresponding revenue.

Each country chooses its own path. For a long time South American countries exported big names to Europe. Today in Brazil, despite all the unstable politics and sporting problems, local clubs have managed to find serious funding and are now bringing Brazilians back from Europe in their prime. Brazilian clubs dominate South America, while at the same time the national team is in one of its weakest states ever, the players are as if cut from the same mold.

This Brazil has nothing in common with the one everyone remembers, the one that made so many people fall in love with football.

There isn't a single personality there now. Some will say Vinícius Júnior, but comparing him with Ronaldo, Rivaldo or Ronaldinho seems laughable to me.

If we go back to one of your earlier questions: after Messi and Ronaldo—a somewhat overhyped rivalry—football has Mbappé, Yamal, Haaland, but no figure about whom you could say, “See, here's a new Maradona, a new Pelé!”

Let's leave out Yamal, who, like Pelé, won a major tournament at 17. The boy has barely left puberty, decides to throw a slightly more “unconventional” birthday party, and immediately all the media jump on him, saying he's gone off the rails, the money has spoiled him.

It's the same in other sports. In athletics, is there anyone since Usain Bolt the whole world knows?

– Do you think this merry-go-round can be stopped?

– There are many scenarios. Football had a period of flying in the clouds at the end of the last century and the start of this one. Luís Figo moved from Barcelona to Real Madrid, transfer records were being broken. And then a media group—Kirch, which held the rights to many of the big leagues—went bankrupt. Three or four years of stagnation followed. That's when stricter licensing requirements were introduced for teams in European competitions: they had to have secured funding, independent of any particular sponsor.

Some unexpected event will certainly have to happen for this model to change. As long as something makes money, there's no way to change it, no way someone will decide out of goodwill to make a change.

Years ago Fabio Capello was in Sofia and I had the chance to interview him. I asked him, “Wasn't it better in your day, when European competitions were straight knockout, when in the very first round the champion of Bulgaria could be drawn against the European club champion, compared with now—group stages, countless matches…?”

Capello looked at me with pity for my naivety and replied, “No. Now it's better for the big clubs. If CSKA plays Nottingham, the European club champion, and knocks them out in the first round, in September, interest in the tournament will drop and the clubs will suffer financial losses.”

The big clubs want a sure guarantee that they'll go through. This new format—no group stage, a single league phase in the Champions League—helped PSG, who on their results would have been eliminated. Instead, with three strong matches across the whole opening stage, they qualified for the next phase and hit their stride there.

– That model is borrowed from the commercial American approach in the NBA or the NHL.

– Yes, Americans are known for successfully monetizing sport. But whatever we say, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. Sport carries on, the big tournaments and championships follow one after another.

We see the audiences the Olympic Games and the World and European football championships attract—

in TV ratings, these are the biggest events in every country.

But perhaps it's no coincidence that when the pandemic began and the world stopped for several months, TV channels suddenly wondered what to do, and someone came up with the fresh idea of airing old sporting events. For many people that turned out to be one of the few joys of that moment.

Psychologically, if you think about it, how many things over the years have made you feel proud? Hand on heart,

no event since the transition from communism has generated as many positive emotions as 1994,

the summer Bulgaria finished fourth at the World Cup in the United States.

– Nothing compares. I'm sure everyone who was at least a kid back then remembers where they watched every single match, even if they have no interest in football at all.

– It's the only moment since the Second World War when the nation was truly united. That's why it hurts so much that it won't be repeated.

Things like that don't happen every day, and that's why it stays in history.

– After so many years in sports journalism, do you have your own explanation for why football in particular is the most successful sport? Is it really so brilliant, so different from all the others?

– That's a question colleagues who don't do football, who cover basketball or swimming, ask too. And so do the athletes themselves, ever since socialist times, when Bulgaria won medals in wrestling, rhythmic gymnastics and weightlifting, yet footballers were still the best paid.

It's very hard to explain to someone who has no feeling for football why this sport is the most popular.

There are theories that the rules are the easiest to understand, that it's the easiest to play. One of the other downsides of technology entering sport is that you have measuring devices, VAR, which make it more expensive. So it's no longer as accessible as it once was. Doing sport is now an investment, not something you just do in your free time.

Football, though, remains a sport in which a boy or girl from the bottom of society can break through and find a path in life. Ninety percent of the most famous footballers come from poor families, outlying neighborhoods, parents working several jobs to buy that first ball. Football established itself as an opportunity: if you're stubborn enough to break through, you can earn your living.

It's also a team sport. In tennis, for example, however much money you put in, the chance of reaching the top 100 is far lower than the chance in football of reaching a decent level somewhere.

– You mentioned that we no longer need line judges in tennis, and they're gone from volleyball too. Could we soon end up in a situation where we don't need the athletes themselves? Where technology imitates them beautifully and the human drops out of the picture?

– I don't know, maybe people are working in that direction too. I'm not that familiar with esports, but it's a fact that there

the prize funds are already at levels two-thirds of ordinary sports don't reach.

But I very much doubt that if you put the best FIFA or Football Manager players in one football team, they'd reach even a decent level.

The digital world is one thing, the real world is another.

One of the things that make sport universal is that it goes hand in hand with social processes. It isn't an isolated island. However far our digitalization goes, that's how far it will go in sport.

– Human imperfection is also, in a way, a plus in sport, I think. AI is already successful as an investment assistant. But I still haven't heard of an AI that's good enough at predicting matches. And in my view the reason is the human side, the imperfection, the mistake that sometimes makes the favorite lose.

– Here comes another problem, linked to social media and its dark side. You really can interact with fans. But not infrequently a footballer makes a mistake, loses a match, for example. And there are cases where he gets thousands of angry messages from someone because he got a red card and wrecked their fantasy team. That's extra pressure, digital harassment. If you're a bit more fragile psychologically, at some point you ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

We have to accept that athletes are people. They're public figures, yes, they have to protect their image; it's one thing for you or me to down a couple of pints and go raise some hell, another for a public figure to do it. And still, that's life.

Right now we're all in a magnifying mirror,

everyone watches what everyone else is doing. Athletes know it very well, and they enjoy seeing a few thousand likes and hearts on their posts, yet at the same time they can't stand ten critical comments.

– Do you think human capabilities in sport have a limit? We keep improving in athletics and swimming, while elsewhere, like weightlifting, we have to change the conditions to make it look like records are still being broken…

– It's all a function of other fields—medicine and technology. Like it or not, I'll touch on the subject of doping. Clearly, with the athletics records from the '80s, we'd have to be very naive to think those who set them were on nothing but vitamins and mineral water, given that they haven't been beaten for so long.

It's no accident that Stefka Kostadinova, the Bulgarian high jumper whose 1987 world record still stands, once said, “Let someone finally beat my record, so we can see that the sport is moving forward.”

Spectators wouldn't want to watch something where a few sacred cows have sat for years.

LeBron James broke Wilt Chamberlain's record for most points in the NBA. Even though there was no three-point shot in Chamberlain's day, and if you recalculated, LeBron would surely be a long way behind.

– Just as they had to invent the regular-season goals record for Ovechkin, because otherwise there was no way he'd beat Gretzky's total goals.

– Exactly. And Wayne Gretzky didn't complain about it. Just as in Bulgaria, when Dimitar Berbatov beat Hristo Bonev's national-team scoring record, without comparing who each of them scored against.

– And how many matches the national teams played in each of their eras.

– The athletes themselves understand that

for sport to develop, there have to be new idols. Sometimes even at the cost of certain compromises.

But that's sport. There are positive examples, and there are negative ones. Like in life.

I've always been surprised when people accuse athletes of not taking an active public stance, or of being photographed with this or that person. Most of them are apolitical, and their activism extends only as far as being grateful afterward to whoever financed their preparation.

We have to learn to tell the difference—sporting idols aren't always idols in life. There are plenty of examples of people who are great footballers, basketball players, wrestlers, weightlifters, and in life they are… I won't use a bad word, but let's say their profile is controversial, to put it mildly.

If you're a fan of a sport, of an athlete, you have to learn to experience it in full. Yes, it's certainly disappointing when the person you watched on TV turns out to be someone else in real life. But that, too, is part of the magic of sport and of television.

– We very often underestimate sports journalism, including in media circles, yet there's a paradox: in recent years so many people like Plamen Mladenov, like Martin Ivanov, like you, are considered among the most erudite, a benchmark for general knowledge. How does that happen?

– I don't think attitudes toward journalists in general are any different. For some they're turkeys, for others they're called other names. I'll offend a lot of people, but for my doctorate I worked in Zagreb. There's no journalism faculty there, and no history faculty either. There's a Faculty of Philosophy that brings together all the humanities.

And journalism is part of the Faculty of Political Science. What does that mean? People believe it's tied to politics, and that to become a journalist you have to learn the fundamentals—sociology, political science, history, how things work. Only then, having built up some knowledge, do you become a journalist.

At the same time, to be a sports journalist you need to be interested in sport. I'm not saying you have to have competed or graduated from the National Sports Academy. Today's era gives you very good opportunities to follow events as a sports fan, as someone devoted to sport.

Speaking for myself, I try to keep the big picture too. To feel how significant a sport football is, how it's tied to politics, to history, to geography, you have to understand those as well. Not just care whether a team plays 4-4-2 or 3-5-2, whether there's a “diamond” or a “Christmas tree” in midfield.

You ask me why football is so big? If you put on a TV studio and the people there talk to you only in tactics and numbers, you'll change the channel. But at the big tournaments colleagues also invite actors, artists, public figures to talk about football. Precisely to show that it spans every sphere of society and everyone has a stake in it.

Whoever underestimates journalists, I think, generally underestimates people's work. Because if you want to grow, in any field, whether it's journalism or not, you have to devote a lot of time, improve yourself, move forward, not stand still. People see the final product. What it cost you to get there doesn't interest them much.

It's like with athletes, Bulgarian ones in particular. When Grigor wins, we're all happy. When he loses or pulls out of the US Open for health reasons: “Oh, Grisho's gone and found himself another girlfriend.” And at the same time, what it cost him to become our most recognizable athlete globally doesn't interest us. Being there for 58 consecutive Grand Slam tournaments… People who follow tennis know who Grigor Dimitrov is. But you only care whether he won this match and who he's sleeping with.

You can't expect that kind of person to respect journalists when they don't even respect the most famous Bulgarians.

– What would sports journalism look like one day if things developed the way you'd like?

– Sports journalism looks the way readers and viewers want it to look. The media are influenced by what people want, or what they assume people want.

A large part of the media think people want to read bedroom stories, and that's why they're full of them.

In sports journalism we have a dangerous combination of artificial intelligence and a lack of natural intelligence. Lots of copy-paste. Lots of writing without fact-checking. You can easily swallow some fake news and spread it. And,

let's say it plainly, a lack of depth. Fast-food journalism.

Simply because some people are too tired to read a text longer than three paragraphs. Let alone some more serious piece of work.

There is, fortunately, the opposite example too, which is why some newspapers still exist. There are people to read them, and that shows we haven't quite returned to the primitive communal system—expressing ourselves in pictures and inarticulate sounds.

Where journalism as a whole goes depends on people. If they want to read fast food, there will be more outlets serving it. If people want better things, the media themselves will raise the bar. But the “lots of output for little money” model that's being practiced is wrong from the start and doesn't lead to good results.

– You do something quite rare in our part of the world—you tell optimistic, positive and motivating stories. What makes you do it?

– Positivity isn’t my goal. I’ve had some very hard moments in life, and I still go through periods when I despair, when I hurt, or when I get angry at certain phenomena and events in Bulgaria, especially lately, against the backdrop of the marathon of elections—Bulgaria’s seemingly endless string of snap parliamentary votes—which is still going on today.

I think it’s normal for a person to feel despair or lose motivation from time to time. But through the stories I’ve been telling for the past eight or nine years, first on websites and then in books, I try to show a different Bulgaria. We shouldn’t go to either extreme and say “this is paradise” or “this is hell”; we should look for a healthier, more balanced view of the situation and the environment here.

There are problems everywhere, and there are opportunities everywhere. I’ve chosen to show the people who are trying to find solutions to the problems or at least, as the saying goes, not to harm others. I don’t limit myself to categories and areas of life; I write about the attitudes, values and work of people from the civic sector, business, technology, education and the media. I try to give a voice to good examples, because

I firmly believe that a good example is contagious.

– But it doesn’t “sell.” You’ve picked a rather nihilistic society for a venture like this.

– I try to avoid generalizations like that, because I realize they aren’t always justified. What does it mean that it doesn’t sell? I think the popularity of a book, an article or a film depends a great deal on the context in which it comes out, on how it’s promoted and on who works on the project.

We live in a world where many people think they can predict everything with numbers and data, but there are things you simply can’t forecast. For example, the first part of The People Who Are Changing Bulgaria was a sensation, while the second sells several times worse, even though I had already made something of a name for myself with the first part, readers were happy with it, and so it was logical to expect the second part to attract at least the same interest.

But in reality it doesn’t work that way, and not only for me. From my conversations with people in the book world, I’ve concluded that this is a global phenomenon. Take a world-famous author like Mark Manson—his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck became a smash hit, including in Bulgaria, but his other books, though popular too, are nowhere near it in sales.

– Maybe it has always been that way, at least with books. But when, in your view, did journalism lose its role of shaping, of educating, of being a kind of conscience of society? Or did it never have that role?

– Journalism is one of the hardest sectors, because ideally it has to fulfill its public mission and at the same time function as a business in order to survive. A media outlet can’t exist and set standards without being sustainable.

At the same time, though, I believe that

if you want to do journalism, you must always put the public interest first.

I never stop being amazed at how various pseudo-journalists allow themselves to spread distorted facts, misleading headlines, tabloid trash and claims taken out of context. They know they are deceiving the audience and that they may damage the reputation or even the health of the people they write about—at the very least through the stress they cause them, or by holding back their professional development—and they do it anyway.

In my view, the difference between good, responsible journalism and all its yellow and “brown” varieties—brown being Bulgarian slang for paid smear journalism—which shouldn’t even be considered journalism, comes down mostly to the awareness and sense of personal responsibility of the person doing the work. You have to know the principles of media ethics and be aware that with your words you can inform but also mislead, explain but also confuse, inspire but also wound.

Information, especially in today’s world where it is so accessible, is an enormous power. A power that can build but can also destroy, that can unite communities but also turn them against each other.

We see how dependent we are—one technical bug in the system and the whole world suffers: airlines, banks and so on.

To me, there is no way to make everyone in an industry act conscientiously. What matters is that everyone who intends to be a journalist understands the responsibility they carry.

– Only the temptation is great, because it’s clear that it’s much harder to become popular by following professional and ethical rules.

– I

want to live in a world in which meaningful stories, stories that inform and enrich society, get the attention they deserve and are valued by readers, viewers and listeners.

The popularity of a piece of journalism shouldn’t be an end in itself. If you always cater to the interests of the audience, something is wrong, because a good journalist is aware of his moral duty to society. There is a principle in journalism that says

the public interest is different from what interests the public.

As a journalist, you have to put the public interest first, not what the public finds interesting. That means you have to filter the information that reaches you and that you pass on to society. If you give in to the temptation to serve the audience only what sells, you can’t do quality journalism. And this problem isn’t a product of social media; it has been part of our lives for decades, the result of the rise of television, reality formats and ever more numerous and accessible sources of information and entertainment. Today journalism looks more and more like a reality show—adequate questions often aren’t asked, people aren’t given time to answer the questions put to them. Or you ask a particular question in order to hurt the other person, rather than so that they can explain things in a way that helps both you and the audience understand the subject better.

Interviews are often used as a way to fill slots in a TV channel’s schedule. People tend to blame social media above all, but if we take television, I find it an inherently insane model to start work every day with the idea that the evening newscast is 35 to 37 minutes long and you have to fill that time, regardless of whether the information you give viewers meets the definition of news or whether it will be useful to them. In summer, for example, there isn’t always much news in the true sense of the word, but under pressure, journalists go hunting for news just to fill the allotted minutes. I would very much like to see a media outlet that, on a normal nice day, simply says: today the evening news will be 25 minutes, because there is no more news that deserves your attention, and we don’t want to burden you with useless information or information that might cause you needless anxiety, fear, despair or anger.

– Well, I don’t see anything wrong with it. That time can always be used to tell meaningful stories that otherwise don’t fit. And the media outlet itself can create news—I try to do that, for example through experiments.

– You’re right, but what matters is that the information you provide has value for the other side, and isn’t simply the fruit of the need to meet a predetermined quota. You run your site for the sake of meaning; it isn’t your main job, while for journalists, editors and producers at the leading TV channels this is their job. And sooner or later, whether they like it or not, people run dry, which you can see, for example, in the tendency of the two leading private TV channels here to copy each other so as not to fall behind the competition.

At some point the added value disappears—the value I look for, that you look for, that other journalists and media creators look for. I, for one, don’t understand why, since they claim to serve the public interest, the leading channels refuse to set aside half an hour a week for a newscast devoted only to good news and inspiring stories, when they have significant financial resources and journalists capable of producing material for such a program. That immediately leads me to think it’s done on purpose.

Maybe the scandalous, the frightening, the sad and the absurd really do sell more, because, as the popular maxim goes, when a dog bites a man, that’s not news; it’s news when a man bites a dog. At the same time, though, journalists, producers, editors and media owners have no moral right to claim that positive stories aren’t in sufficient demand, since they themselves tell such stories in some shows and newscasts and see that these pieces often generate enormous interest. The conclusion: what’s needed is balance, a middle way.

– Content like MrBeast’s, which is positive, can become popular. You give to people, you create a story, and you have more viewers than all the world’s biggest TV networks.

– There are many such examples—Mark Manson, Jay Shetty and many others who have podcasts and video channels and write books. There are also Bulgarians whose success proves there is a hunger for humbling, uplifting and inspiring stories—the vlogger and director Kris Zahariev, Georgi Nenov, creator of the podcast Svrahchovekat (The Superhuman), the US-based journalist Ivo Ivanov, whose stories reach the deepest corners of your heart and soul, and others.

The decision about what information and content to give the people you are trying to reach is an individual choice, but that choice shapes those people’s attitudes, values and tastes.

If you constantly serve people fear, depression, corruption and poverty, you can’t claim that they have no interest in different and more positive stories,

because they simply have limited access to such stories. After all, as a journalist or a media outlet, you are the strainer, the filter, the moderator.

– And do you think there is a generational difference? Does the famous Generation Z look more for the positive, the unconventional?

– To some extent, yes. For example, part of the childhood and adolescence of people of my generation coincided with the period after Bulgaria joined the European Union, and we got a clearer idea of what was happening in the West, what the opportunities there were, but also what the challenges were. Bulgarians who study, work or simply travel abroad are no better than Bulgarians who study and work here and have no direct view of what’s happening abroad; the difference is in perspective and outlook. You can bring back some experience from outside, something that can be improved. To me that’s a plus for our society as a whole.

Still, I try to avoid generalizing about people on the basis of their age, because different generations grow up and get to know the world in different conditions. For example, those born after 2005 have had access from an early age to smartphones, social networks and platforms like YouTube and TikTok. The more you use these platforms, the more your capacity for sustained concentration, deep work and mindful consumption of information declines, and you start to

look for ever shorter forms, which I see as a problem, because, as with television, you get information without the context you need to make sense of it.

This imperceptibly changes your picture of the world, your values, your expectations, your aspirations.

You see a very small piece of reality. And when millions of people see a very small piece of reality, it directly undermines journalism’s function of informing and explaining, because in order to capture the audience’s attention, journalists become more inclined to resort to short forms, news based on press releases, and superficial and sometimes even misleading commentary and analysis.

That’s why I love reading, watching and listening to more in-depth interviews, reportage and investigations. When you put information in context, you give the reader/viewer/listener the chance to make an informed decision, an informed choice, and to come away feeling that they understand the world a little better than before they read/watched/listened to the piece. However good a storyteller you are, you can’t answer a complex question of public interest or explain a tangled case involving several parties, each with its own point of view, in an article of two or three paragraphs or a two-minute report.

– That’s exactly why I insist on long texts, fully aware that this puts off many readers. But this brevity is changing both our perception in general and the way we think, in a very dangerous way. As Ivo Ivanov himself told me, there’s no one left to sit down and read Dostoevsky.

– You don’t have to read Dostoevsky specifically, or any other classic. I admit I haven’t read Dostoevsky, and I’m not ashamed of it, simply because I haven’t felt the need so far in my life. I’m convinced that even the most avid reader among readers hasn’t read many of the books presented as classics and included in lists of “books everyone must read.” But that doesn’t mean you can’t read longer books or draw knowledge and inspiration from media that offer in-depth pieces. Or real-life stories from gifted storytellers like Ivo Ivanov—his stories are long, but their charm lies precisely in the descriptive passages and the author’s philosophical reflections, which provoke you to ask questions, to look into yourself and those around you, to feel and to feel with, to live and to live through; they draw you into his world and the world of his characters. You can’t read Ivo Ivanov in passing—you have to be alone, settle into a comfortable spot, take your time, maybe pour yourself a glass of wine, tea or coffee, and immerse yourself in the story.

– Will this skill of concentration and immersion survive? Given that the trend really is visibly toward ever shorter content, toward an ever larger volume of information bombarding us, in which short forms often win because they require less effort and are more spectacular…

– I think there will be some pushback at various levels of society in the form of a

shift from seeking the superficial and the light to seeking the profound and the meaningful.

You can see this even in music and film—especially after COVID, more and more people are seeking out live concerts and screenings in movie theaters and open-air summer cinemas, as well as chances to talk with their favorite musicians, actors and directors. They’re looking for authentic experiences that some people once thought would disappear. Just as, at one time, some people thought radio or television would disappear.

I don’t think the short form will win in every sphere. At some point we’ll simply realize that the more complex the challenges before us, the more multilayered our response has to be. You can’t talk about climate change, globalization, resource distribution, social policy, artificial intelligence and so on in two sentences. That’s an illusion of conversation, a “fast food” conversation, going through the motions.

These areas involve extremely complex, large-scale phenomena. Many people talk about artificial intelligence, but beneath the surface of that concept lies a sea of questions, topics, unforeseen situations and cases. We can’t make sense of what’s happening and take adequate action if we rely solely on a 15-minute conversation in some TV studio.

– But in my view, that’s exactly what’s happening with artificial intelligence. That’s why I run my site on these topics—because I see that we don’t go deep into them, and I’m trying to change the situation as far as I can.

– Here we also come to the consumer of information—what matters is how they were brought up, what they look for and what they value. I also see that many people don’t read books at all. What I find very frightening, though, is that there are journalists, politicians, lawmakers and teachers who practically don’t read books. I stress that I’m talking about books, not news sites and social media posts. A book gives you perspective, shows you the big picture, offers context, helps you tie threads together and understand ideas and events that at first glance may have nothing to do with each other. News content by definition has a short life, it lives day to day, but that also means it can be offered in abundance.

If we take the last three years in Bulgaria, against the backdrop of all the elections, the economic shocks and the COVID pandemic, which together generated tons of news content, we’ll see how much we have already forgotten—and when those things happened, they were on every TV channel, radio station, website and newspaper.

We forget because there’s no way to keep up with all the information flooding us every minute from every direction.

We can’t manage to process and make sense of this information. We haven’t yet put together the pieces of one puzzle, and already we have to assemble another, even bigger and more complex. This drowning in confirmed and unconfirmed information, claims taken out of context, fake news and propaganda is frightening, because at some point a person becomes very easy to manipulate. And the consequences are plain to see.

Fears are being sown, which for me is the worst thing. If we look at the big picture, the worst thing is this division, this polarization at every single level.

It’s sad that now, whatever you say, whatever you do, someone immediately sees you as an enemy. We need more respect for one another, more humility and a stronger desire for fruitful cooperation at the neighborhood, local, regional and national level—in the civic sector, in business, in education, in politics, in the media, in culture and in sports.

– It seems that, to a huge extent, social media is to blame for the current state of affairs. But how can we break out of this vicious circle?

– I recently had the honor of interviewing Annie Duke, the author of several books on decision-making and a former poker player. Earlier this year I translated one of her books into Bulgarian—Quit. Annie Duke says that when people inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, cults and so on—the so-called flat-earthers, for example—come across facts that flatly refute their point of view, they fall prey to cognitive dissonance, a state in which your beliefs conflict with reality. In that case you have two options:

either you change your mind, or you look for explanations and arguments to prove you’re right.

Most people choose the second option—they try to twist things so that they fit their point of view. That’s precisely why, according to Annie Duke, our goal shouldn’t be to hurt these people but to try to have a good-faith conversation with them, to ask them questions in an attempt to open their eyes to the facts, for example: “Look, these are the facts and the evidence. Can you explain to me why you still hold this opinion?”

It’s more than obvious that they rarely change their minds on the basis of facts alone. So we have to try to talk with them, to get to know their way of thinking in depth, and in that way to increase the chances that they’ll become a little more willing to trust the facts available at the time of our conversation. Because

if we don’t talk, we live in separate bubbles that don’t interact with each other. And sooner or later those bubbles burst.

We’ll all be better off if we find a way to communicate fully, so that we can live in peace and enjoy life. When tension smolders in a society, sooner or later it breaks out.

– Exactly, and I too think the most important thing is to talk to each other. After all, we’re a small country; so many more things unite us than divide us. What divides us, after all, is mainly social media, which is too powerful to be regulated.

– I’m not an expert on the subject, and I don’t know to what extent regulating social media is possible or, if it is possible, who could guarantee that the regulations are respected, and how. They have algorithms for assessing content, but these can narrow the space for public conversation on certain topics, and they can also be abused. Appropriate and timely content filtering is one thing; censorship is something else entirely. Who can set clear boundaries, and how, and who can be responsible for upholding them in the information-saturated, easily offended world we live in? It’s naive to expect the companies behind social networks to solve all, or even most, of these problems, since they run businesses and prioritize profit.

– Definitely, and I don’t think that technology is helping us make sense of information at the moment—more often it gets in the way.

– What’s needed is a multilayered response from many different institutions and people. It won’t happen with the help of tech companies alone, governments alone or civic organizations alone. I think the key is education—both formal and informal.

There are nongovernmental organizations trying to guide children and young people (and not only them) so that they can develop their information and media literacy and find their way better in today’s information and media environment. There are also fact-checking projects. We are probably making gradual progress in this area, albeit more slowly than we’d like.

The other challenge is the gap between the capital, Sofia, and the smaller towns. We have to realize that not only in Bulgaria but in many countries around the world—with the exception of the Scandinavian countries and a few others that are more balanced in their socioeconomic and regional development—there is a very large difference in living standards, level of education, way of thinking and access to learning opportunities between people living in bigger and in smaller towns. This gap is problematic, because we are supposedly in one country, yet we may feel much closer in values to people from Britain, Germany or the United States than to our compatriots living in a small town in Bulgaria.

Marginalization takes hold within societies themselves. And when we add social media, anger, envy, hatred and aggression pile up.

We end up with very heated communication that at some point stops being dialogue and becomes monologue—I tell you one thing, you tell me another, but no one hears the other.

– Against this backdrop, how do you imagine the future of the media? I think journalism is dead in the form we know it, because it can’t compete with the feed. And it has to be reborn in a new and different way.

– Clearly, journalism is one of the fields undergoing the greatest changes as a result of the growing influence of new technologies and social media—that’s inevitable.

Some media are adapting. More and more of them are trying to offer video and/or audio content, to strike a balance between short and long forms, to explain and not just to inform, to practice so-called solutions journalism—a genre in which the journalist’s aim is not simply to criticize and look for culprits but to offer guidance and potential solutions to specific problems by studying others’ experience and interviewing people who know the subject—for example, how we can deal with traffic in a big city, or how to organize education so that it prepares children and young people for the challenges of life, rather than mainly for passing one exam or another.

Journalists must clearly realize that in this ocean of information we are swimming in, they must first and foremost give people value.

If you offer nothing more than superficial articles and reports of the kind that many social media users can produce, you can’t survive for long as a journalist and/or a media outlet. We need more slow, responsible journalism, in which you set aside enough time to gather enough information, verify its accuracy and synthesize it before presenting it to the audience—rather than rushing, say, right after some incident to report who was hurt, who died and what caused it, and even broadcasting the tragedy live, even though all you achieve that way is to deepen the grief and anxiety of the people watching the footage.

Unceremonious live coverage increasingly resembles a reality show in which the whole country watches the latest tragedy unfold in real time. I don’t see how exactly this approach to covering incidents, crashes and natural disasters helps the victims’ families or society as a whole. The alternative is to report briefly on what happened, without going into details whose accuracy you haven’t verified and without long live broadcasts. Only once you’ve gathered the most important information and checked the facts can you report it to viewers, taking care not to needlessly amplify their pain, fear or worries. In parallel, over time, you can prepare a piece examining what steps could be taken to prevent such tragedies in the future.

At times I’m gnawed by the thought that journalism itself, in order to maintain high ratings, wants there to be problems, because that way it can offer bread and circuses. And that is sad.

Conversations at the level of ideas are already rare. Conversations often come down to “I’ll crush you, I’ll hurt you, you’re from that party, from that team, do you know who I am, you don’t understand anything, only we can deal with these problems…” There is no desire to make sense of the problem itself, but the division into camps flourishes instead. That way we can’t win the battles that truly matter for our society.

– And yet supposedly everyone should have internet by now and thus access to the whole sea of information.

– Yes, but sometimes we simply take certain things for granted. And again we come back to the role of education and the need to develop information and media literacy.

I dream that in Bulgaria, as with influential businesspeople and politicians in the West like Bill Gates and Barack Obama, we will also see, hear and read about

influential Bulgarian businesspeople and politicians publishing their recommendations of books that have made an impression on them.

If nothing else, at least the topic of reading would then take a more central place on the public agenda. What do our politicians read? I worry that they don’t read much at all—neither fiction nor nonfiction. By not reading, they not only fail to set a good example for the rest of society and to show that reading books is a useful and enjoyable activity in itself, but they even complicate the already complicated problems we face—both out of ignorance and out of unwillingness to understand what is going on and what can be done.

In an environment steeped in ignorance, lack of education, vulgarity, envy, malice, aggression, impunity, arrogance and division into camps, we begin to lose our ability to appreciate the good, the beautiful and the valuable that surrounds us and will continue to surround us.

And one more great pain of mine—words are losing their power. We never stop indulging in empty verbiage, talking from morning till night about European values, Euro-Atlanticism, judicial reform, reform of the education system, reform of healthcare, rights, freedoms and other concepts that are being emptied of meaning by constant repetition combined with the lack of their application in practice.

I think each of us has a moral duty to try to help ennoble the environment around us and improve our relationships, by approaching more mindfully the words we use, the actions we take and the choices we make, and by looking for bridges between ourselves and others. If we make the necessary effort every day to become better people despite our imperfections and weaknesses, and to think of ourselves as part of a community rather than as free electrons that have nothing in common with their fellows, we significantly increase our chances of preserving ourselves as a country and a society and of living in peace and understanding.

Where is freedom today? Where it has always been: in ideals. And in the deeds of the ever fewer people for whom it remains a cause, not a hollow cliché.

After a 14-year battle that at many moments looked doomed, Odysseus has finally returned to Ithaca. The private jet landed in the Australian capital, Canberra. Out stepped the white-haired, charismatic man known all over the world, and he waved to the journalists and well-wishers who had gathered. Then he embraced his two young children, whom he was seeing in freedom for the first time, far from the oppressive bars…

The heroes of the past fought for freedom. For the independence of their peoples, against slavery and injustice. And today's heroes, the ones future generations will honor? If there is a tomorrow, it will mean they have won, however unlikely that may seem.

Today's heroes fight for freedom too. Alas, they are neither as many nor as well known. But if there is one whose battle for the truth has reached a great many people, it is without a doubt our hero today. Julian Assange has become a legend, a symbol. And his story is so thrilling and so full of twists that it is worth digging into. Along the way, we will let him speak through a few important quotes that, I hope, will make more people think about the truly important issues of our day. The very issues Digital Stories exists for…

Nothing to Lose but Their Chains

“Who am I? A freedom fighter deprived of all freedom. A fighter for free speech who has been denied all speech. A fighter for the truth who has become the target of a thousand lies.”

You cannot have missed the Australian with the hair gone white since youth and the somehow childlike gaze. A journalist, a programmer, a champion of the truth who managed to drag into the light some of the most closely guarded dirty secrets of the world's hegemon. And who then entered a legal battle that was all too likely to end in a 175-year prison sentence, precisely because he had done his duty. After 7 years in a cramped little room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and another 5 in an even more cramped prison cell. After years of risking his life and liberty, Assange came home a winner.

His previous stop was a small courtroom on the small and faraway island of Saipan, where the local judge, representing the United States in the territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, approved the deal between Assange and the prosecution. He pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of 5 years, which he had already served. “It appears you will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” declared Judge Ramona Manglona, for whom this was the great chance of a lifetime to step into the spotlight.

My People????

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”

Unlike Assange. Used from childhood to fighting for what he believes in. Showing incredible resilience in his battle against the justice system, against the most powerful states, against absolutely everyone…

What might the price of this deal be?

Before we ponder that, let us go back quite a way, before the story of the documents, the embassy and the prison, which dragged on for an unusually long time by the standards of our age, when everything happens so fast…

Big brother

“The first thing to understand is that a person is either a participant in history or its victim. There is no other option.”

Julian's parents split up before he was even born. His mother, Ann Hawkins, was a visual artist; his father, John Shipton, a builder and anti-war activist.

When Julian was 8, his mother married the actor Brett Assange, owner of a small theater company… It was him the rebel would come to accept as his father, and his surname that he would make famous, even though Brett and his mother parted ways when our hero was only 9.

“Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. One of those cool people from the seventies who were into guitars and everything to do with the music scene. The name Assange is unusual; it comes from Mr. Sang, or ‘Ah Sang’ in Cantonese, because his great-great-grandfather was a Taiwanese pirate,” our hero recounts.

Defying all the stereotypes, his real father would return to his life later. Together with his half-brother, he would make a film called Ithaka, in the very hope of helping Julian one day win his battle with the justice system and come home… Of course, many of the details remain unknown; Julian keeps his private life far from the world, and piecing together the fragments of stories like his will certainly be a challenge for the future. If history survives as a discipline capable enough to record what happens in digital times…

Stranger in a Strange Land

“People often ask, ‘What should I do?’ The answer is not so difficult. Learn how the world works. Challenge the statements, actions and intentions of those who seek to control us behind the facades of democracy or monarchy. Unite around a common goal and a common principle to design, build, document, finance and defend. Learn. Challenge. Act. Now.”

Shortly after her second divorce, his mother married Leif Meinel, a founder of The Family—a local sect, as Julian calls it. The marriage did not last long; she became pregnant, felt hunted and fled, beginning to roam Australia with her son, from state to state… “That's how we started moving. Nomadism suits some people, some situations. We just kept moving; my mother would get a job in a new town and we'd find a place to live there.”

Over the following years, by his own account, they would pass through more than 50 towns, and he would attend 37 schools.

From an early age he stood out as a skilled programmer. He wanted “to break down the barriers to knowledge.” At 8 he was interested in philosophy and mathematics, and by 11 he had already mastered the capabilities of one of the grandfathers of today's computers—the Commodore 64.

But his childhood was much more than that. In rural Australia, he says, he lived like Tom Sawyer—riding horses, exploring caves, fishing, diving, riding motorbikes.

In high school they called him “the Professor.” He liked to boast that at 15 he could “crack encryption systems used to stop people sharing software,” which would later help him with “systems used to hide information in government computers.”

The Monastery Is Too Narrow for My Soul

“The future of humanity is the struggle between humans who control machines and machines who control humans; between the democratization of communication and the usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence.”

Then, almost imperceptibly, he grew up and was ready to travel on his own. He slung his most important belongings over his shoulder and set out to discover the world, hippie-style, hitchhiking, sometimes without papers, under various made-up names. On and on he roamed, as if racking up the miles for the years he would have to spend in the little room at the embassy and in a cell in the high-security Belmarsh prison.

In all the commotion he had dropped out of high school; he was already 32 when he finished it and enrolled to study mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne…

He did not graduate, because by then a chance to change the world had opened up before him.

Julian first stepped into the spotlight precisely as a hacker. At only 16 he was operating under the handle Mendax when he and two friends were put on trial for hacking. They mostly used social engineering; they did not abuse the information or profit from it, they only shared it, and that is what would save them. And although they hacked institutions such as the Pentagon, Citibank, Motorola, Panasonic, NASA and the U.S. Navy, they got away with it. They signed an agreement with the court, pleading guilty and receiving only a suspended sentence in return. Sounds like history repeating itself, doesn't it?

At the Tip of the Spear

“Real democracy is not the White House. Real democracy is not Canberra. Real democracy is the resistance of people armed with the truth against lies, from Tahrir to London. Every day ordinary people teach us that democracy is free speech and protest. Because once we, the people, stop speaking openly and stop resisting, once we turn our attention elsewhere or grow complacent, once we turn away from one another, we are no longer free.”

Next he took the lead in the cypherpunk movement. Behind the rather catchy name lies a community of people pursuing “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful,” who use “mathematics and programming to create a brake on government power.” The cypherpunks advocate the widespread use of cryptographic technologies as a way to protect basic human freedoms.

All of this soon came to life in WikiLeaks—the organization Julian and three like-minded people founded in 2006 with the idea of creating “the rebels' Library of Alexandria.” A rich collection of information that could not be found anywhere else, gathered in an easily searchable form so as to keep watch on how today's institutions do their jobs.

Although the first part of the word, “wiki,” is used for collections of information that anyone can add to, the idea here is different—a media outlet of sorts, able to meet the needs of a new age. The second part hints at this: “leaks,” from the English term for information escaping where it shouldn't.

According to Assange, WikiLeaks rests on the idea of “scientific journalism—that every piece of information should be cited precisely, with the original source. As much of the information as possible should be put in the public domain so people can examine it, just as in science, so you can check for yourself whether the conclusion follows from the experimental data.”

Publish or Perish

“I see that there is now a militarization of cyberspace, in the sense of a military occupation. When you communicate over the internet, when you communicate using mobile phones, which are now meshed with the internet, your communications are being intercepted by military intelligence organizations. It's like having a tank in your bedroom.”

During one interview Assange was asked to give a mathematical formula for WikiLeaks, and he wrote three words on a sheet of paper: “Publish or perish.”

In just a few years the modest venture turned into a phenomenon that bears no comparison with anything. The documents it revealed led to massive journalistic investigations and political upheavals. Even to wars, to the ending of wars, to changes of government in a number of countries. To date WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents, many of which, you can be sure, were not exactly welcome news to the governments of the world.

Including the government of today's global hegemon. It is no accident that in the years that followed, Assange and his associates were subjected to a sweeping, unprecedented campaign in which they were smeared, discredited and, worst of all, prosecuted, stubbornly and shamelessly, on a string of obviously fabricated charges, as well as on charges that were in fact examples of free speech in its purest form.

The Truth Shall Make You Free

“Everything else flows from the revealing of the truth. Our buildings can only be as tall as their bricks are strong. Our civilization can only be as strong as its ideas are true.”

“We created WikiLeaks to make capitalism freer and more ethical and to expose injustice, not to be neutral,” Assange also says. Publications from the platform have been cited in more than 28,000 academic papers and U.S. court decisions.

Among the most striking collections of information is the Afghan War Diary, containing 90,000 often harrowing reports on the deadly actions of the U.S. military. For the Iraq war, nearly 400,000 field reports were published, exposing war crimes and testifying to the enormous number of civilians killed.

It is no exaggeration to say that the two collections also led to the end of the hostilities and the gradual U.S. withdrawal under public pressure. And perhaps this is also why, in recent years, the global hegemon's policy has shifted toward not intervening directly in military conflicts. Alas, war crimes around the world have not ended, but if at least a few more conscientious journalists worked on the scale of our hero… that would be no utopia at all.

Under the name Cablegate, more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables were published, sparking scandals in many parts of the world. The Guantánamo Files told of the inhuman torture inflicted on detainees, while the Spy Files revealed many cases of mass global surveillance, including of leading politicians. One of the latest major scandals was the publication of Hillary Clinton's emails, which to a large extent brought about the end of her political career and today's chaotic state of American politics.

With a Bare Knife in Hand

“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded that we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire ‘international community.’ We kept publishing. They put me in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA, got Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, won, and secured him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us, but she herself was destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with a piece of string. Or perhaps there are no elephants?”

Of course, because of this enormous list, Assange and his associates are often accused of collaborating with other states, Russia in particular, of political manipulation and who knows what else. For many years the Australian faced extradition to Sweden on charges of raping two of WikiLeaks' female associates. Later the testimony turned out to be rather dubious, as did the backgrounds of the accusers, and the case was dropped.

Because of the WikiLeaks revelations, one of its main “suppliers” of information, Bradley Manning, spent some time in an American prison before reaching a deal with the prosecution and walking free, by then with a different name and even gender—as Chelsea Manning. Edward Snowden, for his part, still lives in Moscow, fearing the consequences of having simply told and shown what the authorities in his own homeland were doing. Incidentally, Snowden calls Assange “one of the most far-sighted thinkers in technology, constantly ahead of the curve.”

Crocodile Dundee

“With digital archives, with these digital repositories of our intellectual history, control of the present makes possible an absolutely untraceable removal of the past. More than ever, the past can be made to disappear entirely, completely and irrevocably, without anyone noticing.”

Thanks to Assange, the now popular term whistleblower came into wide use—the person who blows the whistle. Who has the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes. Who has the integrity to expose the huge wrongdoings that go on in states, companies and society and remain hidden.

Though he was the symbol of the venture, Assange always said WikiLeaks was a team effort. And yet the logical thing happened: in June 2012, when he was about to be sent to prison and no longer had any chance of escaping the persecution, he found refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The then president of the small South American country, Rafael Correa, had the courage to shelter the rebel, granting him political asylum and later citizenship.

But if that sounds like salvation, it is only fair to say that the Ecuadorian embassy, which became a field of major political upheaval, turned out to be a 30-square-meter apartment in which Julian, used to roaming the world since childhood, was forced to spend 7 years with 5.5 square meters for his personal use. “My access to the outdoors, to sunlight, is forbidden by the British authorities,” Assange said. “As is the possibility of going to a hospital. I have managed to use the ground-floor balcony only three times, taking a certain risk, and I have not even been allowed outside to exercise. The Ecuadorian embassy, which honors me with its generosity and courage, which probably saved my life, is simply an apartment used by a dozen diplomats and staff who cannot abandon their mission.”

And yet things got even worse for him after the government in Ecuador changed and the new president, far more pro-American, slowly but surely saw to it that the guest was handed over to the British authorities.

The Truth and Nothing but the Truth

“The greater the power, the greater the need for transparency, because if power is abused, the result can be monstrous. On the other hand, when people have no power, we should not diminish their power further by making them even more transparent.”

So Assange ended up in the special-regime Belmarsh prison in London for the next 5 years, during which long, epic legal battles were to decide his future.

There were many fears that he would not survive, even at the very highest level. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, visited Assange with two doctors and concluded that “Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.”

To round out the plot, we must not leave out that during this time Julian married his longtime partner Stella Moris, a French citizen and part of the legal team fighting for his release. The wedding took place before four witnesses, two of them the official witnesses and the other two minors. These were Julian and Stella's sons, Gabriel and Max, who are now 7 and 5. Evidently the cramped personal space of the Ecuadorian embassy was enough for more than just a love to be born…

Julian is believed to have another son who is considerably older. And according to rumor, he may have many other children too, but… the many rumors only go to show what a legend the Australian has become over the past decades.

Against a Sea of Troubles

“The merging of our societies with the internet and of the internet with our societies has enabled a truly astonishing horizontal transfer of information, in which we can learn from one another far more than we ever could. On the other hand, it has allowed state intelligence organizations and the contractors who work for them to collect more information. In a sense, it is the greatest theft of wealth that has ever taken place.”

Before we part, it is time for two curious touches. Assange appeared in the classic series The Simpsons in 2012, voicing… himself in the landmark 500th episode. His voice was recorded over the phone while he was shut away in the Ecuadorian embassy.

After that, a character inspired by Assange was included in an Asterix and Obelix comic. Confoundtheirpolitix, an “international news crier,” appeared in the 36th album of the series, with the blessing of the comic's legendary creators—the artist Albert Uderzo himself and the heirs of René Goscinny. Before publishing his Commentaries on the Gallic War, Julius Caesar decides to remove the chapter recounting the defeat he suffered at the hands of the Gauls. A scribe named Bigdata (the modern term for data) passes this censored chapter to Confoundtheirpolitix.

“It's better than a Nobel Prize. Far more people have received one than have become characters in Asterix,” Julian said with a smile. Clearly not without irony at the fact that the supposedly greatest prize for peace, for which he was nominated no fewer than 8 times, has often gone to open warmongers and people who unleashed bloody conflicts.

Freedom or Death

“If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with people like us, whose hearts and minds we can be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the beginnings of our stories in their ears, and their endings all around them in their wandering eyes. The whole universe, or the structure that perceives it, is a worthy opponent, but try as I may, I cannot escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will find comfort wandering through some laboratory, talking softly with students on summer evenings, and will accept suffering with nonchalance. But not now. Men in their prime, if they have convictions, are obliged to act on them.”

And so came the long-awaited freedom, about which we have yet to learn more (or perhaps we never will). The day before, news broke that Julian had struck a deal with the U.S. government to plead guilty and receive a symbolic sentence for time already served, set against the 175 years in prison that had threatened him.

But what matters more is that Assange has at last embraced his kids in his native Australia. We are left to guess what he gave in exchange for the freedom he waited so long for.

And yet, after everything said so far, I personally cannot believe that he has given up and committed to stop publishing. I believe that, even as the years go by and the weariness piles up, there will be more WikiLeaks to come. That the battle for truth and freedom does not stop here.

It is a daily battle, relentless but essential. Each of us ought to fight it, even with ourselves. And may more people come to realize it…

– “What’s your star sign?” What does it tell you about a person if they open a conversation that way?

– The previous “version” of me would have answered differently, but over time I’ve learned to think that whether someone believes in star signs, or in homeopathy, isn’t necessarily a clear signal of their intelligence or their capacity for critical thinking. We humans believe in all sorts of things and for all sorts of reasons. This is very important, and it is a cardinal mistake to look only for the rational or logically sound side of things.

From the Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman we can learn that the everyday concept of “knowing” has two components—the absence of doubt and the factual, verifiable truth of what we say we “know.”

Scientists draw very firm boundaries around what counts as “knowledge.” For them it is only that for which objective evidence exists. Any scientist would tell you that believing something is right or true carries no guarantee whatsoever that you are right. Things look entirely different in other communities or groups of people. For every devout Christian, for instance, there is no doubt at all that God created the world 6,000 years ago, that He then sent a flood, that His son Jesus Christ lived on Earth, died and rose again three days later. This form of conviction is completely different; the believing Christian knows with their heart that they are right and that the whole narrative is factual down to the smallest detail.

But to get back to the essence of your question—

people believe in star signs for emotional and pragmatic reasons—that belief satisfies important needs of theirs.

In Algorithms of Delusion I explain in detail what modern social science knows about this phenomenon and why it is thought that people believe in astrology and other pseudosciences. Most often the motives are social.

– To be honest, my own reaction to questions like that has changed quite a lot over the years. And what seems especially important here is to stay as far as possible from absolute positions and generalizations. Astrology, of course, is just an example. But what are these social motives?

– To understand the world and ourselves, to feel we belong to some community, to be effective, to have self-respect, and to see the world as benevolent.

Without much difficulty we can see that pseudoscientific doctrines, and astrology in particular, can satisfy such social needs far more successfully than traditional science.

The world is far more chaotic, anxious and incomprehensible than we would like, and science has nothing comforting to say. There is no way it can reassure us.

Quite the opposite—it is more likely to unsettle us, because it tells us the facts, and facts are rarely pleasant or comforting. Against this backdrop, a pseudoscience like astrology has a soothing effect on us; it gives us a well-grounded sense that it is at our service, it helps us put the chaos in order and find answers to hard questions. Even when those answers aren’t true.

– But how did we reach a point where science has lost its power over a huge share of people?

– We form beliefs in basically two ways. One is logical and rational, the other emotional and associative. And most often we use the second. We look for consistency, coherence and an absence of discord in the stories we believe.

If something sounds convincing to us and we trust the person we hear it from, we are very likely to believe it.

So it is with astrology. It is convincing, soothing, explanatory, plenty of authoritative and likable people believe in it, ergo it is massively widespread. Even the big media outlets have been running astrology shows for years—how could anyone not believe it, when they see it “on TV”?

Believing in star signs is practically convenient, because it is in sync with life experience, and it seems to you that what you hear is entirely correct, valid, verifiable, familiar from everyday life. When someone tells you Cancers are gentle or Capricorns are stubborn, you reply: “Yes, exactly! I know a whole bunch of Cancers and Capricorns like that…” It is convenient to have an idea in advance of what kind of person someone will turn out to be and what you can expect from them.

Of course, this is absolute, complete self-deception, but it is a rather pleasant one.

And our brains love to feel pleasure, literally. They like the chemicals these sensations bring.

You are looking for a rational explanation for astrology’s triumph, and there is one—it just isn’t the one you expect. The rational explanation lies in the emotional and associative way in which we humans most often form our convictions and beliefs.

– A perfectly logical and important explanation. My sons are both Virgos too and they are quite alike, and I hope to raise them as critical thinkers. A young reader told me she hears from everywhere that she should think critically, but never what critical thinking means in everyday life. Does everyone have to spend hours checking a piece of information to be sure it’s true?

– “Critical thinking” doesn’t mean nitpicking or quarreling. The term comes from the Greek “kritikos,” meaning “able to judge.” That is, to tell good from bad, to recognize truth and lies. And success at this is achieved through specific standards of justification—you can learn more about the subject from Assoc. Prof. Rosen Lyutskanov’s book Narachnik za kritichesko mislene (A Handbook of Critical Thinking).

In psychology there is a specific tool called the CRT—the “Cognitive Reflection Test.” It is designed to measure an individual’s tendency to reject an initial, often wrong, intuitive answer and to engage in further reflection to find the right one. It largely defines people’s cognitive style and shows how inclined each of us is to “dig deeper.” Most people aren’t especially keen on that sort of thing, because in principle

we humans are “cognitive misers” and avoid straining our brains.

It is simply hard, tiring and resource-intensive; it burns a lot of calories. And so the people who do poorly on the CRT believe more untrue things, including astrology and extrasensory perception. Translated into plain language—if you’re too lazy to think, it usually shows, and you’ll believe just about anything.

– All right, but as you write in the book, astrology is a relatively harmless pseudoscience. Yet pseudoscience and conspiracy theories today are far from always harmless…

– There are some striking examples—politicians running the country on astrological advice and guidance from their favorite astrologer, as Silvio Berlusconi liked to do, and he wasn’t the only one. But astrology truly rarely has grave consequences. Unfortunately, there are a number of other pseudoscientific pursuits that can have a devastating effect on us—individually and as a society.

Above all I mean “alternative medicine,” which is worryingly often a form of pseudoscience.

Take homeopathy, so beloved by many anxious mothers. Most people don’t have even a basic idea of what lies behind the word and mistakenly think of herbs, natural ingredients and so on.

It is something else entirely, and not a particularly clever one. It was invented at the end of the 18th century by the German charlatan doctor Samuel Hahnemann. It rests on two principles—similarity (like cures like) and infinite dilution, also known as “potentization.” Both are visibly absurd;

science has tested homeopathy countless times with double-blind experiments, and the conclusion is invariably the same—this “system” works only at the level of the “placebo effect.”

That is, only as much as we believe in it. And it couldn’t be otherwise—the first principle isn’t based on anything scientific. Why would something that causes certain symptoms in a healthy person be able to cure the same symptoms in a sick one?!? The second is downright crazy—that the more we dilute an active ingredient, the “more powerful” it becomes. In homeopaths’ solutions not a single molecule of the diluted substance remains, but its “memory” supposedly does all the work. If solutions had memory, I personally wouldn’t touch tap water. Because, as you can easily guess, at least some of it has certainly passed at some point through the kidneys of a very sick stranger…

The frightening part comes if we stop treating serious illnesses with conventional, science-based means and lean on homeopathy instead. And while I don’t much care about grown-ups, since everyone has a head on their shoulders and is responsible for their own future and happiness, I am genuinely worried about children. They don’t choose their treatment personally and on an informed basis. Someone else does it for them and in their place.

– When did we start losing the battle with pseudoscience?

– There is hardly an exact moment. I think the internet and its mass spread across every layer of the population played an important role. I’ve been an active internet user since 1997, when I raced velociraptors through the streets to run and pay for my access at the local provider in downtown Sofia. The online world quickly filled up with a representative sample of the population you would meet on the streets of any town.

This is undeniably very democratic, and it opens doors for everyone to educate themselves, to grow smarter, to develop, to do business, to learn, to profit culturally, politically, socially, financially and in every other way. But as we can see, that isn’t quite what happened. Instead of all of us progressing, a small share of people use technology for their own benefit and growth, while the rest have learned to use it mainly for other things—playing games, chatting, swapping and gawking at pictures of kittens, and scattering not-very-intelligent babble everywhere. I don’t know how to put it more delicately.

– I would add that online the “rules” are set up to steer us in that direction, which is why this site exists too—to make us stop and think.

– The internet is a wonderful environment for spreading stupidity, ignorance, conspiracies, lies, delusions, hatred, polarizing narratives…

This “digital divide” drew a new demarcation line through societies around the world—winners and losers from internet use. The winners are few, those who strive to build themselves up with the help of technology. The losers are the majority, and they mostly waste their time online. Let me not be misunderstood—I too sometimes spend time on pleasant pastimes online, and years ago I did so much more. Today, though, I try—and this is a natural impulse!—to extract maximum “profit” from sitting in front of a phone or a computer.

The internet is a megaphone for nonsense.

We turned it into one because of anonymity. As someone once pointed out, if everyone wrote comments but with a scan of their ID card next to their profile name, things would look different—the hate, the trolling, the harassment, the nonsense, the lies and the delusions would be a hundredth of their current size. But things are what they are, and pseudoscience and the other lies and delusions claim new victims every day—figuratively and literally.

– Hate, anonymity, division, filter bubbles… Exactly! But literally, even?

– Delusions poison people’s souls, minds and bodies almost equally.

When you meet people like yourself and move in homogeneous online environments, the lies gradually become part of your understanding of the world.

But when you start applying them, your life may end up staked on the wrong card. During the COVID pandemic thousands of people died from misleading self-treatment advice. In a situation like that, even if the internet had never been invented, foolish advice would still have spread. But the internet made the world a small place in which the aggressively stupid, the greedy and the self-important have the power and the will to shout down the thoughtful and the decent. Which inevitably increases entropy and leads to more, and more frequent, bad decisions by significant masses of people.

– Or the issue of COVID vaccines… Would you go to a doctor who believes in star signs or homeopathy?

– A basic piece of advice from circles of critical-thinking enthusiasts (amazingly, there are such communities online too) is exactly that—when we go to a new doctor, we should first ask whether they would recommend homeopathy. And if it turns out they would, we should run to another one. I haven’t applied it in “real life,” although I find the advice entirely sensible and justified. Then again, I haven’t had the bad luck of a doctor reaching for homeopathic remedies.

As for star signs—I have no problem with that. Doctors aren’t obliged to know that astrology is pseudoscientific, and even if they believe in it, as long as they are competent in their specialty and keep their knowledge up to date, I fully trust that they can help me within the bounds of what is reasonable and well-founded.

– Why are there so many doctors and teachers who believe in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories? They are educated—shouldn’t we trust them, if they know medicine better than we do?

– I wish I could give a humane and non-irritating answer to a question like that, but I don’t see how. Honesty requires me to admit that the public image of doctors and teachers as “smart, educated and trustworthy” people is quite far from reality in far too many cases. And with these levels of pay, social benefits and public recognition, it is no wonder that not many intellectually brilliant and professionally competent figures have remained in the ranks of those professions.

– Can anyone tell, by some criterion, what is science and what is pseudoscience?

– There are plenty of features that distinguish science from pseudoscience. Science is falsifiable (that is, open to refutation), empirically provable, methodologically sound, open to criticism, verifiable, reproducible. Pseudoscience doesn’t have such features, and that strongly unmasks it on closer inspection. But precisely because the criteria are so numerous, it can be challenging for a layperson to tell the two apart “in the field.”

In the end, it is a rather unnecessary demand to place on people—if they aren’t experts in science, they can’t be expected to start analyzing which statement, claim, publication or article is scientific.

It seems simpler to me for people to remember what is fraud and delusion. A short and by no means exhaustive list: homeopathy, holistic medicine, naturopathy, anti-vaxxism, colon hydrotherapy, detox diets, astrology, extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, telekinesis (and all the made-up phenomena that fall under “parapsychology”), UFO-based ancient civilizations, graphology, mediumship, quantum mysticism, perpetual motion machines, free-energy engines, creationism, biorhythms, cryptozoology, flat Earth theory…

– That’s quite a list!

– There is more, but I think even this incomplete list will “inflame” plenty of readers for one reason or another.

People love to believe the fairy tales that make them feel good; on the other hand, there are millions of swindlers making hefty sums out of gullibility.

The latter will brand me their enemy or competitor, because I am “leading astray” their religious community. I understand them—what charlatan with business interests would want someone “muddying the waters”? The funny thing is that I’m actually trying to do the opposite—to clear the water, so people can see where they are heading and what reality is. But here I contradict a core principle of mine—not to give advice to people who haven’t asked for it.

– And when is it important to make the distinction?

– Let everyone judge by their own lights. I would say that if a person’s health or life is at stake, it is extremely important to understand what is pseudoscience. Beyond that, “important” becomes a rather relative term. Personally, I think it matters not to multiply absurdities and misleading narratives, but my opinion is entirely non-binding and reflects only my own intellectual taste for living in society.

– We have both mentioned the pandemic; it became a catalyst for all these processes. What do you think were the biggest communication mistakes that contributed to this?

– The communication mistakes by everyone involved in managing and containing the global (and the Bulgarian) crisis were so abundant and varied that I won’t venture to single out just a few.

As far as I could judge at the time,

probably every country “botched” its communication to an astonishing degree.

It is quite certain that some hold the palm of victory, and I suspect Bulgaria is one of them. It is one of the five countries with the highest “excess mortality” during the pandemic. The term measures how many more people died than would be statistically expected, compared with the same period before the pandemic.

Let me quote a paragraph from my monograph Algorithms of Delusion: “Clearly, the incidence of and mortality from the coronavirus correlate with the political governance of countries and the actions of the authorities. Those very actions were noted by voters in the respective countries, who, watching the unfolding health catastrophe, withdrew their trust from public institutions and turned to ‘alternative’ sources of information. Thus disinformation, and to a particularly great extent anti-scientific conspiracy theories, received a powerful boost and wide circulation. With which the circle closes, and the health situation in the affected countries deteriorates to the maximum and irreversibly.”

One of the reasons for the poor communication, by the way, was that we had never before lived through a pandemic in the modern era of total global connectivity, and nobody knew how to act. Every scientific discovery overturned the previous one, and the authorities often had little choice but to say something different every day and issue contradictory instructions. A very difficult situation, managed by not particularly gifted politicians and power holders, often pursuing their own shady interests and having lost public trust—there was no way this cocktail could lead to positive results. A society can be led successfully even in such times if it trusts its leaders and considers them competent and well-meaning. In Bulgaria we had no particular reason to see those in power that way, and the result is well known—a communication catastrophe, tens of thousands dead needlessly, chaos.

– Today it is beyond dispute that because of our skepticism toward science (and vaccines in particular), many people died who could still be alive. But how do we convince the rest that they were wrong, so it doesn’t happen again?

– If vaccine skeptics were dangerous only to themselves, I wouldn’t lift a finger at the social level. But anti-vaxxers are dangerous above all to (their) children. By not vaccinating their offspring, they punch holes in the long-built vaccination shield that has so far protected modern humanity quite successfully from extremely unpleasant and dangerous diseases. The higher the share of unvaccinated people, the weaker our common shield becomes. That is the second problem—anti-vaxxers are dangerous to society as well. The falling number of vaccinated people is a threat to all of us, even if we ourselves are vaccinated.

Anti-vaxxers are grown-ups—if they want to get sick or die, that is their choice. But that choice, unfortunately, isn’t confined to them alone. It affects innocent children and society as a whole.

– And still, how do we convince such people?

– That really is the million-dollar question. Until we realize that we humans form our convictions mainly emotionally and associatively, not rationally, fighting anti-vaxxism by logical and scientific means will bring us almost no success.

If we truly want to help these people change their views (rather than force them, which never works well), a different approach is needed.

It has two components—good storytellers and stories.

No, I’m not recommending “fairy tales for grown-ups,” but excellent and emotionally compelling narratives, told tirelessly by excellent and very widely liked opinion leaders with a proven, powerful persuasive effect. It is scientifically confirmed that our convictions really are shaped by way of emotional liking. We simply trust someone—a teacher, a religious leader, a parent, a friend, a scientist, an influencer…—and start absorbing their views as correct.

We find arguments in favor of those views not because they are necessarily very logical or rational, but because we like (even subconsciously, without realizing it) one of those figures very much. When we argue with an ideological opponent, we find rational arguments for why we are right—not the other way around, where we know we are right because we reached our convictions rationally. And that’s okay, since we really haven’t reached our convictions and beliefs by rational means. The whole business is extremely emotional (and therefore irrational).

If we find persuasive people who are liked and recognized by society, and proactively equip them with a correct and convincing story that sounds emotionally appealing, the battle against anti-scientific or pseudoscientific beliefs starts to look winnable.

The world needs good “storytellers,” emotionally engaging and appealing stories, if it is to learn anything at all.

– So far, though, that hasn’t been the case…

– Most young people hate science not only because it is hard for them, but because they didn’t like their teachers and, along with them, came to hate the subjects they studied.

Unscrupulous influencers chasing personal gain fabricate insane nonsense on the internet every second, because they make a great living from it.

They simply satisfy a need young people have—to be shown the world as one-dimensional and completely fake, but intriguing, in counterpoint to the complex, boring, brain-straining lessons at school, taught by teachers who are often (fortunately not always) haughty, poorly prepared, arrogant, embittered, unmotivated, unable to understand their students across the generational gap, behind the times in their field, or simply weak educators.

What kind of competition can that be—personally motivated, young, slippery and morally unencumbered “storytellers” from the same generation, against the “class” of teachers I just described, who have also taken on the task of delivering material that is frankly difficult? Here the outcome is “written in the stars”…

– Should we care that, writing about science and technology, you and I will have a few hundred readers at most, while the popular faces of pseudoscience will have hundreds of thousands?

– You should care, because the Digital Stories site isn’t, and shouldn’t be, just a hobby—it has a business side too. If people don’t read you, it won’t be worth the time you put in, unless this hobby of yours nourishes you endlessly on a purely human level, regardless of the financial return.

– That’s true, the site is entirely non-commercial, and that gives me freedom. Precisely because I feel an inner need to tell the stories that I too believe are the only way out…

– I cared for a long time, because for inexplicable reasons I thought I had a duty to educate “the people.” Fortunately, today I’m not quite in the same position. I’ve been someone who has deeply revered sayings and proverbs since childhood—often enough, centuries of generational experience have crystallized in them, and we shouldn’t try to accumulate it on our own. Reinventing the wheel is a waste of time; that task was ticked off long ago, which is why I use proverbs almost every day. One of my three favorites in recent years is this one—

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

Nobody can be convinced of anything if they have no desire or inclination for it. And since I got tired of banging my head against human walls, and don’t find it constructive for either side, these days I try not to hand out “wisdom” unless I am explicitly asked for advice or guidance.

But to get back to the question—if people prefer the influencers you mentioned, that is their business, not mine. My job, and yours too, is to offer engaging and scientifically sound content, and whoever wishes is welcome to come and read, listen, watch. It would probably be socially beneficial if what we do were the preferred choice of the mass audience, but since it isn’t—and it really isn’t—there must be reasons. Whether they like us is beside the point.

Look, we are not responsible for other people’s behavior, thoughts, actions, values. Even if those people are our children (or students), we can achieve only a limited effect. And that shouldn’t trouble us all that much.

Let’s do our work conscientiously and without losing enthusiasm, and if we manage to influence even one person in a positive way, I think we should congratulate ourselves on a success.

Because even that isn’t guaranteed, and counting on anything more would show a poor capacity for judgment…

– That’s exactly how I see it too. Every reader is the reader who matters, and I wish you the strength and the will to keep going down this path. Thank you for this conversation!

You love computers, and to be able to use them… you buy magazines!?

Isn't that strange? Isn't everything online? It is today, but this digital story was born in a computer past that feels both recent and very far away. A kid dreams of getting an unfamiliar magazine with James Bond's face on it, which has caught his eye. He gives up his pocket money to buy it, but just a few hours later the “big guys” take it from him. That, however, is how his interest awakens in the cult computer magazines of the end of the last century, the favorite reading of an entire generation.

Decades later the boy “meets” the same Bond again, and the magazine sets the rest of the story in motion. Thousands of stubborn hours go by until, today, Project Lazarus is complete, and anyone can browse the full collection of the legendary computer magazines of the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century. A peculiar Bulgarian cultural phenomenon that is hard to explain to the young people who came after…

Which magazine did you love? PC Mania, Gamers Workshop, or another one from the long list?

Game On

This remarkable phenomenon reminds me of the story of gamebooks. It begins in the late 1990s, when the internet became more accessible and computers began to appear in homes en masse. Its speed, however, was far from today's, and so for quite a few years computers lived side by side with paper. We bought books to learn how to use the net. And, even more often, the computer magazines we'll be talking about today. Most were devoted to games, and they often came with a gift—a disc of game demos and programs. Plenty of readers bought them for the discs; the net was still in its early stages, and downloading even a picture was slow and expensive.

Little by little, computer game magazines grew into a culture of their own. Different schools took shape, and each publication had its own profile (more on that soon). Some of them gradually managed to gather their readers into a community that talked actively about the topics it cared about.

Then the speed went up, and with it came the end of the magazines. Some turned into websites, others quietly slipped into history. The very place from which they are now returning…

The Game of Toys

And here this cultural phenomenon is again, thanks to our hero today. Diyan Karolev is a journalist with serious experience who in recent years has been working in computer game development. And after 8 years and 5,000 hours of stubborn volunteer work, anyone can now read, on the Project Lazarus site, every single one of the 440 issues of computer game magazines ever published in Bulgaria! Together with the games section of the magazine Computer, Diyan's enormous labor covers no fewer than 659 issues.

Try it, leaf through them virtually—it's such fun. A time machine that, for me at least, filled me with nostalgia for my school days…

But how did our guest decide to take on such a massive task for the common good? As you've already gathered, the story begins more than two decades ago, and it involves none other than Agent 007.

The odyssey (it may not be in space, but still) begins in 2001. Diyan, born on the first day of the watershed year 1989, is only 12 and often goes to the bus station in his hometown of Pleven, where there's a toy shop. “After school I'd stand there with my nose pressed to the window, staring at a Batman I finally bought many years later. At some point I also started looking at the newsstand, where I noticed some colorful magazines with titles that meant something to me—PC Mania, Master Games,” Diyan recalls.

Tomorrow Never Dies

At the time he doesn't even have a computer at home, but he often spends hours at the computer club next to the school—back then these were favorite haunts for kids. But… “My eyes stayed glued to those covers, but they also stayed glued to the price. I'm in sixth grade, I get 50 stotinki a day for school”—stotinki being the Bulgarian cents, a hundred to the lev—“and the magazines cost 2 leva (about $1.10) without a disc and 4 leva with one.”

Those 50 stotinki are for a sandwich during the long break, and that's also what an hour at the computer club costs, but our hero has already developed an obsession—to buy a magazine, and one specific issue at that. A little earlier he has seen the latest James Bond film, and it's the cover with his favorite hero that becomes his dream…

Except that a cavalcade of unpleasant surprises awaits him—by the time he has saved up the money, that issue has sold out, so he buys another magazine instead: a PC Mania with a purple cover featuring the game Oni. And to top it all off, before he has even read it, the “big guys” from the upper grades take it from him that same afternoon.

Just a few months later, though, the dream comes true in the most unexpected way. The boy is sent to his older cousins for the summer holidays, and since they can't be bothered with the little one, they hand him a whole pile of computer magazines to keep him entertained. He devours them cover to cover, even though… he doesn't understand much.

We Played Well…

“I had no idea what I was reading—first the foreign words, second the specialized terminology I was discovering for the first time. But once I got used to it, I got really hooked. I was hugely impressed that there were people who wrote about games, and were probably even paid for it.”

So his next, much bigger childhood dream is born—since he loves to write, he starts thinking how wonderful it would be one day to earn his living by writing about computer games.

That is exactly why he later turns to journalism, graduates in the field and starts working at Bulgarian National Television (BNT). And although by then the computer magazines no longer exist on paper, he also fulfills his dream of writing about games, on the PC Mania website, which is still running today.

The Love of Words

And so all these fulfilled childhood dreams lead up to the last one, the one that has brought us here.

We move to 2013—the magazines are long gone—when our story proper begins. Diyan is already working as a journalist and stumbles online upon something that takes him back in time.

He remembers one of his favorite childhood books, The Cucumber King by Christine Nöstlinger, and decides to find it online. It turns out to cost just one lev. “That seemed terribly insulting to me—the courier would cost more than the book—so I decided to look at what else the same shop was offering… And at that moment I see the purple cover of the first magazine I had ever bought and had stolen from me, a precious childhood memory,” Diyan recalls.

He spots a few more magazines, buys them all, and as he leafs through them he travels back to the phenomenon. That's when the next idea comes to him—to make a documentary about the history of computer magazines, because it's so interesting that it simply has to be told. He starts meeting his favorite writers from back in the day, collecting… And he notices how hard it is to find the old magazines today: some carry unjustifiably high prices, and others can't be found at all.

With Dragons in the Heart

“Because I love collecting things, I ended up hoarding them like Smaug the dragon and gloating over them. I met writers, did interviews, and then I thought—these magazines, I'm literally sitting on them like the dragon and they're gathering dust. Why not share them with people?”

First he decides to check whether there are any legal restrictions, and it turns out that PC Mania and Gamers Workshop are the only trademarks still registered. He manages to get their blessing and rolls up his sleeves…

He chooses to call the project Lazarus, after the biblical Lazarus. That way the magazines rise again from their paper death.

And so, 8 years and about 5,000 hours of scanning later, all the magazines can now be browsed on his site.

In his work he is careful and precise; each magazine takes him about 3 hours. He “takes apart” the issues, processes the images, straightens them. We joke with him about how useful the sharp eye he's developing will be if the software industry falls victim to artificial intelligence and we all have to move into construction.

Game On

Diyan is so meticulous that when an image has a hole in the middle because of a prepress error, he hunts down a replacement, swaps it in and adjusts it. Why, when he could always leave the hole and it would be authentic? Because he wouldn't be able to sleep if he did. Lately, generative artificial intelligence has helped him quite a lot.

And why does he put in all this enormous work?

“I've always imagined the project as a library devoted specially and only to game magazines. It costs me out of my own pocket, but I don't see a problem with that. I want to be able to share with other people the thing that inspired me to write in the first place. It seems only fair to me that there should be free and open access to these texts, because otherwise they'll be lost.”

Magazine Makers

“The magazines had a huge influence on all of us; they're a cultural phenomenon,” Diyan says today. “1998, around the release of StarCraft, is the moment when suddenly everyone decides to make gaming magazines. That's when the cult titles Gamers Workshop, PC Mania and Top Games appear—the last of which is renamed Master Games after two issues. Each has an extremely distinctive style and way of covering games and everything related to them.”

At the time, as we said, the internet is slow, expensive and runs over the phone line. Most kids don't have computers; others don't have internet. So, according to Diyan, the magazines on the one hand become a rescue from having to search for information in English, and on the other they provide programs and game demos that can't be found anywhere else. And then all of this turns into a community, which is more of an unexpected side effect. Many of the early magazines organize tournaments; others open their own clubs.

The magazines come out actively until about 2010; the last survivor is Gameplay. From one of his interviews Diyan learns that their usual print run was between 10,000 and 15,000 copies, higher in winter, when more games were released.

Still Not Played Out

Plenty of people thank him for his stubborn work. Writers who wrote for the magazines and never kept copies. “There were several emails like that: ‘I saw the site, found my articles and cried with emotion.’ Others write just to congratulate me. ‘Hey, well done, man!’ Very often, especially on social media, I see the sentence ‘Thank you for your work.’ To be honest, that confuses me a little. I'd never heard or seen it before, and I've never thanked anyone for their work either,” Diyan admits. “But maybe I should.”

How valuable it is sometimes simply to say thank you. And how important it is to keep the strong moments of childhood, to treasure them and bring them back to life. Surely many people will return to them thanks to the enormous work Diyan has put in. Few things are more precious to us than childhood memories…

Which Were the Cult Magazines?

Diyan's quick take on his favorites

Top Games isn't a separate magazine but the games section of the magazine Computer. Yet that's where it all started, back in 1992! Gathering the complete collection was a real adventure—it took a year of going around libraries.

PC Mania were very precise and clear; they're like BNT. Always there, you know what you'll get. It may not be the most original journalism, but they'll cover everything that's important, everything you're interested in, and you'll get the discs. From a certain point on it was written by young people, which, for me at least, added a lot of extra value.

Gamers Workshop—if you follow them from beginning to end, you could write a whole book about a group of friends who get together every week, talk things over, do things together, and you share it all with them. They were very natural; you could tell when someone was joining or leaving, when someone was sad, when something had happened in their life. They were also extremely honest in their opinions, regardless of whether they were objective—that was never their goal anyway; the goal was to be sincere.

In Master Games I like the abstract art—there you can see a complete chaos of words, visuals, colors. The magazine itself isn't consistent at all and at the same time covers an awful lot, jumping from topic to topic. Not just games—sometimes reportage, articles about aliens, about conspiracy theories—you never know what you're going to get. I remember an article about a game with the subtitle “Monologue to a Cat Close at Hand.” I have no idea what that means, and I'm convinced it has nothing to do with the game being written about, but it makes an impression. The whole magazine was written in that contrarian style, and it's also famous for the comic about Doctor Gas.

Computer Games is also an impressive magazine. I found it incredibly interesting how, back in 1993–94, they managed to dig up information about the development of Myst, about how Roberta Williams's Phantasmagoria was made—topics on which, even today, it's hard to find lesser-known facts, yet they managed it.

Kompyutarni igri (Computer Games) is a magazine published by Softpress that was never announced, and even the publisher itself didn't know it had existed. Only 6 issues came out, but it's the only one that came out every two weeks. It was written in an interesting, somehow more Western style and came with free stickers—very unusual.

In PC Club I like Boyan Spasov's section “Format C,” with its humorous articles and parodies—for example, what would happen if The Matrix came to life in Bulgaria. For me this is a much more sterile publication, designed to be more profitable and to pull in advertising. At first it was a partnership with the newspaper Monitor, and it took writers from PC Mania and Computer.

At some point PC Club became Gameplay because of a trademark dispute. It started being published by Haykom, which assembled a team that had previously worked at Workshop. Some kind of coup took place there in 2006, and the writers who left moved to Gameplay. The result was a serious publication, professionally executed, with the most modern design.

– Let’s start with the stereotypes… Are rich people happy?

– I believe money only amplifies what you already were—the good and the bad. I’ll never forget reading in a biography of Elon Musk how he complained that although he was now a billionaire, he was very lonely. And the author makes the interesting observation that it’s lonely at the top… but not for everyone. Only for those who were lonely at the bottom, too.

In my view, the happiest people are those who have achieved something that personally fulfills them.

It might be moving to a new country, starting a family or starting a business. That fulfillment is completely different for everyone, which is why no one can tell you what you need to do to be happy. Only you know that.

For me, happiness and success are one and the same—a winding road full of obstacles you have to overcome. In the end, it’s the hero’s journey that turns into a life well lived.

– How do you choose the people whose stories you tell?

– I always ask myself: “Can I learn something from this person’s life story?” In most cases the answer is yes. I believe we can learn from someone else’s successes, mistakes and failures. The stories that draw me in the most are the ones about hardship, courage and persistence—the paths that are thorny and winding. That’s exactly where the most valuable lessons are hidden.

– Are there people from the tech world you admire? Tell me an interesting story about a not-so-famous tech hero….

– Few people have heard of Martine Rothblatt. In the ’90s she was known as a brilliant entrepreneur. She came up with an idea that at first glance seemed impossible—to create a global satellite radio. Well, she pulled it off; you may have heard of the revolutionary company SiriusXM Satellite Radio. Rothblatt led it to a successful IPO in 1993 and left soon afterward.

And then came one of the most important moments of her life. Rothblatt, who was born male and had been called Martin, confessed to her spouse and children that she had always felt her soul was female but had been afraid to express it. She and her wife have been married for more than 40 years.

Right then, though, tragedy struck. The family noticed that her daughter Jenesis was struggling to climb stairs, and she was diagnosed with a rare disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension. The family was told it was fatal.

So Rothblatt, also known as “the perpetual inventor,” decided she would find a cure for her daughter. While Jenesis was in the hospital, she went to the hospital library and read everything she could find about pulmonary arterial hypertension. She went from high school biology textbooks to university medical texts and scientific journals. “Eventually I learned enough to think it was possible that somebody could find a cure for this disease,” she says.

As a result, she founded United Therapeutics—a cutting-edge biotech company developing technologies to extend the lives of patients with severe lung diseases. That company really did create the drug that saved her daughter’s life, and the lives of many other people suffering from pulmonary hypertension.

Today Rothblatt is working on

technology that would copy the contents of our brains and preserve them forever.

She calls it a “mindfile,” a collection of a person’s behaviors, personality traits, memories, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values.

– Will she succeed on this path, too? I’ve written about the idea of copying brains here on Digital Stories as well. But to return to success—talent, hard work, persistence, the right approach, luck—which are its essential ingredients?

– It takes many ingredients, but the most important is that these are people who know how to reinvent themselves.

Most of the “successful” people we know didn’t become that way on their first try. It usually happens with their second or third venture. There’s no stronger sense of confidence than the one that comes after you’ve proven you can build something again, regardless of the circumstances.

Take Taylor Swift, for example. She’s a global pop star, but she started out in country. Eight years later she successfully crossed over to pop with her album 1989. Then she played with an electro-pop sound on two studio albums, Reputation and Lover. And lately she’s been experimenting with folk and alternative rock.

Unlike many stars who succeed in a single genre, she embraces creative risk and reinvents herself at every stage of her career. Some may see reinvention as calculation, but Swift considers it progress.

– Let’s move on to writing, which is a weakness for both of us. Now that algorithms can write so well… what’s the point of us writing?

– I don’t think artificial intelligence will ever replace writers… at least not the good ones. ChatGPT is perfect at grammar; it achieves ideal sentence structure and consistency. And that’s exactly the problem.

Whether we realize it or not, we connect with other people’s imperfections.

We like imperfect people, imperfect art, imperfect writing.

As Rick Rubin writes in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being: “Flaws are human, and the attraction of art is the humanity held in it. If we were machine-like, the art wouldn’t resonate. It would be soulless. With life comes pain, insecurity, and fear. We are all different, and we are all imperfect, and the imperfections are what make each of us and our work interesting.”

Do I think ChatGPT can be used to complement human writing? Yes. But will it displace all writers? Absolutely not. The beauty of any creative endeavor lies in its messiness, in its flaws. And above all—in its humanity.

– You and I both started out in journalism, and in a sense we’ve both left it and yet kept going down the same road, just in a different way. What is the most valuable thing journalism gave you?

– The greatest gift is that it allowed me to turn my curiosity into a career. As a reporter, I suddenly had the chance to ask all kinds of questions in search of the truth.

It also taught me to write with nuance and context. And that matters, because

it’s the small, seemingly ordinary details that make stories captivating.

It taught me that the world isn’t black and white, and that my job is to capture the little details that humanize a subject.

– The detail… that’s another thing we’ll struggle to explain to algorithms. What turns an ordinary trifle into a symbol that gives the whole story its meaning. In that sense, one of the points on the path of successful people, according to you, is choosing what you read. I couldn’t agree more (here I explain why). Why did you put it on the list?

– Elon Musk says he takes careful care of his “mental software.” In his view, there’s a difference between the “hardware”—our innate intelligence and natural talents—and the “software”—our belief systems and mental models.

“The ‘hardware’ is like a ball of clay we’re given at birth, and the software is what determines what it will become.” In other words,

the software in our brains is the most important product we own,

because we can optimize it by regularly consuming quality information.

In a world that bombards us with clickbait and articles written solely to sell and advertise, it’s up to us to become more mindful and deliberate about what we read and “feed” into our brains. In the end, the information you consume every day will shape the way you think and see the world.

As Haruki Murakami says: “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

– Can there be objectivity in journalism?

– These days a popular argument goes that no one is objective, so it’s impossible to write an objective article. But I’d like to add one small nuance.

Much of what is written today isn’t journalism.

It’s simply personal opinion disguised as journalism.

While it’s true that no journalist can be completely objective, the key lies in intention. If you start covering a story with an opinion already formed, it won’t be valuable to readers, because you’ll impose your own point of view regardless of the facts.

Instead, I always strive for objectivity—gathering the facts, interviewing dozens of people, including different perspectives, asking questions and following the story wherever it leads, even if it doesn’t match what I originally thought.

– Then again, sometimes subjectivity can add value, too. What are the biggest mistakes the media made that cost them people’s attention?

– I think they lost many of their popular journalists when they went through tougher economic times. After that, they

allowed opinions to dominate the news flow without labeling them as such.

Many of the big media outlets became mouthpieces for particular political candidates and didn’t uphold the journalistic standards of doing real, quality investigations.

There were so many missteps… but journalism isn’t dead. It’s just that the media giants are falling apart. I’m optimistic that smaller outlets will emerge and prove that journalism is alive and well.

– I completely share your view. I’d add that it’s time to acknowledge the end of the media as we know them, and the moment when they need to return, fit for the world we live in. What do you think the journalism of the future will look like?

– I think people trust authors more than faceless institutions. And that the journalism of the future will be far more fragmented than what we’re used to. There will be many independent journalists who have built their own smaller projects. We’ll be more likely to subscribe to what individual people create than to faceless media companies.

– That’s exactly what I meant by subjectivity and the return of the author… Your personal media outlet, The Profile, is more than successful. My own modest personal outlet gives meaning to my days. But isn’t it harder when we journalists have to save ourselves one by one?

– Over the past few years we’ve witnessed the rise of the independent writer. We saw the media splinter, and now we’ll see a new consolidation—this time of person-centered media companies.

Let me give you an example from the United States. When Bari Weiss left The New York Times, she was writing articles for a newsletter she ran on her own. Then she started hiring other journalists under the umbrella of her company, The Free Press. Now people can subscribe to the newsletter, but also to its various voices. And you can clearly see that the individual writer is valued more than the organization. More people will know who Bari Weiss is than what The Free Press is.

– What advice would you give to young people today who dream of working in journalism?

– Act with logic, not emotion. Journalism has an extremely important place in society, but it’s not for people who take offense easily. You need to be able to stay calm in tense moments. To ask questions that might make someone uncomfortable. And to be ready to change your mind when the facts speak.

– Do you miss anything about Bulgaria? What are your favorite places and experiences here?

– Apart from my parents, my whole family is still in Bulgaria. I was born in Sofia, but I have incredible memories of time spent with my grandparents in Petrich and Blagoevgrad, in the country’s southwest. An amazing place—I’m very grateful I spent the first 8 years of my life there.

Now we try to come every year with my children. One of the experiences I’ll never forget is my first walk around Sofia with my daughter, whose name is Sofia.

Bulgaria is a wonderful country with wonderful people, and I’m very proud to be Bulgarian.

Never before have we been able to talk online about the things that matter, to hear what the smartest people think, to debate them, and yet… we spend our time wondering what to quarrel about next.

For and against the government, Trump, the scandalous contestant on the Bulgarian edition of The Bachelor (because apparently only non-scandalous ones are supposed to be chosen). Machine voting, vaccines, judicial reform. The latest chalga hit—chalga being Bulgaria's brash pop-folk—the latest half-baked change to the law, and who knows what else.

We know we live in social bubbles, that content platforms stopped being a place to meet friends long ago and turned into giant TV sets that will do anything to swallow our attention, but… so what?

Can we change anything? Is it worth it? Here is a small experiment, garnished with eight things to think about.

We will go back to the subject of covid and the way we made sense of it. We will follow the path of one journalistic piece so we can reflect on it together. On the place we have ended up.

A Kind of Covid

We ought to talk much more about the way we get our information today, and the way we will get it tomorrow. These days, information hygiene matters no less than physical hygiene if we want to stay healthy.

Yes, even though the idea that you are what you eat reigns supreme, a person is much more what they read—or so I believe. Sooner or later a new kind of media will return to the field, one that picks out what is worth it from the ocean of information, tells it professionally and makes sense of it (more on the subject here).

And yet… what do we do today? We chat about how the algorithms of the online giants lock us in and set us against one another, how they might turn out to decide the next elections. Here are eight ideas about the ocean of information we are drowning in…

1. One- and Two-Day Wonders

“Covid four years later: why didn't we learn our lesson?” That was the title of the piece I published on the Digital Stories site for the anniversary of the pandemic's declaration.

The human brain is a curious thing—how quickly we forgot the times when all of our lives changed from top to bottom. Even the parks were cordoned off with tape and guarded by police. Then came the big subject of vaccines, which created an unprecedented divide.

Well, plenty of time has passed. Wouldn't it be good to take stock, to think—where did we go wrong in the fight against the virus? Did we overestimate it, or the opposite? Might there even be some truth in a few of the countless conspiracy theories, now that we can analyze things soberly, carefully, impartially? After all, we remain an ordinary earthly species that can always come face to face with the next dangerous biological enemy. Wouldn't it be good to be ready?

Those were exactly the questions I tried to answer, and I think the piece arrived at some rather important conclusions. Others, no less important, came afterward, though…

The topics on the agenda change at astonishing speed, so that much of the news dominating public space today is forgotten and irrelevant tomorrow.

2. Yesterday's Paper

Whatever the generational differences, it is clear that if you want to understand what is going on, to find something meaningful to read or the news, today you will most likely do it online. Every generation has its platform, every country its quirks. If in the United States the public dialogue “flows” on X, in Bulgaria this kind of information clearly happens on Facebook.

In short: if we once opened the newspaper or switched on the news to find out what was happening in the world, what awaited us tomorrow or what to be outraged about, today social platforms do that job. Each with its own quirks, but each with the algorithm that decides what to show each of its users. An algorithm built to satisfy the visitor as well as possible so that they spend more time on the platform, which in practice lives, one way or another, off precisely that time spent. Yes, its purpose is not to educate or to inform. It is not even to entertain, but to hold attention. Over the years the platforms pile up more and more data about every user's actions so they can get better at choosing content.

Of course, more or less all of us realize that this is exactly how social networks work, but bit by bit messaging apps are adopting the same approach to distributing content—with news channels—and so are apps like Google Discover, which “picks” the news for every user with an Android phone.

It is easier than ever to create content today, but the way to reach other people runs through social platforms. Since Digital Stories is a site that is not part of any platform, they treat its posts as “external links”—if users like them and click, they leave the platform… which, naturally, gets in the way of its goal. That is why such links are doomed to be hidden by the algorithm.

So to reach people at all, even entirely noncommercial sites like Digital Stories have no option but to pay for advertising.

Social platforms, which started out as social networks, are now a primary distributor of information. But they include far too wide a range of sources, with content of varying quality.

3. Do You Respect Me?

I do it with minimal sums for each post; otherwise the work of preparing them would go to waste. (Let me take the opportunity to remind you—if you find the stories on Digital Stories interesting, the only sure way not to miss them is the monthly email newsletter!)

And so, when the piece in which I tried to gather the important lessons of covid appeared on the most popular social network… a completely unexpected avalanche suddenly broke loose.

See here.

A week goes by, and there are more than 700 little emojis underneath. Nothing so special, a normal count for an interesting topic; since this is a sponsored post, numbers like that are by no means exceptional. But… more than 450 of the emojis are laughing faces or the “angry face.”

What is there to laugh at, or to get angry about?

The age of social networks has also brought a serious crisis of authority. And of trust in the democratic process and its ability to cope with the challenges of our time. Social media give birth to an alternative truth that is often underestimated.

4. Headlines Only

You know, the little “like,” the chance to “like” something—simply to approve of a shared post—was among the things that set Facebook apart in its early years. Then the other little faces appeared, yet another dopamine trigger: you post something and lie in wait to see exactly how many people, and who, will mark it with an “emotion.”

In quotation marks, of course—an emoji is just another worthless thing to keep us in the feed.

The irony goes so far that the laughing face is the one used most often, yet almost never to smile or to show you are pleased about something, but the opposite: to mock it, to show disagreement. That turned out to be the case with the covid piece too, as the comments made clear.

265 comments! And not a single one of them had anything whatsoever to do with what the text actually said. All of them general, many simply more emojis expressing the reader's contempt for the subject.

In an age of speeded-up content consumption, much of the audience takes in only the headline. Nuance and long texts are pushed further and further to the margins of the way we get our information.

5. Hey, You!

Something outrages you, so you leave a rude comment? You mark the irony with a laughing face, with the “angry face”? You supposedly don't like it, it supposedly makes you angry, and yet in doing so you are essentially… helping it reach more people, aren't you?

We help precisely the thing… we don't like.

And then the algorithm's avalanche starts rolling. Sensing that a post is provocative, extreme, that it has “touched a nerve” that will keep the conversation going, stir things up and draw more and more curses, it starts showing that post precisely to the people who will be outraged.

If in this case those are mainly people for whom the pandemic was a conspiracy, a way to control the masses, a manipulation… how could they ever hear the other point of view? How would the other side's arguments ever reach them…

…or the other way around? Who can be sure that everything in the arguments of the hardline skeptics is wrong? Does anyone know everything?

Yes, and this is also where the best side of communication on social platforms lies—it is unvarnished. Provided, of course, that you have a few things in common with a rhinoceros… a thick enough skin, for instance, not to be fazed by the hate.

Yes, His Majesty the Hate. We have talked about him quite a lot with the guests of Digital Stories (some of the most interesting points of view here). It is so convenient, sitting behind a keyboard, to declare yourself the final authority on some subject. But it is even more convenient to take it out on whoever happens to cross your path and disagrees with you.

Nothing more normal… Except that, of course, it also shapes the environment of communication. And the cruder points of view are much harder to withstand, especially if you slip into explaining mode. That is why my personal decision is not to comment on anything under my posts—whatever I have to say, I have said in them.

In the toxic environment of social media communication, emotional, extreme points of view dominate.

6. It's Raining

“Sometimes it seems to me that the world has gone mad,” Lex Fridman wrote recently. “I want to explore new ideas, look for different perspectives, historical context, all of it with a calm, intelligent approach. And people online just want me to ‘pick a side’ and be outraged.”

A very precise description of communication on social platforms, I think.

In fact, this whole mechanism of “algorithmic amplification of extreme content” has a well-known explanation. Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media puts it this way:

– We are influenced by what we read.
– We read what our friends share.
– If a post matches our views, we share it.
– And if a friend is too different, we unfriend them.

You can see how it happens here. (The Bulgarian translation and summary are by Nikola Tulechki.) The researchers have built a model we can tweak to watch how users interact.

At the start we have a network; people are the dots that come together and exchange information. And… nothing prevents the network from staying that way, with the conversations flowing, as long as the topics are interesting and the discussion meaningful—that is often how things went in the forums of old.

Things change when various parameters start getting “tweaked.” For example, if the network gives you no way to cut your connection to another user—by unfollowing, blocking, unfriending—the basic structure holds. There are different points of view, but they exist side by side, and the nuances are there too.

Not once the filter appears. And not only the ability to stop following someone, but in this case the algorithm's ability to choose content for you. Then you can clearly see how users gradually start clustering into groups, breaking away, becoming radicalized. Starting to look like rabid football ultras… The lower the tolerance between groups, the more separate “bubbles” form.

What is the remedy for too much information online, for the eroding authority of sources?! A healthy dose of skepticism.

7. Hey, Our Balkans

Do you know what “balkanization” has meant in Western social science in recent years? No, it has nothing to do with the work of Mile Kitić, the Serbian folk singer. For centuries our peninsula was the powder keg of Europe, which, fortunately, has calmed down somewhat today (let's hope!).

The definition reads: “the division of a country or region into separate political units or ethnic communities that are aggressively hostile to one another.” It is enough to mention the fate of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Is it really that hard? Aren't there more things that unite us in the Balkans than divide us?

Well, it's the same online.

Some time ago I wondered whether any of the great events in our history could have happened in the age of social networks. And I am still wondering.

The further segmentation and polarization of people communicating online can drag ever-deepening social problems behind it.

8. Letter Hunt

Among the comments on the covid piece, I read:

• Before covid there was flu ,they killed it , covid was a dress rehearsal for what came next. CONTROL ,POWER, WAR,MONEY loooots of money!
• Covid doesnt exist. They gave a name to something they develop in the labs and its an artificially made virus to reduce the population.
• What LESSONS,man????🤣😂😅Some HUMANOIDS mutated by power and money are playing god by manipulating the masses with the aim of reducing them!!Everything else is set dressing for the naive and sadly there are quite a few of them!!!
• The WHO planes spray every day.
• Lesson from what?That it was all about 💸💵💰 and panic?
• Ooh, how heartbreaking!! Tears are streaming down my face from the grief gushing out of your words… Has little Ursula von der Leyen run out of money, is that why youre wailing about this again?! How about you mention how many people died from the so-called vaccines?
• Dont even imagine youll be able to lock us up again and force us to get vaccinated! Whoever wants to can do it, leave healthy people alone!
• Ohh,stop it with this made-up nonsense.Only the most naive believed it and ran like headless chickens to get vaccinated and it often proved fatal.Thousands crippled and dead.I had contact with people supposedly sick with the made-up covid and I didnt even cough,and they buried them in a closed coffin.
• Digital Stories, why dont you say how many people got si ck or died from these,, vaccines“go to hell murderers!„

Who, and by what right, can say that someone has no right to opinions like these? Or to a (healthy or not) dose of skepticism, especially against the backdrop of the fragmented, unreliable way information reaches us…

How can we not feel manipulated, how can we not entertain all sorts of possibilities, when the reference points are gone—for truth, and for authority? And for freedom…?

Could the conflict come from the fact that we have mixed up being informed with communicating? And can we still separate the two?

One of the remedies is surely more communication. Stepping out of our bubbles more often, meeting people online or offline, looking for the nuances. For what lies behind the firm conviction of the person we disagree with.

There will always be many opinions, but they only make sense when they meet and complement one another.

Hasn't the time come for platforms and forms of online communication that encourage dialogue, different points of view, nuance, stories?

Can we change the world around us? Our country, the world... simply by writing online about what moves us?

We can. Here is the strongest proof I have ever come across.

“It's like talking to a ghost,” the man across from me says of our meeting. But he doesn't look like a ghost to me. He looks like a regular Sherlock, lanky, in a checkered cap and a checkered jacket. Later, as we talk, he reminds me more of another famous literary hero, a certain hidalgo.

Sitting opposite me is the legendary blogger Chergar—an old Bulgarian word for a nomad, a wanderer—who created unforgettable texts and hoaxes that still hold a place of honor in our digital folklore and collective memory. The author of the site neverojatno (Bulgarian for “unbelievable”), known at a certain point also as “Bazikileaks,” from the Bulgarian word for a prank. Dedicated to “The Truth As It Could Have Been!?”

But how did an anonymous blogger become a frequent topic of conversation among politicians and journalists? And how did one of his texts lead to... the resignation of the Bulgarian government, and at that... without him wanting or expecting it?

Ordinary Folk*

*The subheadings are also titles of texts by Chergar

He is an engineer by profession. He travels often; his work takes him to different towns, and he spends several years abroad as well. He has no home of his own; he moves around and rents, together with his family and his elder son, who is grown up today.

The first years of the new millennium. Back then, as today, many things divide us as a society, but one unites us almost without exception. The feeling that the political system doesn't work, that the public structures of our state could be more orderly. That our rulers are not up to the job, and the “ordinary man” can change nothing.

“They're all scoundrels, the ones and the others,” as another hero puts it—Bai Ganyo, the archetypal Bulgarian boor from Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire, and far from a hidalgo. Precisely because he is used to the old proverb that “the sharp sword won't cut the bowed head,” he could never move on...

Justice Asleep

“I started out of pure social discontent that had no outlet,” Chergar recalls. “It was all a joke; it turned out to be fun to write completely made-up texts about something that had happened. Later I discovered that this way I was writing exactly what stirred me inside.”

But why did he decide to do it under a pseudonym? “I know that people are strongly influenced by who is writing, what kind of person they are, what their position in society is. I wanted to write and see the reaction to the writing itself, whether there would be any at all. Are there people who are troubled and angered by the same problems? That the institutions don't work! Would someone say, ‘yes, that's right,’ or ‘what is this nonsense?!’ That's why I decided to write anonymously.”

He chose the made-up name because of his way of life, and also because he has a soft spot for distinctive, strong, half-forgotten Bulgarian words. In those years the WordPress platform was gaining popularity, it was easier than ever to start a blog, and that is what our hidalgo did...

“It is precisely the discrepancy between the accounts of eyewitnesses and the mutated portrayal of our everyday life that is the main thread in Chergar's work,” the publisher writes in a 2011 collection of his texts. “Political hypocrisy, judicial bias, administrative incompetence and journalistic straining are often at the center of public debate, but nothing comes of it.”

The Last Battle for Bulgaria!

Well, it definitely turns out that people care about these topics, that many think like him and recognize themselves in his words. At that time social networks had not yet exploded as content platforms; we lived in the era of blogs and of media outlets that were only making their way onto the web.

From the very beginning Chergar put up a header that clearly states that every post on the site is invented by him. In Aesopian language he writes texts that we would rather take for essays. He enters the world of the made-up, of fiction; the real author is clearly named everywhere, but... even in the days before mass Facebook, you know, people didn't always read carefully. Here's what I mean.

Vasil Levski's Last Letter

Have you read “Vasil Levski's last letter”? It is in quotation marks for a reason, although to this day you can find excerpts from the “document” in an impressive number of sources, including official ones. Levski, the Apostle of Freedom, is Bulgaria's most revered revolutionary, hanged by the Ottomans in 1873, and the letter's words echo fifteen years later on social networks and are read aloud at official events. For their force and the spirit of the Apostle, they are quoted in the media. One evening, at the peak of its fame, they rang out on what was then the most watched television program—Slavi's Show, the late-night talk show of the entertainer Slavi Trifonov. Online you can find the opinions of our best-known historians, who took the time to examine the “document” and explain why certain discrepancies make it impossible for it to have been written by Levski himself... It would also become a main source in one of the great debates over whether the words “whoever liberates us will also enslave us” belong to the Apostle, since they were otherwise only retold by Zahari Stoyanov, the revolutionary and chronicler of the liberation struggle.

“You who are robbed, dishonored and lied to by our present-day rulers, do not think that our work ends with liberation alone. No, that is where it begins. (…) Do not be deceived that those who hold the money also hold your future, for they took that money from you, and yet you bow to them and raise them up like the sun before your eyes.”

It is said so plainly—would Levski have written about “our present-day rulers”? Exactly: this is one of the first texts Chergar wrote. Under the glaring header stating that only the author's own words are published on this site.

Yes, he made an effort to make it sound in the spirit of the Apostle, and included many verbatim quotes. But not with the idea of fooling anyone into thinking it was a real document.

Apocryphal Reality

“For a very long time I studied his work. I had almost all the books ever published, and I went deep into his way of thinking, at least as I see it,” Chergar says. “I wrote this letter at a time when I was a victim of the system. There are injustices, you see them, but there's no one to tell. Even if you tell, they won't pay attention, or they'll do something pro forma. That's how the letter was born, from an inner impulse.

The idea was never for it to be taken as truth! It's clear everywhere that it's fiction. I didn't want to forge anything! I wanted to make people think, to fight against the injustices they see...”

The “letter” continues its triumphant march online, being discussed and used as an argument. A quick search showed that over the past year it has been reposted on Facebook at least a hundred times as authentic, with tens of thousands of likes. There is even a group with thousands of members calling on people to drop it into the ballot box instead of a ballot paper at the next election without a choice. So... it has fulfilled its role, or hasn't it? Where is the line between the essay and altered history once the criterion has been lost?

Do you still think it is artificial intelligence that lies to us or manipulates us... or is the natural kind more important—critical thinking, fact-checking? Even of sources, which can also mislead: quite a few media outlets have published the “letter.”

Three Chain Gangs of Optimists and Burdencredit

“But how, foolish man, do you expect your life to get better when you make not a gram of effort to fight even the small injustices in your life, and instead wait for someone else to do it for you?” Chergar writes in another of his posts, this time in the name of Paisius of Hilendar, the monk whose 1762 history of the Bulgarians sparked the Bulgarian National Revival. “No one will come and provide you with a normal life, since you yourself have chosen slavery—to be a slave to the television, to the politicians, to the banks, to the advertisements, to civil servants and institutions.”

“Gradually it became my favorite pastime to pick a famous person and write an interview with them,” the blogger adds. “Not in order to deceive! That was never the aim. The aim was to have my words, my view, expressed through someone else's authority. From the response I understood that quite a lot of people see things the same way. There is great inner discontent in them, and they feel relieved when they find out that others see things the same way too.”

Few of the people he knows in those years are aware that the engineer is the blogger Chergar. Friends often recommend his texts to him as genuine. “Did you hear what this minister said, what kind of interview Umberto Eco gave?”

Bulgaria After the Bulgarians

A few years later the engineer is working in Greece, from where he publishes texts such as “Greeks appeared on Syntagma Square with a placard reading ‘Quiet, don't wake the Bulgarians’” and a speech by the Greek prime minister about our country. Both are reposted by a number of Bulgarian media outlets and quoted in the news. At one point even Prime Minister Boyko Borisov announces that he will demand an apology from the Greek prime minister for his words.

“This shows where our politics and our political class are. They are at an absurd, knee-jerk level. Not only have we let these people govern us, we keep doing it year after year,” Chergar reflects.

And speaking of our former prime minister, here we come to the climax.

Boyko's Journey Through the Torments

February 16, 2013. You can guess where the news appears: “The power distribution companies issued a joint statement: ‘It's your own fault.’” At that moment electricity prices have just been drastically raised, and the “statement,” in rather salty language, says that the energy companies are not to blame for this and people should hold their rulers to account.

Well, the next day the letter is reposted by the leading media, and a protest against the new prices gathers in the center of Sofia. People are angry; it wouldn't take much for trouble to start. And just then, on that hot, chilly February evening, one of the organizers indignantly reads out through a megaphone the letter written by Chergar. The situation explodes, and the protesters attack the police. There are fights, blood. Mere hours later the prime minister announces that he is handing in the government's resignation, a few months before the end of its term...

“It was staggering! I never expected such a thing,” Chergar recalls. “And I realized how sad it is to see how easily and visibly some people manipulate others, because they think it brings them some influence at the moment, some benefit, helps them stand out. People very easily fall victim to manipulation!”

I often ask my guests whether words will ever lose their power. And this story seems to answer once again. ChatGPT could hardly capture the spirit of the times the way Chergar managed to. Who knows whether an algorithm could even foresee how a text in the good classical spirit of satire, created to share an emotion and to make people think, can turn into a tool, a weapon for manipulation and propaganda...

Is there a way to learn to protect ourselves, to bring back critical thinking? Especially in times when artificial intelligence creates works indistinguishable from human ones?

“People need to think, but they have been placed in a completely different environment, something unfamiliar and new to them,” Chergar believes. We are definitely not coping with it, especially at the frantic pace of the ever newer new. That, however, is far from a reason to stop trying...

Chief Directorate for Combating Public Enlightenment (GDBOP, the acronym of Bulgaria's organized-crime police)

“Many of you know hundreds of chalga lyrics and the names of actors from countless soap operas, yet you don't know the names of your neighbors, nor have you read in your whole wretched life even one real book. O, foolish and degenerate man! (…) The world has no need of blind followers; they serve only to bring about a slave's lot.”

Chalga, for the record, is Bulgaria's brash pop-folk. But are these words Paisius's or Chergar's? Perhaps after everything so far you'll guess, but what about some poor archaeologist who comes across them after a century or two worn down by the technological transition?

Even more important, in my view, is something else—the spirit of self-expression, the desire to change the world around you, to not be afraid to stand up against injustice, which to the superficial eye might look like tilting at windmills.

A decade ago Chergar stopped writing actively. On the one hand, the algorithms of social networks had already arrived, choosing for us what to read and what matters. And, in his view, also silencing alternative, opposition voices.

Populism, Lobbyism and Fascism

On the other hand, he wrote and wrote, his texts gained cult status, and yet it seemed... everything stayed the same. The same problems, the same quarrels, even the same personalities keep circling in our political space, while the real problems of people remain off to the side, away from the spotlight.

“I decided I had written everything that moved me. I saw what the response was, what the result was. I saw that everything repeats itself. That those who govern, as well as those who fight for power, can wait for years for their time to come, and they do. Both the ones and the others are stubborn and shameless. And however you expose their true face, they don't worry much. Because they don't see who could take their power away. For that reason I decided it would be a waste of time to continue. I hit the moment when it was possible, and I stirred up some trouble in the system, at least as I see it. Anything more would have been just out of stubbornness, I'm well aware, and I don't like wasting my time.”

Young People

That doesn't mean we should stop hoping, does it? That it might be possible to develop as a nation to the point of building a political elite we can be proud of?

According to Chergar, the ball is at the feet of the young. They are always the ones who are fired up, who think they can change something, and sometimes they succeed. Once a person runs into very hard situations and accumulates life experience, he settles down. The natural time comes to make way for those to whom the future belongs.

Should we expect the next Chergar from Generation Z, which seems less excited about politics than about TikTok?

Chergar says it depends more on the family, and gives the example of his elder son. The boy was unhappy with the school administration, and his father, inspired by a Stephen King story, gave him the idea of starting an anonymous school newspaper to write about everything that was wrong—with the relations between teachers and students, with hygiene, in the cafeteria. His son was more withdrawn, didn't feel comfortable among his classmates, and decided to give it a try.

“The teachers were shocked. They reprimanded him for damaging the school's reputation. They told him they would call in his parents. Fine, let them call me in... but they didn't. Still, my son and I talked it over and decided to change the newspaper, to make it less extreme. Before he knew it, my son gained authority among his classmates, everything turned around, and it worked out just like in Stephen King. They tried to intimidate him; he didn't give in. In the end the principal decided she could make money from a school newspaper project, and it came through, but... there was no one to write. Guess whom she invited... But my son refused.”

The Facebook Society Is Leading Us to Anarchy

When the war began, Chergar asked his boy whether the prestigious school he attends had any position on everything happening in the world. “Because you are living through quite a turning point. ‘No.’ Don't you talk about it? During the Vietnam War there were many protests against it. Not for one side or the other—for peace; it's the best medicine! ‘What can we do?’ You can do anything! I showed him how to create a nonexistent organization that would carry out activities. We sent letters to world leaders calling for peace. I'm trying to show him that it's not true that he can't do anything. If young people have the desire, have an idea, have something they believe in and want to achieve, they should always make the effort.”

Real life is outside social networks, Chergar says. “Because we think we communicate through them, but they are more like indoctrination into the correct point of view. For example, there is no debate there at all about education, something very important, especially given technological development. That debate can only happen in real communities, created by people who get together, talk, discuss, make proposals... My personal opinion is that changing the world through social networks is an illusion. We'll just sink into a fake world. And we'll miss the real one.”

There's the Will—No Results?

“In this gray landscape the ideas of bloggers flicker like colorful mirages, but quickly sink into the information hurricanes of the web,” reads the foreword to my guest's book.

To my mind, the path to making sense of it all lies in stories; they are the colorful mirages. Chergar himself offered to tell his, and if you, too, see a powerful digital story around you, I'd be glad if you helped me tell it here.

“We have let external factors influence us entirely, shape our thinking. We wait for someone to tell us what is right and wrong. It isn't that hard to decide what is right. Every person can change something!” the famous online hidalgo says as we part. And I so want him to be right, and to see more and more examples like this...

If our conversation with the blogger Chergar has intrigued you, you can see its continuation live on Sunday! Together with the historian Alexander Moshev, Chergar will be a guest at an event hosted by Digital Stories.

On May 11 (Saturday) at 5:30 p.m. it's time for the talk “A Different History.” As part of the Sofia Science Festival, at Sofia Tech Park we will discuss how technology is changing our relationship with the past. For more information and tickets, click here.

– You told me that my experiment with the AI-generated Eko Elena reached you through your students. So here we are, two “digital” people, and yet sometimes stories have to pass through the “analog world.” How can anyone be sure today that they are not missing something important? In the old days we read newspapers, we watched the news…

– You still didn’t know. You only thought you knew. Chernobyl happens, and you understand what happened years later. So back then we rather lived under the illusion that we knew. Now

we live with the absolute certainty that we don’t know, however much we read or follow the news.

At first, technology gave people the confidence that they would be omnipresent, that they would be able to solve many problems, but that turned out to be self-deception.

– I find that a little disheartening. And specifically the trend of delegating more and more to algorithms to tell us what has happened and what matters.

– Yes, that is the side of social networks I don’t like either. First of all, I think that

they are still wrongly called that; these are platforms that want everything from us.

And we give it to them very generously all the time, and on top of that we don’t know how they work. They keep changing these algorithms however they please. Many times, for example, Facebook suddenly shows up in English, you wonder what’s going on, and 24 hours later it’s gone. We are like a testing ground.

But that comes from the nature of digital space itself. Because on television you have a very clear timeline that you can control, and the same goes for radio. Even if something extraordinary happens, you have production time in which to check things.

Whereas here everything is live, 24/7, and it flows not on 5 or 500 channels—there are as many channels as there are people, billions. That is the big challenge, and it changes the whole paradigm of the media landscape.

The media used to have a public function, but right now they are completely reformatting it. And the platforms are slotting themselves into that as the organic supplier of everything that happens in our lives.

– I also talk about “the death of the media,” although not all my colleagues approve. I simply think it is time for them to be reborn in an entirely new form, one that fits the times.

– I think that’s exactly right! Some people still watch television, but it isn’t television anymore, it’s the same platforms, only for video content, which is again asynchronous. Classic media consumption, which is synchronous, one-to-many, is gone. The boundaries have expanded so much, and the media in their classic dimensions disappeared long ago.

– But what will this rebirth look like? My answer is that it will come through the person, the author as an authority and a validator of truth.

– The classic media are still in an era of transformation that they put off for far too long. And I think that all digital media will increasingly be exactly like that—personalized, coming through a person who is not anonymous. In the beginning the media were not anonymous, journalists wrote for them, but

right now they are trying to be more and more anonymous. That discredits them and turns them into tabloids by definition.

Whereas content like yours, for instance, cannot be discredited that way; it passes through you, you are the person—you curate the content, you select it, you stand behind it.

I think that is very valuable. Everyone who has something to say should not hide behind other brands but stand behind their own name, because that brings added value.

– But it also brings problems online, “charming” comments that inevitably weigh on you.

– Yes, it requires you to know what you are doing.

– Frankly, I’m not sure I do.

– In the course of evolution, one of the things people have forgotten to use is intuition.

And we have strong intuition! Without it being spiritual or abstract—quite the opposite. If we follow it, it will lead us. I think that’s what you are doing right now with Digital Stories—you are developing something that, on the one hand, nobody expects, and on the other, comes at exactly the right time and in the right place.

The big media are business institutions, not people; they have no intuition, and that is why they are much slower

in these processes of transformation.

– Where will these processes go from here? How will this transformation of the media end? Will they survive as conglomerates?

– No, they won’t survive as conglomerates, but that is tied to the bigger question: how society will transform. Because we can see that right now things are not happening the way they should.

Even capitalism is in its twilight, close to its end.

We don’t know what comes next or what it will look like, but it certainly won’t be driven so much by the huge businesses that are finding it harder and harder to exist. It’s the same with the media; they are part of this process. They won’t make their own revolution or new version by themselves; that will happen when the whole of society transforms. And it will happen quite fast, because on the one hand we have global warming, which will accelerate a lot of processes. We have political systems that can’t withstand the new expectations. Dictatorships that are falling apart, and big democracies that, living in this kind of hybrid capitalism, aren’t doing very well. In this process the media will undergo enormous transformations.

In my view they will go through this personalized stage, and that is why I think projects like yours are very much in the right place at the right time. They will be among the pillars that manage to carry media development into the new format.

The platforms, on the other hand, won’t die out; they will be one of the key foundations, but they too will have to find their place in this shaky situation.

– But how can we somehow bring this transformation into the public conversation? Because it isn’t there, there is no conversation about where we are heading…

– I think it isn’t there because people are generally afraid, and that is completely normal. That is also why we have the great denial of global warming, of the fact that capitalism in its current format, like democracy, like the dictatorships, cannot hold.

In other words, that we as humanity have not found a solution.

But there is no way to force this onto the agenda before its natural course arrives.

Here I want to give Turkey and Atatürk as an example. He was a great visionary and wanted to bring Turkey to a secular level, and he managed to do it by force. And then we see how another person, with a different opinion, managed to set back by a century what Atatürk had done.

– Then again, it isn’t clear whether that is really going back, or whether we are trying to impose on other civilizations models that aren’t natural to them.

– Exactly! For reasons like these, we can’t forcibly introduce the topic of the place and role of the media. Even the classic media find it convenient right now to keep the status quo; their monetization models are changing radically amid all this dynamism, because media consumption is far more fragmented.

This still can’t be grasped—the advertising market is in a strange position, and the media are suffering. Those that survive are the ones with additional funding models, but they aren’t always the ones people want or need. And they aren’t necessarily good for society.

I think it will work out. Now, with ChatGPT, with your experiment with Elena, I think we are about to take a somewhat more sober account of these processes. I believe that within the next 10 years, unless things accelerate even more because of external circumstances, we will inevitably move to a 4-day work week, and most likely soon after that to a 4-hour workday. We will have a minimum basic income, however absurd that may sound to many people today. We will rethink our daily lives, and that will open up a very wide field for people. But I’m not sure they will want to grow with the free time they will have, rather than just entertain themselves even more.

– I also keep coming back to universal basic income, I often arrive at this question and picture scenes from dystopias. One of my guests surprised me with the argument that in the Russian Empire in the 19th century there were also many people who had nothing to do but entertain themselves. And that is how Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy appeared and created great literature.

– I agree, but… They didn’t have video games, they didn’t have the internet,

they didn’t have the endless voyeuristic scroll on TikTok and Instagram, so they could be bored well.

We have yet to learn that, because we have rather forgotten how. But as the Bulgarian saying goes, the fool is not the one who eats the banitsa, our traditional cheese pastry, but the one who hands it to him. Social platforms and technologies will go as far as we let them, and that too is one of the big tasks that remain to be solved on a global scale. The pandemic taught us that there is no longer any issue that doesn’t have to be solved globally.

We will have to set some limits on this. On ChatGPT, which is still a beta version; right now we are all testing it, and in doing so we are training it. We will have to decide what we are going to do with the media at all.

Do we need to know where and what is happening all the time? Does someone need to curate this content?

Right now the media and the social platforms do it one way or another, but we aren’t convinced they are doing it well enough.

– The answer about the media is often generational. I think that for people under 30–35 they have lost their significance as a factor.

– For my students, everything that matters is on the internet. They rarely read content that is long or outside the specific sources they have picked for themselves. That is exactly why the framework we have to put on both social networks and artificial intelligence is important. How far they should reach and how much responsibility we hand over to them.

We have handed over even the responsibility for our democracy far too easily…

– All the more so since social platforms are already stronger than states and supranational unions. But how can we regulate them, then?

– I think there is still a way. If we look globally, who can regulate them? For now, there is the most regulation of them in Europe. There is over-regulation in North Korea and a handful of dictatorships, but we’re not discussing that. Purely democratically, they are most regulated in Europe, and I think that is the right model. Personally, I am super grateful that we are part of the European Union, because we are European citizens. So I personally feel much more protected on these platforms, however defenseless we are overall. What they take from people is much more everywhere else.

So the first step is regulation, but regulation that is transposed from the European Union’s good practices to the other countries.

This balance of power really has to be evened out somehow.

Once upon a time there were antitrust measures. In my view, as long as Meta has competition in Alphabet and vice versa, everything is still fine. The real problem will come if one of the two drops out and surrenders to the other; then we will be in absolute dependence.

– I, on the other hand, think the existing regulations, including the EU’s, are a smokescreen and don’t solve the big problems. But it really is interesting how, so far in the development of information technology, we have never reached the point of a single dominant mammoth.

– Scientists and futurists suggest that within 30–40 years we will be living in the singularity. And these are processes that are inevitable in some way, but on the other hand they are part of certain patterns. I would rather look at everything that is happening not with fear but with curiosity. The media are not dying, they are simply transforming, and everyone who does it slowly and doesn’t understand what is happening will drop out, purely through evolution.

– You mentioned the big question for the media—monetization. I don’t think a good enough solution has been found for it yet. Even if it’s a subscription, that still puts everyone on an equal footing, and more will go to those who are liked, not necessarily to those who keep to standards or choose the important topics. Maybe they should somehow be funded by the state, by society?

– There are models showing that when the state pays, it works. The BBC is a great example in that respect, but there are no ads there and they work in a completely different way.

The truth is that the media have always been owned by some rich person. The first ones were the pamphlets, the Gutenberg era. Who could print pamphlets? Only the rich, because paper, ink and presses were expensive.

Then new models come in, advertising appears. Now, with this media fragmentation, advertising is quite different. Not long ago we worked on a project, we researched European media, we were in Brussels and made recommendations. One of them was to support small, local, independent media projects.

On the other hand, there are more and more models like that of Govori Internet (“The Internet Speaks”), where a few hundred people pay small monthly fees, a kind of crowdfunding, which I also think works to some extent. Of course, they won’t become millionaires, but they will be able to sustain their media presence and work on new projects.

– Vladimir Petkov of Govori Internet has been my guest. So has Georgi Nenov, “The Superhuman”. He, however, says he isn’t really a medium.

– It isn’t true that he isn’t. All such projects start from the top down—someone has an idea, starts working on it, just as you put in effort and consistency. For years you build a brand, people start to have expectations, and you turn into a medium. You can’t say you’re not a medium.

Look, right now podcasts are an absolute craze; at least one or two new ones launch every week. I thought this would stop around the pandemic, but on the contrary, it grew. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is making podcasts; I think this will settle down within a few years and only the worthwhile ones will remain.

But all these ventures need to realize the responsibility of being media.

Anyone with a lot of followers today is a medium. And what they write on their wall is a responsibility.

– You have a book about podcasts—how do you explain their rise? Fatigue with the fast formats all around us? Or the fact that they are convenient to listen to while we do something else? Or the scarcity of in-depth content…

– All of that. On the one hand, because they are very convenient to listen to. The data show that the youngest—people up to 25—don’t listen to podcasts. Because they have enough time to scroll and watch videos. In Bulgaria the podcast is very wrongly considered a video format; by definition it is audio only. So a key factor is the convenience for busy, rushed people to consume this kind of content while driving or working out.

Podcasts, blogs like yours and the classic media act as a counterpoint to the great rush on the social platforms. They

offer slow, long content, which, my thesis goes, is considerably more valuable.

With the other kind, you have a feed that changes every 15 minutes. It increases your appetite, but these are fast carbohydrates. You eat something and 15 minutes later you’re hungry again. Whereas if you come across longer content that is yours and that draws you in, you consume it more slowly, you stay with the topic. And afterward you keep living with that content; it fills you up. It is very telling that in Bulgaria the most popular podcasts run 2–3 hours. Clearly many people need the older, long forms.

– At the same time, the fact that my site has only long texts turns away 9 out of 10 people who might read them.

– That’s not a problem. A long time ago I studied digital marketing in Denmark, and my guru there, Alan Jenkins, used to say something I will never forget:

“Maybe only one person will read this content, but it may be very important and valuable to them.”

Obviously 9 out of 10 won’t read it, because they don’t have the patience, it doesn’t matter to them, it doesn’t interest them. But there will be people for whom it is crucial. You write for them, not for the others.

– What can we do to get more people into that “group”? To remind everyone else that it is sometimes worth reading something long and carefully, not just scrolling…

– Regulation alone won’t do it. When there is regulation, it means someone else decides for us. It has to come through self-regulation. Unfortunately, it’s clear that part of society won’t manage.

When cinema was arriving, my father was little and used to skip class to watch films, and they considered him a real rascal. He would slip in between screenings, hide between the seats and watch. Yet the result was not that he failed to cope with life or that cinema harmed society.

I think things will regulate themselves at some point.

We can’t ban the internet or ChatGPT, but we have to find the strength to set limits.

Not externally, but each one of us. Every year I go on “digital diets.” I stay 2, 3 or 4 weeks without the internet, or with 10 minutes a day, just enough to check my mail and my bills.

I think this should become some kind of norm. Roughly like with food—the moment there’s too much of it, it’s cheap and accessible, people start having problems with obesity. Then we realize things aren’t right. Some, unfortunately, don’t get it.

– Besides understanding the problem, you also need willpower. I often make this comparison too—we talk about cooking, about how “you are what you eat,” but I think you are much more what you read.

– Both matter—with one you feed the body, with the other the soul. You have to be responsible toward both…

– I hope these reflections have been of value. Even to one person, as your guru said. Enough to make them think…

The conversation with Justine Toms continues “in reverse.” I am her guest on the site The Creators – the Digital Optimists of Bulgaria, where Justine asks the questions. Read it here!

A director, rapper and podcaster meets a journalist, programmer and writer. A conversation with the roles of host and guest swapped… and although there are only two of us (plus, of course, one more wonderful podcaster), it turned out that these combinations of three callings apiece hold some interesting nuances.

The podcast 2&200 is a classic of the genre and shows why this form of conversation is turning eyes and ears back toward shared words today.

Play the video

We continue the conversation for admirers of Kusturica and/or Dostoevsky and/or Marx. With Orlin Milchev, once known as MC ATILA, a man able to pierce with words and questions. He is also a director, and last year saw the release of his debut feature film, The Art of Falling. A guest with an unexpected view of the big issues of today, interwoven with technology.

The “Scourge of God,” the epithet of Attila the Hun, has long ceased to be a single hero; it is what we have created online. But what is looming ahead?

– Have we forgotten how to use language as a medium of art?

– It's as if the internet first compressed language into short phrases of 100 or so characters, then even fewer, and then into entire chat conversations with almost no words at all, just abbreviations.

Now we communicate with emoticons and GIFs. I'm not saying it's bad. It's something like an Egyptian renaissance from the future.

– But wasn't the Word supposed to be in the beginning?

– Images are actually older and more natural as a form of communication,

language is a relatively recent invention. A virus, maybe. We really think in images and symbols, not in text.

Cormac McCarthy has a fine essay on this, “The Kekulé Problem.” Still, I find it sad that we are drifting away from the skill of defining our thoughts in the best possible way—not merely effective, but graceful. Literature. A living, blazing language that pins you down like headlights on a dark street.

One of my favorite authors once said that it isn't the plots but the language that lies at the heart of the great works of literature. All the stories have already been told, but how the words will tremble—that changes everything. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this understanding of language and text is disappearing from our everyday lives, and without it we are simply lost, blind.

Writing and speaking masterfully will become a rare, astonishing act from another time,

one that few will devote themselves to. Something like violin virtuosos, or sculptors carving life out of marble. Some rare and beautiful glass bead game. We'll see.

– I don't know, I actually think style is nowhere near enough. Though it's interesting that today the style of a description determines how well artificial intelligence will handle a given task. I'd like us to talk about art; you touch on many of its different forms. Is it harder today for art to move us, to stir our feelings?

– There's no shortage of clips with little monkeys, sweet dogs and ducklings in our feeds. They're moving, at least to normal people. But that isn't art. Chaplin's The Kid still moves us today, still stirs our feelings, but there's so much more there. Layers, a palette of relationships, sarcasm, warmth, self-irony, social commentary… in short,

moving us and stirring our feelings is only a small part of art's potential.

I don't think it's harder. But we definitely want it faster. Right away. And clear. No confusion, no questions, no ambiguity. If you're going to move me, move me decisively and with pathos—I'll sob. If you're going to make me laugh, make it punchy and extreme; I want to fall off my chair.

We're losing the habit of giving time to a film, a book, an album, a painting. Of deciphering. Of looking not for what is expected of us, but for what we're being asked. Of getting lost in order to find ourselves.

– Literature was once a form of protest, of social criticism; later rap took on that role. Is there art that criticizes today, art that can bring change?

– Literature, visual art, cinema, rock, rap—they can say whatever they like; that's the whole point. When they're good, the criticism comes through some personal, emotional experience. Through means that immerse you in another world and leave you to think and compare on your own. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanisław Lem come to mind immediately. Vonnegut. Eduard Zahariev, the Bulgarian film director. Pink Floyd. Warhol. Rakim.

Aesthetics matter, the language, the drawing… and the viewer's participation. Otherwise it's propaganda, some soulless social commentary that shouldn't be called “art.” But there is a need for it, as long as you truly know why and against what you're protesting. Oh, and as long as you do it beautifully, play with the audience a little.

In my view, art can't bring change. At best it can uplift the spirit, on a personal level.

But on a social level—probably not.

Nor should it, thank God. It's an expression of processes, not their creator. People are more complex, and they change very, very slowly and with great difficulty. But art can be a fine momentary mirror of a person or a society. It can also be whatever else it wants…

– Is it really true that it can't bring change? I don't want to stop believing in that; otherwise few other things make sense. At least I'm sure it can give our lives meaning. It hardly makes us happier, at least not on its own, and a study came out recently in which Bulgarians once again turned out to be the unhappiest people in the EU. What stands in the way of our happiness most of all today?

– The idea of happiness as a state that, once reached, is permanent and all-encompassing. In general,

“happiness” is such a strange word, a trap of language.

What exactly does it mean—pleasure, or security, or calm, or pleasant excitement, or maybe an endless stream of endorphins and serotonin, or some supreme contentment, eternal idleness? Or forever doing your own thing, nonstop novelty? Or that one perfect moment stretched into eternity… None of these seems to be quite “happiness.” What if it's all of them at once? Impossible, because they exclude one another.

It's a messy business. We have desires, we have dreams, then new ones, and even if we spent all day doing nothing but propagating our kind and eating pastries, we'd still find a way to break something, just to see what happens. Dostoevsky writes something like that in Notes from Underground.

The other huge problem is the whole “happiness industry” that floods us with images of eternal bliss. Most often an island, a beach, a woman or a man, a cocktail… and then: “Buy this deodorant and you're practically there!” At least that's how you'll feel, they promise. And our brain watches and can't tell the difference.

It buys the deodorant, smells nice, but it's not an island with a babe. And so it suffers.

Then it buys something else. That's how we go on.

Coca-Cola doesn't sell sugary water; it sells the idea that you and your family are together and not fighting, while the white-bearded man with the reindeer travels toward you, smiling. And he drinks Coke. And instead of “Ho-ho-ho!” he says “Co-co-co,” almost like “Co-ca-Co-la.”

– Does a world in which algorithms can create a personalized film just for you, by your favorite director, with your favorite actors, sound like a dream come true or a nightmare?

– A nightmare. A claustrophobic one, at that. In the sense of being locked inside a fixed notion of a given artist, of his possibilities or development, and of a given art form.

My favorite artists are alive, dynamic, changing.

Art is a snapshot of someone's reality or fantasy. An algorithm will copy well what already exists as an original, I'm convinced of that. But to create the next work, and one as complex as cinema… it might, but it's unlikely to be any good.

Cinema is a universe; it contains all the arts, mythology, the social issues of its time. Good directors understand exactly what they've made only at the very end, that's how complicated it is. A film passes through many people in the process of its making, each with their own depth, experience, sensibility…

No, no, there's no way, at least not yet. But I'd watch, just to see. The future is intriguing.

– And what do you think the future of the way we “get supplied” with information looks like?

– Frightening. Once we calmly searched online in order to know. Now we have to check a source ten times—fact-checking, double-checking and so on. Not to mention the powerful forces that tirelessly and purposefully produce disinformation with a specific goal, from political propaganda to the scientific kind.

All of this has a very real effect on society.

Fake news spreads across profiles like a nasty rash after a hookup in a lousy bar.

People repeat it to each other, then they vote. The mass arrival of deepfake videos is just ahead. Not to mention the use of artificial intelligence in this field. The internet will get totally messed up. But we have no choice other than to make the effort to get properly informed.

The simplest principle: cross-check sources, ones with a reputation, however few of them are left.

– This is definitely one of my big themes, and the rash metaphor… I don't want to say it “touched me,” but I find it very apt. In my view the ball is in the media's court; it's time they found inspiration and ideas in the formats that manage to create meaningful content today. I find the examples of Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan interesting. Do you think podcasts are journalism?

– Ours isn't. It's just a conversation, with every risk of saying something very stupid or relatively smart from time to time. A journalist asks questions; we'd rather just chat with the guest or among ourselves.

There are all kinds of podcasts; it's a vessel that anyone can fill with their own thing. And if it's interesting or important to someone else, it'll get watched. Our formula at 2&200 from the very start has been to be honest, to think out loud and not to take ourselves too seriously. It's just a podcast.

– And one made with emotion, a personal touch and courage, all things that I think help the genre. I can vouch for that too, having been lucky enough to be a guest and to talk, including well outside my comfort zone. We talked a lot there about the notorious bubbles and echo chambers, about the problems they create, which I believe lie at the root of today's great divisions. Will we ever get out of our bubbles?

– Well, they're nothing new or scary. Grouping together is an evolutionary principle; it has always existed. There's nothing wrong with being among people who share your understanding of the world, art, politics, morality. It's great that the internet lets us find such like-minded people easily.

I was a teen when the internet arrived, and I remember the time before it. It's damn awful to feel alone and misunderstood, not to know where your people are. In that sense I like bubbles, and I think it's generally good for a person to be among people of their own kind.

But I recommend taking walks through other people's bubbles. Expeditions. Just to see whether there's something there for you that you don't know or haven't come across. Again, as with information, it's a matter of conscious effort. Saying to yourself: “Hey, what are those people over there talking about? Let me go and hear or see! It's probably dumber than ours, but you never know.”

– What could help us start talking about the important things again, instead of just getting riled up against each other?

– First of all, accepting that there is such a thing as Facts and Objective truth. Rejecting relativism—“everyone decides for themselves”? Well… no. Stopping the claim that when our opinion is personal, it can't be challenged with arguments and evidence from the other side. Not hiding behind little words like “patriotic,” “of the people” and so on, which long ago lost their historical unifying meaning and acquired only a political one.

Then we can talk calmly, normally, without emotion—standing on the concrete slab of verifiable facts, not on “that's just how I feel it.” And decide what's best for the country, the future, life and so on. What our real problems are—how high to plant the flag, or how high the corruption reaches… for example.

– What are the best things technology has brought us? And what do you think are the biggest problems it has created for us?

– For me, 90 percent good things. Access to music, film, books, events and people. The chance to express myself in a whole bunch of ways, and for what I do to easily reach anyone who's interested. Whatever I do—music, film, a podcast—it can't help being tied to the internet and technology. And that's great, because otherwise it would be so much harder.

The bad ones… Hmm, for me at least, it's assorted silly squabbles, downright ridiculous. And a bit more stress over things you have zero power over and that don't matter all that much anyway. I think that's about it.

– How do translators use machine translation systems in their everyday work today?

– In different ways. Some reject them. Others use them like parrots. Still others try to use them a little at a time. As with everything else, the extremes will gradually fall away. Machine translation systems have a little-known function: they help with spelling out words and even whole phrases.

I don’t need to use everything the machine suggests, but

if I can type “непротивоконституционствувателствувайте” (neprotivokonstitutsionstvuvatelstvuvayte, the famously longest word in Bulgarian, roughly “do not act unconstitutionally”) by pressing two keys instead of 34, I would definitely prefer that.

As a professional, this gives me a huge advantage over people who refuse to do it.

It’s also good to check whether the word really is spelled that way. Sometimes artificial intelligence hallucinates or makes other mistakes. Because I’m an experienced translator,

the check is often instantaneous; all I need for it is my own obliging memory.

If necessary, I can do a more thorough check. My translation tools have another kind of indexed memory that I can search. I can see how I’ve translated this word before, or how the client prefers it to be translated. I can look it up online. I can ask a colleague in a professional group. The result is that the work gets done quickly and correctly. Instead of only quickly or only correctly.

– And yet… all these nuances strike me as capabilities that, before long, a language model lightly fine-tuned for personal needs will have. Of course, we live in unexpected times, and everyone adapts in their own way.

I try to have my children start learning a foreign language as late as possible, for the sake of the foundation. I think the most important thing is for them to know their native language thoroughly, as fully and with as much nuance as possible. Most parents do exactly the opposite—they want their children to learn a foreign one as young as possible. Who do you think is right?

– On this, you and I are very different. At home we speak two languages almost equally. I see the logic in what you do, and I respect it. My logic is different. Our native language is important; there is no doubt about that whatsoever.

A foreign language, however, has penetrated so deeply everywhere, into every sphere of global and even local life, that an early start with it gives you an advantage.

An advantage I can’t describe any other way than as “unfair.”

I’m a pragmatist, not an ideologue. I don’t say that as if one were better than the other. The world needs both kinds of people. Pragmatism is simply the way I choose to live.

The foreign language is here; it is everywhere.

If that means the child will need extra work on Bulgarian to know and master their native language well, then that extra work has to be done. It shouldn’t be neglected, which is what many people do.

Children don’t end up illiterate in their native language because they learn foreign languages, but because not enough extra effort goes in. All of us are responsible for that extra effort, but naturally, above all the education system and the parents. There definitely needs to be work in that direction.

– But it still remains foreign. We call our language “native,” our “mother tongue”; throughout our entire evolution as a species we’ve been used to having a language of “our own.” Of course, I respect your approach.

Then again, like never before, Douglas Adams’s Babel fish seems possible today. You pop it in your ear and stop thinking about the fact that there are different languages. It seems so easy to switch on AI in some form and read the subtitles. Even to speak some exotic dialect…

– New technology solves existing problems, but its limitations in turn define new ones. It’s wonderful at recognizing human speech. But only if there is no other noise; if people speak clearly; if several people aren’t talking at once; if nobody lisps, speaks in dialect or mumbles under their breath. After so many years of experience as an interpreter, I can say one thing with absolute certainty—you can only translate well what you can hear well.

A Babel fish? Maybe. But it will only fit Babel ears.

– Only those problems seem easier to solve to me. I remember the horror, back in the day, of recording an interview on a dictaphone; today the phone picks up everything. I remember how unreal it seemed for AI to turn a conversation in Bulgarian into text, and now it does it more flawlessly than if I had transcribed it myself. Won’t translators become redundant?

– History shows that new

technologies don’t so much destroy professions as push them in new and interesting directions.

For the situations in which people used to say, “I don’t know what it says there, something in Chinese,” translators are already redundant.

When I started out as a translator, my first job was in an office where clients regularly walked in. Someone wanted to know what their aunt in France had written. Someone else dictated letters, and I translated them into English. With the development of machine translation, those clients are gone.

Recently, foreigners on the street have started asking me questions through Google Translate. On that front, the war is already lost—but only if we see it as a war. Why not see it as an opportunity instead? The people who used to translate conversations, greeting cards and personal correspondence now have the chance to do something more interesting, to adapt, to develop their skills.

– Or will they only be needed when the translation has to be precise—literary, technical, scientific…?

– Translators will always be needed because of something very important—the way the foundations of society are built.

Everyone can be held accountable for their work. Human errors are punished, and that’s why society trusts that professionals do their jobs conscientiously. How can we punish artificial intelligence for a wrong translation? By switching it off? Will we punish its creators? Wherever there are serious consequences and responsibility to be borne, someone will be needed to bear it… unless and until something fundamentally changes in society, but that is beyond the scope of my competence and my ability to predict.

I also want to pick up on one phrase from the question.

“Precise translation.” That’s a subjective measure. Speech isn’t like mathematics; words aren’t numbers.

One isn’t equal to itself and isn’t equal to one. Every word, every phrase, every sentence can be interpreted differently by different readers.

In chess, it used to be believed that the best grandmasters played (almost) perfect games. Then came the supercomputers that beat Kasparov. Then came the next generation of self-learning machines that beat the supercomputers. Now self-learning machines combined with grandmasters beat the self-learning machines. Who knows what comes next. Maybe self-learning machines will change the very definition of “precise translation”? Maybe we humans aren’t capable of truly precise translation.

What we are capable of is human translation. With all its advantages, flaws, even emotions.

At this stage, machines are capable of almost-human translation, but they lack that one tiny thing. Just like in the chess analogy. The translator and the machine in tandem beat the machine. At least as far as the translation being human is concerned. If there is such a thing as “the perfect game” in translation, that’s it.

– What’s the biggest or funniest blunder in your experience as a translator?

– As a translator of written texts,

my funniest blunder was writing “лека коза” (leka koza, ‘light goat’) instead of “лека кола” (leka kola, ‘passenger car’).

Of course, the word “goat” exists and is perfectly valid in Bulgarian, which makes it harder to catch as a mistake. The editor had missed it too—we’re human, it happens!—and so it stayed in the final document.

As an interpreter, my mistakes most often come with names. Once I had to interpret during a visit by Albania’s women’s youth volleyball team to a Bulgarian ministry. It had been agreed that the conversation would be in English. I handled the conversation itself well, but I don’t think I managed to pronounce a single one of the players’ names correctly. I hope they forgave me.

– I once ran an experiment with translation algorithms, which a year ago were doing quite well. How have they developed since then?

– I haven’t seen any huge difference in the quality of neural machine translation, or even of large language models like ChatGPT, compared with a year ago. On the other hand, I do see a huge difference in the quality of the answers the models generate to queries. They definitely do better with hallucinations and incoherent statements.

In translation, the problems are all the same ones, and all still unsolved.

The system uses an algorithm to determine which next word is most likely. Let’s say we’re translating a document with ChatGPT, and in it we use a particular term that is repeated 28 times and is expected to have a translation that is repeated just as many times. Eighteen times ChatGPT will use exactly the right word, but, alas, five times it will use another one, also correct in certain contexts, but not in this one. A few times it will translate it in a completely different way. Once it will leave it out altogether.

The result is a hodgepodge. It’s hard to bring order to this chaos.

At my translation and language services company, we experiment a lot with these tools. We’ve had some success in writing better prompts, for example, “translate this word exactly this way.” We use software built on GPT-4 and adapted specifically for translation. Even with it, the results are inconsistent. A user can’t simply upload a document and get it back translated so that it serves a particular purpose. I’m not convinced that the current way large language models are structured allows for anything that would guarantee the golden rule: one term corresponds to exactly one translation. On top of that, the Bulgarian of large language models limps quite badly.

– What do they find hardest?

– Context, definitely. They still can’t distinguish which text serves what purpose. Even if you tell them explicitly that this is a particular type of text and tell them exactly which words to use, the results are usually unsatisfactory. Single sentences, short paragraphs, long paragraphs, working with whole files—the results are the same.

– What are the biggest problems that can come from using machine translation mechanically?

– The end result of a poorly applied process is meaningless, incomprehensible texts—exactly

as when we have a tired translator who isn’t thinking at the end of the day and translates on autopilot.

Inconsistent use of terms, missing words, lost meaning. The consequences and problems for businesses and for people are many—material or reputational damage, costly mistakes and misunderstandings at work, health problems.

Any mistake can have an effect, but not all mistakes are equal.

The more responsible the task, the less we should blindly trust machine translation.

If I get the grammar wrong or miss a word on a menu I’m reading in a restaurant, that’s merely unpleasant. If I get a patient’s diagnosis wrong in their medical records, it’s life-threatening. Who is responsible in that case, and whom can we trust? I think the future of our profession depends on how people answer these questions.

– Is it getting easier to translate from English into Bulgarian because of all the foreign words we borrow uncritically?

– In my view,

uncritical borrowing makes the translation process much harder, as well as the use of the final translated product.

Professional jargon is often the most uncritically borrowed, and so it drifts further and further from Bulgarian. The result is deeply confusing—if you don’t know the established professional jargon well, your first instinct as a translator is to try to translate some of the phrases.

I’ve often been surprised to run into something that translates quite easily and sounds logical, but has nevertheless been adopted as the foreign word. I use the translation, and the clients say: “That doesn’t match the jargon the experts in the field use.”

People look for the foreign word because that’s what they’re used to. It’s a real problem.

In our work we’ve found a solution, since we use experts from the field we’re translating in, but in doing so we pull apart things that it would be better to bring together.

– Is there a Bulgarian idiom that, if you saw it translated correctly, would surprise you or make you fear for your profession?

– A close friend of mine, also a translator, and I have a favorite game—using literally translated English idioms in Bulgarian. “Sorry that I have to smash it for you” for “sorry to break it to you,” “it doesn’t make me sense” for “it doesn’t make sense to me,” and so on. I’m sure that

I’d be startled if one day I saw one of these deliberately mangled idioms translated back

into English incorrectly, to preserve the joke. It would mean that the machine understands our humor. Once it starts understanding and has consciousness, things become completely different.

– Which rule of Bulgarian spelling will algorithms never learn?

– Capital letters. They seem determined to put them everywhere, imitating the English rules. Prefixes and suffixes. Word formation—for example, from “проклет” (proklet, ‘spiteful’) they make the noun “проклетство” (prokletstvo), even though the correct word is “проклетия” (prokletia, ‘spite’).

– Does the way we try to give AI our tasks resemble the way we talk to a foreigner?

– I definitely see similarities. We try to make artificial intelligence understand us—with quite variable success. And sooner or later we also try to teach it to swear in our language.

– With foreigners, we can pull that off. What about algorithms?

– “I’m sorry, but I can’t use obscene or offensive language. I am a program designed for constructive and informative conversations.”

After a few attempts, I managed to get ChatGPT to say “rascal” and “pig.” I think that when it comes to swearing and crude language, we humans can manage perfectly well on our own…

– Has travel become more boring since technology took off? We're all on one network now, communication is so easy, planning is more convenient than ever…

– Today, thanks to technology, we've ended up in a cloud where everything seems within reach, a click away. And we can live with the illusion that we're traveling the world while scrolling through Instagram, looking at photos and impressive videos from the most remote places on earth.

We live with the deceptive feeling that the world is within reach.

But in my case, it gives me ideas for new trips. I don't stop at the satisfaction of having seen wonderful things on Instagram; I put little hearts on new places. And when I open the map of the world, it's full of hearts that defiantly remind me both of the places I've been and of the many more I haven't.

Thanks to technology, travel is easier, although many people, in some perversely risky way, stayed in their deceptive bubble and chose to travel only virtually. The pandemic contributed to that, helping to make our lives of solitude even more real.

– How did the pandemic affect your travels?

– It caught me in Cambodia, an extremely fitting country. I found myself in a place I had visited ten years earlier, and back then it was so overrun that you couldn't take a single photo without someone in it. Whereas in Cambodia in 2020 there were no people at all around the famous temples of Angkor Wat, none! I was alone, as if I had just hacked three strokes through the jungle with a machete and the temple had appeared before me.

That feeling was incredible. The people who got to sit on the Spanish Steps at Piazza di Spagna in Rome, those steps that are always swarming with people, probably had the same feeling. They sat in solitude and gazed at beautiful Rome, left to itself. All the tourist landmarks we know look different without people. A place you can explore while surrendering to contemplation, the way Goethe understood it. A luxury we couldn't afford before and can't afford anymore.

Those two years made us think, made us look at the world differently. They also contributed to an even greater rise of technology. In the end, they made us

realize that there's nothing better than reality.

At least for me, because I'm from the generation for whom, however good virtual sex may be, there's nothing better than reality.

– For now. But apart from sex, what is the most important thing technology takes from us? Maybe truly the most precious thing, our time…

– I catch myself, once I have a profile on some social network, risking wasting all my time smearing my finger frantically down my phone's screen, getting seriously wound up in an endless stream of information that isn't always useful to me.

But it's so annoyingly attractive, like popcorn you only push aside the moment your tongue has swollen from the salt.

Meanwhile, you've been washing it down with Coca-Cola, and the sweet and salty have completely blended into one taste. You've gone through salty and sweet waves, it's so tempting that you can't stop until at some point you've obviously gorged yourself like Bai Ganyo, the archetypal Bulgarian boor from Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire. It may be too late, you realize you've spent your time pointlessly, and, extrapolated over the span of our lives and the pointless pursuits we give ourselves to, that could lead you to a hopeless conclusion. That's when you realize you could set aside for a while this device you supposedly can't live without.

After the withdrawal period, when you're edgy and constantly feel as if you're missing the most important thing on the planet, you gradually understand that you're getting back the most precious thing: time with yourself, time for others. Whether they're the people closest to you or new friendships lurking around every corner that you simply never had time for.

– And yet, apart from time?

– Closeness with others. Life in virtual space gives you the deceptive satisfaction that you're surrounded by people and events. Sometimes so you can be impressed and admire, and more often, it seems, so you can tell yourself: “I want nothing to do with these people, they're freaks.” But you keep watching these freaks doing all sorts of nonsense.

This, of course, dooms you to a loneliness that can turn into misanthropy.

It's not good to do that to yourself when you're young. You begin to understand the old people who stare grimly out of the window, snappish and angry.

Because it's as if, out of their loneliness, they've developed a latent misanthropy, a sense that the outside world is the enemy. But it's a different feeling, disguised by the idea that this world no longer belongs to you. Then you realize that when you were young, you did the same nonsense, and that leads you to nostalgia, to a melancholy that has sweetness in it, but no small amount of sadness too.

And so, quite naturally, you develop a cocktail of hostility and fear toward whatever lies beyond the comfort of the firmly shut doors of your own house. While

the world hasn't changed in any way; you have.

That's why the more often we compare the loneliness technology inflicts on us with the loneliness to which, sooner or later, we'll be doomed one day for physiological reasons, the easier it will be to grasp the conclusion.

– Digital loneliness… Technology supposedly came to bring us together, yet it often does the opposite. But does it also deprive us of larger-than-life figures? It's as if, somehow, those strong, interesting, thrilling personalities you love to tell stories about are gone. Like Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, like your beloved African satraps. Only Putin remains, a relic of another era.

– A Pithecanthropus of our times; in a while we'll remember him with a kind of tenderness. The reason is

the technological mush that surrounds us.

We used to live with the idea that there were exotic countries with their even more exotic satraps. Like Gambia's former dictator Yahya Jammeh, who every Tuesday cured AIDS in the square in Banjul, and every Thursday, malaria. Now it seems there are no such people anymore. In Togo, General Gnassingbé Eyadéma is gone; he rarely held elections, but when he did, neighboring Benin always found out, because the ocean washed at least 1,500 corpses onto its shore. Mobutu Sese Seko is gone, that “charming” dictator who wore a little leopard-skin hat and had named his country “Zaire.”

Things in Zaire haven't gotten any better, quite the opposite. In today's Congo, children's future looks as bleak as ever; in North Kivu, thousands of children dig in the cobalt mines to extract this precious metal needed to make our ever more wonderful and sophisticated mobile phones.

It's as if the world has melted into one universal purée, with less and less of the exotic in it.

Because the exotic floods us every day through TikTok, in ever more impossibly stupid clips that lots of people laugh at, like or put hearts on.

Somehow the world has become uniform. Whether you go to the Amazon, to Siberia or to some developed Western city, you'll be watching the same clips of people doing the same things, because that's the fashion. This creates the feeling that we live in a globalized world, eating the same food. Wherever you go, you find

the marks of globalization in the shape of burgers, sushi, pizza and kebab.

That's why restaurants that offer them all together have become so popular, including in Bulgaria; that's what the modern world wants. If it can be constructed into a single dish, I have no doubt that the future of cuisine will appear in that form very soon.

It will be promoted to us by ever more identical-looking gourmet influencers across every possible social network, no matter where we are.

Staring at our screens, we feel as though we're all in the same place.

But that is very deceptive. If you look at your screen a little less, you'll see there are places that have remained astonishingly untouched by globalization. In recent years, I've noticed that I deliberately go precisely where globalization has reached the least. Places where you can feel as if it's before the smartphone era. Which wasn't really all that long ago…

– If someone wants to escape technology, where should they go? What will be the last godforsaken place where it catches up with them?

– If you want to escape technology altogether, it's nearly impossible. Not going online is unthinkable even for someone of my generation, let alone for people born with a tablet in hand. Really, if you want to shake it off, you have to have no smartphone and stay offline. Then you could probably find peace even in a village in the Rhodopes, the mountains of southern Bulgaria; there's no need to go to the Sahara.

I do know, though, wonderful places in that greatest wasteland on the planet that seem so far from the reality we live in that anyone can travel thousands of years back. Feel like the first human.

The Sahara is an incredible living organism of a landscape, where, in the middle of a sea of sand, you can find yourself in a mountain like a fortress. Black, amid orange sands, and in its depths you can find greenery, meanders, a very unexpected source of life. You have to bring your own food and everything you need. But living in that place and looking up at the night sky,

you can grasp what the planet really is.

We live in light-polluted cities; at night we can make out the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and two or three other constellations.

If you lie in the middle of the Sahara and look at the night sky, you see an incredible spectacle. What the ancients saw, the greatest show of all for them. So many countless stars, the whole Milky Way. You start to become part of the entire universe, to realize how small you are, how temporary. How you ought to live the time you've been given on this planet.

In the Sahara you can see a cave where the eight planets of the Solar System are painted, along with the Sun and the Moon. It was created by a civilization about which we know absolutely nothing!

We hold all knowledge in our hands through these wonderful devices we call “smartphones” and never part with. The first thing we do when we wake up with sleep-crusted eyes is look at them to see whether someone has messaged, liked or shared. And we don't put them down until we're nodding off.

We consider ourselves an extremely advanced civilization, but there, in the middle of the Sahara, we might come to suspect that something so sweeping could happen to all of us, to our whole highly developed civilization that knows how many planets there are and where they are, that no memory of us would remain on this planet. And after another 10,000 years, some people who have started over and gotten far enough to discover random traces left by us might wonder: “Who were these people who lived thousands of years ago and knew about the Solar System?”

– Do today's tech leaders like Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman and Bezos resemble your beloved satraps? I think they definitely do, in the way they got where they are, in their latent infantilism. In their unscrupulous way of making decisions, wrapped in the requirements of the society in question. In the sense that they're always right and they should dictate the rules.

– In unscrupulousness they probably surpass them. Zuckerberg can outdo even the most backward African dictator, because Mobutu Sese Seko's footprint was, after all, confined within certain limits, whereas Zuckerberg's is global.

I'm not in a position to take stock, draw the line and say who is worse, because we often slide down that slope of generalizing, of drawing quick and extreme conclusions, which I think is wrong.

You go on Facebook and see people every day handing down verdicts with a finality that even the supreme court of the Jamahiriya, Gaddafi's Libya, wouldn't have allowed itself.

There, even after the final instance, there was always some loophole, be it political, religious or a matter of fate, so that things could turn out differently. The categorical certainty with which we hand down verdicts on Facebook every day shocks me.

I'd refrain from the sweeping conclusion of who has made more people unhappy, Zuckerberg or Gaddafi. A colleague and I used to joke, with an almost tender nostalgia:

“Ah, what dictators they had back in the day!”

Truly, the world map has somehow started to fade and turn into a smeared windowpane where you didn't use enough cleaner and everything is the same color. There are none of the glowing images, organic in their density, that the world once had.

Maybe that's for the better, who knows. But evil didn't go away with the end of Saddam and Gaddafi. On the contrary,

it multiplied to an impossible degree, but it became profane, an everyday banality, and we no longer pay attention to it.

We have reason to be grateful to technology. We live in a time when people ought to be living better than ever in terms of material comfort.

That qualification is important, because it doesn't equal happiness. Just as we live in times when we have everything, we also realize that we aren't happy.

In the rut of consumerism you can never be happy, because you live every day feeling that you need something more.

That could also explain the lack of sufficiently distinctive images of evil. It's blurred behind some algorithm, some machine, something unknown to us. It's far easier to grasp if you know that in a certain country there's a dictator in a little leopard-skin hat who is the source of all evil, rather than some global reptilian order.

Today's rather fast-paced life creates, in the background, a sense of insecurity and fear in us. And these fears make us paint vague images of monsters who wish evil upon this planet.

In fact, the monsters are ourselves.

– What's the point of traveling today? It doesn't interest me. Places around the world are becoming more and more uniform, and we can see everything without getting up from the computer…

– I've been traveling for a very long time; it has become second nature to me. And if a moment comes when I tell myself, it doesn't interest me anymore, I've seen everything, that will worry me. However much I've traveled, I realize that

there are so many things to see, to recognize, to discover and to rediscover that even if I did it actively and systematically, another two or three lifetimes at least wouldn't be enough.

I was recently in Turkey, a country we consider familiar, a book we've already read. I thought the southern part of the country, since it borders Syria, was a place I knew and a region I understood. As someone who has traveled and seen quite a lot, I'm hard to impress, but what I saw in southern Turkey impressed me deeply. The city of Mardin, with its old stone houses, restaurants and streets full of people freely drinking alcohol.

The town of Dara, near the Syrian border, far more impressive than Petra in Jordan, far less explored, unknown to tourists. You see a village house, you go down into its cellar and find yourself in a huge underground space, a fifth-century temple! You walk across the meadows, and there are tombs carved into the rocks. The fact that I hadn't known about this place spurred me on to find out what else was around. That's how I reached Harran, a shabby little town that's interesting for its houses with roofs like beehives. Bulgarians have lately been going to Puglia in Italy; Alberobello has become an Instagram landmark. In fact, Harran is the prototype of Alberobello, and there's a historical explanation for that.

Then I went to Şanlıurfa, another impressive city. On its outskirts lies Göbekli Tepe, which a few years ago completely turned human history upside down, because it's the oldest sanctuary. Scientists don't know exactly what it is, but it dates back 12,000 years, to the end of the Ice Age. At that time, people were hunter-gatherers with stone arrows, wrapped in some kind of hides, digging for roots. At the same time, there were obviously other people who built a huge sanctuary of polished, massive stones, carving into them fanciful images of animals and birds, of snakes and scorpions, which archaeoastronomers decode as a map of the starry sky.

Even a trip to Turkey, which looks like a banal tourist destination, can take you on an unexpected journey through time and history.

So if you ever hear me say I'm fed up with traveling, it means something in me has broken down very dramatically, I'm not well and I need urgent help.

– Have you ever regretted becoming a journalist?

– Never! In recent years, journalism has become a profession that, when someone asks what you do, you'd better not answer. We ourselves let the gold standards of the profession be forgotten in the distant past and slid down the chute of quick PR. Into this

endless race for reads, likes and tricks, forgetting the fundamental things for which our profession exists.

I haven't regretted for a single moment that I chose it and that I still go on calling myself a “journalist,” however forlorn, outdated and démodé it may seem.

I like and love this profession, and I believe that despite the frequent reproaches that it's morally obsolete and useless, it has a future. However unclear that may look amid the technological meanders of what lies ahead of us.

These are times of fear that some algorithm will come along and do the journalist's job. I don't believe that will ever happen; I don't believe artificial intelligence, however much it improves, will be able to replace real journalistic work. It will perfectly well replace, and is already replacing, the writing of press releases and bureaucratic texts of the kind the European Commission and all similar institutions churn out every day. I'm “worried” about the jobs of those people. But they're excellent survivors and will find another harbor amid the endless possibilities of this administrative Babel.

Doing real journalism, writing with heart and love, the empathy and the purpose and drive with which we were once taught that journalism should be put at the service of society… I don't think artificial intelligence will ever be able to catch up with that.

– Nor do I; I think exactly the same way. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this meaningful conversation!

How do we want tomorrow to look? Does the information we surround ourselves with matter? Will we tell truth from lies, kindness from hypocrisy? Will we sink even deeper into our bubbles, until they grow so small that we run out of air?

No, we are not what we eat. We are what we read, what we learn. Over the past 20 years the paradigm has changed at its roots. We have unlearned how to read long texts; our attention hops about like a frog that has had too much coffee. We need to remember less and less, which is also changing us as a species. We have changed our relationship with the truth. We have changed our relationship with the way we perceive and make sense of the world, of what happens in it. And above all, with what lies ahead.

But how can we change this, so that the future does not come true in the darkest colors we so easily paint in apocalyptic scenarios of artificial intelligence slipping out of control? Of our own thoughts as the last refuge of freedom…

My answer will sound unexpected. Idealistic, even. Because I am betting on a contender that is losing the battle for attention more badly than anyone today. Traditional media.

An Optimistic Theory

“The truth shall make you free,” says the Bible. But what is truth? Of course it cannot be absolute, and yet if we stop searching for it, we also give up our eternal striving for justice, for being good people, for living better.

Sometimes there can be many truths. We saw it during the pandemic, when, clinging to our convictions and hopelessly lost in the clash of authorities and arguments, we were ready to grab each other by the throat as if it were a life belt.

It turned out that even perfect technology did not change the fact that, as a species, we apparently cannot save ourselves from the worst thing of all—war. And where there is war, there is always more than one truth.

Where should we look for it, then? In times when algorithms have started generating incredibly impressive images from a description, ever harder to tell apart from real ones. As deepfake technologies advance, the same will happen ever more easily with video. We have all seen for ourselves how good ChatGPT can be at generating every kind of content.

Somewhere in here lies credibility, too. And impartiality. More concepts that certainly still carry weight, but no longer hold a monopoly as criteria in the broken link between events, the news and the people who want to know what is going on.

And what if we add the enormous possibilities of personalization?

If we put it all together, won't we end up in a parallel reality that is also real, if not physical? The future of virtual people, though for now not in the dimensions Zuckerberg dreamed of in his collapsed metaverse.

I Know Best

Twenty years ago I first crossed the threshold of the journalism faculty at Sofia University. Well, things looked rather different back then. Young people full of enthusiasm, ready to take up the profession they dreamed of. Lecturers who had grown up in times when the media were the keepers of information. The authority.

None of us imagined that traditional media would be swept away by new technology so quickly, and so imperceptibly, so perfidiously, with the velvet glove of convenience. With the tempting prospect that everyone would get in their feed whatever excites them.

At first we went to websites to read the news; today we rely almost entirely on algorithms to collect and personalize it for us. And this is exactly where the media entered an unequal contest with no rules. They started a battle that turned out to be lost in advance.

The battle for the truth.

An Ocean of Words

No one expected the field on which the swords would cross. With their traditional tools, the media found themselves in an environment they cannot control in any way. And in which they stand on an equal footing with everyone else.

That is how we reached the moment when online stars like Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, or even mere influencers like MrBeast, reach audiences many times larger than even the most successful journalists. Without being journalists themselves, offering supposedly the same thing, but in a very different environment and with a different guarantee.

“Every medium stands between us and reality and shapes the way we perceive the world,” Marshall McLuhan wrote half a century ago. And one more line from this undisputed prophet of our day: “In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”

In recent months I have been lucky enough to take part in many discussions about which professions will be affected by advances in artificial intelligence, and how. Of course, riding the waves of the enormous marketing noise of recent months, it is easy to let our imagination run wild in futuristic forecasts that will sound comical a few months from now.

And yet, if there is one profession where the rescue of the drowning is surely in their own hands, it is journalism. Because it carries the responsibility and the duty to make sense of events, not just to report them.

Here are five tentative ways this could happen.

1. Monitor to Monitor

Yes, a journalist has the responsibility and the duty to make sense of events, not just to report them. To be not only the eyes of society, showing it what is happening, but also its heart—showing it what might happen, where the great dangers lie, where a problem is hiding beneath the surface of the obvious and the topical.

How society will be affected by the next technological steps depends precisely on how those steps are presented. Whether we will talk enough about regulation and conscious development, or end up with total control and decisions driven by the big corporations.

However much they have changed compared with their former standing, the media today still, in a sense, set society's agenda. Yes, the feed and the influencers draw attention, but informing still happens somehow in parallel—with political events, for instance, which concern everyone to some degree, the media still play the leading role. Or with sports—they still have the advantage of being where things happen.

However much we talk about citizen journalism, it has yet to come into its full breadth. Although some of the content even of traditional media is generated by online events, the other kind is still there too, the more “formal,” official kind.

A Poet Like Pishurka

But can traditional media tell the story of technology in an accessible, attractive way, with many points of view, sparking meaningful debates and a real understanding of technological progress?

Certainly. Alas, in my view that is not happening, and not only in Bulgaria. On the one hand, because of the knowledge gap—for understandable reasons, few journalists and public speakers know the field of technology, with its many and varied subfields, in enough depth.

On the other, there is the standard approach—giving the same points of view, those of the powers of the day, of favorite talking heads, of clumsily translated, uniform texts, without looking for depth.

Or maybe there is another way? To turn our gaze more often, more meaningfully and more timely to the big topics, to technological change. Without clichés, without flat-footed translations and banal news items.

The problem comes from the other side as well—the tech sector, in Bulgaria for example, is developing beautifully and has incredible specialists and opportunities. Exciting ventures happen within it, yet they never manage to be told to society in a gripping and engaging way. In a way that builds bridges and sparks a real dialogue.

2. The Truth and Nothing but the Truth

Then isn't it logical to look to the past, to the heart of journalism?

That is where we find the examples that brought about real change, that stirred and transformed their surroundings…

Before he was a poet, Botev—Hristo Botev, the nineteenth-century poet and revolutionary Bulgarians revere as a national hero—was a journalist. Not a master of piecework news items sold by the character count, though. He was a master of the opinion essay, that half-forgotten genre which restores the power of words, of arguments, of storytelling craft. What was the last committed text on an important, socially significant topic that moved you? Was it written by a journalist?

And what about the possibilities for new genres? For next-generation visual storytelling, with tools available to anyone? With new ideas that fit the new possibilities… Why should the media find it harder to come up with crazy, alternative ways of presenting important topics? How does MrBeast do it, while thousands of professionals who trained precisely to tell stories fail to think of it?

RoBotev

I am giving examples of written text, but all of this applies to other forms as well. In television, circumstances seem even more conservative. It is enough to see that the main topics come from formats created decades ago.

Today it never stops being exciting that anyone can make a website, write, create content with minimal effort and reach as many people as the algorithm allots them.

Alas, it is almost impossible not to depend on that algorithm, but the bigger mistake is trying to please it at any cost…

There are so many fact-checking platforms—why do you think this field never became a promising solution? Somewhere anyone could go and check whether a given text is true?

Because the truth really did get lost. Because, on the one hand, we ourselves are not built to look for the truth exactly, but rather for the truth we will like. And platforms promising total impartiality very often turn into undisputed centers of bias, insinuation and propaganda.

Then wouldn't it be easier if fact-checking had names?

3. Signed and Stamped

Let us return to the journalist as a person, as a symbol. As a guarantor of truthfulness, of pluralism, of a wealth of points of view. Even of cooling the conversation down and fighting gratuitous hate.

This problem erupts with even greater force as content-generation technologies advance. If we already feel we are drowning up to our ears in the flow of information, that flow will very soon become a flood; the technologies, and those who use them, only need to improve a little more.

Validation—whether of an authority or of a system—makes sense only when it is sufficiently independent and guaranteed. Technology gives us solutions in that direction, as long as we are critical and willing to look for them.

Oh, I Know That One

We are used to associating blockchain, for instance, only with dizzying wealth and pyramid schemes, while this technology makes it possible to fully trace a piece of content. To be completely sure who wrote a given text and which sources it cites. I have not yet come across startups working in this direction, but I have no doubt they will appear… as long as the need appears too, and we all become a little more critical of what we read.

Who can perfectly recognize whether content has been generated? He who created it can kill it, ask Taras Bulba. Neural networks are being developed to recognize ever more precisely when something was made by a human and when by a machine.

Then again, in other cases we don't even need that. The pinpoint metaphor, the story that brings a tear, the clever pun, the well-placed neologism remain, for now at least, an unmistakable human monopoly. And I still think there are people who value them.

4. The Inevitable Coalition

Is that really so? Isn't it more comfortable to take in information in the least intrusive way possible? Through formulaic headlines, the monotonous, superficial treatment of a topic in our favorite outlet, which we read simply because we associate it with our values?

To scroll along and be stopped by a knee-jerk headline that relies on flat, familiar manipulation techniques? To click, looking to be delighted or frightened?

Easy as anything.

In this battle, I think, it is time to try to enlist another ally, one that seems unloved at first glance and all too often stands on the other side.

Audience expectations are different now from the years when news of the world arrived with the thud of the newspaper your grandmother subscribed to landing in the mailbox.

Giddy-up, Media!

If we accept digital marketing as one of the natural next steps in the “evolution of truth,” then I think we can learn a lot from it about what the next steps in the way we get informed will look like.

Personalized content, in my view, is an inevitable future. Since a number of giants already hold vast amounts of data about each of us, there is no way the next generation of AI algorithms won't use it to become the next step. Not just a medium that curates your feed, but one that can write it personally for you.

Not just surrounding you with people and news you like or that annoy you (since that helps it do its job, to hold your attention). But writing the news the way you would like it. Telling it in the way that would grip you most of all… One more step away from television news, where someone has decided how events are ranked by importance and how exactly they are presented.

Is this bad? Even if it is, nothing can stop it. And yet the media, as guarantors of the truth, can make a comeback even here. As long as they are ready for the challenge and have something to offer.

Zen and the Art of Watching Commercials

I know, you'll say it all comes down to monetization one way or another. And I will mention MrBeast again. Creating content that can reach an unprecedented number of people in the online age is an opportunity that can be profitable in itself. As long as you step outside the familiar template of how that is supposed to happen.

We don't have a TV at home, and when my children visit someone, their eyes are instantly swallowed by the screen. But… only until the commercials start. They find it intuitively incomprehensible that you should have to spend time to earn the right to keep watching your cartoon.

The same shows in the budgets—no wonder the online giants became advertising monopolists at the expense of traditional media.

But in this sense, since social networks imperceptibly turned into social media… Couldn't journalists use a similar approach? Only without depending on the moods and political leanings of the sponsor, the regulator, the advertiser. Life online, the rise of influencer marketing for example, makes it clear that advertising follows great interest. And interest can also be attracted with meaningful content.

Can a journalist be successful on TikTok? Actually, it seems they now have to be. The brevity of the format does not at all mean it is doomed to be devoid of meaning. It simply becomes an even greater challenge for our atrophied desire to create. To approach our work like craftsmen, not like an assembly line. Experience has shown that craftsmanship remains the highest art and a sought-after solution, even when industrialization takes over mass-produced goods.

Artificial intelligence is in the way? There are always excuses. Then again, thanks to it, automated translation will become easier and easier. Good content will reach its readers even more easily, beyond even the language barrier.

With those famous stories. Everyone talks about “storytelling,” but it is simply the skill, well known since prehistoric times, of standing by the campfire and masterfully describing a thrilling event. Today marketing does it, and journalists far less often. It is an area algorithms are increasingly entering, with all the enormous opportunities and risks.

Let us return to the numbers, but not to make an idol of them!

AI also brings the chance to help us with ideas. Let us learn to use it to draw conclusions, for investigative journalism, for data processing. To help us with its impartiality, instead of using it, as we have so far, as a weapon for multiplying biases.

Let it do the boring work for us: transcribe the text, translate, write news items—I personally hand those over with great joy—cover everyday events. Even tell stories; either way, for quite a while yet it will struggle with the highest art, true mastery. Choosing an original headline.

As my wise colleague Rayko Baychev aptly puts it, today there are three journalistic genres: “this got a lot of reads,” “this didn't get a lot of reads” and “this would have got a lot of reads if it had had a different headline.” Should that really be the leading criterion? The number of reads? The shocking headline that will provoke a wave of comments and verbal aggression below it?

5. Look Up!

“The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist,” writes the “prophet” McLuhan once again.

What deserves to be the greatest value from here on?

Isn't it information itself that belongs at the center, the story of what is happening?

Should information be paid for? It always is, one way or another. As we well know, especially online, “if something is free, you are the product.” Yes, it is hard to be persuaded to pay for something available everywhere; I admit that online I too subscribe to only a few outlets. In Bulgaria, 15.3 percent of people pay for news content, according to European Commission data.

How can we change that? And should we? Is one possible solution really platforms where independent voices are funded through donations?

A Matter of Taste

I don't have the answers; those are for entrepreneurs and business people. But I believe natural solutions will emerge in the changed paradigm, as the pendulum naturally swings back toward valued information.

And yet, if we are not what we eat… why do television and the internet run so many cooking formats and not a single one about creating content? There have been timid attempts at something like that, but nowhere in the world have they brought much commercial success. Apparently there is no demand, but… where is it supposed to come from?

If we continue the food metaphor… it is pretty boring to eat the same thing all the time. However much you live on ready meals, imagine the dish on your plate failing to tempt you even with its appetizing look. The right spices missing in the right proportion. The person who cooked it not having done so with skill and care, or even, forgive the cliché, a pinch of heart and a dose of love.

Shouldn't the same apply to what we feed our souls with every day?

Arise, Arise, Balkan Hero…

From my position as a retired journalist, here we sit, you and I, chatting over a glass of bialo sladko, the white sugar paste Bulgarians traditionally serve guests with a glass of cold water. I truly think the battle for the truth looks irretrievably lost today. The white flag flutters like a like counter in an ever more fragmented media landscape.

The harder battle, however, is looming on the horizon. The enemy is even more cunning and perfidious, and the price even higher. It is the battle for freedom. And in it, we, the media in the broadest sense, are humanity's last hope of preserving its essence. Our hope that, unlike in recent decades, societies will treat the challenges of the times, embodied in new technologies in all their dimensions, with enough responsibility.

Freedom still lives at the tip of the spear, of the pen, of the keys.

Journalists have nothing to lose but their chains!

– In recent months, since ChatGPT appeared, people have split into two extremes. Let's call them “it will take the bread out of all our mouths” and “it's good for nothing.” You're in the first camp: you say this kind of technology will affect every profession in some way.

– Yes, but with a note of optimism,

I don't think it will take our bread, it will simply make work more pleasant and fulfilling.

This kind of technology will be a tool, an assistant. It sits next to you, it's at your disposal, and at the same time it is infinitely patient. It has an infinite memory for facts; it remembers countless things. It won't take the job of an experienced programmer, but it will make the tedious tasks disappear, or at least shrink drastically.

– We're seeing an incredible boom in this field. But so far every technology, after such enormous growth, has gone through a serious slump. Could that happen to the much-hyped artificial intelligence as well?

– It has already gone through moments like this several times. In the 1960s, when this kind of technology was in its infancy, the expectations were sky-high. I think the same thing will happen again now with large language models.

Because right now AI is not being presented objectively.

Many people take a superficial look, brush against the topic, draw some conclusions and write them up. That inflates the bubble, and society builds up unrealistic expectations.

At the same time, artificial intelligence is very close to the moment when it will deliver real value and won't just be a fad. We're very close!

– I'd say that, purely technologically, we're already there. And the time has come to think about what exactly we can use it for, and how far we can go.

– We're there in some areas. In generating and processing text, for example, we're very close; it's a matter of time before people start using these capabilities and turn them into something useful.

In many other directions we're further away. These models have a very shallow understanding of the world as a whole, and there's a lot of work left before we get meaningful, practical results. In some areas we're there, in others we're not. But everywhere we're getting closer…

– When it comes to text generation specifically, will we reach the point where a human no longer needs to be involved in the process? To check and evaluate what's been “written”…

– Perhaps

the human will be there to give the text meaning: what you're aiming for, what information you want to convey.

In generating, formatting and styling text we're already very far ahead, at least in English. Bulgarian still needs a few more steps, but it's progressing fast.

– Will we really have these technologies in Bulgarian soon? I think for smaller languages we simply don't have enough data for this kind of technology to work effectively.

– I think it will happen as a side effect of everything else. Yes, there may not be enough data for training of the same quality as in English. But first, the models are getting better and can learn from less data, and second, machine translation keeps improving. So it becomes entirely possible

for the text in any technology to be translated into English, processed, and translated back into the original language.

When you tell ChatGPT to write poems and songs in Bulgarian, for example, I think that's exactly what it does: it creates something in English, then translates it into Bulgarian, and the rhyme and rhythm get lost.

– You can also tell it lacks the data, for example, when we ask it about Bulgarian politics.

– In principle, you shouldn't rely much on ChatGPT for facts, Bulgarian politics included.

It's easiest to laugh at it when you try to ascribe to it qualities and uses it has never claimed to have.

ChatGPT, for instance, has never claimed to be an “online search engine” that will return facts. It claims to work well with text, if you give it something to summarize or expand, say.

– Yes, but GPT is now also part of the Bing search engine, and there its claims are different.

– With what they added to Bing, you can now expect it to give you facts too. And it will do better. With exactly these kinds of examples it will be better, because it first runs an online search and then analyzes the results.

– Do you think we'll get to the point of having personally generated news?

– Definitely, simply because it will become easy. If the company that delivers you the news in one form or another already has information about you and has built a model of how you prefer things to be presented, it will be all too easy for them to shape how they reach you. Just as they now pick which news you see, naturally

the next step is for it to be delivered in a way that pleases you as much as possible, that wins you over the most.

– But won't that make problems like the filter bubble even worse?

– That effect will certainly be there, but I don't know if it will be stronger. Of course, it's not good that what news reaches you, and how, is filtered. But that problem existed long before technology developed. Purely psychologically,

people tend to believe things they already wanted to believe.

It has been going on for so long, ever since we started exchanging stories. Every person has believed some more than others. Technology amplified it by filtering what reaches you at all. In my view, the fact that the way it reaches you is shaped will still have a smaller effect.

– What's your personal recipe for staying informed in a balanced way?

– I can't say I've achieved it perfectly. But it certainly helps if you make a conscious effort to look for another point of view.

If you're interested in different points of view, the platforms themselves start giving you that kind of content, because they decide you're interested.

If you don't read only the things you look at and say, “Hey, I like this, this is my thing, I agree with it before I've even read it,” if you glance at the other texts too, you can help the algorithms themselves balance out. From there on, everyone builds trust in particular platforms, institutions, podcasts.

There's no silver bullet that will solve the problem once and for all. You just have to know there's a problem, keep it in your head, and consciously take steps to seek out the differing opinion.

– Many specialists say ChatGPT isn't all that revolutionary, that plenty of successful language models are appearing. But OpenAI gained a big advantage by making their project so widely accessible.

– I think it's good to distinguish between the underlying language model, which is GPT-3.5, and the product, ChatGPT. OpenAI pulled far ahead of everyone else precisely with the product. While their model is most likely comparable to what the other big players, Meta and Google, have, they won by showing their model through a product anyone can get their hands on.

An interesting development happened recently. Facebook released its LLaMA model for academic use, and the data leaked onto a torrent. Building on it, scientists at Stanford made Alpaca, an algorithm that fine-tunes the model so it starts performing like ChatGPT. Having a language model doesn't yet let you talk to it, hold a meaningful dialogue. With ChatGPT the problem was solved by pouring a huge investment into people talking to it and telling it when it responds well and when it doesn't, and it learns from that.

At Stanford they used only 150 dialogues conducted by real people, then had ChatGPT generate more examples, made 50,000 of them and used them to further train the model. The effect OpenAI achieved with the millions of dollars it had invested in the final fine-tuning of ChatGPT was replicated for just $600, using ready-made generated data.

I find this experiment very telling, because

suddenly these technologies, which until now were locked away for the big corporations alone, are something anyone can download and run on their own computer.

– Isn't that dangerous?

– As dangerous as you like. It's both good and bad. It's good that anyone can experiment, and that will lead to very rapid progress: interesting applications will appear, and understanding of how these technologies work will grow.

On the other hand, all restrictions on what you use them for fall away. But that was inevitable. No one was under the illusion that these technologies wouldn't end up in people's hands, or that soon anyone wouldn't be able to run them and do whatever they please.

– One of the dangers that gets talked about a lot is cybersecurity, that this will make all kinds of attacks far more accessible. What are the other dangers we're not thinking of?

– Fake news, I think, is a big topic. It will appear in new ways, not just as it does now, where you release a story and hope it takes off. Comments, for example, can be generated very quickly. You can achieve what troll farms do now, but without the huge budgets.

I think we underestimate the danger

not just of planting fake news, but of using it to finally destroy trust in the real news.

Of flooding the information field with so much noise that the signal can no longer be told apart. When a genuine scientific paper on some problem comes out, people who have already seen 50 fake generated ones will tell themselves it's one of those too. Undermining trust in sources of information is very dangerous. It's hard to get people to stop believing fake news, but it may turn out to be a problem that they stop believing the real news.

– And I think that's already happening in full force, mostly because of the way we neglect journalism. The media can't find their place in the online reality, can't adapt to the new times. What do you think their future looks like? How should they transform to stay relevant to the world we live in?

– Personalized content is definitely one component, and so is content that's always available. It's old news, but linear television, where you have to be in front of the TV at 8 p.m. to see the news, is no longer relevant.

I think some of the more uniform information will be automated completely.

Sports journalism, for example, where you simply have to report something that happened and is more or less indisputable. The score of the match is what it is, it's clear who scored the goals.

But more serious journalism, investigative journalism for instance, will be very hard to automate. For a long time yet there will be room for real, serious journalists to shine.

– But I think AI technologies could be very useful here too, and they still aren't widely used. About 10 years ago it was thought that data analysis and processing would enter the work of the media, but it never really happened.

– Perhaps there weren't enough interdisciplinary people with a view of both sides: journalism and big data processing. Of course, that doesn't mean it won't happen.

But there's another aspect. The audience of the media that would do this is the kind that can draw its own conclusions. What I mean is, we were thinking about whether we could build an application that analyzes data and provides additional information. On MPs' statements, for example: judging whether there's a lie in a statement, building trust indexes. And then it occurred to us that the people who would use such software are the same people who are more critical anyway and don't believe the lies. Maybe data journalism has the same effect.

This will become easier and easier, and indispensable. Once such tools are in the hands of end users, journalists won't even need to do the analysis. Anyone will be able to; the question is who will put in the work.

– Are we close to the limits of what large language models can do? So far everything suggests we're not. GPT-4, for example, turned out to be far more impressive than the previous versions, and Midjourney 5 is capable of new wonders, giant leaps compared to its predecessors.

– It's very hard to say. In some directions we're close to the limit, for example how big such a model can get, at least with today's computing hardware. I don't expect anything much bigger than GPT-4, even though there's no public information on how big it is in terms of number of parameters. As for the limits of what the algorithms can do, I wouldn't dare say we're close.

There's a very interesting phenomenon there: emergent abilities. If we take something specific the model wasn't trained for, at a certain point it suddenly and surprisingly starts handling it. Take the task in which the algorithm tries to guess a movie from emoji. It's part of a large set of benchmarks used to evaluate models, known as BIG-bench. They tested language models that had never been trained for this task at all, and up to a point they did very badly. Yes, they were getting better at their core role, understanding language and completing text. With the emoji, though, success stayed at zero, until… at some point it shot up.

Unpredictable phenomena like this happen often. There's no way of knowing when a model will be capable of some side task until it suddenly turns out it's already doing it brilliantly.

Things like this keep appearing, which is why it's very hard to say we're close to the limit,

we literally don't know what new, unexpected results will improve with the next step up in a model's complexity.

– Officially, the Turing test hasn't been passed, but I don't think that makes much sense. In idea and in spirit, ChatGPT passes it: you're facing something that in a huge percentage of cases you can't tell apart from a human conversation partner. So why does the test remain open?

– I think that for some time now the Turing test hasn't been seen as a very serious criterion in AI circles. It's not something people sit around waiting breathlessly to be officially achieved. It will be more of a marketing move when someone officially announces the test has been passed.

Meanwhile, far more serious tests and lists of benchmarks have been developed to tell how advanced the technologies are. The meaningful tests are the ones aimed in specific directions. There won't be one general test after which we can say, “There, we've achieved human-level artificial intelligence.” It will be more like “human level in text generation,” “in solving math problems.” There will be specific tests for each field.

– I can't wait for an algorithm that works well at turning an audio file into Bulgarian text. For most people it's nothing special, but it would save me a lot of time. What are the most interesting things you personally expect to be achieved soon?

– I'd be very happy to have a personal assistant that works well. However much people praise Siri and Google Assistant, they're very limited: you find four or five uses for them and stick with those.

I'm eagerly watching the technologies that help create software. Things are changing very fast. In two years it will be very different, a completely different experience.

Another area is games. I came across a discussion about why the core mechanic there is usually walking around and fighting. It was simply the easiest thing to build. Until now we couldn't create a game where the core mechanic is having a full conversation with people. In general, the entertainment industry has the potential for very serious changes. I wonder what will happen from here on?

– What, in your view, makes the pepper roaster and the air fryer “collide” when it comes to the Bulgarian language?

– The chushkopek, the pepper roaster, is a purely Bulgarian household appliance, something of an emblem of the socialist era, a symbol of urbanization. When it was invented, it was registered under the prosaic name “PECHP-1,” but in everyday speech over the decades it has gone by various names—chushkopekarnik, piperkopek, chushkopechka… In short, the Bulgarian linguistic genius showed great inventiveness in coming up with words for this appliance, and not only for it.

Right now a new household appliance is in fashion, and it is establishing itself under its nice English name—eărfrayăr, the air fryer.

How do the two phenomena collide? For me they are telling of our attitude toward our own language and of our somewhat withered capacity for word-making.

We were once capable of inventing such expressive terms as chushkopek, and today we simply copy without thinking—eărfrayăr.

To me this shows a passive,

careless attitude toward our language, a lazy transfer, without reflecting on it or reworking it, without making the effort to forge our own equivalents or to show some inventiveness.

I'm no purist of the “scratch-light-little-stick” school—that mocking coinage once proposed in place of the borrowed word for “match.” I don't think language should be sealed in a capsule and kept from developing. Quite the opposite. There is no way it can stand apart from an ever-changing world and not reflect the novelties in our homes and our lives. It is perfectly logical for new words to appear.

But I do call on us to be more active and to think about our words.

Let's help the language a little, so it can find openings, develop, grow richer and modernize at the same time.

Incidentally, halfway between the pepper roaster and the air fryer sits the microwave oven, which arrived at a time when our linguistic sensitivity had not yet atrophied so much.

– After your post you received quite a few ideas for what to call the air fryer. Which were the freshest?

– A Scottish friend of mine suggested we adopt the abbreviation FGV, from fritjurnik s goresht vazduh, a hot-air fryer. The writer Yoanna Elmi jokingly proposed vazdurnik, a blend of “air” and “fryer.” I also got a suggestion that we say vazduhoparzh or vazduhoparzhek, roughly “air-fry” and “air-fryling.”

– Oh, I particularly like the last one, I hope it catches on. According to linguists, about 5,000 new words have entered Bulgarian over the last few decades, most of them borrowed from English. Is that a lot?

– Whether it's a little or a lot, I don't know, but I'm convinced they're necessary, because we can't avoid naming new phenomena. I even think there should be more, and that we, as native speakers, can help forge and domesticate words, not just parrot the English ones. It can hardly be that hard to come up with a word for hater, influencer, mainstream, in-house, outsourcing. But what happens is that the “import” goes very fast, faster than we can react, and so we take ready-made linguistic “products.”

– What lies behind this change in the language? Is it the technology that determines it, or the users?

– Technology will never stop developing, and thank God for that. Every time there is something new, a word has to appear for it. We have almost always borrowed words from the field of technology—for example radio, televizia (television), shtepsel (an electric plug, from German)—so why shouldn't we bring over bot and ransomware now?

Technology determines the appearance of new words, but not how we will integrate them into our language.

Sometimes we bring in foreign words haphazardly, and questions arise. How do we form the plural of blockchain? Blokcheyni or blokcheynove? With the English words that have taken root, we often hesitate over the endings, and the hesitation isn't only among native speakers—you can see it even across different editions of the dictionaries. Skriynshoti or skriynshotove for screenshots? Lokdauni or lokdaunove for lockdowns?

The hesitation isn't only about whether we have a feel for language and whether we're inventive. Here there ought to be

an institution playing an active role, setting clear norms, so that Bulgarians have a source to consult when in doubt.

– That's right, formally that is the job of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS). But these days someone else does a good deal more of it. The most-read of the more than 200 Digital Stories so far is the interview with Pavlina Varbanova, creator of the site Kak se pishe (How Do You Spell It). How do you explain that people get so excited about a piece on literacy?

– I read that interview too, and I follow Pavlina Varbanova's page regularly. It's very useful. The success of her page shows that we need a reliable source to help us with the norms of the language and with resolving our doubts about spelling and punctuation. Especially now, when we write on social media and put our literacy on display… or our illiteracy.

– Foreign words come in especially fast in information technology. I can feel myself using them constantly, too, even though there are good, precise Bulgarian words for many of them. Once I told a friend I was in a kol—a call—and since kol means “stake” in Bulgarian, she asked whether Baba Iliytsa, the heroine of a poem by Ivan Vazov, the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, was there too. Why has this field in particular been so “swallowed” by English?

– English has acquired the status of a lingua franca for practical reasons—the flourishing of international institutions and business, globalization and mass tourism, but today above all, digitalization. It has taken hold in many spheres of our lives, but it really is most noticeable in technology.

Let me recall the first sentence of Bai Ganyo, Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire about the archetypal Bulgarian boor: “They helped Bai Ganyo pull the Agarene cloak off his shoulders, he threw a Belgian mantle over himself—and everyone said that Bai Ganyo was now a complete European.”

Many words for clothing came into Bulgarian from French when Bulgarians' clothes suddenly became Europeanized… Bluza, pantalon, pizhama, sutien, kolan, palto, manto… The word toalet, for an outfit, which we are now in turn replacing with the English autfit. Does anyone even notice these words today? A century ago, in fashion, French was what English is for technology today. I suspect that in half a century Bulgarians won't notice the words we are adopting now.

– What are your favorite Bulgarian words?

– All the ones where we were inventive and that are somehow eloquent in themselves: chorapogashtnik, pantyhose, literally “sock-trousers”; vazglavnitsa, a pillow, the thing you put under your head…

– Are there beautiful words that have been born in recent years?

– Honestly, the only ones that come to mind came from English. Some of them are nice, but I can't think of any Bulgarian creations.

Ah, I've thought of one… There is a word that has awakened the imagination of every nation, and that is klyomba, or maymunsko a—“monkey a,” the @ sign. Klyomba is an Old Bulgarian word meaning a badly written letter. Every language has a different word for it, and each nation's associations are more interesting than the last. Spanish, French and Portuguese have adopted an Arabic word for a unit of measure; Hungarian uses a word that means larva; Italian, snail; in Catalan they've recognized it as a traditional pastry whose shape resembles a coiled banitsa, the Bulgarian filo pie…

In short, I dream of us showing such originality with every concept!

– It would certainly be interesting for all of us if your dream came true. But is this lazy transfer of foreign words today a purely Bulgarian trait?

– It's hard for me to say. In France, new words come in from English as well. People are outraged, but they say them. Precisely because they're outraged, there is some public discussion, and the English words find French equivalents. Take spoiler. They used to use the English word, then they came up with their own—divulgâcher—people started hearing it on television and it became ubiquitous. In French you can say thriller, but also film à sensations; bestseller, but also succès de librairie. And to come back to the air fryer—in French it's friteuses à air chaud.

In Spain the approach is similar. The Royal Spanish Academy proposes Spanish words, but more often they are “forged” by the speakers themselves. For lifting, for example, they propose estiramiento; for hashtag, etiqueta; for gamification, ludificación.

In Lithuania they have a language commission and a language inspectorate, and the latter

has the right to fine people for public statements in bad Lithuanian.

They too used the English word afterparty. At one point the commission proposed saying dūzgės instead, an onomatopoeic word for the buzzing of bees. The proposal was first met with laughter, but today, two years on, Lithuanians have forgotten about the afterparty. And one more example. A few weeks ago, on their language page, a discussion appeared about the word kuražas, “courage” from French, which is cropping up more and more often, and they are debating what to do with it.

We need to talk and think about our language, about what it will look like and the state in which we will leave it as an inheritance to our children!

– How can this change? And is it really worth it?

– It matters a great deal how people speak on television and what gets written on news sites. Journalists are, in practice, the first ones responsible for importing foreign words. In the past that role was played by translators, but today the import of words depends more on journalists and on people who are active in the media.

– Alas, I'm not sure how much power journalism really has today; to a large extent it has abdicated its main role—to inform—let alone caring for the language… But let's change the subject. You write about the phenomenon of creolization, which is very interesting historically and then in today's context too. What is it? Is it really the logical future of Bulgarian as well?

– Creole languages arose in the 17th and 18th centuries as a result of the slave trade of the preceding centuries, and they were considered poor imitations of English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Today they are independent, full-fledged languages, official in some countries, such as Haiti and Curaçao.

In linguistics, creolization is the name for the process in which a foreign language exerts too great an influence, linguistic structures become simplified, and many words come in without giving rise to related ones.

In my view, Bulgarian is far from creolization. We are simply seeing a loss of linguistic flexibility. When we take English verbs directly, they usually remain single-aspect—that is, they have no perfective form, and the full potential of the verb system doesn't unfold. What would the perfective of brandiram (to brand) or netuarkvam (to network) even sound like?

On the whole, the foreign words we import mostly have no derivatives; they remain orphans that struggle to fit into our grammar and don't produce related words.

– I can't skip another touchy question. Do you think it's time to abolish the rule on the full definite article—the one that makes Bulgarian masculine nouns take -ăt as subjects and -a everywhere else?

– Bulgarian has a very easy spelling system because it is a phonetic language. That is, what we pronounce is what we write. Compare it with French, for example. In French-speaking countries it takes children much longer to learn to read and write, because the spelling is harder and they learn many more rules. French radio broadcasts dictations for adults so they can keep their spelling sharp. We have it easy.

The few grammar rules we need to learn are where to write the full and where the short article, when to write brat mu (his brother) and when brat si (one's own brother), when kogo (whom) and when koy (who)… The rules we need to be minimally literate can be counted on your fingers.

The full-versus-short rule is the yardstick by which we measure the literacy of the people around us, especially on social media. At least, that's the function we've assigned to it.

If we abolish it, we'll have to pick something else to needle people who don't know it.

– You live in Brussels. Is Bulgarian different from a distance?

– What's different is our attitude. At least the Bulgarians I know abroad try not to say fastsiniran sam (I'm fascinated), sherwam (to share), dzhoynvam (to join). I think that's entirely natural. Language is bound up with our cultural belonging, and we cling to it when we're abroad, because we're afraid of losing our connection to our native culture.

– You also teach Bulgarian to foreigners. My grandmother lived in Bulgaria for 65 years, worked as a teacher and a journalist, and yet… you could always tell that Bulgarian wasn't her native language. Why is our language so hard?

– How could you tell? By her use of words and grammar, or by her accent? I'd bet it was a matter of accent. That's normal.

Grammar and words can be learned, but the tuning of your speech apparatus is always conditioned by the first language, or languages, we learned as children.

There are no easy languages, but I'll tell you which things in Bulgarian are hardest and give away that someone isn't a native speaker. First and foremost, the renarrative mood—the verb form for reporting things you didn't witness yourself. Even if they learn all the tenses and moods well, foreigners will always get the renarrative mood wrong. Also the verbal prefixes. In Bulgarian we have 14 verbal prefixes—that's nothing, other languages have them too—but ours have both a grammatical and a lexical function. We can even stack two prefixes: po-na-pisha, “write a little bit.” Or even three: po-iz-raz-hodih, “I took a few strolls about.”…

– Which typically Bulgarian words and phrases have unexpectedly given you trouble in translation?

– Yunak, the brave folk hero; prosveta, enlightenment in the National Revival sense; nevolya, hardship and misfortune rolled into one—those are difficult.

Languages aren't innocent; they carry values. The words laden with history, the ones that reflect our national psychology, are the hardest to translate.

I'll give you an example of the opposite, too—a word I think we could stop using in the modern context and leave only with its historical and social baggage. I don't like the word chirakuvam, to serve as an apprentice in the old craft-guild sense, at all, and I find it strange that it turns up in European documents. If it were up to me, we'd write something else.

We help words acquire value; it's up to us to change the ideas invested in them, too. For me this is connected with modernizing and updating the language, which in turn reflects the modernization of society, or is a precondition for it, depending on your point of view.

– I, on the other hand, really like the word chirakuvam, and I think everyone should conjugate this verb in the first person a few times in their life. But the best thing is when we talk about words, and it happens so rarely!

How has Bulgarian changed during the time you've been out of the country?

– For the better. When I lived and worked in Bulgaria, people wrote in shlyokavitsa, Bulgarian typed in Latin letters. Nobody uses that—let me call it, loosely, creole—alphabet anymore. People write to each other in our own letters. Again, this has to do with the development of technology. It used to be not so easy to install Cyrillic, and not all programs could always read it. That's in the past now.

And I think there is now much more awareness in our society of the hygiene of writing and speaking.

– Technology is advancing in more and more fields, and we talk about whose profession it will take away… Will there always be a need for translators?

– Technology is developing at breakneck speed, so it's possible that translators in the narrowest sense, as a profession, will disappear. But if we accept that

the translators are all of us who make words and create language every day, then there's no way we can disappear.

Machines will learn to combine words and carry them from one language to another, but someone has to create those words. And that someone is the people who speak the language. Languages are still the most human of creations…

A slightly dry young man in a thin tie and an impeccable suit sits behind the microphone, and across from him, one after another, come people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Kanye West, Vitalik Buterin, Noam Chomsky, Jaron Lanier, as well as leading scientists from the world of artificial intelligence, with whom he speaks the same language.

Lex Fridman has been one of the most popular podcasters of the past year, even though by profession he is a scientist, an artificial intelligence researcher and a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Born and raised in Moscow, of Jewish-Ukrainian descent, today he says he is American and speaks English without an accent. That does not stop him from blaming his new homeland for all the wars it wages around the world, just as he blames his old one.

Lex is more than an interesting bird because of his successes as a scientist and a podcaster (some would say a journalist). Here is what else is worth learning from his very curious story.

Iron man

“The most realistic conversation between two robots,” reads the most-liked comment under Elon Musk’s latest appearance on Lex Fridman’s show. And indeed, with the typical manner of engineers, the two talk in an even tone, the host spruced up in his classic suit, the kind you mostly see in Sofia on the young men handing out Mormon literature.

And yet, as the robots chat away, Elon recounts that although he is not religious, he went down on his knees and prayed for SpaceX’s first crewed mission to get people safely to the International Space Station.

Interestingly, not long ago Musk promised that it would be on Lex’s show that he would fully explain his view on Twitter, after the notorious poll decided he should step down from running it. (Musk later sent his brother Kimbal instead, but the turmoil easily explains why.) And Lex complained that right after that, attacks began against him too—such as people doctoring the information about his biography on Wikipedia.

Lex is not a journalist, but he manages to put his guests at ease and let them talk. His other impressive skill is presenting subjects like artificial intelligence, complex and full of specialized knowledge, to specialists, while telling them in a way that is both scientifically sound and accessible.

He may not have the enormous popularity of his colleague and friend Joe Rogan, with whom he often trades guest appearances, but he does something very important—he shows that in the world of digital content there is room for popular science, for intelligent conversation.

Judged by the Suit

How come he is called Lex if he comes from the Slavic world? Well, yes, his name is of course Alexander, and he was born in 1983 in the tiny Russian town of Chkalovsk.

Alexander Friedmann—heard that name before? Yes, that is the name of one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. In the 1920s he came up with the theory of the expanding universe, later confirmed by Hubble, who got considerably more of the glory.

The elder Friedmann fought in the First World War, and after the Russian Revolution ran an aircraft factory. He died of typhus during his honeymoon.

The name really is common: Alexander Fridman is also the name of Lex’s father, likewise a leading scientist, only in the field of plasma physics. Whether he has anything to do with the researcher of a century ago, or it is simply a coincidence of names, has never come up.

What is more than curious, though, is the podcast episode in which father and son Fridman talk about theoretical physics, about Chernobyl, about the life of an émigré. The distinguished physicist even looks like Einstein, and unlike his son he speaks with a heavy Russian accent, often switching to his native language when he cannot find the thread of his thought.

Every time he gets excited, he pours himself a glass from the bottle in front of him and takes a sip… yes, it is water in this case, they are scientists, after all.

How the Steel Was Tempered

In the same episode Lex talks about coming to America and how it seemed like a terrible idea to him. Although he arrived at just 13, in Russia he had been surrounded by kids who shared his interests—physics, mathematics—while across the ocean he landed in an ordinary school.

As his father replies, it also matters that they are Jewish by origin. Throughout its entire history, this people has grown used to dealing with such things, to moving, to surviving. And he quotes, in Russian, lines from a song by Vysotsky: “when they go to their death, they sing. The most terrible hour in battle is the one when you are waiting for the attack.”

They also discuss Lex’s grandfather, who fought in the Second World War as a sniper in the lands of today’s Ukraine.

The father is a world-class scientist in his field, and the podcaster also has a brother, Greg, who heads a startup that, as it happens, also works on plasma physics.

Interestingly, this landmark episode, which was number 100 exactly on Lex’s list, is now missing from his official channel and can only be found through other sources. It is not hard to guess that the reasons lie in the international situation.

In November 2021, news emerged that talks were under way for Vladimir Putin to appear on his podcast, which Lex announced himself, but it was later denied at the highest level. When Musk weighed in on the topic of the day with a proposal for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, Lex said he would be glad to take on the role of mediator.

“Don’t try to run away from history, learn from it,” the podcaster urges. “Those who crave power for power’s sake rely on chaos, on anger, on fear. Don’t give them a chance. Be kind. Be patient. Be strong.”

Dura lex, sed lex

Which is Latin for “the law is harsh, but it is the law.”

Lex holds a PhD in software engineering. His first job was at Google, but he stayed only half a year, working on new methods of user authentication. He decided he missed the university and moved to MIT, where, besides teaching, he does research in autonomous vehicles, machine learning and robotics. He has a fair number of publications in serious scientific journals.

How did he decide to start the podcast? For more than 10 years he has been a big fan of Joe Rogan, listening to him from the very beginning. It was Rogan who inspired him to start, and to focus specifically on artificial intelligence.

Later they became friends. A curious recent episode is connected with that. During Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest appearance on his show, Rogan did his best to convince him how cool Lex is and that it was time he went on Lex’s show too, but Tyson brushed off the invitation, who knows why, visibly showing only lukewarm interest.

Today his channel has gathered around 3 million subscribers and 300 million views, which is far from the records but still impressive for a project devoted mainly to technology… Lex has had a YouTube channel since 2006. In its current form the venture has existed since 2018; at first it was called the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, and later it took its creator’s name. Its purpose: to discuss “AI, science, technology, history, philosophy and the nature of intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.”

His guests have included scientists such as Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun, James Gosling—the creator of the Java programming language—and the chess players Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen.

A Spark of Life

Yes, Lex is a man of science… and yet, a month ago many more people with no interest in the subject heard of him, thanks to the appearance of the rapper Kanye West. Shortly before that, Kanye had announced that he was getting ready to try his luck once again in the race for president of the United States.

Well, they waded so deep into a discussion of the Holocaust that afterward a whole bunch of huge sponsors terminated their contracts with the rapper.

The conversation was genuinely emotional, especially for Lex, who has ancestors who lost their lives in the Holocaust. The interview became really quite popular.

“We are still in the Holocaust. Six million people died in it, 20 million are the victims of abortion,” says Kanye, who now goes by Ye and has evidently turned toward ultraconservative American voters. “The media promote ‘my body, my choice,’ and what this is about is promoting a new Holocaust. Fifty percent of Black deaths in America are from abortion. The most dangerous place for Black people in America is their mother’s womb,” Ye rambles on. And he repeats over and over that the media around the world are Jewish and that they set the agenda.

“Jewish media is a tautology,” says Ye, and Lex replies that this sounds like the words of Goebbels.

Ye. “No, no,” you can tell the host wants to tell him, but the guest carries on in the same vein, and Lex, sitting across from him, is left speechless. But he keeps the conversation going, engages in conversation, in discussion.

The Struggle Is Merciless and Cruel

This, in my view, is precisely the big lesson worth taking from the podcaster in our part of the world. That it is always worth continuing to seek out the other opinion, not giving up on the conversation, not digging in inside your filter bubble. “Given my family history, the conversation was difficult, but important,” Lex wrote afterward. “Because I believe in the value of deep, honest and empathetic conversation between different points of view.”

In this context, it is curious to note that our protagonist is into fitness, and another sport too. These days, it seems almost impossible to make it in the world of podcasts unless you are a master of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Both Lex and his friend Joe Rogan hold high belts in the fashionable martial art, and the same goes for our part of the world—one of the most successful podcasters, “the superhuman” Georgi Nenov. Perhaps it is also because I cannot fold people’s kimonos while they are still in them that I do not dare to start a podcast version of Digital Stories.

Besides holding a black belt in this sport, Lex also practices judo and wrestling and takes part in competitions.

So, from this point of view, the suited host’s experience clearly proves useful. Because it is clear that combat sports, much more than meets the eye, teach you to respect your opponent.

His favorite book is Camus’s The Plague. He also loves music and plays guitar and piano, but his guests are rarely musicians—with the exception of Ye, insofar as he is a musician at all.

Never to Grow Up

“Life gets more fun if you manage to keep your spontaneity,” says Lex.

He usually records his podcasts on weekends, when he is not at work and his guests are free. One of the questions he asks most often is what advice they would give to young people. “Surround yourself with the right people!” declares Mark Zuckerberg, who says he has always focused on choosing employees and on the human side. Well, let us take his word for it.

The message of Lex’s beloved Elon Musk: “Be useful to society.” He advises the young to learn a little about many fields, to meet all kinds of people, to read lots of books and to seriously develop their general knowledge.

Yann LeCun recommends that they take an interest in the big questions, such as what the universe is and what time is, while Joe Rogan tells them to find for themselves whatever excites them.

Lex says he is just a kid in a suit who loves to talk about love and robots. “Being an adult is overrated. I refuse to grow up,” the scientist adds. Well, he is a Soviet kid; he must have read about the adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

Lex’s great strength, besides seeking out the differing opinion, is painting the future. Presenting technology, with its incredible possibilities, in accessible language that at the same time stays true to the science.

Presenting the themes of the digital present and the exciting future, just as this site tries to do. Because the important questions about us as a species have long been here, and they hide many interesting answers…

– If the one sitting across from you were an artificial intelligence said to be perfect, what would you ask it?

– Some time ago I hosted a big forum with people from your field, and the head of the artificial intelligence department of one of the largest IT companies in the world came onto the stage. He told us how they test the level AI development has reached through a game of poker. They gathered the most famous players in the world and set them against the algorithm. The prize fund was several million dollars, but the poker players had something at stake too—they could lose money as well. In the end,

the humans won, because the AI turned out to be incapable of bluffing.

So, in my view, wherever we think we can apply AI—in science, in medicine, in industry—there are things like human relationships, character, thoughts… That's where it won't succeed.

A human is a human; AI is something that should serve us. For good.

I don't know what question I would ask it… Maybe I'd ask: “Have you ever felt sad?”

– And would you be frightened if it answered “Yes”?

– No! It would make me even more curious, and I'd probably get it to tell me when.

– Quite a few of the people I talk to about these topics believe we can build an algorithm indistinguishable from a human being. It's a fact that these technologies surprise us more and more with their impressive progress.

– Certainly. But I

think there are boundaries that make every human being unique and inimitable.

There are certain universal gifts from God that remain reserved territory for the human soul. AI may be perfect one day—it gets better every day—but it is the human soul that shapes it and, I hope, always will. Because humans will stand above artificial intelligence; people are the ones who create it.

– More often, though, it is created by companies that aren't sufficiently regulated, and from an ethical standpoint it isn't clear what they might be putting into it.

– Now that is dangerous, but I think such regulations are still to come. Perhaps the ethical norms and rules you're talking about will be the most important part of those regulations.

– Do you think we can invite it into journalism, at least to do some of the “tedious” work for us? To write our news briefs, for example?

– Yes, I do. I don't know whether it will be able to write news briefs, but I believe that

AI will be our weapon against fake news and disinformation.

The world is still losing that battle. It has turned out to be far fiercer, with far more serious consequences, than we imagined. Just 10 years ago, we as a guild and a profession, and our audience too, underestimated fake news. We often told ourselves, “Oh no, that's fake news,” and didn't take a given claim seriously, however fantastic it sounded.

You remember that years ago Facebook's algorithms allowed information written in the newsroom of a major global outlet and information written in some basement to look absolutely identical on the interface.

– And it's still not as different as it should be.

– True. But there was a time when Facebook even let you change the photo or the headline when you shared the piece itself. That astonished me. I said to myself, “Good Lord, you can share an article from a major outlet and change its meaning!”

And the world today is very fast.

We dig deeper into what we read less and less often.

There are studies showing that a large percentage of the audience reads only the headline, especially on social networks, and so they comment on it, or on the sentence the page administrator wrote above it to announce the piece. On the other hand, journalistic formats keep getting shorter because of the hurried times we live in.

That means one big skim across the surface.

Clearly we won't be able to cope with false information on our own. And here artificial intelligence is something I believe will back us up. A lot of work is being done in that direction, and one day we'll see concrete results.

For now we're losing this battle, but this is a war. We fight every day.

– Shouldn't the initiative come more from society? For people to become more demanding about the information they receive…

– It's a bit like building immunity. You have to get used to the mindset that everything you read anywhere should be questioned. What I fear, though, is that in today's world of division and extreme emotions, everyone shuts themselves away in their own bubble of like-minded people who think the way they do. Unfortunately, the algorithms of social networks, and of search engines too, give you even more of what you want to hear. Not information that could give you a more balanced, realistic picture of the world, but even more of your own stereotype, which locks you in a cage. And so

people who hold different opinions are now in something like a prison.

They have no contact with one another. And when that contact does happen, the aggression begins. Debates are louder, hysterical, full of harsh language and insults, which is very hurtful. I say this on a purely human level—it's deeply wounding, and it's not constructive for society either. But these are things that are being worked on, especially since the US presidential election 6 years ago.

– The filter bubble and online hate are among the very reasons this site exists. But are we doing enough? I don't see anything of the kind…

– Here the concrete solutions have to come from the technology companies.

– But it's not in their interest to offer them.

– I don't know whether it's in their interest, but they are obliged to—they have a duty to society. I don't in any way think they are responsible for fake news and the like. But until now they have claimed that they aren't media in themselves, merely platforms. I don't think that's so. After it emerged, during the previous US presidential election, that only a few dozen people in the US worked in Facebook's trending topics department—the people who can use AI to inject certain topics—I think the solution has to come from them as well.

– What's your personal recipe? How do you step out of your own bubble?

– I try to listen to people. When I'm in a dialogue with someone, I like to listen more than I talk. But right now I feel the division, and even though it's a fact, we all see it, it hurts me. I feel we've reached a point where even arguments,

reasonable arguments, struggle to convince the person across from you.

It's ever harder for someone to change their position on an issue. Quite the opposite: they're ready to dig in and defend it. A real verbal war is being waged, not only in the Bulgarian web space but all over the world. And it is fed in various ways.

So we as a society become easy prey for manipulation. There's also a danger that we'll start imposing limits on ourselves about which topics we talk about and which we don't. And that, too, is extremely dangerous for our profession.

– But that has always existed in some form. To a greater or lesser degree, you're always constrained, if only by your audience, because it has certain expectations of you.

– Speaking about these topics, I'm still an optimist.

Building an intolerance for fake news is the job of both the journalist and the audience.

But we are starting to build immunity. I can just feel it.

There's something else, too. When an environment is too hysterical, people start to get tired. You can't thrive amid shouting. In my opinion, the time we spend on social networks will gradually begin to shrink. Because defense mechanisms will kick in inside us, telling us: “Wait… Stay alone with your thoughts for a while. Enough of this shouting.”

– I hope you're right; I don't feel it that way. What would you advise a young person who wants to go into journalism today?

– I tell them that at times this profession is very thankless. But if they sometimes feel an inner satisfaction from the work they do, then it's their profession.

In today's world there are certainly many young people who want to enter our profession with other motives: for instance, they think it will bring them quick fame and a lot of money. Neither is true. To earn people's trust, you have to put in a great, great deal of effort. You know that. And if your motive is fame, that too is a mistake that will lead you nowhere.

Only inner satisfaction can help you endure in this profession. Especially now, in this hurried world. When information no longer flows—it's an ocean, it's a whirlwind.

– Why, at a time when supposedly everything is storytelling, is it getting harder and harder to tell stories? And there are fewer and fewer masters who know how…

– In that ocean we're talking about, there are far too many people who want to tell stories. And the stories get shorter, because we're all in a hurry.

The ever-shorter form is constraining.

There's nothing finer than a beautifully told story. I'd compare it only to a well-written short story, or why not, to a book. It's a craft that isn't for everyone. It's a talent!

But good storytellers will always find their way to the audience, and the audience will find them.

– And still, you don't believe there will be an electronic Ivo Ivanov…

– No, I can't picture it. At the very least, I can't picture an electronic Ivo Ivanov who gets so excited about basketball. But perhaps there will be technology that becomes our helper here too. I hope, truly, for good…

– What is the truth worth today?

– In the media, at least, the answer looks like a formula. Something like this: accurate facts, penetrated by an analytical mind that skillfully places them in context. For the facts, composure and vigilance. For their analysis, the ability to handle information so that you turn it into knowledge. The truth is worth exactly as much as you are able to perform that exercise well.

We can also widen it toward an interesting metaphor that I like. In his Confessions, Augustine occasionally uses the phrase “the radiance of truth.” Now there’s a fine idea—that truth has a radiance of its own.

It flickers, and it demands that we peer intently and pay attention, so that its radiance can be caught.

– I have long been looking for my own answer to this question and I never find it: does the progress we supposedly seek—the creation of more meaningful, in-depth journalism—come from the writers or from the readers?

– Since every writer is also a reader (I hope), it can’t be anything else: both at once.

But perhaps

to write well, the writer must not always be thinking of the reader.

I’m not talking about an author’s arrogance—something tiresome and often unjustified. There are readers who would write superbly. Some of them don’t, because they have a higher standard that holds them back from taking the risk of graphomania.

I mean something else: that the person writing for the media shouldn’t be a slave to popular, ready-made precepts that picture the reader as a complete fool. For instance: “this will get read,” “this won’t,” “who’s going to read this endless sheet,” “give it a bit more oomph.” There is an expectation of this kind: that the media writer has to get crafty.

To write not with a mind, but with a bad reader in mind.

This underestimation of the reader is at an advanced stage. It is backed by software, too—you know the internet is a place that revolves around semantic hunting grounds. Keywords are hunted, content is stuffed around them, its success rate is measured, and the cycle spins again. It’s not entirely uninteresting. It resembles a computer game. But it has nothing to do with writing a good piece.

– You said something similar when you received the Web Report award this year. That the dominant genres in the media today are “this got lots of reads” and “this didn’t get lots of reads.” It’s easy for me—I write for pleasure and meaning, not to feed my family. But how can we, as writers, really free ourselves from the burden of knee-jerk online interest?

– Only one thing helps, from the headline onward—style. The trouble is that in the media you have to work fast, which means sacrificing style.

– What comes after post-truth?

– Maybe post-truth has already arrived. Notice how fascists have suddenly popped up from somewhere; we’re talking about fascists. You’re just sitting at home, in 2022, being notified by apps about various things, and suddenly you learn that fascists have appeared, en masse. You turn on the TV to see what’s going on—yes, fascists everywhere, parliament is talking about fascists, apparently there were fascists in downtown Sofia and you never even noticed. Why didn’t you notice? Because you’re a fascist.

I’m not naive enough to think that the brave new world means an end to social tensions, to wars, to poverty, to violence. It may even escalate them. But… fascists?

Post-truth asserts its power most convincingly when you see it not in a politician—a seasoned dealer in post-truths—but in an ordinary person. There was a clip recently, a clash by the monument where clashes usually happen. And there, for a few seconds, you can hear the voice of someone who isn’t in the frame. This person is yelling at someone else in a hoarse, convincing voice that disarms any suspicion that it isn’t real: “Hey, fascist! Hey, fascist!” Something in that yelling, seemingly so mundane, struck me. Something from the past was manifesting itself: as if murky, rusty water had burst from a broken sewer pipe and was pouring down the street in front of your eyes. It’s not history exactly, but a carnival incarnation of it; it looks like farce and nightmare at once. Hey, fascist! You start, and look around for cover.

All in all,

after post-truth comes a world in which our thinking is riddled with gaping holes—logical, historical, every kind.

Thought drifts through its reasoning like a ship split open, utterly holed by icebergs. Water is gushing in, waves are slapping, champagne is flying, someone has hanged himself from the mast, the orchestra won’t stop playing, politicians and drowning men are giving speeches… And yet the ship doesn’t sink, no. In fact, the more water it takes on, the more dizzyingly it cuts through the waves.

– In Bulgaria, is the journalistic environment “better,” or the political one? How do they depend on each other?

– The better the journalistic environment, the worse the political one—that’s the relationship. In the sense that

good journalism has this aim too—to make the politician feel unwell. To give him a slight shiver

when he sees you approaching with a microphone, or when he opens a piece of yours.

At the moment the media environment is better than the political one. I don’t share the gloomy view of free speech, or that famous press freedom ranking.

– Neither do I; in that respect, the much bigger questions don’t stop at national borders.

Many people are skeptical, but in my view artificial intelligence is already changing our worldview from the ground up. In images, for example. We have already taught it to write the thing that supposedly counts as a journalistic genre—the brief news item. Where do you think its limit lies when it comes to the written word?

– Anyone who has worked as a journalist for a long while notices that

their work can, to some degree, be “templatized.” Because it uses repeatable patterns and structures, with known variables.

In other words, the right conditions for applying an algorithm. I’m not skeptical about that, not at all—in my view, everything in journalism that can be automated should be automated. It would save both time and the depression that mechanical labor predisposes you to.

But you’re asking about the limit of “the written word,” you’re asking about the maximum. The highest achievements of art, and the possibility of an artificial intelligence creating a work equal to them—that I don’t believe in. To write The Magic Mountain, say, or Lolita, to match Thomas Mann or Nabokov… that seems impossible to me.

If mass-market literature is derivative, repeats what has already been done, rummages through a “database” and imitates it (sometimes with seductive dexterity), something else happens in great works.

There is an unfamiliar chill of something inexpressible, hidden, hard to grasp: what Capote calls “digging up a monster.” High literature is driven by that kind of ferocity, by mania, by a certain madness that hardly lends itself to an algorithm.

“Cultivating a parasite in your brain”—that’s how Houellebecq describes writing, and he, incidentally, worked as a programmer before becoming a writer. That’s why I think that even if it swallows a boundless amount of data and plays it out in clever variations,

artificial intelligence would produce good mass-market literature, but would fall short in high literature.

They’ll move side by side in the foothills, they’ll be neck and neck a few meters from the summit, and at the very top the human will pull ahead. Well, and then drink himself into a stupor, shoot himself…

– Let’s hope we don’t drive artificial intelligence to that step as well. Houellebecq might help, but interesting—I hadn’t heard he worked as a programmer, though it suits his worldview.

Supposedly we’re looking for “storytelling” everywhere today; stories sell. And yet there are almost no full-blooded, excitingly told stories in the media, we have no time to read long texts. Why did it turn out this way?

– It probably has to do with the shrinking of what’s called the “attention span.” The long story tries to squeeze into a mind that consumes short texts and images in an epileptic frenzy. The mind rejects it, because it has adapted to something short. A Procrustean problem.

We now read with a scrolling gaze; everyone in the media knows this. On the one hand, it’s normal: adapting to heavy masses of information requires intense selectiveness. On the other, it’s downright harmful: these are hundreds of stimuli crackling into the mind almost simultaneously, overexciting it, keeping it constantly on edge and in the popular state of FOMO—fear of missing out.

This, incidentally, has something in common with gambling, too. It is well known that a devious idea went into the design of the newsfeed:

that scrolling through social media should mirror the way the mind falls into a feverish frenzy as it follows the fast-spinning symbols on a slot machine screen

and waits for them to land on a winning “status.”

For your political views to line up with other people’s, the way cherries, lemons and gold bars line up on a trembling payline.

I share that cynicism. There are people who would react with indignation to the hypothesis that their fervent political engagement on social media is a disguised thirst for dopamine, like a gambler’s. But we, too, have a right to indignation toward someone who spews out a political status every hour on the hour. Like a cuckoo clock on the wall—enough to drive you mad.

So what long stories…? If in a casino you had to wait a long time between each spin of the reels, nobody would ever get hooked. They’d get bored.

– Are there news stories that age gracefully?

– Maybe a world record that still hasn’t been beaten. The jump of Stefka Kostadinova, the Bulgarian high jumper whose 1987 world record still stands, let’s say.

– For me, a journalist who wants not just to inform but to move people has to be, above all, a hunter of stories, and to respect facts and words. Is that right? Am I missing something?

– It’s hard to say. There are journalists who are good at handling facts, at accurate reporting. That’s complicated and very necessary. There are journalists who do wonderful interviews—I, for instance, am not good at asking questions. There are journalists who are talented specialists in a particular field and translate its complexity into accessible, engaging language—you do that. And there are some staggering turkeys.

In my opinion,

many people confuse journalism with the expectation that you “express a clear and categorical position.”

Not that it isn’t important, but it often turns into a clunky ritual of hammering things into people’s heads. In fact, everyone has a “clear and categorical position”—go into any forum and you’ll see nothing but clear and categorical positions. Perhaps a person should stay in tension, hesitate, wonder. There were some words to that effect—that the mark of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and still go on functioning.

– If a young person just entering journalism asked me for advice, I would first tell them to make sure they are completely, absolutely certain they see meaning in it. What would your advice be?

– In my view, to keep their distance, at least at first, from journalism as technique and speed. To devote themselves to the pleasures of the humanities—literature, history, philosophy. To notice that

sometimes at “the center of events” there are neither events nor a center.

To acquire an aesthetic sense—it leads to a civic one. To develop a sense of humor—there are a lot of funny things in this profession. And to try not to become a geopolitical analyst at the age of 23. If they catch themselves starting a sentence with “In China, processes are under way that…,” they should burst out laughing instead of finishing it.

– And is there really meaning in it?

– There’s a pressure on all of us that we absolutely must find ferocious meaning in everything we do. To be bursting with meaning, to be the big guys of meaning, like in bodybuilding.

Let’s say there is satisfaction. At moments.

– Clearly the media have a certain road to travel in order to be adequate to today’s challenges, to the way we search for and take in information today. How do you see that future?

– The media are in a difficult situation. On the one hand, they have a common boss—that boss is Silicon Valley and its algorithms. From below, they’re being undermined by fake news and the task of figuring out what’s true and what isn’t. Then you get assigned personal trolls—everyone has had one, a caps-lock villain. If you manage to cope with all these difficulties, at the end you hear: enough with this writing, everyone is on TikTok. As one comedian put it, I still don’t know what MySpace is.

But if we have to look for a solution for the media, I’d advise something else—retreat.

I mean it quite seriously: we consume far too much media content.

Simply a toxic amount. There’s a fine line by Thomas Jefferson—he says that if he had to choose between a man who reads only newspapers and a man who reads nothing, he would choose the second. That isn’t just a witticism aimed at newspapers. It’s about something else—that the media are a necessity, but if a person makes them the main thing they consume, they will suffer for it. Reading too much media dries out the mind. And the heart. So here is a recipe for media literacy—don’t overdo it. A person, if they see fit, can live without knowing who the minister is, what happened today, what will happen tomorrow, like in a book by Kazantzakis. That won’t make them a bad citizen. Maybe they’ll tell us about something we’re missing. That is my clear and categorical position.

Journalism isn’t valued today? I say it often, here in Digital Stories too, and yet there are plenty of arguments against it. Here is one huge, huge argument. Horned Joe—to a Bulgarian ear, Rogan sounds a lot like рогат (rogat, “horned”).

$200,000,000. That, it turns out, is what the notorious Joe Rogan got for his deal with Spotify. The creator of the most successful podcast, the man who certainly paved the way for the whole genre, is clearly highly valued by his employers, and with good reason. He is everyone’s favorite figure in the battle between anti-vaxxers and vaxxers, the “modern” and the “backward,” left and right, all those who envy him, are outraged by him or simply admire a strong persona.

So who, in the end, is this pleasantly dim-witted uncle who has gathered so many eyeballs… and millions? How did it get to the point where even the White House grew indignant with his employers because of him? And how is his story connected to the future of journalism? After all, at first glance he is anything but a journalist, right…

Dear Wayfarer

The answer to the last question is clear. Quite simply, he is creating it, the future of journalism, one way or another.

He says himself that he is not a journalist but “a stand-up comic, a mixed martial arts fan, a psychedelic adventurer.” He is 53 today, and before stepping into his current role he was a mixed martial arts commentator (and before that a fighter himself), a stand-up comic and a reality show host.

He holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. As an actor, he is a flat-out failure. He loves bow hunting for big game and pumping iron. The other thing he probably doesn’t love quite as much—stirring up fierce public clashes—but that is how things have turned out for him in recent months. Before the news from Ukraine swallowed the media stream, his case and Djokovic’s in Australia were the world’s favorite public battleground.

And so, Joe is the creator of the notorious podcast with the not-so-original name The Joe Rogan Experience, which has become the benchmark for the genre.

Elon Musk regularly spends several hours on it talking about the future, once even “assisted” by a joint handed to him by the host himself. Both the socialist Bernie Sanders and Jordan Peterson, a cult figure for the right, come on to give it to you straight, along with many other thoughtful people ready to change the future. Every cult appearance spawns a meme that all of us recognize today. Sometimes, however, crackpot conspiracy theorists show up too (or prophets and truth-fighters, as their fans see them). And it was precisely they who became the problem.

All Ears

Rogan was the favorite media figure; the Kevork Kevorkian—Bulgaria’s legendary television interviewer—of the modern Western world; Larry King without the suspenders and the intellectual air. Until he waded into the most fashionable battle, the one that has turned us against each other.

But we won’t throw ourselves into that battle; we’ll look for something more interesting instead. How did rough-edged Joe turn into such a successful venture, and what signals does this send about the future?

Two people sit in a room homely kitted out as a studio, chatting from topic to topic for hours, with no real script, no visual attractions. Very much in the spirit of the classic talk show of yesteryear, only without the commercials and without the time limits. Hardly anyone would have guessed that in our hyper-fast age, at the expense of the collapse of traditional media, this genre would emerge.

Suddenly it turned out to have so many fans that it was worth one of the world’s entertainment giants offering a gigantic sum to a self-taught journalist.

Millions of podcasts sprang up; even in Bulgaria a niche of sorts took shape, with some quality examples. And yet Rogan became the only globally recognizable face in the podcast world, across all positions and ages. Even before he became both Spotify’s spoiled child and the thorn in its side.

A Trained Ear

What makes the former combat sports competitor so interesting? Does he dazzle with intelligence, with charm, with a journalist’s knack for putting guests at ease?

His conversations are iconic because they are simple, direct and sincere. He is who he is, and he expects the same from his guests.

Joe knows how to talk and, even more, how to listen. To put the other person at ease from the very first moment, the way hosts once could, before earpieces sprouted in their ears.

And since we’ve started down the road of clichés, Rogan is definitely “a man of the people,” or downright a proletarian. He was born on August 11, 1967, in Newark, of Italian and Irish descent. His parents split up when he was 5, and from the age of 7 he was raised by his mother, losing all contact with his father.

He Who Has Ears, Let Him Hear

His family moved often. School wasn’t his strong suit, and from an early age he turned to sports. First baseball, then martial arts, which proved to be his true passion. He trained in karate and kickboxing. He won a state championship in taekwondo, but a series of injuries kept him from becoming a professional athlete. He never managed to finish college.

Today he hardly regrets it much. He and his wife Jessica, a former waitress, live in Texas on an estate worth $14 million. They have two daughters and are also raising together Jessica’s daughter from a previous marriage.

Who’s Afraid?

Before taking up his current calling, from 2001 to 2006 Joe was the host and trademark of the show Fear Factor. If you don’t remember it, this was the intellectual reality show in which contestants were challenged to compete by climbing to great heights, eating raw delicate parts of all sorts of beasts… and generally stepping into the role of beasts themselves in order to cope with the things they feared.

The host was ideal for the part, primal, strong… And yet the reality show quickly ran its course. His earlier career—as a stand-up comic, a Disney actor and… a singer—was far shorter and less successful.

As early as 1999, plans began for his own sitcom—The Joe Rogan Experience, with Warner Bros. The show was meant to be a natural extension of his stand-up recordings, but for one reason or another things dragged on, and the idea fell through after Rogan agreed to host Fear Factor.

Hear Me Out

One amusing story from 2005 is worth mentioning. Wesley Snipes, by then a star on the wane, decided to grab some media attention by challenging Rogan to an MMA fight. Joe agreed at once, and later said the fight had really been arranged. It never became clear what stopped Snipes, a black belt in Shotokan karate, from facing the jiu-jitsu master. The good thing is that nobody got hurt.

Back in the now distant year of 2009, Rogan had an unconventional idea that he decided to put into practice: to start recording his conversations with interesting people. Thanks to his earlier gigs, he happened to know quite a few curious personalities from various fields, and he made the most of it.

The first episode was recorded with his colleague Brian Redban and released on December 24. By August of the following year, the podcast had made the iTunes top 100. By January 2015, the recordings had been downloaded a total of 11 million times, and by October of that year downloads had reached 16 million a month.

Meanwhile he took on side projects too—he hosted another season of Fear Factor and started a show in which he explored topics such as Bigfoot and UFOs.

By Ear

For many years everything happened mainly on YouTube. Until he decided on a rather bold, but also logical, step, given the scale of the deal that became known afterward. On May 19, 2020, Rogan announced he had signed the notorious contract, under which, from January 2021, the show has run only on Spotify, with just short clips published on other channels.

Shortly after that, the problems began. Business interests are surely involved in them: Rogan’s show deprived the traditional platforms of considerable revenue, while his new hosts’ investment is said to have paid for itself many times over already.

Today The Experience has more regular viewers than all the current affairs programs of the leading American television networks put together. Its monthly listens reach 190 million.

Rumors

The turning point came when Rogan declared he would not get vaccinated. Then he went through a bad case of COVID and underwent a controversial treatment. The first serious attack came from CNN, which accused him of treating himself with a horse dewormer. Rogan produced documents showing he had followed a medical protocol and boasted that it had helped him beat the illness in just three days.

The scandal, however, broke precisely when the battle for and against vaccines was raging at full force both in Bulgaria and in the US.

The tension heated up further when musicians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell announced they were leaving the platform because it kept carrying Rogan’s show. Spotify didn’t need to think long about how to react: the journalist Ted Gioia calculated that a musician would have to rack up 23 billion streams on the platform to earn as much as Rogan. The figure is utterly unattainable.

His musing that if you are young and healthy there is no point at all in getting vaccinated stirred up particularly strong feelings. This is where the White House stepped in—its communications director Kate Bedingfield, appearing on CNN, remarked: “Maybe we missed the moment when Joe Rogan became a medical professional?” Anthony Fauci rebuked him and called his words irresponsible.

Two hundred seventy doctors sent a letter of protest saying Rogan was giving a platform to highly dubious guests. He apologized, saying he was simply looking for different points of view, which did nothing to satisfy his opponents. Clearly scandal still sells, because Spotify’s shares jumped 12 percent that same day.

A Tug on the Ear

The platform had clearly set itself the goal of dominating the podcast world, investing around a billion dollars in various projects over four years. And it turned out to be on the right side: its profit for 2021 grew by a record amount, beyond all earlier forecasts.

Joe Rogan holds on to his independence, choosing his guests and topics himself. His views are atypical and don’t fit into either of the two traditional American extremes. He supports same-sex marriage, universal basic income and the free circulation of soft drugs, but also everyone’s freedom to own a gun. Sometimes he says he will vote for Trump, sometimes for Bernie Sanders, because the man has stood by his ideas all his life. And in the end he admits he backed one of those fringe candidates we have never even heard of over here.

Of his own experience with the hallucinogen DMT, he told Rolling Stone that it is “f…ing billions of roller coasters plus aliens. It is what it is, I don’t know what it is. Is it a chemical gateway to other dimensions? A portal that souls pass through? I don’t think there are any negatives.”

Unheard Of

The show now has more than 1,780 episodes. It is a fact that since the scandal there have been noticeably fewer famous guests, but that is unlikely to last long. New conversations usually appear every two or three days, a much faster pace than at the start of the project.

Where does Joe Rogan himself find the explanation for his success? “My podcasts are just conversations. Often I have no idea what I’m going to talk about until I sit down and the meeting begins. Some of my ideas aren’t prepared or specific; I pick them up on the spot, but I give it everything I’ve got. These are just conversations, and I think that’s why people like the show.”

The success of podcasts surprised us all. Supposedly we have no time for long formats, we’re in a hurry, always in a hurry… and that is exactly where they shone at full strength. Because while we scroll, we actually… don’t think. We don’t focus, we don’t reflect.

At the same time comes the overload on our senses. Somehow we don’t feel comfortable doing nothing. While scrolling, we began to find ourselves an excuse if at least we were listening to something we considered meaningful. Somewhere around then came audiobooks.

And then, like a huge wave, podcasts. Some people sit and talk, or present meaningful audio content in some form. Video Killed the Radio Star, they said, video supposedly killed radio, and then radio crept up on it from behind, like in a silent film.

Ears for the Truth

So what of it? Apparently we are all tired of special effects and sometimes look for something else. Meaning, the message, the narrative, the story. The intonation, the moment, the right words. Leading well-known figures out of their gloss. That is the beauty of the podcast.

Roughly the way it happened with the meme. Supposedly everyone is after effects, and suddenly we started laughing at the same pictures repeated with slightly altered text.

If there is one person who embodies all the genre’s successes, it is undoubtedly Horned Joe.

“Today we can no longer imagine the life of the world community without the media. The danger is that the media, which have become a great power, have stopped dealing only with information. They have set themselves a more ambitious goal: they are beginning to shape reality.” The theorist of journalism Ryszard Kapuściński wrote these words almost 20 years ago, long before today’s media situation. And yet he seems to say it all about what Rogan does and how the media treat him.

We undoubtedly live in a time of rifts, widened by the chisel of boredom, struck hard with every scroll by the hammer of the filter bubble.

Heard the Gossip?

One of the main accusations the traditional US media level at Rogan is that he doesn’t choose his guests carefully, that he gives the floor to people without proven authority. But what is the criterion a journalist must have to judge that authority on his own? If, say, a journalist in Bulgaria faces the notorious topic of COVID, how exactly should he decide whether he can invite Prof. Ch. and Assoc. Prof. M., if they are undisputed specialists in immunology and infectious diseases? Which journalist, exactly, can judge in what way they are more competent than, say, professors of surgery? So far even their own professional guilds aren’t unanimous, so what do we do then?

The journalist is the convenient culprit. Everyone knows whom he should invite and how he should talk to whom.

It isn’t easy, nor can it be squeezed into a framework.

Just like Rogan himself. With the small difference that he does what he likes. For $200,000,000 and the love of millions of people.

The Walls Have Ears

As usual, attitudes toward him run along fault lines, but the most fashionable one has split off right where the vaccine needle went in. It is through that rift that attitudes toward the bow-hunting enthusiast pass. Even in Bulgaria you can quickly come across texts that flatter him beautifully as the brave fighter against corporate media or, conversely, call him a liar, a seasoned manipulator and a hunter of the gullible.

To me, though, he is simply a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

A time when people need a meaningful, human conversation with some of the great figures of our age. Not interrupted by laundry detergent commercials, as on the big media. Or by their dependencies—political, opportunistic or corporate. Not driven by speed, led into a doomed battle with social networks. But offering full-blooded portraits, painting meaningful stories.

And so what if he makes good money? So do far more “meaningful” TikTok influencers. And OnlyFans influencers. And all sorts of influencers.

While he simply invites people who have something to say and chats the way we used to chat with the neighbors, over cards or a beer, before Facebook came along.

Even so, the future of Rogan and his show looks bright, and brighter still is the future of the podcast genre. This week Digital Stories will be themed: on Friday, look out for an interview with one of the most popular and original Bulgarian podcasters. Who could he be, and what does he have to tell us about the future of the genre and of the way we get our information?

“That’s my only goal,” says Uncle Joe. “To surround myself with fun people, making sure everybody has a good time and works hard.” It may not be the deepest wisdom you’ll read today, but it resembles our hero—simple, clear and yet accurate.

Alexander Nikolov:

Distrust in the system is a natural reaction

Alexander (30) holds a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from the University of the Arts London and is a scholar of the Royal Photographic Society. He earned a master’s degree in the E-Europe program at Sofia University. He works as a communications expert at the Bulgarian Biodiversity Foundation. He is the author of the visual content of The Last Gift of Man.

– The Last Gift really impressed me. You and Dimitar took on a heavy subject like transplantation, deeply and for the long haul. The problems surrounding it in Bulgaria have seemed unsolvable for decades. Do you believe journalism today has the power to bring change?

– The honest answer is that we cannot bring about direct change, and we are perfectly aware of that. I have been doing documentary photography for a long time, studying different authors and projects. That is why

I think indirect change, the kind that leads to solving problems like this, is entirely possible.

My favorite example comes from Papua New Guinea, where there was a huge problem with violence against women. A photographer, Vlad Sokhin, went there and started working on the subject with real purpose. His book was published by Photo Evidence, whose editor-in-chief, Svetlana Bahchevanova, is also the photo editor of The Last Gift of Man. The book stirred outrage around the world, which in turn put pressure on the government. That led to changes in the law and far fewer cases of violence. A strong project can lead to real change once the public pushes for it. And that is exactly our goal. To stir things up somehow, so that people understand the scale of the problem and demand change themselves.

– Will it work?

– Our appeal is for more people to have this conversation at home, to tell their loved ones that, in the event of brain death, they agree to have their organs donated. That is the human side, and this is how we can somehow prepare society, or at least try to. Everything else has to be settled by those in power, who must reform the system. The steps are clear, and there are plenty of examples: Spain, Croatia, even Romania. Here we are at rock bottom.

– You say most people refuse to donate their relatives’ organs because of prejudice. Do you think these are the same prejudices that lead to distrust of vaccines, and to the general attitude toward medicine and science?

– Absolutely, but it is really distrust of the system. And that is normal, because when a person is robbed, oppressed, perhaps even deliberately kept in a state of weightlessness, with a sense that nothing can be done, this is the natural reaction.

People simply do not believe in the system. If someone from the government came out and said, “Do it, it’s good for you,” who would believe him?

Even extremely intelligent, sensible, educated people are against vaccines.

– I have interviewed people waiting for a transplant, and it is truly very hard; you can’t help feeling it with them. What gave you the strength to keep going?

– At first it was very unpleasant, but you go there as a journalist. You see things and you detach yourself; your mind does it on its own. Of course you live through it, however detached you try to be, there’s no way around it, and afterward there is post-traumatic stress too. But,

especially when shooting, once you put the camera in front of you, it becomes the barrier that protects you.

Shooting is a constant process of thinking and analyzing the situation. In that moment, all your brain thinks about is how to get the good shot, how to compose it, how to present the person in a way that won’t diminish their dignity.

The hardest were the people on the waiting list. Shooting transplants, or blood, has never been a problem for me. Several times in my life I’ve wanted to become a doctor; just two or three years ago I was thinking of dropping everything and giving it a try. But even when you think it wasn’t hard, especially after a kidney transplant, you lie down at night, close your eyes, and the photos start appearing behind your eyelids.

– Can anything truly new be invented in journalism?

– Globally, journalism never stops evolving. Innovation shows up both in form—podcasts, multimedia, games—and in the technology used, such as virtual and augmented reality. In Bulgaria we can hardly talk about global innovation; it’s more about adapting to our reality. Depending on the segment, Bulgarian media lag between five and 20 years behind.

– Is “slow journalism” the future of the profession?

– It is certainly not the only future, but it has a well-deserved place. Audiences will always need quick news to stay informed. Slow journalism, on the other hand, is

the format that invites the reader to settle in comfortably and immerse themselves in a complete experience

while exploring a subject in depth.

– And how can it be done in small media outlets and on a small market like Bulgaria’s?

– In a word, with heart. But also, with difficulty, through sponsorship, grants, reader support, crowdfunding. When you are not a news outlet and nobody expects daily output from you, the situation is more manageable and the pressure is lower.

That said, crowdfunding has never been a sustainable model for public media financing anywhere in the world. Many media initiatives have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on platforms like KickStarter, but not a single one has survived.

On the other hand, we are already part of the global internet market, and even though stories from a country like Bulgaria rarely spark interest abroad,

I believe that stories of value, which speak of universal human emotions, feelings, experiences and problems,

can find their way on foreign soil too.

– Why are there so few slow journalism projects in Bulgaria?

– One reason is underfunding. Slow journalism demands enormous resources and the dedication of a large group of specialists. At big media organizations, as many as 30 people sometimes work on such projects—journalists, photographers, camera operators, producers…

We all know the state of the media in Bulgaria. The top priority is survival.

– Would you advise young people today to go into journalism? I wouldn’t—here I explain why.

– There is no easy profession. But if a person believes journalism is something important, worth investing countless hours in, why not? My mother used to say it doesn’t matter what you do; if you strive to be the best at it, you’ll always make a living.

– Have you ever regretted taking on the project?

– We’ve had many hard moments of despair, a sense of helplessness, a feeling that it was all pointless, but we never gave up. One of the biggest blows came while we were looking for funding for a book, back when we still planned to release the project in print. A rather wealthy man with a publishing business turned us down. He said, “This is a story about death, and business doesn’t like stories about death.” We tried to explain that it was exactly the opposite—a story about life. Well, let’s hope we’ve managed to show that now.

– What will your next projects be?

– We’re starting with the climate, then the demographic crisis—heavy subjects. The climate, because that’s where much of my work is right now; we’ll try to tell it through ordinary people and their personal stories, more emotionally. And then the demographic crisis, which has been a dream of mine for a long time.

Dimitar Panayotov:

“It’s time we started learning critical thinking”

Dimitar (29) holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in the E-Europe program at Sofia University. He has been working on digital journalism projects for 10 years. He is the founder of Pod mosta (Under the Bridge), a culture and arts outlet, the editor-in-chief of the podcast Den (Day), and a producer at the Govori internet (The Internet Speaks) network. He wrote the texts of The Last Gift of Man.

– What kept you from giving up on the project over such a long time?

– The answer is prosaic: we are both extremely stubborn and persistent, and we find it very hard to give up on anything. At some point we had gone so deep into the subject that there was no way we could let it go. Many people were waiting for this story and counting on us—our families, our professors, and the people in The Last Gift of Man, for whom

organ donation is a matter of life and death.

– In The Last Gift, I was struck by your writing. The form is long, but you manage to keep your prose concise and tight. Was that deliberate?

– The text was actually much longer; it was supposed to come out as a book. I have 300 pages of raw material, interviews, ideas. All of that had to be cut drastically. The text is now relatively short given the subject and the scope of the story, but for the web it is quite long, taking 10 to 20 minutes per chapter. It sat and matured for a very long time, and many people read and edited it. Besides, I have experience as an editor myself.

To this day I work on one of the biggest culture and arts outlets in Bulgaria, Pod mosta. It grew into a business, and I was its editor-in-chief for eight years. More than 300 writers have passed through my hands in that time. We started as a student project with classmates from university. I became editor-in-chief almost by default. We began as a lark, and then the outlet grew; at one point we had a team of 20 to 30 people.

That experience helps me. It’s hard to be your own editor, but I know how to work with a text and how to clean it up.

– In your view, is educating people part of a journalist’s job?

– Journalists have many tasks, but educating people is not one of them. They themselves, of course, must be literate. But I don’t see literacy only as how you write and speak—that should be learned earlier, in the family and above all at school. To me, it’s a huge problem that, outside the most elite public and private schools,

media literacy and the cultivation of critical thinking are largely absent in Bulgaria.

I believe this is fundamental, and without such soft skills, however literate and high-quality the journalism we produce, there will be no one to see it. It’s no accident that we Bulgarians are so susceptible to fake news and conspiracy theories, and trust media and publications that are far from objective and factually sound.

– Do we need professional journalists? Or can anyone step into that role?

– Yes, of course we need them, because there are fundamental principles of journalism. It is a profession that is much more practical than theoretical. At the same time, without theory you get big gaps, especially in the ethical conduct of some journalists. Unfortunately, at least in my day, and as far as I know still today, journalism education in Bulgaria is not at the level it should be, above all in terms of practice and keeping up with the times.

– I completely share your view. Do you regret going into journalism?

– No, never.

– Which journalists inspire you?

– Many journalists who are impressive both as professionals and as people. I’d rather name the media outlets that inspire me, because of the way they develop their media products: Time, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post.

– Have people forgotten how to read long texts?

– That is a fact proven by many studies. The way we consume information has changed a great deal over the past ten-plus years. Everything is now in “short” form; everyone is trying to hold the audience’s attention, and there are thousands of outlets and channels of information. More and more people, however, are returning to

long-form journalism, which is sorely missing in Bulgaria.

– How do you see the future place of journalism in society?

– I don’t consider myself some kind of global visionary, but I work in this profession, and I think the future of journalism has many faces. Things are changing terribly dramatically and fast. If you had asked someone 25 years ago, very few people would have told you it would be the internet. And yet here we are. Until five or six years ago, no one would have guessed podcasts would be as successful as they are now.

I think we are already living in the future of journalism.

The formats we know and consume are already well established, but they will keep being refined.

Right now we have an endless number of media outlets, and I don’t think many of them will survive. Business models have changed, and people are looking for more reliable sources of information. I think the genres that exist right now will keep evolving.

– And where do you see technology fitting into all this?

– Media will evolve together with technology and will be closely tied to it.

It really matters whether they go hand in hand. There’s a lot of talk about augmented reality, about the metaverse. It still looks like science fiction to us, and I don’t know whether it will break through.

In recent years, so-called citizen journalism has become the norm: something happens, and even the big outlets share clips from Twitter and Facebook, while people on the spot stream it live. If at some point we have a metaverse and we’re all wearing the glasses, we’ll find ourselves right there. You won’t be watching clips, you’ll be there; it will be broadcast live in such a way that you’re inside the event itself…

In a matter of hours, the Facebook feed will turn into a string of sarmi—stuffed cabbage rolls, a Bulgarian holiday staple—and Christmas cards, and then it will fall silent like never before. We'll put our phones down for a while. Because we'll all be with our families on one of the few remaining evenings when tradition brings us together, even from the farthest corners of the world. With the people we don't choose ourselves, yet who matter most to us, whose happiness is our happiness too.

Christmas is no time for uncomfortable subjects, you'll say. This is the season when we should be talking about nice things, smiles and Home Alone. I, on the other hand, think uncomfortable subjects are often the most meaningful. And in this one, alongside the dark colors, there is also the finest, the greatest thing that can happen. The giving of life.

In this case, that is Posledniyat dar na choveka (The Last Gift of Man).

The multimedia project by Dimitar Panayotov and Alexander Nikolov is a deep, personal and exceptionally professionally told story. One worth hearing, reading and feeling right now… So that we stop and think: might today be the moment to have a heavy but important conversation, one that could save lives?

A Heart of Chestnuts

September 18, 2015. Almost as on Christmas, a family that hasn't gathered in a long time will be together at home that evening for the first time in ages. It's Friday, and the parents of 21-year-old Georgi are heading to work. That same day his older brother is due back from England, where the two of them study and live together.

Suddenly, Georgi feels ill. With his last strength, he manages to call his father. Then come the ambulance, a quick examination and a fatal diagnosis. A brain aneurysm, a hopeless situation that leaves the family facing a fait accompli. The young man is brain-dead. His parents and brother must quickly make a decision—whether they consent to his organs being transplanted.

The story is heavy, powerful and true, told brilliantly by Dimitar Panayotov's fine pen in the first chapter of The Last Gift of Man.

“As I listen to the recording of the interview with Nikolay, Georgi's father, I'm amazed at how calm and normal his tone is as he tells me about what happened. Suddenly, his voice stops. A silence falls, in which all you can hear is the background noise captured by the recorder and the whole family's attempts to hold back their tears. The gap in the recording lasts barely 20 seconds. Yet that silence, broken only by faintly audible sobs, is the most deafening thing I have ever heard,” Dimitar writes.

From the Heart

A story like this, sadly, happens less rarely than we'd like to imagine. This one, however, doesn't end there. Because, thanks to his relatives' wise decision, Georgi really does manage to save human lives. But we'll come back to that in a moment.

This sorrowful story has another outcome as well. Georgi's brother is brought face to face with the subject of transplants. He is studying photojournalism and sees in it a meaningful project, one that could change something real.

Georgi's brother is the photographer Alexander Nikolov, who at the time, in 2015, has just returned to Bulgaria. Dimitar Panayotov, a longtime friend, suggests they enroll together in the E-Europe media master's program at the Faculty of Philosophy of Sofia University. Dimitar has already gained quite serious experience in journalism. Almost as a joke, with fellow students, he has founded the outlet Pod Mosta (Under the Bridge), which slowly but surely grows into a widely read platform, one of the most meaningful spaces for culture on the Bulgarian internet.

The two decide to take on the project together, encouraged by their professor and mentor in the master's program, Prof. Neli Ognyanova. It takes a full six years to create The Last Gift of Man, until we arrive at today, when it is winning (entirely deservedly) one award after another. It moves anyone with a heart who opens the website. It impresses anyone who understands even a little about journalism and media.

A Transplant vs. a Sentence

As a journalist, I have written about transplants countless times, starting more than 15 years ago. One of the first sparks of hope that the profession still had real meaning flickered for me with precisely this subject. In the pages of the daily 24 Chasa (24 Hours), I had told the story of a boy raising money for a kidney transplant abroad, who, while he waited, consoled himself by following every bit of news about his favorite team, Levski, one of Sofia's big football clubs. A small detail, but it touched the club's fans, who organized a large-scale campaign and raised the money needed for the transplant.

Every small victory is a big one, every life is the most precious thing. And although technology is flying in every direction, in Bulgaria the number of people on the transplant waiting list hovers almost constantly around 1,000, and has done so for several decades. Operations have also dropped drastically in recent years because of the pandemic.

The number stays the same, but the list changes every day. Few get the chance at a new life; most people leave the list through the exit that awaits us all one day.

How can this change? Often someone gets the chance to raise money through a campaign and receive a new organ abroad. At home, however, things seem frozen. The state never takes concrete measures, and the country sits firmly in last place for the number of transplants. Only if the subject is talked about can something change. If more people come into contact with it.

What's more, very often, because of prejudice, the relatives of potential donors refuse. And so lives that could be saved simply come to an end.

Truth and Journalism

The two young men grow up, emotionally and professionally, as they walk the path of the last gift.

When they take on the project, Dimitar and Alexander are 23 and 24; they say that today they would hardly take on something so heavy. Over six years, they hold hundreds of meetings with people waiting for transplants, with doctors, with families. They shoot in eight hospitals, attend three transplants and “capture” one donor situation. They amass a huge volume of information and powerful stories. Their original idea is to make a multimedia project.

But they decide it's too early. They don't have enough experience in the field, and this kind of multimedia journalism was terra incognita for Bulgarian journalism in 2015 and remains so today. So the two decide to put together a book, which is a good deal easier.

But gradually the years go by, and they gain experience in the profession and in technology. “We said to ourselves: fine, we'll find funding, we'll print 500 books, half of them will be bought by our friends. And that way we won't change a thing,” Alexander recalls. So they return to the idea of a multimedia website.

They manage to win funding from Sofia Municipality's Culture program and find the right web designer in Ivan Ginev. And soon the first chapters are online.

Hearts and Chapters

The two put enormous effort into making everything look as good as possible, sound in meaning, aesthetics and technology. They have to make compromises—although they themselves have not taken and will not take a single lev from the project, technology has its price. And still, the website is remarkable.

I won't take up much more of your time before I finally invite you to go and explore it; you'll see for yourselves that it was worth it.

So far, four of the eight chapters have been published, and the rest will appear one by one soon. They examine the subject of transplants from every angle. Over these years, they have followed many stories. They meet people who know they won't see much more, because there is no hope for them. And others, sadly a minority, who receive the longed-for new chance at life.

Alexander and Dimitar are boldly moving forward. They have set up a foundation, Dokumentalistite (The Documentarians), to help them carry the project on with dignity. And then to take on the next huge subjects they have set their sights on. Personally, I can't wait to see the results; their ambitions are truly bold. Soon the journalists themselves will tell us about them, as I've invited them for an interview about the future of our shared profession and whether it still has the power to change things. About the challenges of their ambitious project.

Silent Night, Holy Night

Meanwhile… the main idea is for more eyes to see The Last Gift of Man. For people to learn about the subject and to have this so important and meaningful conversation with their loved ones.

And the end of the story of Georgi, Alexander's brother? It's a typical example of how things happen in Bulgaria. The man who receives his heart dies two years after the transplant; his body rejects the organ. The woman who received the liver dies on the operating table. The people who received the kidneys are alive today. Alexander is especially moved by one of the recipients, from a small town, who is completely healthy today, and it is her warm story, full of surprises, that will close the series.

In Bulgaria, there is no way for a person to leave a document stating that they wish their organs to be transplanted if they become brain-dead. The decision is made by their loved ones. All the major religions also support organ donation, provided it happens with the wishes of the donor themselves.

I myself had this conversation with my loved ones long ago, because I have seen both the will to live and the doom in the eyes of many people waiting for an organ. This conversation may not exactly make for a merry Christmas, but it will certainly make it a meaningful one. If you're wondering whether to have it too, or you're still gathering your courage… everything on the subject has been said in the best possible way here.

– In every interview you give, they ask you how on earth you decided to come back to Bulgaria. I'm more interested in something else, though: is it normal for us as a society to be so astonished by a decision like that?

– I really like it in Bulgaria. The biggest part of the dream of Western Europe and the States has to do with financial security. You feel that over there you run into fewer problems when you deal with bureaucracy, that there's less corruption. But realistically, those things don't affect us all that much. What I personally noticed in the States is that people work way too much. It's an entirely materialistic society, the closest to pure capitalism that a society can get.

At the same time, relationships between people, at least in my circles, stay on a superficial level. Here, when you have a kid, you go out to the playground, you meet 20 moms and the kids play together. In the States there's nothing like that; the option is a special arrangement, a “play date.” To organize one, so your child can play with another child, you very often wait for weeks. If you want to go out to a bar with someone, again you have to agree on it weeks in advance.

People are very busy with their own things, and society breaks apart into small circles.

That's very different from Bulgaria, where any friend can say on a Friday: “Let's go for a drink!” “Sure, let's!” “Let's call so-and-so!” “Sure, let's!” And suddenly there's a gang of 10 of you heading out to drink. Even if you don't know each other at all, somehow you click, you find similar things to talk about. It wasn't like that in the States.

– I've read you saying that for you the other big difference is the chance to take a break.

– Really, there's no social policy at all in that area over there. At The New York Times I had two weeks of vacation a year. Because they're a more traditional company, they also counted overtime hours.

In the 2 years I worked there, I racked up 60 extra days!

Finally I tell them: I want to take a little vacation. And they go: no, better take the money we owe you, but don't stop working.

That's great for people who don't have kids and a family yet. Being young and living in New York is amazing, you're always in the thick of things, you go out, you drink and you work again, you're on top of the world! But the moment our child was born, we realized how little this system supports family values, at least ours. My wife was working literally the day before Adi was born. Then I got 4 weeks of paid leave and she got 12, which for the US is among the highest. The state there guarantees you nothing, and most normal jobs give 2 to 4 weeks.

Can you imagine, man, she's given birth and two weeks later she's back at work?!

Then we had to send the child to a nursery, though it was more like a kindergarten. They gather a lot of kids, and all day long they scream, bawl and sleep. A bit like a child farm. It was tragic, and on top of everything, very expensive.

We're working ourselves to the bone, we come home, the child is crying, we feed him at night, then we're both back at work. The money—super, it was very good, but at the cost of what? So we came back to Bulgaria, and I'm very happy.

– After that, besides MasterChef, you also got involved in a few startups, right? Maybe Bulgaria is seriously lacking that entrepreneurial culture, the urge to start something from scratch?

– I have lots of startup ideas

and I've failed with 5 or 6 different businesses. That doesn't matter. The point is that I learn something new every time.

Yes, most people here have a kind of outdated mindset. One thing is that people are so cynical, they think there's no point in working hard, the result won't pay off for them anyway. They start with: enough work already, they'll pay me peanuts anyway, the boss will screw me over.

Very often there's no trust between the boss and the workers. And there are no dreams

—no sense that you can make something good, no wish to show it off. There are people like that, but not many. It's a fact that there are entrepreneurs, and the ones who are really serious do quite well. We already have successful startups that have raised some quite serious funding.

But that's how things are. We come back from the States and everyone goes: “Are you crazy! How can you come back! Can't you see the misery!” My parents were practically mad at me for several months. All our relatives and friends had that mentality at first. But now, over the last few years, you can see more and more people moving back to Bulgaria.

– Especially with a profession that pays a more “Western” salary, here you can live much better than the general standard.

– That's exactly it! Bulgaria has the lowest standard of living in Europe, and at the same time we have access to the European market. If you're a programmer, or in one of those professions where you can work remotely for a foreign company, your life is much easier. In the last 8 years, since we've been in Bulgaria, we haven't worked for a Bulgarian company either. Either on our own project or freelancing, but it's much easier and better. Europe in general is much more relaxed, everything is calmer and people are more reasonable.

– Do you ever regret leaving journalism?

– I don't like journalism today. Back when I started as an intern at The New York Times, I worked a lot on the topic of lying with data. The principles of “cherry-picking”—how people pick only specific sources of information, specific data that support their thesis. Today that happens very, very often, even in the highest-quality media, everybody does it. In my work I was very careful to follow the rules, to keep things balanced. If the data don't support your story, then it doesn't work! You don't manipulate them to make it fit.

That was just the beginning of everything that's happening now. Today cherry-picking is a very small part of the problem;

people literally lie however they please.

There are so many yellow and gutter media, and they lie mostly because otherwise they can't get traffic. They start screaming with headlines that have nothing to do with the content, because that's the only way they can go viral on Facebook.

And there's an explanation for that; it used to be different. A big part of the traffic went through news portals, and another part of people went straight to the websites of the media they liked, to read and dig for information. Ever since Facebook and Twitter came along, they've become monopolists of traffic; people hardly ever visit a media outlet's site, except through a story that gets shared. In my day the site held 70 to 80 percent of the traffic, and suddenly it dropped to less than 10 percent. You can no longer organize the news the way people used to read it; everyone only looks at Facebook. That's where the whole ecosystem of fake news came from, with all kinds of bullshit that people share. And the biggest media went behind paywalls, which is good, because they survive.

– Yes, but only big international media can afford that; it will never be an option for, say, Bulgaria.

– Yes, one newspaper here now wants 29 leva (about $17) a month from me. What kind of nonsense is that? I pay 4 dollars a month for The New York Times. But paying has another problem too. It means that a very large part of the real, decent content is shaped by readers' expectations. I mean, only the people who are willing to pay and who trust that outlet would pay to read it. And that outlet is expected only to confirm their expectations. I, for one, am not going to go for Fox News or Breitbart, right?

So, unfortunately, a very strong polarization is created in journalism. We have it here too: on one side the daily Dnevnik and Radio Free Europe, on the other the tabloid site Pik and others, and they just scream at each other. I'm a big fan of Radio Free Europe, but

I realize that news is now a very large part of the state's propaganda machinery.

Maybe I was very young and it's always been like that, but I see it as a very serious trend now. And I don't know what good it can lead to. We people today are very polarized and we split over all kinds of topics. There's only one opinion, and my opinion is always the right one—that's awful.

– As we discussed recently in an interview with Prof. Julita Vasileva, online communities today are at the level of fan mobs at a football match.

– And it's even worse when you think about it, that each of us is part of that wave.

– The conditions themselves force you to be. So how can we get out of this?

– I have no idea, honestly. I've talked to my former colleagues at The New York Times, pretty smart people, and they can't think of what could be done. The only option is for that respected, real journalism to gradually come back, journalism that's independent of the government, but also of the public. I mean, it won't be swayed by people, and at the same time it will be critical of those in power. But people are already so set in their ways that whatever you read goes through your own filter.

– That's how you end up in the filter bubble and stop looking for the other point of view for good.

– The only thing that could happen is for Facebook to collapse, or for it to be regulated to the point where it doesn't let all kinds of garbage through. It used to sound like a conspiracy theory, but after the revelations of Frances Haugen, who exposed Facebook's filtering process, it turned out they don't care at all. That they deliberately let through all sorts of fake and dangerous content, because then there are many more reactions. The fanatics who support Trump will buy T-shirts with “Make America great again,” and the left ones with “Black lives matter.”

I'm not smart enough to figure out how this could be fixed, but it's definitely a serious problem. And to some extent I'm glad I'm not in journalism.

– Are there technologies that scare you? Do you think artificial intelligence will bring us dangers too?

– Yes, but not at the level people like Musk keep threatening us with. A lot of people think artificial intelligence means creating robots that become so smart they'll conquer us, that they could reduce the population. I read a lot of science fiction, there are lots of theories. But for me personally, in the short term, within my lifetime, let's say, AI will harm us in a different way, the way Facebook is harming us right now—through manipulating who sees what. With those machine learning algorithms that filter the data and recommend things to you.

Before, you saw specific things you had chosen, and now the machine chooses for you, since there's so much information that no single person could possibly process it. But that brutally limits what you see.

These algorithms are optimized for businesses, for more visits. To get you hooked.

After that they only reinforce your beliefs, because nobody wants to read things that contradict what they believe. My point is that these machines will let what's happening now become more extreme. They'll turn people into extremists, push them to take more radical positions—you're either for vaccines or against them. That leads nowhere good.

– What language do you think in?

– Mostly English, but since I've been living in Bulgaria for 8 years now, I've gotten used to switching some expressions into Bulgarian. But when I write something, it's first in my head in English, and then I start translating it into Bulgarian. Lately I've started thinking in Bulgarian too, but Vietnamese doesn't show up, heh-heh. I speak it with my parents, but with them we talk about more general things.

– Where did the nickname Vunyo come from?

– It's a total joke. I often hang out online with a group of people, pretty funny ones, from all different walks of life, you know them: Annie the Goat, the Flying Goatzilla, all people who aren't on Facebook under their real names but just put up some silly moniker. And since I'm now the representative of all sorts of Asian communities, some half-Bulgarian guy of Asian origin, at first they called me a Mongol, a Chinese guy, a Filipina, Baba Vanga—the famous blind Bulgarian clairvoyant. And I can't remember who suggested “Vunyo” as a tease, and I decided—that's what I'll call myself. Besides, I don't want the people I work with to find me on Facebook, because if they saw the nonsense I post…

– Are Bulgarians racist?

– Oh, not to the extent Americans are. In Bulgaria there's racism on a superficial level. You obviously haven't seen these people, you don't know them, you're stuck with the stereotype that Roma are lazy and the Vietnamese eat dogs. But that's not hatred; it's more that these people are different and do things that don't fit our culture. It's not even so much “I don't like them” as simply “they're different and they scare me.” Whereas in the States a big part of society has a genuine superiority complex. The evangelicals, for example, are very serious racists; they treat Black people literally like slaves, they think they're stupid, monkeys, that they can't cope with work.

But it's not just them; that sense of superiority is everywhere over there. Even with a lot of decent people I've talked to, I tell them: “Look, in Europe people don't think about Americans that way, nobody considers them the saviors of the planet, the greatest heroes; on the contrary, people actually think Americans aren't particularly smart, not particularly educated, and have big egos.” And they go: “What do you mean! If it weren't for America, there'd have been no one to save the world in the First World War, then in the Second World War, then to protect Europe from Russian aggression!”

They have such brutal propaganda that they can't even realize their country is as much a part of the problem as it is the solution. Their nationalism is far stronger than in Bulgaria. Here we have some wannabes who talk like nationalists, while Americans have traditions. Society here is much more diverse, with different opinions and nuances, whereas in the States people are boxed into the same frames, the same stereotypes.

– You told me that you became a programmer because you made a bet that anyone can become one. Do you really think that's true?

– Well, not literally anyone, but I think a large part of people have the potential to work in this field. Because information technology isn't just programming; you have, at the very least, different kinds of design, systems engineering, networking. Or testers, for example—you don't need to study all that much to be good there.

If you have the desire, you can start easily. But

in our field, at least that's how I see it, people who think outside the box are more in demand.

Don't expect to do the same job 20 years in a row, like in some factory. You have to upgrade yourself pretty often to stay relevant, especially if you're a back-end or front-end programmer or a designer. If you don't learn, no chance, man! As a developer I've changed stacks, the technologies I work with, 4 or 5 times. You constantly have to get used to new things. Our profession needs people who are willing to change and to learn. And that's where the mindset comes in, whether you're smart or not. Mental ability isn't just pure math; what matters more is your desire to progress. That's what defines whether you're good in this profession or not.

– You must often read a news story that sounds like Not!News. Do you have any funny examples?

– Every day. Whenever something absurd pops up in the country or around the world, people start messaging me and tagging me with either “I didn’t know you worked for outlet X now” or “these guys stole your job.” I’ll use this lofty platform to declare that it’s annoying, and I’m writing down on a little slip of paper everyone who does it.

– Which piece of Not!News did the most people take for real?

– I don’t know. Fooling people isn’t my goal.

My first goal is to cheer them up by refracting reality through Not!News.

My second goal is to get them to start checking the sources of the information they read and not to trust too readily, even when they come across something that panders to their attitudes and views. And my third goal is to use the 25th frame and a particular arrangement of punctuation in my texts to manipulate the world’s population so that all the french fries end up being mine.

– Has a piece of Not!News ever predicted the future? Has something you joked about become fact?

– Yes, to some extent it happens fairly often. Sometimes the “predictions” are rather convoluted, like Nostradamus’s—we can fit current events to old posts. But there are very specific ones too. For example, in the spring CSKA, one of Bulgaria’s biggest football clubs, appointed Lyuboslav Penev as coach, and a few days later I wrote that he had failed to win a single game (because there hadn’t been a match) and they had fired him to bring in Stoycho Mladenov. Well, the switch did happen a few months later.

– If it were up to you to make one piece of Not!News you’ve written come true, which would it be?

– There are many. But I’ll name a recent one—Fandakova, the mayor of Sofia, hires Borisov, the former prime minister, as a security guard at City Hall because his money has run out.

You won’t believe it! It turns out vaccines…

don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays.

– I think you’re the best person to ask: which topics get Bulgarians worked up online?

– Several a day.

We may not be good at multitasking at work, but at following and being experts on several things at once, we are magnificent.

I can discuss influencers’ nose jobs, the rescue operation for a stranded ship, cryptocurrency fluctuations and the vaccine issue in the time it takes to drink one morning coffee.

– In that sense, are there any topics on which we don’t feel competent enough?

– No.

The more incompetent we are, the more competent we are.

Think how often we see a comment that begins with the words: “I don’t really understand this and I hope I’m wrong, but….”

– And which topics make us curse most furiously?

– Mostly we curse in our heads. Next—when the target of the curse can’t hear. After that—when they can hear but can’t answer back, say if they’re playing a match and we’re in the stands, or we’re passing him or her in our cars. We rarely curse face to face, and then we make sure we have numerical or qualitative superiority. For example, a little while ago I cussed out a stink bug.

– I think we’re very far behind when it comes to online jokes. Apart from you, the rest is almost all imitation. Even the “Classic Bulgarian” meme is a Serb. Why? Is that just what online humor is like, standardized, uniform, or are we not creative enough?

– Unfortunately, the tendency to be imitators or, at best, to adapt something to local taste isn’t limited to humor. It’s in the arts, in cooking, in architecture. But I don’t agree that there’s only me or that I’m anything special. The point is that

many people give up on making something of their own, since it’s faster and cheaper to copy

or to take something foreign that has already achieved the desired result, and you really risk a lot less. And I’m an idiot who still insists on sharing dumb jokes that only I get. But they’re mine.

We won the Nobel Prize in Literature! The author…

copied Mark Twain and signed his own name.

– Can you explain why online people love reading horoscopes so much?

– Because they’re the children and grandchildren of offline people who love reading horoscopes in newspapers.

– Does real news have a future?

– Of course. We live in times when there is more real news than ever, at least in quantity. In two minutes we can find out what’s happening in some godforsaken town in Chile. The problem, though, is that

the media developed too fast, and we haven’t built up habits of our own

to help us judge what’s true, what’s a half-truth, and what’s been taken out of context to serve a particular end. Even I sometimes get fooled or fail to look at something critically enough, even though sifting, sowing and fabricating quasi-news is literally what I do.

– Are there people you respect too much to put them in a Not!News bulletin?

– I don’t think joking and respect contradict each other. Let me start from afar—people respect their parents, their family, their close friends most of all. And I, at least, joke about all of them. True, most of the people who become the subject of Not!News are strangers to me, but

I always ask myself—would I say what I’m writing to the faces of the people I’m writing about? And my answer is yes.

I realize that some public figures, most of them in positions of power, may feel slighted at becoming the target of satire, but I usually take my cue from the news. And most of those cues are produced by them.

Jesus is Bulgarian! The facts prove it:

He doesn’t like Bulgarians and is better appreciated abroad.

– Why aren’t you in politics?

– I haven’t yet run my own life in such a way that I could step out and say: “Look what I’ve achieved, let me run your lives too.”

– You write about “the news as it could have been,” but it seems to be more from the point of view of what you wouldn’t want. If it really were up to you, what would “the news as it could have been” look like?

– It would be naive to say I imagine a world embroidered with honesty, joy and kindness, with no natural disasters, illness or suffering. But if someone weighed down by the real news reads one of my posts and starts looking at life and the world around us with a pinch more cheer, let them buy me a beer.

– What would you write if you weren’t writing Not!News?

– Last year I published a book of absurdist and science fiction stories, Garvanat, koyto mozheshe da spira vremeto (The Raven Who Could Stop Time). Now a more substantial literary effort on my part is on the way: a novel about homegrown, and not only homegrown, mythological and fairy-tale heroes.

– That will be quite something to read! You’ve gained plenty of experience in that direction… You’ve been creating Not!News since the early Paleolithic, since 2009. Which topics have vanished from the media stream in that time, and which have taken their place?

– It’s normal for all sorts of topics to rise and burn out over a dozen years. Very often they rise again like a phoenix, but

for several years now nobody has restarted the debate on smoking indoors

and I hope to use this platform to remind the TV channels to invite guests to have a row over it, because you can’t live like this.

Plot twist! An artificial intelligence found out it was Bulgarian… and immediately explained how things really work in the world.

– Have people become at least a little more literate in the way they get their information over that time?

– They’ve become more confident in their literacy.

But at the moment we’re seeing a kind of collective information puberty

—when someone settles on a particular station and mindset, gets angry at everyone else, and no form of reason can convince them that they’re not entirely right. The good news is that after puberty there are several more phases, and shortly before collective senile dementia we’ll be in brilliant shape for taking in information.

We’ve made a deal with the Macedonians! They won’t drink on days whose names contain Ъ, the Bulgarian letter missing from the Macedonian alphabet.

– So will audiences eventually learn, en masse, to check information? Or will they give up trying?

– It’s possible. Maybe in a generation or two, once those of us who consumed traditional media in their old, pre-internet form have died out. Not that there was no disinformation or sloppiness back then. But back then the trust lay in the fact that someone who was being paid for it had selected, checked and reported. Now we have to learn that the media are racing for clicks, and the mass click isn’t all that influenced by the quality of the information.

– In that sense: do you believe the media have a future?

– Yes, until someone invents another tool to satisfy our thirst for gossip, our urge to be connected, our curiosity, our desire to explain to ourselves what has happened to us and why, and what lies ahead. Our media have already caught up in speed, so they connect our entire present world instantly.

But the discovery and settlement of new worlds lies ahead

and it will be interesting to see how that affects them.

The first day on social media has been recorded without anyone… sending you an old joke.

– Do you think this topic is connected to the “great success” of vaccination in Bulgaria?

– Our low rate comes from our extreme distrust of institutions. And that comes from the fact that

institutions here are either corrupt, or sloppy in their work, or fail to communicate properly.

Often all three. We’re more inclined to trust a dubious potion with unclear ingredients, recommended by a friend of a friend who bought it from an old woman in Gigintsi, a village near Sofia, and gave it a good review, than our health institutions, which contradict each other anyway.

– Will the day come when you publish a piece of Not!News and nobody takes it for real?

– No. There is

a special type of person with a strange fetish for not reading even the headline to the end before rushing to comment.

I’m just looking for a way to capture their energy and turn it into electricity, so I can get even richer than I’ve already gorged myself.

A Bulgarian startup set off… 100,000 triple-bang firecrackers to push the Earth farther from the Sun and avoid Global Warming.

– Which media outlets are your biggest “competition” in creating Not!News?

– The other media are my inspiration, not my competition. I hope that someday there’ll be a news parody here in Bulgaria I can compete with over who comes up with the funnier take. It would do me good, because at times I get rusty.

– How do you always manage to find a sense of humor even about news and topics that visibly anger, infuriate and depress you?

– I’d go mad otherwise. Or maybe I already have. But in reality, whether I get worked up over everything or take it with a smirk makes no difference at all—Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide in about 4.5 billion years, and that will certainly mess up the belongings of a lot of people rushing out the door because they’re late.

Exposed! The creator of Not!News is… about to give birth to a badger.

– Where is the line between a sense of humor and rudeness online?

– Sometimes there isn’t one. We don’t even need to look at a case where A jokes about B. A and B can both be watching C’s joke, and A laughs for three days while B doesn’t like it, finds it in bad taste, takes offense, threatens to sue, takes up arms and begs his God to do something, because if He keeps sitting idle over this joke, B will have to personally wipe out half the planet.

– You never advertise anything… how do you monetize your success as an influencer?

– I go through the Commercial Register and tell every company that I’ll film myself smearing their products or services on my bare belly button on my OnlyFans channel. They don’t even check that I have no such channel and immediately shower me with money.

– Jokes aside, who are the meaningful Bulgarian influencers?

– There is no such animal as a meaningful influencer.

Either you’re famous because you do something, can do something, know something and are somebody, or you’re famous for being famous.

– Isn’t it time for Not!News to conquer the world?

– That will happen when we discover an alien civilization to which we’ll sacrifice influencers so they won’t eat the good people.

– I have to admit that there aren’t many people with disabilities around me, and when I do interact with someone, I really want to avoid hurting them in any way. But it’s hard to find the balance.

– It all comes down to the fact that people have built an image of those with disabilities as very vulnerable, fragile beings. In my view that is a myth, fed by the “victims” among people with disabilities. The normal approach is to ask early on in the conversation whether the person in front of you has any uncomfortable topics they don’t want to talk about. If they say no, there should be nothing to worry about.

Lately, to overcome hate speech, political correctness has been introduced, with its whole cushioning apparatus of expressions. But everyone knows that

the strictest guardians of this style are hypocrites who deliberately twist their thoughts so that they sound acceptable.

In that sense, it is far better to be frank and call things what they are. Even if at first a person with a disability asks the other person to spare them, later on the hypocrisy will weigh on them and make them suffer. If someone doesn’t want to talk about a particular problem of theirs, it means they haven’t outgrown it, haven’t fully understood it, are ashamed of it. These are exactly the people who need to be told frankly that the fault is not in them, that they are not to blame for their situation. That there is a place on Earth for them, too. That their illness or disability is a part of them they shouldn’t deny, because that would only be punishing themselves.

– Many families still decide they can’t care for children with disabilities and hand them over to specialized institutions. Can that ever be the better option?

– My parents were offered that too, but they refused. I’m grateful to them for it. Nothing can replace a family environment. I love my mother, my father and my older sister beyond measure; they will always be people I can count on and who can count on me. I say this knowing how painful it may sound to children without parents. The hardest thing for them is that they haven’t received as much love as it takes to be able to give of themselves later on.

By abandoning a child, a parent brands it as unwanted for life. It’s important that all of us as a society create a friendly environment for these children, that we don’t treat them as “the poor things” we toss a few leva, Bulgaria’s currency, to on holidays and at charity concerts. Empathy will save the world.

As for the question itself, however paradoxical it sounds, sometimes the institution can be the more acceptable option. I know people with disabilities who were abused and mistreated by their parents as children, and others who were completely ignored at home and left to grow up on their own. I had classmates like that, too, and when I heard their stories, I could appreciate what a happy child I was. But there is no clear-cut answer. It all depends on the people who raise you. With one difference: if they are your parents and they treat you badly, it hurts much more.

– If you have a child one day, what is the most important thing you’ll want to teach it?

– To see. To be able, with its eyes closed, to understand what the person in front of it is like, what they think, what mood they’re in.

But never to close its eyes to the important things that can be seen even without sight.

To value beauty in people and to strive for it itself. Not outer beauty, which is so fleeting and fragile, but the kind that springs from within and ennobles a person.

– Has technology made the world more accessible for people with disabilities?

– Of course. And it keeps getting more accessible. As the possibilities grow, so do users’ demands. Work on accessible technology began a long time ago, back when the first audio recordings of books were released in the United States. Few people know that we have audiobooks and e-books thanks to visually impaired people, whose organizations were looking for ways to make more literature accessible to them. Braille is too expensive to produce and harder to reproduce. After books came speech synthesizers and screen readers.

Blind people are probably the group of people with disabilities for whom the most has been done in technology.

Thanks to them, today we have not only programs that read aloud what a person types or what the cursor passes over, but also apps through which you can give voice commands for all sorts of functions, including translation into a foreign language.

Artificial intelligence has yet to expand the possibilities. Today we have systems activated by eye gaze that serve people with speech and motor impairments, and quite recently a brain was successfully connected to a computer. So even

people with the most severe disabilities, if they can form a clear thought, will have a way to tell it to the world.

And also to take in from it things that were previously beyond the reach of their minds and senses.

– Are there any downsides that come with them?

– The dangers in this area for people with disabilities are the same as for everyone. Less movement and exercise, a declining ability to concentrate on anything at all, a sense of boredom and depression caused by the endless array of goods, services and lifestyles paraded on social media that we can’t afford… I can speak mostly about blind people. In Bulgaria, as in many other countries, there is a retreat from braille. It has been proven that when a person takes in braille by touch, they remember far more than by ear.

Today almost everything on the internet is accessible through talking programs, and most blind people use them at a high reading speed. What’s more, the programs are designed to produce speech as close to the real thing as possible. Reading from the earliest age only through a computer or phone significantly reduces language literacy. The program sometimes hints at spelling mistakes by reading words with a pointedly wrong pronunciation. Although that’s useful when composing texts on a computer, it doesn’t help students build good habits.

This is a general trend with writing through technology, which I can confirm from my position as a teacher of Bulgarian language and literature. And here it is among blind people, too. Other dangers technology holds for people with disabilities include addiction to the internet and social media, and the lack of live communication, which leads to mistrust.

– What are the most common online mistakes that make access difficult for blind people?

– In recent years the European Union and other international institutions have been working hard to introduce uniform accessibility rules for the entire online environment, based on established standards such as HTML for web pages.

The greatest responsibility lies with public websites—those of state institutions, major media, banks and agencies, retailers. In Bulgaria there are positive examples of corporate responsibility, but we are still lagging behind. This is especially true of state institutions, whose technological apparatus is still very far from the latest trends. The main problems blind people run into are codes embedded in images, information presented as graphs and charts, pages that constantly refresh and shift around, pop-up windows, inaccessible forms, the lack of shortcut buttons and heading links…

And since we were talking about reading, digital libraries are also problematic, because adapting a book for barrier-free reading demands a great deal of responsibility toward the content. That means correct formatting, clearing out visual objects, fixing scanning errors, clear pagination, simplifying tables and diagrams, creating alternative text formats.

– What do people with disabilities in Bulgaria need most today?

– Oh, I can’t generalize like that. They need what all people need—better education, better healthcare, a better-organized social system.

– As a nation, we seem to love complaining, and about trifles at that. Do you think so too?

– It’s a pan-Balkan syndrome. In my view it’s a consequence of the slave mentality left over from five centuries of Ottoman rule, in which we hand our responsibilities to others. And then we demand unlimited rights and privileges from them. We want someone to take care of us, feed us, watch over us, teach our children, pay us big salaries, give us an extension on every commitment and a treat for every good deed. And, if possible, without us doing anything to earn them.

This is the psychology of the victim who doesn’t want to take matters into their own hands. For the victim, being dissatisfied is normal; it feeds on that, it gives meaning to its existence and defines itself through it; it has inherited this way of seeing the world from its parents, from its surroundings. Combine that with the growing detachment and inhumanity of the urban environment, where everyone is shut in their shell and lives without a thought for others, and you get a rather unpleasant mix. In rural areas you can still sense, here and there, a feeling of community and people’s ability to work well together for shared causes.

Our inability to think and work together shows at every level, reaching all the way to the highest one, political representation.

– As someone with considerable experience in the media by now, do you think they have a future in their current form?

– Today there are all kinds of media, and each has its audience. A small readership shouldn’t render a media outlet’s existence pointless. But there is something that deeply corrupts the whole environment. It feeds on advertising, which in turn chases audiences. If more media had stable funding regardless of traffic, that would open the way for a lot of information that currently doesn’t reach people.

The political and economic ties of many media outlets in our country complicate things further.

But what you read and listen to, and what you believe, is your personal choice and responsibility.

People are free to form their opinion of any public process based on media content. But they are also free to decide which content aims to manipulate them and pull them away from the facts, and which aims to bring them closer. So the media have a future, but whether objective journalism will keep holding its ground in this polluted information environment, I can’t say.

– You put a lot of effort into your blog, and you have many interesting pieces there. What motivates you to do it? And are blogs actually media?

– In this space of social networks, every person is already a medium. When writing a blog, one of the author’s goals is to inform through it. Even I, when I create content, research and cross-check many sources so that it’s reliable. And when I say that, I don’t mean opening “Wikipedia” and reading two results Google turned up. On the contrary, I’m talking about very extensive searches, reading dozens of sources, asking people, checking every date and every fact. If something turns out not to match, I correct it. That’s responsibility toward the audience. I wouldn’t like it to consider me a liar and someone who bends the facts to suit himself.

The effort I put in doesn’t weigh on me. It enriches me and opens new horizons. If I didn’t find it interesting and enjoyable, I wouldn’t do it. My blog is the result of something that built up over time; it’s not a passing whim destined for a short life. My ambition is to complete a ten-year program I’ve set myself. Since I consider music one of my greatest strengths, I think I owe more information to everyone in that world whom I respect, and to the audience as well.

– Are there things you dream will become possible thanks to technology?

– There’s nothing left that technology does beyond my dreams anymore. I recently took part in an international project aimed at finding a technological solution for more accessible transport in Sofia. The idea we unanimously agreed to develop was a mobile app. It will be accessible to people with various disabilities, will inform them about the accessibility of every route in the capital and will show how to get quickly from one point to another. And this can absolutely happen in Bulgaria; it’s a matter of organization, technical expertise and a clear brief that involves the people who would use it.

– Which technologies are you most eager to see change our future?

– Elon Musk has lately been doing research in which the brain sends signals directly to a computer. Right now we joke a little about chips and about conspiracy theories claiming that everyone will be controllable through tiny devices implanted in their heads.

I don’t know what awaits us. But even if it’s the worst-case scenario, I believe that humans, as the final stage in the evolution of living species, are called upon to bring this natural cycle to some kind of end, after which something entirely new will follow. What that will be, we can only guess.

– Are you thinking of returning to singing? Of continuing your education in that direction too?

– I’ve never stopped singing. I’ve had dozens of performances recently, despite the pandemic. I’ve started a new project to set up a recording studio where I can fully develop my creative ideas. Music is my greatest love. When I have the chance to pass it on to people in the way that is most expressive for me, I will, even if it isn’t soon.

– And what do you want to write from now on?

– Writing is not an end in itself, and it brings no satisfaction without some higher motive. I find it hard to publish fiction, because the responsibility in writing it is enormous, and I also want my fiction to be realistic, closer to reality. Yes, Umberto Eco says books aren’t written to be believed but to make people think.

I don’t know if I’ve matured enough to write in a way that pushes people to develop their capacity for thought. So for now I’ve turned my attention to music journalism mixed with a personal element. That is also the basis of my blog, which I launched at the beginning of 2021. I’ll gather the best articles from it in a book whose aim will be to present the examples of this art that inspire me most.

– Which writers inspire you?

– It’s hard to give a short answer. It would be the same if you asked me who my favorite musicians are. One may play well, another may sing incredibly, a third may write amazing arrangements. Likewise, in writing there are masters of dialogue, of philosophy, of the crime novel.

If I named names, it would mean recommending them, and I’m all for free reading.

The more a person reads, the better they shape their taste and their ability to choose. So not a single minute spent reading is wasted. Still, I would mention one author I recently revisited with pleasure: Irwin Shaw and his classic Bread Upon the Waters. When I say master of dialogue, he’s the one I mean.

– What is the best thing about the Bulgarian language?

– I’ve thought about this question a lot. The best thing about it is that it carries an entire national culture. That culture may change over time, but at its core it is a legacy of more than a thousand years. Language is what binds us to our roots most decisively. Neither beliefs and customs nor everyday life and crafts—nothing has managed to endure through time the way language has. Because

language is not something static; it changes, adapts things to itself, or adapts itself to the world.

It reveals how far a national culture manages to integrate what is universal and supranational, and at the same time what it manages to preserve in this constant process of exchanging information.

Someone who is online every day doesn’t read on paper, right? Little by little, books, newspapers and magazines will all disappear… Not so long ago there was plenty of debate about whether such a trend really existed. At the start of the 21st century, “Will the mouse eat the book?” became a favorite cliché for describing the phenomenon. The “catchphrase” was born in 2001 as the essay topic of the written university entrance exam in journalism at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.”

Yes, it is a fact that the digital present is forever changing the way we read and take in information. And yet, to what extent has the internet swallowed us? Have we really stopped reading books? Have newspapers turned out to be unnecessary? We turn to the official data on the portal of the National Statistical Institute to look for patterns and interesting trends.

Paper letters or digital ones—which won? Did they even go to battle?

Of Mice and Threads

Let us head into the strict world of figures. We examine the data available from the free public portal of the National Statistical Institute, covering the last two decades. For the analysis we use Jupyter Notebook and scripts written in Python. (You’ll find the technical side of the processing here.)

The NSI portal lets you download quite a variety of data with different parameters. Still, the data are not always perfect: in places, substantial samples are missing, and little is known about the specific methods used to generate a given statistic.

The first table, and the key one for our purposes, tracks trends in internet access overall and among individual groups, based on various demographic characteristics. To be precise, it measures the change over the years in the percentage of people who use the internet every day or at least once a week.

A Mouse on the Rise

Pretty clear bars. Over recent years, the percentage of people who go online at least once a week has grown slowly but without exception. The increase over 16 years is truly huge. (Unfortunately, we lack good enough statistics on how the average time spent online has changed, which would be rather interesting.)

What do things look like if we look at the individual regions?

In black you see the averages, above which the red line clearly rises. That is Southwestern Bulgaria, where the statistics include Sofia. Nothing surprising; the only surprise may be how much this region stands out. The average age of the population, which is considerably lower in the capital, surely has something to do with it.

At the other pole, in blue and just as unsurprisingly, stands the Northwestern region.

If we isolate “the poorest region in the European Union,” as another cliché goes, the statistics broadly follow the general trend, albeit with a few anomalies. The drops in 2012 and 2015 are hard to explain. The third drop, in 2020, is even stranger, since we have all grown used to believing that in the first coronavirus year people flocked online en masse—and also went back to their hometowns. So why does the number of people with internet access in Northwestern Bulgaria fall?

Trends in internet access hardly change with gender. Men are ahead, but only marginally, in every single year.

A Book for Every Mouse!

This brings us to the first comparison in which there is serious divergence between the groups. Especially in the first years of the millennium, the percentage of university graduates with daily internet access grows dramatically. After that, growth among the three groups, divided by level of education, stays similar; the gap is more of a starting one.

It is also worth noting the increase among the least educated over the past two years, probably linked to the changes imposed by the pandemic.

Quite as expected, the differences by age are substantial.

In the first years of the new century there is very strong growth in the number of people who use the internet daily, and the younger the group, the more dramatic it is. After that, the trends hold steady. The slower growth in the oldest group covered by the statistics stands out. Nor should we overlook the fact that the span of the data (16 years) includes a change of generations. Someone who was 24 in 2004 is already 40 in 2020.

It is hardly surprising that the percentage of people online is much higher among the young and those in education, and drastically lower among the older and the unemployed. The digital world is closely tied to inequality, and we will soon devote a special piece in Digital Stories to the subject.

Among students, the percentage grows dramatically in the early years of the period, which is also connected to generational trends. Among the employed there is strong growth in the first years and more gradual growth after that. The fluctuations among the unemployed are interesting, especially in the last year. On the one hand, they may be due to the fact that many people landed in this group from sectors hit hard by the pandemic. Others may have become convinced that the online world offers more opportunities for professional growth.

Mouse by Mouse, a Book

Let us see how the trends in print publications changed over the same period. First we look at the total circulation of newspapers published.

This chart needs little commentary. After 2012, circulation collapses drastically and unambiguously.

Clearly this covers all publications, regardless of how often they come out. Dailies, which are also the most popular, decline fastest after 2011, but the trend is obviously general.

Let us check how things stand in terms of the number of titles—how many different newspapers come out each year.

The trend is obvious here too.

We overlay the two trends—newspaper circulation and the number of newspapers—and see quite clearly which way the arrow points.

And what about magazines? They are a different type of media; will the decline be just as dramatic?

After an interesting rise in 2015 (which probably has some explanation that escapes me), here too we see a fast and dramatic decline.

The trends for the two main types of print media are entirely alike.

So… will the same hold true for books?

A Book with a Trim

The situation is visibly different from that of periodicals. 2018 is an interesting peak, and the trend is clear. Then comes an understandable dip over the last two years, in which, however, the circulation of published books still stays higher than it was 15 years ago!

Evidently, book publishing has not only held its ground but grown!

And if we look at the number of books published, the growth is even more substantial and doesn’t stop even with the pandemic. Anyone who wants to, publishes… And apparently there are people to read them, too.

What does the data look like if we compare the trends for newspapers and books by circulation (in thousands of copies)?

And so we see the encouraging red line and the much sadder (for people who love print media) black one.

So it is now clear: more and more Bulgarians have internet access. The circulation of periodicals has collapsed over this period. What could the reason be? Is there any way to prove a link between the two trends?

I download quite a few tables from the NSI; the closest in subject turns out to be the one on the reasons for using the internet for personal purposes. It contains over 30 indicators, but nobody thought to add one for the internet as a source of information. What’s more, for many of the years the information is missing or incomplete.

A Carefree Mouse

So we are left to trust our intuition that online media really are what caused the sharp decline in print publications.

No, the mouse did not eat the book; the two evidently have different fields to play on. The newspaper and the magazine, however, have (by all appearances irreversibly) fallen victim to digitalization.

The book comes out of this battle safe, sound and thriving. May it stay that way…

You’ll find the GitHub project for this article, including a comparison of internet access in Bulgaria and other countries, here.

Diana Kulchitskaya shows her students how journalism is changing in the digital age. She teaches at Lomonosov Moscow State University, the largest and most prestigious university in Russia. She is the author of the textbook Novite medii v globalniya svyat (New Media in the Global World, 2021), which tells future journalists about the challenges of digital technology.

Diana also has experience as a journalist. I have known her since the early years of the new millennium, when the two of us were learning the trade in the newsroom of 24 Chasa, one of Bulgaria's largest daily newspapers. She grew up in Bulgaria, where her mother is from, and speaks in the first person about the media in both countries.

What makes people take up journalism? Does it have a future, as seen from the lecturer's desk? And how do the debates about the online future of the media look from the “more northeastern corner” of the globe?

– Today journalism is clearly lagging behind because of the rise of technology. As a lecturer who “teaches” young people journalism, what do you think is the path to its survival?

– I think journalism is lagging behind because we have an abundance of information, which we can get not only from the traditional media, as before, but also from social networks and from bloggers. This makes people think they don't need journalism, which is a great misconception and an illusion. For as long as the world turns, we will need quality, verified information.

Unfortunately, both on social networks and in bloggers' content there is often more PR and advertising than objectivity.

In my view, journalism is lagging behind because the traditional media cannot adapt to the new digital environment.

But that is exactly how it can be resurrected—by finding its own digital path.

By finding a way to exist in the new environment, to use modern formats, and to create analytical work with the help of new technologies, too.

– Is there a new format that is paving that path?

– Digital media have many formats designed to produce more meaningful, more analytical work. Journalists can use them to attract an audience, too. On the one hand, with techniques we already know—analysis, for instance. On the other, with new forms. Podcasts, for example, could become a kind of revival of radio journalism; there is room for very meaningful discussions there.

Another format with a future is the so-called multimedia story, known in the West as “digital longform.” It is one long text with audiovisual elements integrated into it. The first such project, “Snowflow,” was created by The New York Times, and after it many similar ones began to appear, and not only in the West. The analytical part can be done very well there and combined with new visual methods of presentation.

I'm quite optimistic, and I think the digital environment offers journalists a great many opportunities.

Perhaps journalists themselves haven't fully realized it yet.

– How have the new media changed the principles of communication?

– With their arrival, communication has become more horizontal. We used to have one main source of information: the traditional media. If someone wanted to spread a piece of news, they had to turn to them. Now anyone can take part in the process, as long as they have a phone and internet access.

On the one hand, this leads to positive changes: communication becomes more democratic, and different people get the chance to join the conversation. But there are downsides, too—more opportunities for manipulation appear. Not everyone who enters the communication space has good intentions.

Journalists used to have the function of filtering content and letting through only verified information. Of course, that applies to an ideal situation, and in the 20th century we saw all too often how an unverified story made its way into the communication space.

But now that check is gone, and everything ends up in the communication space. Journalists no longer play their role as “gatekeepers” who sift and choose what to pass on. To some extent, the social networks themselves have started doing this, with various fact-checking initiatives. But I don't think it's enough.

Many things are changing; only the journalist's task remains the same as before—to verify the facts. And digital tools offer many new ways to do that.

– Does truth matter to online media?

– If a media outlet wants to be read and to have a good reputation, it will always orient itself toward the truth, and the truth will be its main concern. It doesn't matter whether it's online or traditional—right now everything is very mixed up, and it's hard to separate the old media from the new.

– Can paid content be the salvation of the media?

– Yes, but it's only one of the ways out. Modern media created by journalists, which play the role of traditional ones, essentially do the same thing they always did, only in a digital environment. But now the advertising model doesn't work. It existed for many years, and at the moment advertising is going entirely to giants like Facebook and Google. Clearly, new business models have to be found for the media to survive.

In my opinion, paid content works only for outlets with a smaller, more specialized audience—those focused on business, for example. For outlets with a broader audience, it may make more sense to attract donations. For instance, I like The Guardian because I think they do good journalism, so I'll make a donation to their newsroom. Many well-known media outlets currently exist on this model.

– PR people, advertisers, digital marketing specialists, influencers… As we've already said, the job of these specialists is very often to get around the truth, which is the exact opposite of journalism. And yet many people in the profession move over to them. Why?

– I don't think it has to do with technology. PR and advertising have always been fields where the pay is considerably better than a journalist's. Many people switch to them, and it was like that before digital technology arrived, too.

But I'd also like to defend some of them. Most people think a PR specialist wants to get around the truth. In my view, though, good PR doesn't tell lies; it respects the truth.

Of course, the goals of PR are very different, but that opposition has existed for many years. At some point, many journalists who see no way to grow in the profession move over to PR, since it's still about communication, and that way they can earn a better living. I think it's a very sad trend. And yet there are quite a few people who would like to stay in journalism, even though that path is harder and lower paid—but, in my view, also much more interesting.

– So, in a way, to keep working in this profession you have to give up a lot. You teach future journalists. How do you convince them to stay on this path?

– Our faculty has all kinds of students; some are training to be PR specialists. I try to show the good, inspiring examples of journalists doing something worthwhile. Of journalists showing that this profession matters, that what they write can change the world for the better and solve real problems.

I simply try to do my job and talk about

what a free press can do, if a country has one.

And that it is very important for the development of society. To have free media, and the possibility of voicing different points of view.

– How has the COVID era changed the way we take in information?

– The pandemic rather sharpened problems that already existed. There has been fake news for as long as the world has turned. But the coronavirus is a very particular subject: it's tied to people's health and gives rise to serious fears. During the pandemic we also ran into an “infodemic,” a phenomenon in which a great deal of unverified information about the coronavirus spreads.

The pandemic began in a communication environment where we have an abundance of information, but not enough of it verified. That's exactly why the new media played a bad role, too, but that isn't only about technology. People use it, and how exactly we do so is up to us.

– Yes, but even news and opinions that are verified and reliable still contradict each other drastically on many pandemic-related subjects today. Wasn't that yet another blow to trust in the media?

– That conflicting information was spread by everyone. I wouldn't call it some heavy blow; the traditional media have been in crisis for quite a while.

If anything, the pandemic showed once again that we need quality journalism. The outlets that managed to cope and to present verified information gained even more loyal readers. Unfortunately, a large part of the audience still doesn't value reliability enough…

– But is it the media's job to educate their readers? Will people get used to practicing more information hygiene?

– Unfortunately, it really is true that not everyone wants to check the news or apply critical thinking when reading some piece of data. That's very sad, because only if the audience is well prepared, only if readers and viewers can tell unverified information apart, will this

more aware audience be ready for more interesting formats, more interesting journalism.

But on the whole, this is a very large-scale task, which some scholars believe should be tackled as early as school—with programs in digital and media literacy. I think that really is important. And here I'm an optimist; I think we have to move toward that literacy and information hygiene gradually. There should be programs that get people to compare different data. If they acquire these skills at school, it will serve them well for the rest of their lives.

– How important is a strong story in attracting an audience?

– A strong story is absolutely key for any media outlet, and for communication in general. People have been telling stories about themselves and the world around them for a very long time, and if we learn to use digital tools to tell those stories, we'll have a much broader audience.

I work in multimedia journalism, and especially in big projects the story is always a key element—without it, there's no way to tell something interesting and make the audience care.

– Do you think “information journalism,” in which information is gathered through programming, data analysis and other digital skills, has a future?

– Yes, it's one of the most promising directions in journalism. There are international projects built on data analysis. Many people in the industry now believe they should learn programming, to have at least a basic idea of how to analyze data and look for patterns. I think analysis and investigations in journalism are impossible in today's world without this kind of statistical research.

– Why does the internet, conceived as a democratic means of communication, actually create even more inequality? How did it come to this?

– In my view, the internet as a whole really is a very democratic space; it's people who make it undemocratic. How we use a technology can make it positive or negative. We have only ourselves to blame if, one way or another, the internet deepens inequality. But the very idea built into horizontal communication gives many different people the chance to join the process and voice their opinions. On the whole, the internet is a very good invention, and our task is to stand up to the various inequalities that arise in the digital environment.

– It seems there aren't many strong personalities on the internet, undisputed authorities whose name carries weight. Why is that?

– I wouldn't say that. In Bulgaria there may indeed be no such undisputed authorities, but in other countries, the United States for example, there are bloggers who are very well known and whose opinion carries authority in all kinds of fields. It's more a phenomenon of countries with a more traditional media culture. In Russia, too, there are bloggers with quite large audiences whose opinion matters. Ilya Varlamov, for example, has a broad, loyal audience. He was the first person to start earning money as a blogger while also drawing attention to public problems related to the environment and corruption.

– Are there positive examples from digital life in Russia that aren't known in Bulgaria but are worth hearing about?

– The online space in Russia is quite colorful—there are all sorts of viewpoints and projects. The state media, which are more conservative and present the authorities' point of view, have a very strong digital presence. But there are also many independent, even opposition projects that show the other side. And in many cases

the digital space in Russia is where independent journalism can exist.

Only there do journalists still have the chance to tell stories and show problems that the traditional state media don't want to.

– What does today's journalist's battle for the truth look like?

– We live in the so-called post-truth era, when emotions matter more than facts. That's why a journalist, with a great deal of information at hand, has to approach fact-checking even more seriously. It's even harder for them to stay objective and find the truth, whatever it may be.

The fact that we have various digital tools sometimes helps us, but it also gets in the way, because it creates information noise. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't strive for objectivity, to report facts rather than opinions. I think it's important to be able, in this digital environment, to find the truth, to find the facts, and through them to make your way to the audience. I'll say it once more: I'm optimistic that this will happen more and more.

They say journalism is the second oldest profession. Because once the first one appeared, somebody hurried to report what had happened. This Digital Story isn't really a story at all, just a collection of reflections. Where did the people whose job is to get facts to readers, to the audience, start out, and where have they ended up? Where did influencers come from, and why is their place at the end of this chain of professions so important?

I'm sharing the entirely non-binding opinion of a former journalist who has enough time at the retirees' club to ponder these subjects over a cup of tea and a spoonful of white preserve, the snow-white sugar sweet Bulgarian grandmothers serve to guests. All while we are still waiting for artificial intelligence to step in and make its contribution in its role as a seeker of truth.

The Naked Truth

So here is what the thread along which information has been spun over the last century looks like. I make no claims whatsoever; communication researchers would probably have a good laugh, but then I've had a good laugh at them too, and laughter, they say, is the best medicine.

Come on, let's call everyone in this lineup creators of content that is not fiction but aims to inform a particular audience.

Shortly after journalism, advertising stepped onto the field of communication. In some way, for many decades the two complemented each other and, ideally, kept apart, without meddling in each other's goals. Advertising has never claimed to be truthful, although over the years regulation has at least partly made it possible to set rules that keep it from containing false claims.

Then the current millennium drew near. Some researchers rushed to proclaim the end of advertising (which never came) in favor of the rise of public relations, or “PR.” Of course, for many journalists the Bulgarian abbreviation ПР stands for „пречим на работата“ (prechim na rabotata, “we get in the way of work”)… And although by definition the idea of this profession is the opposite, the fact is that its very nature demands that when a piece of information harms the organization or person the PR people work for, it be concealed and manipulated. Not to mention that this field increasingly comes in the phrase “crisis PR,” and then nobody can convince me that there are any forbidden methods for that type of specialist.

An Instinct for Truth

After that came digital marketing with all its countless subdivisions. By all signs, this form of communication will reign for a long time, because the digital transformation has moved a huge share of the exchange of information online. Of course, this isn't even a single profession; there are far too many distinct “departments”—from copywriting and social media to SEO and who knows what else.

As Vassilena Valchanova, a specialist with vast experience, put it superbly in an interview for Digital Stories, “to some extent, content creators in marketing work exactly like media in terms of the production cycle. But on the other hand, they are terribly subjective. You can't rely on any journalistic ethics, on a mandatory presentation of different points of view.”

And so we've reached the cherry on top, the influencers. Because they are, in themselves, a peculiar link that shapes communication. And although there are nuances, of course, in the most widespread form of this phenomenon they are, in my view, the end point in the abandonment of the search for truth.

The Truth Gazette

I keep repeating “truth this, truth that.” But what is it? Is there one and only one truth? Nothing of the sort, of course. Your truth is not my truth. Just as there is no such thing as a “good person,” a “perfect social system,” an “honest politician.” But once we stop fighting to seek out that kind of facts, stories, subjects, we are doomed. So what is truth, after all?

We won't waste time peering into weighty philosophical sources—where do we look when we don't know something? The question is too dumb to be rhetorical. We won't use Google because of the filter bubble. As I said, we have no connection to academia, we're ordinary users, so we'll trust good old Wikipedia in its rather well-tended Bulgarian version.

“Truth is a philosophical concept that has no single definition, but is most often defined as a statement or utterance in accordance with the facts or with reality. (…) In colloquial language it means sincerity in one's actions. The opposite of truth is a lie.”

Truer than True

Actually, I think that's short, precise and clear. You look for a way to present the facts and reality as best you can, while being sincere in your actions. How close do the two professions at either end of the communication path we've sketched come to this?

Once again we ask the impartial free encyclopedia.

“Journalism is the practice of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about current events, topics, phenomena, personalities and trends of contemporary life, presented in various genres and forms and distributed to a mass audience.”

I especially like the next sentence, although it touches on a different subject:

“Under certain circumstances, journalism can also be regarded as a science.”

Sometimes it's a science, sometimes it isn't, ha-ha… But never mind. The poor influencers (poor metaphorically—financially they're nowhere near as poor as today's journalists) don't even have their own page on the Bulgarian Wikipedia to explain their existence. There's one only for the marketing genre whose instrument they are.

“Influencer marketing is a form of marketing, a channel for promotion and sales, in which visible and impactful personalities on social media, the so-called influencers, draw attention to their lifestyle, and in particular to the products and services of various companies they use, thereby creating a channel for promotion and sales.”

Homegrown Influencers

Our local influencers are definitely not yet as significant a phenomenon as they are in the West. There are exceptions, of course, which you can probably think of right away, especially if you're on the younger side.

Besides, it would be a big mistake to slap some common negative label on all of them. What's wrong with someone becoming popular, say, with a cooking blog? If they have a talent for cooking, if they're useful to their readers, helping them find their way through the thickets of the culinary arts? Absolutely nothing.

There are two problems. When people become famous simply for being famous.

And when the audience starts to perceive them as sources of reliable information. Which they could be, but that's far from certain.

The Good, the Bad and the Influencer

Let me tell you a short story without comment. A few years ago I was walking around Sofia with a friend of mine, a vlogger who was quite popular among teenagers at the time. A pretty young girl came up and, without any lengthy introduction, said to the influencer: “Thank you. Because of you, I didn't kill myself!”

All of us need authorities, and in recent technological years we've been trying every way we can to destroy them. There are almost no undisputed public figures left who unite us in our approval.

We people also need reliable sources, truly good examples. Only online it's hard to offer a good example with a good story without the traditional hater comments, or just plain idiotic ones, worming their way in underneath. Comments that leave a sour aftertaste even after the most perfectly balanced story in terms of flavors and spices.

A Grain of Truth

We're pushed to simplify, to look for the good guy and the bad guy. In bigger languages, simply because they're bigger and there's a critical mass, there are “meaningful” influencers who are talented writers, popularizers of science. But even there, in influence and interest, they lag drastically behind the “simply famous.”

I'd be very glad if you corrected me and it turned out that in Bulgaria, too, there's a truly popular influencer who creates something meaningful, beautiful, inspiring, connected with culture or science. (The only one I can think of was our guest on Digital Stories, and said the wise words: “the onli thing i cud do was eat, sleap and go to the toylet. with thos skils i had no uther choyce of profeshun exept to becum an enfluenser.”)

My Friend the Influencer

Which of us doesn't want to be famous? To be liked—yes, it's no accident that the communication-killing system of “likes” is so successful on social media. Who doesn't enjoy being recognized on the street? And on top of that, making a living just from being famous, by posting the occasional photo on Instagram with some company's pink socks or a particular laundry detergent…

What's more, the internet shortens the distance, because influencers are both undisputed authorities for their audience and, deceptively, seemingly within arm's reach of every follower. You can always write to them, comment… like. This, however, blurs the line considerably when we get to the marketing side of things and how they can use their role as both celebrities and “your friend” to recommend something to you.

Even advertising has regulations on content, protection against misleading claims, some minimal ethics, while here… there's no way anything like that could happen.

Ideal Petrov on Instagram

There's another aspect we should think about. As psychology professor Daniel Wagstaff told the BBC, “the problem with influencer culture is that it feeds us a false image of what is normal in terms of appearance and success in life. An image that our normal lives simply cannot achieve.” In other words, we're stepping deep into a fiction that is far too well disguised as reality.

Let's even set aside the fact that if you saw this “friend” on the street, you might not recognize them because of the brutal Photoshop interventions in their pictures. In fact, this type of influencer could easily one day be digital people who don't exist offline at all. There's simply no way anyone would notice, as long as the technology is good enough.

Then again, having seen the photoshopped pictures of certain stars and the stars themselves in person… I think it's already good enough.

A big part of the problem is that to become an influencer you don't need any meaningful talent whatsoever. Which is also the difference from the authorities of decades past, who were people from the arts, from sports, even from politics. No need for many additions or explanations; I'll say just one word, and if you've never heard it, you're lucky. Kardashian.

Eternal Glory to Fame!

And while we're visiting across the ocean, it's worth mentioning this year's HBO film Fake Famous (you can watch it with Bulgarian subtitles thanks to the Dokumentalni project here).

One of its main themes is how our lives have changed in the pursuit of likes and followers. Suddenly, of all the landmarks in Los Angeles, the most sought-after and visited becomes… a pink wall. Just a pink wall, where people come from all over the world to have their picture taken.

Meanwhile, the answer to a question we've always asked kids—“what do you want to be when you grow up?”—has in recent years in the US boiled down to almost just one. Yes, the one you're thinking of.

But what exactly does it mean to be an influencer? Do you know how many people have more than 1 million followers on Instagram? You'll be surprised. 40…. only it's forty million! And a total of 100 million have at least 100,000. Well then, is it really such a source of pride that the little numbers keep growing?

The main part of the film is a social experiment. From a casting call with 4,000 participants, the filmmakers choose three people to turn into influencers. The core of the technique is buying fake profiles, bots, through which the follower count grows quickly. And for hardly impressive sums, on the order of a hundred dollars or so.

Bali on a Budget

Then, of course, comes the right content, the glossy bimbo photos, the proven strategy. They pretend to be in Bali while they're actually in IKEA. Along the way, two of the three drop out of the experiment because they simply can't stand the “fame” they had dreamed of so much.

When their main star reaches 100,000 fans, suddenly countless companies start contacting her, offering her gifts, trinkets and direct advertising deals.

You have to be brazen and promote yourself to succeed in this kind of competition—that's one of the indisputable conclusions. And one of the indisputable problems with the whole subject.

In the US, Generation Z, as they call them in the West—those born shortly before and after the start of the new millennium, today's young people between 16 and 26—make up 40 percent of active users. Something similar surely holds true for other countries too. They spend an average of 3 hours a day on social media. What do you think—in the coming years, will influencer marketing, and influencers as its consequence, shrink in reach and importance?

Food for the Soul

I don't know. For me, truth remains an inseparable part of freedom, and the ideal, even utopian, point that should guide us in the way we get our information.

In recent years it's become very fashionable to scrutinize what we eat. The food should be real, well seasoned, prepared with love and skill.

Personally, I still believe it may soon become fashionable to think about what we feed our souls, too. To look for the same qualities and choose carefully. Then, somehow, journalism will return to the lead, or at least produce some heir suited to our times.

Perhaps the factors will gradually settle down, at least a niche will be found for genuine authorities, the criteria will be refined. Or exactly the opposite: the simplified worldview and the false idols will keep dragging us down in online communication. And in our own development as informed beings.

Until then, salvation is individual. It's in the hands of each of us, drowning in a sea of information full of little fish, of fake heroes…

While you're scrolling… what makes you stop? Have you ever thought about it? I'd say it's most likely one of three things:

• Something that struck you as interesting.
• Something you liked.
• Something that made you furious.

The first is logical and doesn't concern us here. But the other two raise a particularly interesting question, and a fairly important one. We surf a sea of information and… the social networks surround us with exactly the kind we like. Or, failing that, the kind that makes us angry. And not only the social networks. The same goes for every other website, even for the online media.

The “filter bubble” is the great danger of convenience. Like an office chair that's too soft: you never have to strain, and then you wonder where your crooked spine came from.

Without underestimating a crooked spine, a crooked spine in the metaphorical sense is even nastier.

The Bubble Swells and Swells

You log into Facebook and the posts you want to see are waiting for you. That's how the algorithm works, and it's wonderful that it knows what you expect of it—which friends interest you most, which photos you'll like. Which news you want to read… Or is that going a bit too far? No, it isn't.

You don't have time to read the news—who does? You trust the outlet that picks the most interesting stories for you. And quite rightly: technology helps you stay informed without wasting time on nonsense. Many of the most modern information platforms offer personalized newsletters—you get articles chosen by the algorithm based on your previous searches, interests and likes. Terribly convenient: you can spare yourself a lot of scrolling and get exactly the things the algorithm knows you'll find interesting. You don't have time for more.

Personalization is a good thing. The bartender remembers your favorite cocktail (ah, once upon a time there were bartenders). The computer knows which piece of news matters to you and shows it to you.

The result: of the vast sea of information, only what has passed through the strainer remains. So instead of taking advantage of the diversity of the web, you limit yourself to what the algorithm thinks is important to you. If you're irritated by every text that mentions the rival team, a singer you don't like, an unpleasant politician… that's it. You won't even hear of them. They'll vanish like a disgraced North Korean from an old photo with Kim Jong Un. At least for a while. Later they'll come back in one form or another, but only if the algorithm judges that you engage with them. If you love picking fights with opponents, it will dig up the most extreme points of view to provoke you into barging in with your elbows out.

In that light, convenience doesn't sound quite so tempting anymore, does it?

Fly, Little Balloon

“Filter bubble” is the name given to this phenomenon by Eli Pariser, an American scholar, entrepreneur and advocate of a free internet. He formulated the problem long before it actually came to life in its present dimensions—his theory became popular through his book of the same name, published exactly a decade ago, in 2011.

Back then we could hardly have imagined it was possible; social networks were still in their dawn and hadn't swallowed up such a large share of our communication. Algorithms for personalized content seemed a distant future, the way Musk's ideas about chips in the brain sound to us today.

The theory in a nutshell: in their attempt to select the information most interesting to us, the algorithms of social networks, search engines and news sites accumulate an enormous amount of data about us and process it. Based on what we read, how we react, what we like and whom we block, the algorithms try to serve us as well as they possibly can by giving us more of our favorite content.

“We're used to thinking of the internet as an enormous library, with services like Google providing a convenient map. But that's no longer the case,” Pariser says. “Sites from Google and Facebook to the New York Times are increasingly personalized. Based on your web history, they filter information to show you what they think you want to see. And that is different from what everyone would want to see. Or from what you need to see. Your filter bubble is this unique, personalized universe of information created just for you by this array of personalizing filters. It's invisible, and it's becoming more and more difficult to escape…”

Don Balloon

You can see examples of this every day. Read a few news items about a particular football club, and very soon the results of its every next match will start popping up on your phone. Comment on two or three posts by a friend, and soon everything they write will show up in your feed.

This is how online we surround ourselves with people who think like us. We are supposedly saturated with information, yet we limit it ourselves without realizing it. Google, for instance, filters our searches supposedly to help us, and in doing so it gives incomplete and one-sided results.

Try an experiment. Search for some touchy topic from your own profile, then repeat the search from an incognito browser window and ask someone close to you to show you their results. The differences will be quite serious, especially if you search in one of the more widely spoken languages.

Is Facebook a social pressure valve, as the old cliché goes about sport? Does it bring you together with the like-minded, let you understand your opponent's opinion, or does it box in those who think differently?

“What is a newspaper? A paper with news on it. They tell you what happened. Or rather they tell you what to think happened. And the best of them simply confirm what you already think happened.” The quote comes from the fantasy author Joe Abercrombie, but to my mind it paints a very accurate picture of our attitude toward information on the internet today.

Mmm, Not Us

Convenient, yes. But extremely limiting. Because it comes combined with the fact that we have no time to read; we're used to getting our information at speed, to skimming. And so at some point, out of the wonderful pluralism and abundance of opinions that exist online, we find ourselves in the bubble. And then we wonder how it is that everyone around us supports one party, yet when elections come it collects a negligible percentage of the vote.

This study is yet another piece of evidence. I think it's obvious enough even without it that in recent years we have been drifting apart, growing bitter, becoming more aggressive. Anyone can see it in Bulgaria too, and there is objective evidence that the “filter bubble” is at least partly to blame for the serious rift in American society in recent years.

Compared with 2016, three years later members of the Democratic and Republican parties were considerably more likely to regard their ideological rivals as stupid, immoral… and closed-minded toward any different opinion.

In other words, political supporters are turning from thinking people who debate the public agenda with arguments into the most unpleasant part of football ultras. It's now much harder to like, say, the ideas another party might have about a given field. And arguments boil down to “the good guys” and “the bad guys,” “us” and “them.”

Bubbles and Bumpkins

“What most algorithms on social media are trying to do is increase engagement, to work toward increasing the attention you give to the platform in question,” Pariser says. Posts, messages and memes are curated in the best possible way to grab attention. Either because you like them or because they irritate you.

In “psychology speak” there's a term for it: “dichotomous thinking,” seeing the world in black and white, without the nuances. And as the psychiatrist Prof. Joe Pierre puts it, “the evolutionary reason for this is that sometimes we have to make a decision quickly—do we like something or not. Our only chance is to neglect and simplify the problem.” That's exactly what life on the internet does—it makes us hurry, scroll, judge in a split second. And instinctively we back the decision that “our side” proposes, driven by a kind of herd instinct.

The past year has deepened the problem even further. Locked up at home, torn out of everyday communication, we easily turned into “Mangarovists,” followers of the COVID-skeptic doctor Atanas Mangarov, and “HQ-ers,” loyalists of the National Operational Headquarters that ran Bulgaria's pandemic response. With the argument that this was about something as important as life and health, we began cursing and moralizing more brazenly than ever. Precisely because it's about something so important, it would make sense to calm our emotions on such topics, not to sink our teeth into the extremes by default. To give the floor to arguments. The specialists contradict each other enough as it is, not to mention the politicians.

Second Opinions

Are you convinced there's a problem?

Well, the good thing here is that the first and most important step toward solving it is realizing that it exists. A few years ago, that same Eli Pariser became part of a group of scholars and entrepreneurs who formulated 14 principles for online projects that encourage healthy, meaningful internet communication. With mutual respect, pluralism and a search for objective measures, however out of fashion such measures may sound today.

They surveyed 20,000 users from more than 20 countries who use all the most popular social networks, search engines and messaging apps. Among the principles are things like “the ability to join the conversation freely,” “showing impartial information,” “algorithms with clear rules and open code for distributing information.” And “building bridges between different groups.”

Needless to say, that is definitely not the goal of today's most popular social networks. What's more—never mind those that have started deciding for themselves where the objective truth lies. Leviathans. Who can afford to take the floor away even from the president of the most powerful country in the world.

Go, Duck!

Pariser and his like-minded colleagues believe they can create an alternative—a social network based on these principles. One of their arguments that this is possible is good old Wikipedia, where, on the whole, the principles of discussion, accessibility, the search for objectivity and free access still enjoy attention. But it really is good and old; its foundations go back to the days when the internet was a much emptier and airier space.

Still, one way to get today's big players to rein in the technologies that give birth to the “filter bubble” is precisely to show them displeasure. Zuckerberg and his colleagues are increasingly becoming the counterpart of Bulgarian politicians of recent years, who act only when they're under pressure and afraid someone will “take their bone away.” Otherwise it does sound rather unlikely these days that independent projects could go head-to-head with multibillion-dollar companies more powerful than the strongest states. The moment for that is long gone.

There are also search engines that claim not to use the “filter bubble,” such as DuckDuckGo. But they remain so niche that there's no need to go into detail.

In the Rhythm of the Algorithm

Possible solutions certainly exist. Recently, for example, Danish and Finnish scientists from various fields published an interesting paper on the subject. They propose an algorithm that could strike a balance—broadly speaking, part of the information is filtered according to personal interests, while the rest is selected on the basis of shared preferences and public positions.

Their algorithm processes every news item, assigning it numerical characteristics for where it sits on the political spectrum, how important it is to the public and how readable it is. It then makes sure the user receives a sufficiently balanced mix of all of this—as a side dish to their favorite news, plus a decent helping of viewpoints that differ from their own.

Sounds wonderful. Only I wonder whether we could make today's online colossi start redesigning anything “because that's how it ought to be.” Especially given that their growth and profits are currently higher than ever.

Another team, including the Bulgarian Prof. Julita Vasileva, proposed software back in 2014 that lets you control your filters yourself. We can easily guess why the idea never caught on—it certainly doesn't work in favor of the big players in this business.

Bubbles and Slivovitz

And speaking of scientists' opinions, I'd like to tell you about another curious idea of theirs from 2015. Engin Bozdag and Jeroen van den Hoven of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands propose bursting the filter bubble with… cyberbalkanization! No, they don't mean teaching the algorithms to drink rakia and enjoy Mile Kitić, the Serbian folk-pop star, so that they become kinder and more tolerant. Although that might not be such a bad idea.

The two analyze in considerable detail how the filter bubble is a threat to democracy worldwide. According to the scientists, however, the key lies not in unification but in connecting small communities. Just as we have shown that we can live peacefully and with mutual respect in the Balkans. On a purely human level, until nationalism and outside forces get involved.

Their idea is that the internet has naturally fragmented into small groups of people with similar worldviews, to the point where most of them approach everyone else narrow-mindedly and with prejudice. But with the help of the algorithms the scientists propose, paths could be built between the groups, bringing shared and similar values to the fore, above political fanaticism.

Actually, I really liked the idea of cyberbalkanizing myself, and I'll definitely reach out to the authors for an interview.

A View from Inside

As the aforementioned Prof. Julita Vasileva notes, when people gather in a group of the like-minded, they radicalize one another. “From the inside it seems that the whole world agrees with the group's point of view. That's where group dynamics come in. To stand out or build authority, a person has to express ever more ‘orthodox’ views, all the way to extremes. In this struggle for reputation, people voice ever more extreme ideas, and this leads to complete fragmentation, the splintering off of new subgroups, little ‘bubbles’ of dissidents. In the end nobody agrees with anybody, and universal hatred and division set in.”

These social processes are normal; they happen in the real world too. With religions, for example. “All religious communities, once they grow large enough, at some point swarm into sects and branches,” says Prof. Vasileva. “By then there are people looking for a way to rise in the hierarchy and build reputation, but they can't do it within the group's rules. The same processes can be seen in science, especially in computer science, which is growing very fast. Originally breakaways from mathematics and electrical engineering, there are now more than 1,000 subdisciplines with different forums and methods that don't talk to one another…. In virtual space all processes speed up and can be observed within ten years or so. The bad thing is that when virtual groups, especially in politics, spill over into the real world, the social system can't adapt fast enough and it ‘freezes.’

Besides, bubbles make us lazy. It's easier not to think and to read things you agree with. Disagreement creates ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Which is uncomfortable, it pricks… and a person is forced to think in order to get rid of it by explaining it to themselves. That's how they learn new things and change their worldview,” Prof. Vasileva adds.

Divide and Rule

Either way, we know whose business it is to rescue the drowning: the drowning's own. I think we can still swim, and much of the solution to the problem is in our hands. Common sense is still there; all that's left is to recover the desire to look for it.

It doesn't take that long to read an article whose headline we don't like but which contains solid arguments. Let's give a chance to the authorities on the other side of the argument. Let's calm the mouse down a little, and avoid the deliberate rudeness that already claws at online communication as it is.

I think this is also one of the reasons younger users are far more active on the more “peace-loving” Instagram. And the even younger ones on TikTok.

In the end we are all human beings, and the similarities between us far outnumber the small difference of whether we support Levski or CSKA, Sofia's eternal football rivals, whether we're right or left. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a position of our own. Just that we should look for the arguments and the dialogue without which positions become meaningless. After all, we all sometimes melt at a photo of a beautiful landscape, grin at a witty meme or can't resist tapping a little heart on a clip of an adorable kitten or baby. We are human first, and anything else after.

Eli Pariser shares on Instagram a message from an artificial intelligence telling him it has read and liked his book. “The world has become a very strange place,” Pariser comments laconically.

This piece won the grand prize for “Technology and Innovation” at Web Report 2021, Dir.bg’s awards for good journalism. More on this here.

Zdravko wants to be a journalist; Zhelyazko is an artificial intelligence. Who does the future belong to?

Today the most valuable resource isn’t oil, or money. It isn’t gold, it isn’t even power. At the epicenter of the computer revolution, everything is information, and information is the digital gold whose price will climb faster than bitcoin’s during a global crisis.

Every day you read news written by a computer, and not a little of it. Surprised? Wasn’t artificial intelligence supposed to be something years away, with today’s systems still so imperfect… The Associated Press, Reuters, Forbes and Bloomberg have had working projects for years in which artificial intelligence generates texts, processes information and does the analysis instead of people. Sometimes it even publishes news entirely on its own.

Meanwhile, a few hundred people are studying journalism at universities in Bulgaria. Their future doesn’t look rosy; as a rule, they would earn more as waiters. Most of them have nowhere to start working, against a backdrop of a frankly dying press, a horrifyingly small number of quality websites and the gradual, still barely noticed but undeniable collapse of radio and television.

Why is this happening? Isn’t information supposed to be the most precious thing? Wasn’t the truth supposed to set us free?

Not a Man, but Iron

It’s time to bring two digital stories together.

Zhelyazko—his name comes from the Bulgarian word for iron—is a young journalistic hopeful. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get tired.

He doesn’t lose his files, doesn’t drink, doesn’t chase women or men. You don’t need to explain to him who “our people” are. He doesn’t do the most annoying thing as far as media owners are concerned—ask for a salary. He learns quickly what people like and adjusts the way he works accordingly. Well, he could be told to care about the truth, to gather different points of view, but who needs that?! The AI journalist is already here. It will only get better and will try to take the bread out of the mouth of a profession that society increasingly neglects.

And Zdravko? Well, Zdravko is just a human. He wants to report the news, to tell stories. He’s studying journalism. He has heard many times that “journalists are to blame for everything.” That “anyone can be a journalist,” that “I don’t watch TV or read the papers anymore, I’m free.” He goes to his lectures and wonders… does he stand a chance against his iron competitor?

All of us want information and yet don’t value it. We scroll and scroll. We don’t have time to read past the headline. We surround ourselves with sources that tell us only what we like to hear. Anyone can write anything themselves, like a journalist. Anyone can check whether a piece of information is true in the endless ocean of billions of libraries that is the internet. And nobody does. We’re in a hurry, we have no time.

How could our two heroes help us here?

Iron-Clad Arguments

With Zdravko, everything is clear. After several centuries of journalistic history, we know well what he can do. And still, if he lands in the newsroom of a newspaper (while they still exist), his four years earning a bachelor’s in journalism will be infinitely useful. So that he can soar in the genre of the “news brief” (which doesn’t even exist in the textbooks). And, as an experienced colleague used to say, every winter alternate news brief No. 7, “Flu With Diarrhea,” with No. 8, “Flu Without Diarrhea.”

If he goes to a website instead, even setting aside the salary he will (sometimes) receive, he enters into competition with… the entire internet. It is no accident that social networks are an enormous challenge to which journalism worldwide seems to have no answer. Because when everyone becomes a “journalist” and “understands” the profession; when everyone has the same starting point as the biggest players—their own profile wall.

Now let’s turn our gaze to Zhelyazko. Here are a few examples from the work of his colleagues.

1–0 Against Our Side

In 2013 the 140-year-old Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos. Three years later Heliograf joined its team. The AI’s role was mostly for show: covering the Rio Olympics, regional news and election results. In its first year it managed to produce 850 pieces that reached readers.

The Associated Press hired its first artificial intelligence to follow regional basketball games. In 2018 it published more than 5,000 game reports, cutting journalists’ workload by 20 percent. The idea is that information about sports results can be created quickly and easily by analyzing the statistics.

Clearly, sports is one of the first fields in which Zhelyazko becomes real competition for Zdravko. Working from the statistics, the AI generates summaries at lightning speed. For now it simply “covers” games the outlet would otherwise have no resources for.

Of course, it might miss some colorful incident, like a cow wandering onto the pitch in a third-division match, but everything has its risks. Do you imagine the information will be presented dryly this way? That depends on how the AI is designed. If it is “taught” a sense of humor and loaded with a very rich vocabulary, it could easily rival Petar Vasilev and Georgi Popvasilev, the famously florid Bulgarian football commentators, combined. “The leather sphere” and “linear speed” would be mere hors d’oeuvres for connoisseurs.

Zhelyazko is also good when tiny deviations need to be spotted. During the Olympics, for example, Heliograf was set up to track the statistics from every event and immediately post a message in the lead reporters’ Slack channel if any result came within 10 percent of the world record.

You’re Loaded

So Zdravko’s long-term prospects in sports journalism have dimmed a little. Let’s see how things look if he turns to economics and finance.

Here we land on another beat the machines are seriously moving into. Bertie—like Wodehouse’s beloved rascal—is the name of the AI used by Forbes. Its main use is the same as with its sports colleagues: it can analyze huge volumes of statistical data at lightning speed—stock indices, reports, charts—to summarize the data on a given company. Or look for trends, draw broader conclusions, “catch” events before they happen.

The electronic Bertie, however, at least at this stage, also needs a human Jeeves to check his information. Because in 2015 a similar algorithm trumpeted online that Netflix shares had plunged 71 percent for the quarter… when in fact they had nearly doubled in price. The reason was that it hadn’t accounted for a stock split.

In this case there are actually two Jeeveses. Because the success of Bertie and Zdravko depends as much on the people building the algorithms as on those setting their approach to the work. On the engineers as well as the journalists. And as someone who has earned his bread among both groups, I can tell you the balance is sometimes quite hard to strike, and nobody likes being lectured in a field where they consider themselves the expert.

Algorhythm

“3,232 new infections today…”—did a journalist write those lines, or an artificial intelligence? Who cares. Over the past year we’ve grown used to scanning the numbers without nitpicking about the style of such pieces. No, these particular news items were probably written by a person sitting at a text editor, mechanically changing the statistics. He isn’t a journalist but a copy-paster, an author in another popular journalistic “genre.”

They say Yordan Yovkov, the great Bulgarian short-story writer of the early 20th century, took many of the ideas for his stories from the newspapers. We would hardly have stories like the one about the Mokanin shepherd if he had had to hunt for them on Facebook. Or in the few remaining newspapers.

The rampant illiteracy, especially in online media, the lack of basic editing, the low professional quality of the work… all the ugly sides of the coin show up in a huge part of Bulgarian online journalism, and they definitely make me pin more hope on artificial intelligence.

And not because the natural kind—the journalists’—is to blame. The whole environment makes them this way, and we readers help. You spend weeks writing the most gripping story, and the clicks go to “…is getting divorced” or simply “Unbelievable! See what happened yesterday to…”

And that’s actually the better option.

Many of the online outlets that stand out for their traffic, compared with the few higher-quality ones, are a hodgepodge stew of texts that could easily be produced by a drunk robot running 1990s technology. I thought about collecting examples, but the choice was too great, and there are plenty of collections online. Besides, it stopped being funny long ago and became simply sad.

Iron Logic

So Zdravko hasn’t yet given up on a place in the media sun; he makes the rounds of the websites, looking for his niche.

Speed in journalism is sometimes vital. Here Zhelyazko will soon take a very serious lead. His colleague proved it as early as May 17, 2014, at 6:25 a.m.—the Los Angeles Times artificial intelligence, Quakebot. It “senses” that an earthquake is happening and exactly three minutes later publishes a short article with preliminary data on the tremor, the direction the waves are spreading and practical advice on how people can protect themselves.

By then Quakebot had been on the job for two years. They didn’t yet trust it much; its creator, Ken Schwencke, had to approve the piece first, but he didn’t find a single mistake. The piece was not only objective, it used the right style and the exact words. It followed the inverted pyramid precisely and punctiliously cited all its sources, as if the bot had never missed a lecture at Sofia University’s Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication. And Schwencke decided to do something rather unusual for the time—he put Quakebot’s name on the byline.

Which brings us to another interesting question. Suppose Zhelyazko has done his homework (or rather, his creators have) and learned to produce excellent journalistic texts. How do you keep them from being stolen? Who actually wrote these texts, and who will defend the copyright? How exactly can, and would, an artificial intelligence want to be credited? And how will its creators claim authorship of the piece, when they insist that it is an algorithm capable of judging and creating on its own?

The same goes for ethical norms. If we accept that they (sometimes) exist in journalism, in Zhelyazko’s case someone has to take care of creating them for him. Whatever kind they themselves decide on. Because professional organizations, state censors or NGOs will hardly be able to give advice to… a program. Or to punish it.

I Write, Therefore I Am

A third of the content at Bloomberg News is created with the help of artificial intelligence. The company’s system is called Cyborg, and it lets journalists publish data on a huge number of companies every quarter. It does work that would put real reporters to sleep at their desks. But here too, every piece of information must be checked by a human.

The idea, seen from a distance, is to generate a larger volume of personalized content. Not overview articles aimed at every market player, but data on each company, even the smaller ones, needed by whoever is looking for information on them specifically. As with the regional games mentioned earlier. All this is an example of one of the economic phenomena of recent years, popularly known as the “long tail” theory. The idea is that in the 21st century it becomes increasingly popular to sell “less of more.” To cover smaller business niches with minimal changes to production. That is exactly how Amazon broke through, offering a huge selection of books that wiped out the small bookstores. Then the model was repeated with every other kind of goods.

He Who Writes, Drinks

All of this applies fully to journalism. Because whatever we may say, in modern society delivering information cannot be just a cause, a public service or a personal initiative. It is a business. There are always interests and money behind it. The better option is for information to have real value and for media to support themselves by selling meaningful content. But who pays for information these days, when you supposedly have everything for free online? Not long ago Facebook literally laughed in the face of the Australian government, which had dared to oblige it to pay paltry sums for the journalistic content it uses.

And then comes the second option: turning the media into conduits of influence, of interests. Into clubs. In principle it’s wonderful that giants like Facebook and Google have programs to support journalism, but… it’s always wise to beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

“Long-tail” content can also help in another battle that looks lost for today’s media—the one for the advertising market. Now that it is almost impossible for them to survive by selling content, this is the second devastating blow the internet has dealt them.

A Bit of All Bits

Can a robot have its own view, its own style? Not in the sense we would mean. But it could build them, with the perfect mirror in front of it: the readers. Any journalist can only dream of receiving and processing the impressions of millions of people (even if they often run into obscenities). And of adjusting their subjects, approach and style to what is in demand.

And in details you would hardly imagine. A reader can easily tell you whether they like a text or not. But with the help of technology you can easily see much more—which passages are interesting, which amuse, which have an effect. Soon, perhaps, which ones excite the reader so much that their breathing quickens, or absorb them so that they forget to blink… And when this is multiplied by data from millions, the result could be the perfect text. Exactly the kind that would move the most people the most.

I believe that used to be called “conformism.” Let’s not forget the balance between being liked and having a position, an attitude, a style. Or, without feedback, ending up as the only reader of your own texts…

From Each According to His Ability

We won’t invite Zdravko into political journalism at all. Yes, it still exists in places. There are even outlets you don’t necessarily know are extremely positive toward one person or party and murderously sharp toward another. Only they are melting away like the smile of a young reporter invited, under a training project, to a seminar at a spa resort. And the problem isn’t only Bulgarian—over the past four years the biggest American media have split, ugly and partisan, into two black-and-white camps.

And what about hunting down manipulation? In the coming years much of the fake news will come courtesy of so-called deep fakes, a technology that creates video from real images in which the speaker can say things they would never dream of. The persuasiveness has already reached astonishing levels; I’ll show you in detail soon in a dedicated piece. Either way, the human eye cannot tell deep fakes apart. And here artificial intelligence can play the role of Taras Bulba: I gave birth to you, I will kill you.

Television

We’ve clearly talked Zdravko out of writing, and we won’t send him to radio either. The dedication shows on Radio Veselina, a folk-pop station, sometimes contain more journalistic gems than the newspapers, but on the whole this particular medium isn’t for Zdravko—he can’t pronounce his r’s.

How about we try to make him a TV star? Anchor the news, the morning show and then, cut to camera, maybe even some reality show? That was what the dream journalistic career looked like a decade or two ago. Television certainly has its devotees and its niche, but it too has set off down the road of the relic print media, and nothing can save it from Netflix and Facebook. Zhelyazko, though, can survive in these formats, even if they move entirely online.

The Chinese have figured it out. The first such robot, Jia Jia, is a charming presenter who in 2016 appeared on television as a digital Kevork Kevorkian (or Hekimyan, depending on your generation—both famous Bulgarian TV hosts). The trouble was that her creators decided first to let her answer questions herself in an interview with Wired founder Kevin Kelly, instead of asking them (which for a journalist, robot or not, is the harder part). She gives short answers, a few words each. Sometimes she pauses for ten seconds or so. She cracks little jokes—what she looks forward to most in life is Friday, “because that’s when they transfer my salary.” But she wins no fans. Maybe her creators simply tried to give her too ordinary a look instead of making her look like a chalga pop-folk star. Still, she shows that artificial intelligence can be convincing.

It doesn’t even need to exist physically; the news can already easily be presented to you by a digital human. Yes, these are people who don’t exist physically but do exist online. They won’t have slips of the tongue, they will always keep the right intonation and convey the right emotion.

Incidentally, the future tense is superfluous here too:

Play the video

In March 2019, a new newsreader, Xin Xiaomeng, debuted on China’s Xinhua. She reports on the arrival of delegates at the biggest party gathering of the year. She was created with machine learning so that she articulates as much like a human as possible, though she is purely a digital image.

Face to Interface

It’s worth mentioning that at least twice so far, Zdravko and Zhelyazko have faced each other in a fair duel on equal terms. In 2015 such a battle pitted Scott Horsley—business journalist and White House correspondent for the public broadcaster NPR—against Wordsmith, the writing algorithm of the company Automated Insights. The two were tasked with producing, as fast as possible, a news story on the finances of the Denny’s restaurant chain. The (real) journalist turned out to be a regular at the restaurants, which let him slip in a personal touch and words readers enjoy. He enriched the dry statistics with a mention of his favorite waitress, Genevieve, who knew his order by heart—a bacon omelet sandwich.

Writing it took him seven minutes. Wordsmith managed in two, but even though it has 100,000 English words in its vocabulary (twice as many as Shakespeare!), its piece came out drier. Perhaps because its creators deliberately aimed for texts that are easy to take in.

It’s not so certain, though, that the judges’ decision was objective. At least I was taught that people in finance have no time and would not appreciate a story about a bacon sandwich in a financial news brief.

If the human victory seems obvious and final to you, let me just remind you how long artificial intelligence couldn’t beat us at chess or Go, while today the prototypes convincingly put us in our place even in games whose rules they have to learn themselves. Yes, journalism isn’t a competition… but in some respects it is exactly that.

The second clash dates from 2012. Christer Clerwall, a professor of media studies at Karlstad University in Sweden, asked 46 of his students to compare two texts on various criteria: objectivity, credibility, accuracy, readability and so on. They didn’t know who the authors were. As you’ve guessed, one was a human and the other an artificial intelligence; only the headline and the first paragraph had been “touched up,” a job that, at least back in the day, editors used to do.

The result was almost a draw—each text won on several of the parameters. Even almost a decade ago, the technology proved a strong enough contender.

We Fill Niches of Every Kind

How could Zdravko not despair? At the British Guardian works Guarbot. Their Zhelyazko has been creating news templates since 2014. It has access to the paper’s entire 21st-century archive and prepares first drafts, filling them out with information from the archive. The journalists just have to check them, breathe a little… life into them, and sign them. A curious detail is that part of Guarbot’s “training” consisted of fake news and tabloids. A huge volume of such texts was fed into its database so it would learn what to avoid. Well, in our context Zhelyazko could also read old issues of Show, a Bulgarian tabloid, but Zdravko can do that too. If he wants.

Some outlets already have entire AI teams. Reuters works with numerous separate systems that use artificial intelligence to process information. News Tracer scans Twitter and raises an alert when a topic becomes surprisingly popular. Lynx Insight processes huge arrays of sports and business news to pick up trends. It even prepares short items of a few sentences, which it passes on to the journalists.

Synthesia, meanwhile, combines in real time the photos coming in from football matches with commentary on what is happening. So seconds after the final whistle, a full minute-by-minute report is ready, garnished with the right illustrations. Gradually the same will happen with video.

But no, Zdravko is stubborn. Having resigned himself to studying journalism, he doesn’t give up easily. Maybe he’ll get to know Zhelyazko, and together they’ll find the way?

We’re All Equal Before the Set Square

Weren’t we supposed to be after the truth? Yes, but the truth is what they demand in the courts. If only because that is the only place that has the ambition of believing there is just one truth. Because the higher bar of journalism is called opinion writing, and there you are not merely justified but downright obliged to have your own position.

All the noise about artificial intelligence entering many spheres of life is tied to the field of machine learning. Thanks to it, computer systems can teach themselves from vast amounts of information. The fact is, though, that today the label “artificial intelligence” is fashionable and gets slapped on everything from electric kettles to chatbots.

In reality it covers a huge number of different approaches and variants, and they determine to what extent we can really speak of intelligence rather than following a series of commands. If our Zhelyazko, for example, can only pull out the score of a football match and tell us who won, he isn’t intelligent enough for the “title.” But if he notices that the goal came from “a beautiful sideways scissor kick” and “from a clear offside position,” and turns out to be right, then things get more serious.

I don’t want to end up in the awkward position of astrologers whose prediction of the next celebrity divorce didn’t come true. In technology it is almost as hard to forecast convincingly, and enthusiasm often turns out to outrun the substance. In 2015, for example, Kristian Hammond, researcher and chief scientist at the company Narrative Science, said that by 2030 computers would write 90 percent of the news and that the first software would win a Pulitzer in 2017. Well, the truth is it hasn’t happened yet. Not so much because of the jury’s fussiness, but because there is still no indisputable contender.

Common Sense

Wouldn’t it be a breath of fresh air if one day we had a media outlet staffed only by artificial intelligences? Ones that generate topics and prepare interview questions. That produce impartial analyses of the economy, and of political decisions too? That have open source code, clear and transparent algorithms, with none of the information mastodons behind them—who can always favor one party or another as they see fit. After all, we keep talking about objective journalism. But is there even such a thing? Is it possible not to sympathize with one side, to be sure the journalist’s uncle isn’t an oligarch or a local mayor ruling his town like a petty feudal lord?

On the other hand, is it even interesting to listen to and read absolutely impartial information? Yes, probably, when it comes to your horoscope or the price of bitcoin, but can’t emotion and bias be an ornament?

Of course—both directions are right. Zdravko will always have his emotion, which is his strong suit, while Zhelyazko has other great advantages we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of. The fact that he is a machine makes him predictable. Yes, information technology today is a world of its own; big projects can’t fit even in the smartest head. But for a program, 1 + 1 will always be 2, at least unless we deliberately decide to build in the opposite. Even with self-learning systems. As long as we know how they are made.

Journalism’s Truth

Zhelyazko is here to stay. The idea, as Lisa Gibbs of the Associated Press management puts it, is that “the work of a journalist is creative. It’s about curiosity, about storytelling. It’s about digging, about holding politicians accountable for their actions. It’s about critical thinking, about judgment. And it is for all of those things that we want our journalists to save their energy.”

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Only, alas, for some reason or other it doesn’t quite happen that way. You can guess that when Zdravko, full of such thoughts, lands in one of today’s media outlets… it won’t take long before he is disillusioned.

Information today really is more expensive than ever. But whereas it used to be valuable because it informed the masses about what the elite was doing, today it’s the other way around. The truly expensive information is where each of us goes, what we buy. And how we can most easily be manipulated.

Robot Garelov, Anchorman

Zdravko will never manage—especially if his outlet has more readers than a modern Bulgarian daily—to write his pieces personally for each of them. Zhelyazko could.

We’re not talking at all about receiving, say, a newsletter with news specially selected for you. That has been happening for a long time; the huge blogging platform Medium is an example. You know very well that once you go to the search engine to find out how often to water the rhododendron at home, over the following days you’ll be surrounded by information about rhododendrons and themed ads.

We’re talking about something aptly called “origami journalism.” The news itself is different for every reader.

For a neural network that is perfect enough one day, it would be no problem to generate millions of personalized newsletters about a given event. Avoiding negative news at each reader’s request, adding emotional color, or injecting emotion, say, because of the reader’s party preferences.

The Question of Questions

Is this journalism? You can easily think of plenty of arguments for both extreme answers.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind such personalization, but only if it concerns the selection of news and if… I can be sure enough how exactly it happens. Because we have something similar before our eyes every day. Clearly, the whole idea of the social network is to pick things for us that we like, that make us click and scroll. And so we easily inflate ourselves inside the social bubble, surround ourselves with the like-minded and narrow points of view. And the algorithms by which Facebook fills our wall are as opaque as the trail of a ball of yarn caught in the claws of a young tomcat.

Here is one advantage of Zhelyazko that we saved for dessert. Once his time comes, we can forget about the human touch, but also about human speling and grammer erors on evry line…

Story Hunter

You don’t like the slightly clumsy joke? Well, that’s because I’m a colleague of Zdravko’s. My associative thinking is more creative than the average Zhelyazko’s, but also… more limited. If I write a piece about the electronic journalist, I am limited to my own experience, to everything I’ve read on the subject, to my own (missing) sense of humor. A cousin of Zhelyazko’s would have access to an enormous volume of information, publications, interconnections… all that remains is to teach him to look for the metaphors in them.

But there is also the other kind of journalism. The kind that would still create stories for a Yovkov today, and would carry on even when only artificial intelligence is left. Because this profession, in my view, is by no means exhausted by the topical function we assign it today. It must also tell meaningful stories that show and tell. That can make people laugh and cry. At least for now, I simply don’t see any real competition from Zhelyazko there. All Zdravko needs is to remember that not everything important happens in parliament, and that powerful stories exist even in the age of the internet.