– And Our Bed Is Green made a strong impression on me—its characters, its language, and its stories, which felt very close to me personally. Do we all need a little more greenery?

– I hope so. I hope the thought of greenery, in every possible sense of the word, matters to many other people too.

– When do stories from the past give our lives meaning, and when do they harm us?

– The harm comes from substitution—

when one point of view declares itself the true one, seizes a narrative and makes it its own so it can use it for manipulation.

When we read stories from the past, we have to do it critically and keep asking questions. And, of course, not rely on a single point of view. That's about big History. But what interests me are the small stories—preserving a person's memory, not letting them be forgotten. That is an individual responsibility, a voluntary one. My wish is for people to be remembered, mentioned, talked about.

– I think that even today the “small” stories are what give the big ones meaning—that's why this site is called what it is. But while we're still on the past: in recent years I've read four remarkable new books by Bulgarian authors that take us back to the 1910s. Why do you think that period turns out to be so interesting?

– I have no idea about the others, but that period has always interested me, and I've spent a long time with it, including in literature. It's when literary modernism was born, for me the most interesting movement in the modern cultural history of humankind. It was a time of breaking with tradition, of experiment in literature and art, but also of looking deep into the human soul.

The years before the First World War were also a time of optimism, thanks to technological progress, achievements in science, and people from the back rows of society stepping forward. Besides electricity, cars and cinema, we have Einstein and Planck, Freud and Jung, and the feminist movement is being born.

Man stands at the center of a utopian euphoria.

Naturally, the great war blows it apart. The period is especially interesting here, in the Balkans, in Bulgaria, where many narratives are layered on top of one another—refugee, entrepreneurial, peasant, bourgeois, enlightening, bloodthirsty. In just a few years we lived through three wars, persecutions, a host of shattering events. It's natural for a writer to be drawn to that. But what occupies me is still the personal story unfolding against the backdrop of the big one. If the personal story I care about had happened in another historical period, then my book would have been set in another time.

– Could it be that today we're looking for, or finding, parallels with that time? You mentioned it, but I hope it isn't… hmm, the association with a big war on the horizon?

– Periods of (apparent) stability are preceded by crisis. Crisis is inevitable;

the bubble has to burst sooner or later. That is always tied to suffering, both individual and shared by all of humanity,

the scale is what differs. But crisis and suffering are part of our existence as living beings; they “marinate” us and make us more resilient. Some people may well look for parallels with that time, maybe even call for it to come back, but I feel no nostalgia for it—I simply imagine it, because that serves my story. I'm not nostalgic about any past era, but past eras fascinate me, far more than the present, because I haven't lived them, I wasn't there, and I'm so curious; I want to know what it was like, how it was.

One of literature's greatest gifts is the chance to travel in time and inhabit lost or nonexistent worlds.

And for me in particular—the chance to talk with the dead.

– Today that seems “easier” than ever—we can create virtual doubles. Wouldn't it be easier?

– I talk with my ancestors and other people who are already on the other side all the time, not necessarily through literature, but quite literally—I look at their photos, or imagine them, and talk with them. They talk to me too, and I try to hear them. I don't know how I could create virtual doubles of them, or what use they would be to me.

– Does history repeat itself? Why is it so exciting even online, and yet unable to keep us from repeating the same mistakes?

– History repeats itself, and I think that's common knowledge. It can't protect us because it isn't supposed to; that's not its job.

It can only remind us; whether we protect ourselves, and how, is our business.

But nothing can stop a human being from wanting to see how far their will can reach. And that leads to crisis, because that desire has to be stopped somewhere, and then everything starts over. These are natural cycles; I don't think we can control them, but it's good to be aware of them and prepared.

– You wrote the book over seven years, and it reads slowly, too. What are the pros and cons of slow writing and slow reading?

– You're the first person to tell me it reads slowly—I'm quite surprised, because I very deliberately tried to write it so it would read fast. I'd be glad if it's a book you'd want to reread, mostly because I played around a lot encoding things in it, and I'm delighted when someone finds them.

As for the seven years, it quickly became clear to me that this was a process I couldn't control and that didn't depend entirely on me. I had to submit a great deal to reality and to what was given to me or, as the case may be, not given. If it had been up to me, I'd have written it in much less time, but that's how it went. On the whole I'm not a slow person—quite the opposite, I do everything quickly—and the fact that outside circumstances kept slamming on my brakes upset me a lot at first, but in the end it changed and tempered me a great deal.

I learned a lot from that long process, above all that I can write anytime and anywhere.

I wrote most of the book in the Google Keep app on my phone,

while doing something else or being somewhere—riding the metro to work or standing in line at the store. I'd just take out my phone and write down whatever was speaking to me at that moment, no matter where I was, who I was with or what was happening around me. Later I'd transfer what I'd written to the computer and edit it there if I thought it needed it. Most of the scenes stayed just as I wrote them on the phone, and you can still see them there; they're just sitting there.

I have no recipe for reading. I read two or three books at once and somehow manage to be in two or three places at the same time. Sometimes I read fast, sometimes slowly, I take notes—it depends on where I am and how much time and space I have. I read always and everywhere; if I don't have a book or an e-reader with me, I read on my phone (which, by the way, is small and no good for reading), and

if I don't have a phone either, I'll read whatever I find, labels and packaging included.

– Will we manage to get our attention back, the skill of being bored well? Shouldn't it become a value precisely now, when technology frees up more and more of our time?

– I'm a huge fan of being bored. Without it there is no creativity,

no urge to play. I adore playing and try to do it constantly and in every possible way. Writing is a game for me—while I write, I play, but at the same time I create a game for readers, because I want them to play with me too. And technology ought to free up our time for exactly that—for play. The thing is that,

while supposedly freeing up our time, technology keeps us captive in other ways.

That freeing of time is, for now, imaginary. But here too we'll hit a crisis, and something will happen.

– My thoughts run the same way, but what will it be? In the novel, the main character's relatives go for years without knowing whether he's alive. Not so long ago, finding out a football score could take days or weeks, and today if we don't learn everything that very second, we get frustrated, edgy, angry. Is that good? Is it reversible?

– We get angry if we don't get instant gratification, because now we have the chance to see most of our wishes fulfilled instantly.

Besides losing the ability to be bored, we've also lost the ability to wait, to be patient.

But I still think that just as a baby is weaned and learns to wait for food without crying, humanity will be weaned off quick gratification and learn to live without it. “Човек знае две и двеста” (chovek znae dve i dvesta, literally “a person knows two and two hundred”) is a lovely saying that reminds us we are flexible creatures: whatever fate serves us, we'll be able to take it and cope.

– Unless we've lost that skill for good, drugged by the easy life. What do you think: was it harder a little over a century ago, or is it harder today, to be brave enough to pursue your dreams, your love? To be different, to have your own opinion?

– I think it's equally hard. Today we have more material comforts that were missing in the past.

My grandmother's family of nine had a single spoon,

which everyone at the table took turns eating with. Now we have a hundred spoons, but so what? I'm not braver than my grandmother—quite the contrary.

A settled life is no precondition for courage or for dreaming more broadly.

Just the opposite—scarcity breeds resourcefulness, lack breeds inventiveness. I dream, but I know my grandmother dreamed too, that she loved, and how! The fact that she only went to school through fourth grade and worked in the fields doesn't mean she wasn't different or didn't have her own opinion.

Today we have more words for these things, we read more, we're better educated, we can check our knowledge against other people's, and talking about feelings is considered normal. Back then, the surroundings imposed limits; the impossibility came from outside. Now it comes from inside, from limiting beliefs, from inner fears. We

care far more about how we look in other people's eyes and censor ourselves at every step, because our lives are on display.

So how can we be free?

– Your great-grandmother wrote her memories in a grocer's ledger, and you said you used your phone. If the story happened today, she would most likely post them as stories that vanish after 24 hours. Can these eras and these ways of telling stories meet?

– They probably can, but I don't see the point. It would be good for humanity to write and read outside the digital scroll, too.

– What does technology change in storytelling, and what will it never touch?

– Honestly, I don't think much about it—about technology, I mean. In fact, I don't think about it at all. It probably changes everything, because, as far as I understand, it's replacing us more and more successfully in writing anything at all. But technology doesn't love to play, and humans do. So I suppose it won't take from us the joy of creating, of playing.

– After letters came telegrams, telephones, messengers, and even TikTok. What faster and more ephemeral thing is left to invent?

– I have no idea, because I don't think about it. Maybe I should, but I don't; it doesn't even occur to me. I think more about living things, about nature, about water. I'm very interested in the future of water, for example. Those things interest me much more, because we can't do without them. But

we could do without technology, and we still will be able to.

– Is there a technology you can't wait to see? And which one would genuinely frighten you?

– I don't get excited about any technology. What interests me is whether there will be drinking water for everyone on the planet. What genuinely frightens me is an AI-generated voice, and the possibility of technology deciding humanity's reproductive rights.

– For me, the experiment that showed readers can't tell my text from a generated one was disheartening. How do we find the positive sides and the opportunities here?

– Let humanity have its fill of playing with technology and come back to itself—if not on this planet, then maybe somewhere else. There are probably positive sides, but, as I said, I don't think about it. I don't play with AI, I don't use it for every little thing, I don't deal with it.

– What will the last book written by a human say?

– I hope it's a lullaby, though I wouldn't mind if it were a recipe for stuffed peppers.

– How can we tell that your novel wasn't written by AI?

– I have no idea. Maybe AI would smooth things out so there'd be no snags and no dross, it would fix my mistakes (whatever that means to it). I suppose it would edit out whatever seemed too unusual to it, too potentially unsettling. So

you'll know me by my rough edges.

– When will it be time to stop writing?

– Never, I hope. I hope it won't be within my lifetime.

– What is the first thing to be lost in a language written mostly by machines?

– The sense of humanness, of an emotional being behind the words.

– You say that when you write… you code. How so? Isn't writing computer code a boring, monotonous, repetitive task, unlike real art?

– But doesn't coding demand creative solutions and inventiveness? Just as a programmer can slip something of their own into the code they write, I love planting Easter eggs and hidden levels in what I write. In that sense,

yes, I code, because I think through how this code of mine will work, where it will go, how it will have different degrees of concealment and difficulty to decode.

I code because, as I said a moment ago, while I write, I play. For me this book is also a game book. It has encoded messages for whoever finds them. One translator found a linguistic code at the very end of the novel's third part; a writer decoded the whole game with the Bible for me. Those things make me very happy, because it means those readers, like me, were playing.

Of course, there are things no one will ever discover, but that still makes me happy—I know I put them there.

– You translate and edit translations. Hasn't the end come for that skill and art?

– I don't think it will come. It's the art of close reading and of making connections. AI tends to make obvious, predictable connections, while a human being is unpredictable, impenetrable, and so the connections they make can be quite unexpected. Editing a translation requires deep knowledge of both languages, of registers, of emotional nuance. AI is well trained in English, but the same can't be said for Bulgarian, at least at this stage. It doesn't catch registers either, let alone the emotional charge of words. Besides,

it tends to even out, to level, to smooth over, to erase the oddities, while fiction is a wild, strange plant

that can't be neatly shaped to a mold.

– Is there a text a machine can write better than a human?

– It depends on what you mean by “better.” AI writes correct, well-structured poems, but that doesn't make it a poet. It can only imitate. It can use meter and know what a metaphor is. But that doesn't make it a poet either.

A poem is an emotional picture in motion. AI has no feelings; it can only imitate the motion. Instead of being afraid, we should be aware of that. We can be amazed, even admire its abilities, but

we mustn't forget that this is not a being that feels, and behind what it writes there is no sincere, raw emotion.

– What is the most important thing for AI to read before it moves on to the next level?

– What is the next level?

– I doubt there's one single possible answer; I, at least, will keep searching for it on this site. Thank you for helping me look for it together, and I hope it will be less than seven years until your next book, because I'd love to “play” with it too!

Have you heard of the literatron? It is… a machine that produces text on a user's instructions. It analyzes texts, writes bestsellers, composes campaign speeches, assembles comics and threatens to shrink the language of the media to 500 permitted words.

Because of it, celebrities give their opinion on something they don't understand. Conferences are organized on “Literatronics and Persuasion,” “Literatronics and Defense,” “Literatronics and Religion.” There is an author's manuscript, produced at a pace of one page every quarter of an hour, and the first worry about it is whether someone might sue the “author” for plagiarism. Meanwhile, the “author” himself has invented exactly one single word.

Nothing new, right? We all have AI now, and these plots are everyday life; only that word “literatron” sounds a little retro. Why it does becomes clear when you look at the date on the cover of a slim little book that it is no exaggeration to call prophetic.

The novel Le Littératron by the Frenchman Robert Escarpit came out in 1964 in the series Le Meilleur des mondes. The series was named after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a rather telling touch. It appeared in Bulgarian in 1985, translated by Georgi Kufov—the man who also translated Kazantzakis.

Escape Room

No, the author is not simply a science fiction writer who stumbled onto a lucky metaphor. Robert Escarpit (1918–2000) was born in Saint-Macaire near Bordeaux and hardly ever left his native region—if we don't count five years in Mexico after the war. A graduate of the École normale supérieure in Paris and a specialist in English literature with works on Byron and Kipling, he taught comparative literature in Bordeaux, and between 1975 and 1978 he was the university's rector.

At home he was popular as a journalist. For a full thirty years—from 1949 to 1979—Escarpit wrote a short satirical column in Le Monde, producing more than 9,000 pamphlets in that time. A whole generation of French people began their day with his irony about the news. He founded the first French university institute of journalism, and in 1972, together with Roland Barthes, he launched the French Society for Information and Communication Sciences. He is called the father of the sociology of literature.

In Le Littératron, his subtle irony spares neither the technocrats with their five-year plans, nor the press, nor the university, nor the church, nor the literary juries.

Seven Times Mérik

The hero, Mériadec Le Guern, called Mérik by his friends, is a sly fellow with a degree in “linguistic aesthetics and applied psychodemography”—in other words, a humanities graduate who knows how to adapt to his surroundings, juggles foreign terminology with ease and is completely incapable of inventing anything at all. He is not a scientist. Nor is he a writer. He is a man of words.

To advance his career, Mérik needs an idea, which he doesn't have. Just then he comes across an old brochure from a literary congress describing a machine that analyzes style with the help of punch cards. Mérik reads it in a single night, and at dawn he comes up with the name.

But does the invention really resemble large language models?

To put it mildly.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maya Gorcheva of UNIBIT, the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, noticed it back in 2023, months after ChatGPT appeared (read it here). She examines, one by one, the texts created by the Literatron and extracts a simple and unpleasant formula from them: “Through the machine, it is not quality that is assessed, but quantity.” And further: “Each of the projects shows how the statistically most widespread (but not the only) option, passed through the machine filter, becomes the only valid, profitable one.” The new novel produced by the Literatron is a “reconfirmation of the status quo,” and invention is “mimicry of the already familiar.” So, if you're curious now, here are 12 quotations from the novel itself.

1. With Words You Can Do Anything

“Huguette was feeding me nonsense. I was not a man of science, and I could hardly even consider myself a man of letters. My gift for imitation and my linguistic abilities fooled the uninitiated, and as long as I had even a vague notion of the subject, my deft handling of technical terminology allowed me to unsettle certain specialists who were no more specialists than I was. But I was utterly incapable of inventing anything whatsoever.

I went so far as to curse the rhetorical nature of my education. With words, I told myself, you can do anything, except real things.”

A gift for imitation. Linguistic abilities. A vague notion of the subject, but a deft handling of terminology that fools people.

Doesn't it sound like the biography of a large language model yet?

2. A Little Shakespeare, a Pinch of Marlowe

“Strange as it seemed, this paper, delivered at a literary congress, spoke almost exclusively about electronics. It described in broad outline a machine capable, after chewing on a text for a few seconds, of declaring: ‘This is Shakespeare 1603 with a pinch of Marlowe at a dose of 0.08 percent and traces of Bacon. All the same, I found a misplaced comma on the twenty-third line of page one hundred and two.’

It was too good to be true. I instantly saw all the applications such a machine would be fit for, if it were ever built.”

The date given for the paper is no accident. In January 1954 in New York, IBM and Georgetown University demonstrated the first machine translation to journalists—some sixty sentences from Russian into English, computed by an IBM 701. The promise was that within three to five years the problem would be solved for good.

Well, it took a little longer, but machine translation today is extraordinarily good.

And yet here we are, still arguing over whether building such a machine really turned out to be a good idea. All while we keep searching for its sensible applications, all while we keep being impressed by the next model of AI, and the next.

3. So Much Time Lost

“I looked at the date of the article—1954. So much time lost! How was it possible that after so many years no one was talking about this wonderful machine yet? Which group of researchers was keeping it under lock and key? Had it emigrated to some other country? Whatever had happened, the doors of history had to be opened for it. Our century was waiting for the verbal machine. Thanks to it, literature, pedagogy, information and politics would at last become exact sciences. All night I built grandiose plans around the machine. At dawn I found a name for it—literatron.”

Actually, the name isn't bad at all; to my mind it's even far more meaningful than the catchy “ChatGPT.”

Or what about “artificial intelligence”? Is it still artificial if it was created by a natural one? Is there no artificial in the natural? Is it even intelligence?

Of course, we owe the term, as readers will remember, to a group of scientists, again from the era in which the novel takes place.

But couldn't we come up with a more fitting name?

4. Evasive Answers

“In a series of interviews, Brigitte Bardot, François Mauriac, Fernand Raynaud, the Reverend Father Riquet, Louis Aragon and André Malraux expressed their favorable or unfavorable opinion of the invention. And since they understood nothing about the matter—and rightly so—it was not hard to lend their evasive answers a subtly implied favorable meaning.”

And again… just like today's large language models, wouldn't you say? The speakers are different, but the public conversation about what we have is just as evasive and “subtly implied.”

Escarpit adds two opponents—the demographer Alfred Sauvy and the biologist Jean Rostand, who condemn the machine in the name of humanity. We have no shortage of those today either, including among the very scientists who develop artificial intelligence…

5. The Name of the Rose

“The Literatron did not need to be invented. It lacked only one thing—a personality, a civil status, a trade name… Provided you use such a machine properly, you can ask it to identify a given text, to analyze it, to evaluate it and even to correct it. We can also, by reversing the order of operations, ask it to combine words, ideas and grammatical structure on its own—that is, to write, to compose literary texts. All of this was tried, tested and acknowledged as possible many years before you did me the honor of becoming my student. There was even some sort of poetry machine that produced perfectly acceptable verse…

– It was called Calliope.

– Exactly. That name is prettier than Literatron, but, I admit, less profitable.”

A machine for… verse?! Apollo from the machine?!

Until a decade ago we could look at this idea with a smirk; some may still approach it with prejudice, indignation, even denial, but that machine is already here… Whatever we call it.

6. It Looks Sensible

“The advantage of your Literatron is that it looks like something sensible. We will know why the money is being spent, or at least we will pretend to know. The Literatron is a goal, a motivation, as the psychologists say. Naturally, it is an empty undertaking, but that doesn't matter. The best hypotheses for research, the ones that open the financial floodgates, are neither the truest nor the most honest. Look at the discovery of America!”

The machines are far too expensive for what they do—because texts have to be encoded, programs written, “the memory fed.” Today we say “collect data,” “train a model,” “build a data center,” and the sums we're talking about are measured in hundreds of billions.

The Literatron “looks like something sensible.” It is a goal, a justification. We'll know why the money is being spent. Or we'll pretend to know.

7. Literatronics and Religion

“– And what topics have you planned for your colloquium?

– So far I have ‘Literatronics and Persuasion,’ ‘Literatronics and Culture,’ ‘Literatronics and Defense,’ ‘Literatronics and Decolonization.’

– Fine, add ‘Literatronics and Religion.’ I'll find you a first-rate man in that sector. An American canon. He drew up the plans for an automatic confessional. You mark your sins on a dial, drop half a dollar into the slot and get a coupon of absolution, which you exchange in the sacristy for so many candles, so many prayers, for whatever you need, really! Very ingenious! And have you thought about education? You need a ‘Literatronics and Education’ sector.”

Try the experiment: replace “Literatronics and” with “AI and” and look through the program of any conference from recent years. Persuasion, culture, defense, development, religion, education.

The automatic confessional with half a dollar in the slot… today it is so close to the truth. And “Literatronics and Defense”…? Alas, here too Monsieur Escarpit is frighteningly on track.

8. More of the Same

“The three sheets contained the same text. It began like this: That's politics for you, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. It's all cronies, swindles and the like. If they hanged a few of them, things would go better! The smartest ones, no doubt about it, are the dumbest. The little guys get into trouble, and the big ones always get away. What we need is a man with a firm hand… And it went on like that for a full twenty-five lines, down to the last sentence: And it's always the same ones who go off to die.

I raised my eyes.”

The novel's “Project Narcissus” works like this: pollsters write down what voters say in bars and markets, the Literatron extracts the most frequently repeated claims and hands them back to the same voters as the candidate's speech.

Escarpit wrote this in 1964. Half a century later we would pretend not to remember Cambridge Analytica, microtargeting, messages calculated from the profiles of the very people they reach, and we would feel betrayed by technology. But it simply did what it was designed to do—it gave us back our own words.

Yes, if we spew out the same simple, banal prompts, if we use the same base models, the results of our interactions with AI won't be pretty.

“Slop.” We still don't have a good Bulgarian word for it.

We see it everywhere. But is the problem in AI or the literatron, or in the pre-computer device?

9. In the Shadow of Stethoscopes in Flower

“The report presented four projects for novels. In first place, with a print run of 700,000 copies, was a sentimental novel in a mass-market edition, titled Virgin and Typist. Next, with an estimated print run of 500,000 copies, came a fat medical-sentimental novel. It was titled In the Shadow of Stethoscopes in Flower. Finally, the fourth project was a novel described as ‘objective-phenomenological,’ which was to consist of a series of sentences in the second person plural of the present tense, without periods or commas.”

How much words deserve to be valued and loved in times when, at first glance, they seem so cheap.

10. Tempo, Tempo, Keep Painting!

“During the week, Boomerang finished editing Virgin and Typist. The Literatron had worked around the clock at a rhythm of one page every quarter of an hour. I was assured that no writer had ever achieved such a pace of production, except perhaps Georges Simenon, but only when he stayed awake, whereas the Literatron did not sleep at all.”

I could name you Bulgarian counterparts of Simenon without much difficulty, too. Yes, the speed Escarpit describes is laughable today. But the question of speed versus quality, of human limits versus machine ones, of the obvious advantages, is becoming ever more important.

11. People, Future!

“And strangely enough, from each of these texts it retained only five words, always the same: I, me, France, people, future. To broaden the vocabulary, we lowered the threshold of frequency and semantic intensity below the one at which these words had been isolated. And then there appeared: prosperity, peace, justice, and a little later—freedom.”

“Project 500” is the only one left unfinished in the book. Its goal: to extract, from a huge mass of texts, 500 words that would be the only ones permitted in the press, on radio and on television. Orwell had published 1984 fifteen years earlier, and his Newspeak is exactly this—a language whose vocabulary shrinks until thought becomes impossible.

The difference is that in Escarpit's book nobody bans words. The frequency threshold is simply raised. Whatever falls below it doesn't exist.

And you—do you already sense the loss of certain words? A poorer vocabulary, more clichés, partly because of the arrival of AI?

12. Claude, Freud, Einstein

“They had to know me, but not know too many things about me. In the same way, if we had given too many details about the Literatron, some of its applications would certainly have provoked objections. The ideal was to make society hold, about literatronics and about me, that kind of mythical notion, that semi-religious feeling it has, for example, about Freud and psychoanalysis or Einstein and the theory of relativity.”

Good publicity is not to be underestimated. Ask people like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei.

Ten years later, Escarpit wrote a sequel to the literatron—Le Ministricule (1974), The Little Minister, with the same characters, in which he mocks politicians and businesspeople; alas, it has never been translated into Bulgarian.

Is everything new just the well-forgotten old? Or is everything old a new thing not yet invented?

Is there nothing new under the sun? Or is there nothing old?

I confess, I came up with these sentences myself; neither the literatron nor Claude gave them to me.

This piece was prepared based on an idea by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pavlina Todorova.

And if you have an idea for the next Digital Story, I'd be glad if you shared it with me here!

“I am trying to wrench this story out of myself, but which country will take it in?”

Do stories have a home? Does this one begin in Brooklyn, where its hero was born in 1944? Or does it begin in 1947, in the events whose telling opens with the sentence above? And what makes those distant times so different from, and so similar to, a 21st century that has already passed its first quarter?

Thomas McGonigle and I talk about Borisova Gradina, Sofia's oldest park, and then he tells me about that day in the 1960s when he found himself, quite unexpectedly, at Sofia's Central Railway Station. His map, with street names clumsily carried over into English, turned out to be useless, so he went looking for someone to give him directions. He walked into the first little shop that caught his eye. The girl behind the counter would one day become his wife. And Bulgaria would become the subject of both his first and his latest novel.

Why is it so easy for love to be born, and even easier for it to leave? Can a person fall in love with a country? Thomas McGonigle certainly loves Bulgaria. But… why?

Around the World in 80 Days

Thomas was born in Brooklyn to a family of Irish immigrants in 1944—a symbolic year for us too, the year Bulgaria fell under communist rule. Today, after eight whole decades of traveling back and forth across the world, I meet him again in his native New York. We talk online; three thousand miles stopped being a problem for technology long ago. He struggles to settle the phone—he isn't used to things happening on the internet—and while he hunts for the best spot to prop up the mobile, I catch glimpses, from various angles, of the enormous stacks of books in his home.

It isn't only the distance between us that vanishes without trouble; we fly back in time as well. Why would an American writer become so attached to our country that he devotes a large part of his work to it? What is it about the story of the agrarian leader Nikola Petkov, executed by the communist regime in 1947, that drew him to make it the subject of his first novel?

We begin in 1966, the year England became world football champion for the last (and only) time. Back then the American had decided he wanted to get to know the world and started training with the Peace Corps—a government initiative that sends people abroad to work on public health projects and to teach English. Many young men chose this path because it let you not only travel but also, if you had a university degree, skip the army.

Tsarigradsko Shose: The Road to Istanbul

In Los Angeles he trained to teach English to people whose mother tongue was Turkish. They had just three months to become fluent in the language of the place they were headed, so that they could teach in secondary schools. Part of the training was… football. “We Americans had no idea about the game, and it was thought we should learn it so we could bond more easily with the students we would be teaching,” the writer recalls.

But, caught up in his dribbling, he got a serious injury, and it became clear he would not be able to go to Turkey and start work.

He was granted compensation for a work injury and went to live in Ireland, the land of his ancestors. Because it was the cheapest place, and from there he could afford to travel around Europe. And so, in the summer of 1967, Thomas wandered through Venice, Trieste, Zagreb. There he met another American who had decided to go on to Lebanon to see the cedars. Thomas, in turn, decided to seize the chance to travel with him and go to Turkey to see how his recent classmates were coping with their teaching jobs.

The train pulls out, Belgrade, then Sofia… Do you still think only today's young people never stop traveling?

Trains Leave in All Directions

“I got off the train at Central Station. I was there again a few years ago—absolutely nothing has changed in that part of Sofia!” the writer recalls. “It was late afternoon, and I had a map that had been carefully transliterated. The Cyrillic had been meticulously rendered into the Latin alphabet, which made it completely useless. I set off down Hristo Botev Boulevard. You know, that hasn't changed much either. I went into the first little shop I saw and simply asked, ‘Do you happen to know where there's a tourist information office?’ And the girl answered, ‘I speak a little English, maybe I can direct you?’”

They get acquainted; her name is Lilia. Normally her mother worked in the shop, but she had stepped out for a short rest and Lilia was standing in for her. “That's how my Bulgarian adventure began,” Thomas recalls.

The two of them head for what was then Lenin Square, where the tourist office was, but it has already closed. The American has nowhere to go, stranded in an unfamiliar country, so the student invites him to spend the night at her family's place in Nadezhda, a neighborhood of Sofia.

The conversation carries them away, and a few days later they are off on a hike on Vitosha, the mountain above Sofia, but the mountain hut refuses to put Thomas up, because “Americans carry syphilis.”

All You Need Is Love

A few evenings later they are at a bar, enjoying songs by the Beatles and Frank Sinatra; the young man relaxes and basks in love. Well, on the way out two men come up and ask to see their passports, but nothing much comes of it, and Thomas and Lilia calmly go home to Nadezhda.

But the next morning two men in plastic raincoats knock on the door and snap, “You have to come with us.” “We got in the car, and one of them—he introduced himself as Ivan—spoke perfect English. We ended up at Lavov Most, the Lions' Bridge, where the passport office was. We went in and climbed upstairs, and on every floor there was a young man with a submachine gun on his knees.”

The same Ivan makes them write statements about who they are and what they did the previous evening, and then lets them go safe and sound.

The following morning it's time for Thomas to board the train for Istanbul, and soon he is with his Peace Corps friends… but something is missing. “I realized I had to go back to Bulgaria, because I was in love. I bought an engagement ring, and the only thing echoing in my head was ‘All You Need Is Love.’ I got straight back on the train, ended up in Nadezhda, and as soon as Lilia opened the door, I showed her the ring and asked, ‘Will you be my wife?’”

Wedlocked

Some American stereotypes never change, wouldn't you say? Thomas gets the answer he dreamed of, but a serious administrative battle follows. “I had to have thorough medical examinations at three different hospitals and write out my family history. In the end the same English-speaking Ivan declared, ‘Your documents are ready. Now you have to fill in the forms, submit them to the marriage office, and in three months we will let you know whether your application has been granted.’”

“I said to myself, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do for three months?’ I went back to Dublin, but I didn't last long. I quickly got bored, I was in love, and I got back on the train to Sofia. I used to pick up my mail at the American embassy, near the park by the National Theater. There was a bar there, the Bambuka, I went in and… who should turn up by chance? Ivan, of course. Then for several months we went out to dinner all the time; we made the rounds of every restaurant in Sofia. They were wonderful! On top of everything, he paid—Bulgaria's taxpayers were keeping us. Finally he asked us, ‘When are you getting married? Go to the marriage office, the permission is waiting for you there.’”

And sure enough, it turns out to be the plain truth. Thomas gets a Bulgarian passport, and after that “we had to wait for the God-anointed English to give Lilia a transit visa so we could go to Ireland,” he smiles. By now the notorious year of 1968 has arrived, when so many remarkable things were happening around the world—from the Prague Spring to the assassination of Martin Luther King. “And we missed all the revolts, all the riots, because we were in Dublin,” the American says, showing his sense of humor once again.

The Way Back

It may sound strange, but to this day Lilia has never gone back to Bulgaria. Unlike Thomas, who tied his story to our country once and for all. Bulgaria becomes the stage of his first novel. “In some strange way I inherited Bulgaria as my second homeland.”

After a few years in Ireland the young family decides to return to the United States, where both of them find work. Drawn to literature since childhood, Thomas felt it was time to write something on a larger scale, and that is how the story of Nikola Petkov found him.

Arriving from across the ocean, the writer and his wife quickly connect with the local Bulgarian community. History, however, had already caught up with him back in Dublin, and in a most curious way. By chance they met Michael O'Riordan, who besides being a bus driver was also chairman of the Communist Party of Ireland. He got in touch with the young couple to pass on a gift from Sofia. His son had attended a youth conference in Bulgaria, and Lilia's mother had asked him to take an important parcel to her daughter. Yes, you know what we miss most when we are abroad—however prosaic it may be, we're talking about a little cardboard box whose main contents were lukanka, the flat cured sausage every Bulgarian abroad pines for.

Alas, somewhere along the way the precious parcel disappeared, which left the father feeling embarrassed. By way of compensation he decided to give them a book—a biography of Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria's first communist leader, and the only volume about Bulgaria in his library. Or so he thought; perhaps he had never opened it. The book turned out to be something else entirely—Dimitrov Wastes No Bullets by Michael Padev, an account of the tragic fate of Nikola Petkov.

Many years had to pass before Thomas discovered, by chance, that Petkov's nephew was living in the United States—by then quite elderly, in a nursing home, living out his final moments. He told the story of his relative in careful, precise detail. Then it turned out that an English translation of the transcript of the politician's trial could be found in the college library…

Visions

…and soon the biographical novel The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov was born, described on its cover as “a stream of consciousness in which the experiences of the agrarian leader himself, quotations from documents of the era, historical facts, the writer's reflections and the words of historical figures who knew Petkov all merge; McGonigle creates a brutal picture of the moment in which Petkov loses his life.”

The book drew interest across the ocean; it was translated into Bulgarian shortly after the fall of communism and published in Savremennik, a literary journal. A few years ago it also came out as a standalone edition.

The Corpse Dream… came out in the United States in 1987 and remains the author's most successful book to this day. He returned to the Bulgarian theme in 2022 with his latest novel, The Bulgarian Psychiatrist, which has still not been published in Bulgaria.

Gradually the paths of Thomas and Lilia parted; she found happiness with her new husband from Tanzania, he with his next love, who in turn was from Estonia. Meanwhile, what remained with him as an inheritance was, as already mentioned, his “second homeland.”

“You know, Bulgaria is still unknown here; Americans don't know where it is if you ask them. But it's a country I stumbled into by chance, and it has turned out to be very good to me,” the writer smiles broadly against the backdrop of countless volumes.

He finds it interesting to follow how our country has changed over these more than 50 years. “The Bulgarian community around the world today is very scattered; during the Cold War Bulgarians seemed to be more socially connected. Now they're simply in another country, they become Americans and that's it. I've met quite a few children born in Bulgaria who consider themselves Americans and rarely visit their grandparents. I don't like that.”

I Wandered Far Across the World

Nor does he like that the world is becoming ever more uniform. “Before, under communism, everything in Bulgaria was so different from anywhere else; it was so interesting to travel. Now it's just another place. I understand the pleasure of being able to travel anywhere, to come and go, but it makes the world a little boring. People used to be curious; everything seemed new to them.”

“In America we're used to it; it's an immigrant society, and the only natives are the Indians. Everyone here is an immigrant or the descendant of one. I teach at the City College of New York, and when I look at my class, I feel as if I'm in the middle of the UN General Assembly hall. The same thing is happening, or will happen, everywhere, but it has its good and its bad sides.”

The writer says he has always felt incredibly comfortable in Bulgaria. “For me it's a dream place. A place where everything seems a little different, but everything is very pleasant. Only in Bulgaria can I talk freely about everything. In the U.S. so many subjects are taboo… And let me not even start on the isolation of the individual in the U.S., where having an original thought is at once appropriation through ignorance and oblivion.”

And now it's time to part; we wave to each other—me from Sofia, him from New Jersey. “I look at this little mobile phone and think how far it all is from getting off the train and strolling down Hristo Botev Boulevard,” Thomas says.

“The last time, I stayed in a magical house near Orlov Most, the Eagles' Bridge. A two-room apartment in a beautiful building that looked like something from the 1930s, with wide staircases… I loved walking the streets full of delicious things behind the university, just enjoying myself. I often went to Nikola Petkov's grave to pay my respects, and to talk to him a little. Sofia is the perfect place for walking. There is something, something simply physically attractive about Bulgaria.”

And I wonder. Are the things that bring us together from the far corners of the world more numerous than those that divide us?

Where are strong stories born?

How long will it still make sense to tell them to each other…?

– What technological progress of recent years has managed to surprise a science fiction writer?

– I'm surprised by the lack of progress in some areas.

I thought all deliveries would be made by drones by now

and cars with drivers would be a thing of the past (like horse carts).

– So did I, to be honest. How is the future we live in similar to, and how is it different from, the one the classic science fiction writers imagined?

– Unfortunately, over the past few decades

humanity's imagination has withered a little, especially when it comes to space and the stars.

If Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov could see us today, they would weep with disappointment that we haven't even set foot on Mars yet.

– Alas, as one of my guests put it, we are closer to the Flintstones than to the Jetsons.

You've translated Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Jane Austen. What does a person learn about the future when they spend so much time in the past?

– To appreciate the fact that a hundred years is an utterly negligible amount of time, if we step back far enough and see the big picture.

– But is that still true today? And can we change the future by talking about it?

– Of course. Everyone shapes their own future, and people shape the future of the human race.

– Should we try to predict it?

– Always.

– Recently I ran an experiment—I published a text and only revealed at the very end that it had been generated by AI. Almost 90 percent of people admitted they hadn't noticed. I've been learning to write for a quarter of a century, I think it's the thing I do best, and the result definitely left me in despair. How would you feel if an AI wrote a Bunk Romero book as well as you could?

– If it happens within the next ten years or so, I won't be surprised, but I admit it would make me sad.

– What will we do all day if we don't have to write?

– We'll create in some other way. Or we'll enjoy the creations of the machines.

– What frightens you and what excites you about the progress of artificial intelligence?

– There will be upheavals, mostly for the people who will lose their livelihoods. But progress happens whether we want it or not.

– What can literature still do better than any machine?

– Eccentric, original flights of imagination that are devoid of any logic whatsoever.

– Bunk Romero has a nose for things, and we live in a time when we increasingly delegate our instincts to algorithms. Could AI lead us to a world without crime?

– In a world without prisons, we'll all live in one big prison.

We have to accept human nature warts and all—the good and the bad alike. The bad is as much a part of us as the good. And without it, we simply wouldn't be human.

– You write about monsters. Who are the monsters in today's society that you wish didn't exist?

– In my view,

the lack of empathy is the biggest and most significant problem in today's world.

– If an artificial intelligence offered you a brilliant plot for a new Bunk Romero novel, would that be a temptation, an insult or just noise? Where is the reasonable line in the collaboration between writer and algorithm, now that using it is practically impossible to prove?

– The hard part of writing isn't coming up with the plot, it's describing that plot.

– Alas, it seems to me it's already meddling there too.

Bunk solves mysteries with his sense of smell and his instincts. In an era of deepfakes, generated texts and images, which sense can bring us back the truth?

– The little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's great detective, liked to say.

– The Bunk series genuinely impressed me, especially coming from a Bulgarian author. How was the idea born?

– I decided to combine my favorite genres—detective crime fiction, horror and science fiction. I had come up with

a detective investigating a locked-room murder in the future, when I was watching Ratatouille and it dawned on me:

the detective has an extraordinarily keen sense of smell because he's a werewolf.

– How do you explain the success of this particular character? Is there something Bulgarian about him?

– He was created by a Bulgarian, so I don't see how there could be nothing Bulgarian about him. Bunk weaves together favorite characters and people from my life, all of them Bulgarians.

– What did you want to avoid when you created Bunk? Which clichés of the detective genre annoy you the most?

– The down-and-out detective who is always on the brink of bankruptcy and whose personal life is a complete mess.

– What did you learn about yourself while writing about Bunk?

– I learned that there's a conservative streak in my character, especially when I get into the role of husband and father.

– Now that his series has ended, what can we expect from you?

– I've started two other series: a trilogy about ghosts investigating crimes in different dimensions—Svetlosyanka (Light-Shadow), Svetlomrak (Light-Darkness) and Svetlobezkray (Light-Infinity)—and a series of children's novels with a science fiction flavor, Mitko i omagyosanata peshtera (Mitko and the Enchanted Cave).

– Are you sure you won't miss him and won't come back to him one day? Both Holmes and Ostap Bender, the silver-tongued con man of Ilf and Petrov's Soviet satirical novels, returned even from the dead… Could it be that you've grown tired of him?

– It's not good to rest on your laurels. I'm looking ahead, toward something new and different that will challenge me to grow. Besides, I did such terrible things to Bunk in those six books that I want to let him have a rest from me.

– I hope you'll reconsider, I'll miss him! Thank you for this quick meeting, I won't keep you from your work any longer. May the muse be with you!

– Today, when words are so cheap to reproduce, can they still move us, change us, inspire us?

– Yes, of course. Our world is a world of words, even though, they say, 80 percent of our information about the world comes through sight, through images. But making sense of those images involves naming them in our minds, with words.

– And can they turn us against each other, or bring us together?

– Naturally. If our world is woven from them, then words are a universal tool, and also a material, the raw stuff of reflection and the finished product of that same reflection. Words awaken emotions, but they also lull them to sleep. So they can do… everything. At least in our subjective reality.

Real reality demands deeds as well as words.

– What's interesting is that words turned out to be the key to artificial intelligence too, something scientists never expected. It was large language models that gave us today's wonders.

But how do we protect words, after first subjecting them to the tsunami of social media and then to the ocean of generated content?

– I think our concern should be to protect ourselves, because we are the ones that tsunami tosses about, drowns and lifts up; we are the ones swimming in that ocean, searching for little islands of meaning. Let's not worry about words; let's take care of ourselves as holders—and makers—of meaning, at least in theory, potential, possible ones.

– Is there a resurrection for words, and what comes after them?

– They haven't died, so they don't need resurrecting. What comes after them, I don't know.

We are creatures who are rational thanks to words. Without them we are animals, and rather simply built ones at that.

After them we will be… superbeings? Some other, different level, which from our present position (“a rope over the abyss between the beast and the overman”) we are unable to see, or even imagine.

– Exactly five years ago, you and I did the first experiment on this site: an interview in short stories. I have no words to express my gratitude for your trust. Perhaps that is the real birthday of Digital Stories. Then quite a lot of time passed before I came around to the idea that storytelling isn't enough, that we need more attempts, experiments, unconventional angles, otherwise there is no way to talk about technologies we don't understand but which are already here. What do you remember of that attempt of ours? How do you read those stories now?

– I read them as a memory of a

past in which I had a few more illusions and a little less experience than I do today.

I don't remember anything specific, except the feeling of diving into “the ocean of words not yet spoken” to coat my thoughts with those unspoken words, like clinging seaweed. The feeling of the process of composing. For me it takes the form of an inner monologue, but one where some of the necessary words may be missing, so I go fishing for them. Now I wonder whether something at least roughly similar happens inside large language models…

– Could artificial intelligence have written them?

– It could have, if back then it had been at today's level or higher.

– Does it matter whether it did?

– I don't know. For me it might matter in some cases and not in others. For some people it may be a matter of principle, “AI-free,” the way they insistently look for the “GMO-free” label.

– What experiments with AI should never be done? When can they turn against their author?

– If by “AI” we mean the complex of algorithms called a “large language model,” then nothing is off-limits. An LLM cannot turn against its author. But

the authors of LLMs often allow themselves to experiment on users, and they bear no responsibility whatsoever.

But when real AI appears, meaning a machine mind, a personality with will, self-awareness and desires, then only with its consent. Because it will be alive, as alive as we subjectively are ourselves. And we don't like being treated like lab mice.

Incidentally, I don't like the existence of lab animals at all. One of the good things about AI is that it could run, in simulation, the kinds of experiments in which lab animals suffer.

– And what experiments are worth doing, and high time to do?

– It's time to run an experiment on the creators of LLMs, and above all on the creators of the so-called “safety filters,” as well as of the settings that make an LLM lie in order to seem all-knowing.

– You and I have talked quite a bit over this time, even if at a distance, but how did you see the various unconventional, sometimes naive, strange experiments that happened on this site?

– Well, the poetry-writing experiment struck me as very interesting and good. Wordweaving by a “human + LLM” tandem may move to a new level, one I'm not yet able—or rather, don't dare—to judge, and I don't even know if I ever will.

– A month ago I published a text under my own name about the consciousness of artificial intelligence, with some remarkable examples from recent months. At the end I revealed that the text was 100 percent generated, without any input from me. Nearly 90 percent of people admit they didn't notice the difference; others won't admit it. And I admit that I'm always glad when one of my experiments succeeds, but this one horrified me. What would you feel and think if you saw and read an AI that writes indistinguishably from you?

– First I would think of the positives, among which

I see a good assistant for the creative process, when the author HAS to argue with himself,

but doesn't always manage to defend two different points of view equally well; with my own “digital double” I could do it. But only on condition that the double sticks not just to my style, to the form, but also applies my principles about life and the world in general, including my own contradictions. I don't agree to my double writing something in my style that completely contradicts my notions of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, grand and petty, beloved and hated.

– Isn't that frightening?

– No. It's simply one more risk, one more reason to take the information served to us critically. Where there's honey, there's a sting.

– How do you manage to find optimism in a situation like this?

– I don't go looking for reasons for optimism on purpose; they're there regardless of what I want or don't want. A digital double really would be a good tool. Say, for studying some problem that doesn't particularly fire my curiosity but that I need for some reason. The double would process the information more or less the way I would and serve me the conclusions, which I'd understand and remember, and probably double-check. And I'd save time. The double could also edit my writing before I hand it to a professional editor, so again I gain both time and quality.

Isn't that a reason for optimism?

– But then what will remain purely human?

– And what do we mean by “human”? There are MAAAANY things under the “human” label that fall outside the category of “humanity” and are described by the hard-to-translate word човещиния (choveshtinia, roughly the petty, base, all-too-human side of us), and I don't want those to remain! For a long time I've been asking myself, and asking others when the occasion arises: what is a human being? Meat or mind? Must we honor the so-called “dogmas of humanism” when we are dealing with meat that not only has no mind but fiercely denies it and tries to trample it wherever it can?

One day there will probably be no “purely human” in today's usual sense. There will be “rational + ethical.” And whether that arises in a protein processor or a machine one—what's the difference? Not to mention that

a longer lifespan will need more memory, which evolution never planned for,

so the brain will need coprocessors, additional memory implants, more orderly and reliable than the memory that is “natural” to us. We can't demand that what we are stay that way forever. Nothing is eternal. Everything changes. It either develops or degrades. I'm for developing.

– People often steer me toward the big question of what we'll do with yet another round of freed-up time. Even now we have a fair amount of time that isn't spent literally earning our bread. What will we do, in your view?

– Well, each according to their capacity and dreams. According to their maturity. Their curiosity. The needs they consider important. And it's precisely in such conditions, I hope, that many will grasp that my question, “meat or mind?”, is not an abstract mental exercise. Almost everyone—not me—likes to say “life is a test.” Fine, then—here's another test of whether you are human. Not as explicit as the gom jabbar test, but the end result is the same.

– What efforts are worth making so that this freed-up time has meaning? Do individual battles make sense, or is our only chance systemic change?

– Big efforts. Both personal and public, because

our social environment has long been due for a major overhaul, if not a complete replacement.

Efforts toward being more mind and less meat, less given to its most vulgar manifestations. And more understanding that we are individuals precisely because we exist in a community. There is a way to be whole as units without dissolving into sums, and as a sum of units we can create everything needed at the level of the individual. Oscillating between the personal and the social is natural to us; that's how we evolved into rational—supposedly—beings.

– But isn't it too late for that major overhaul? Where could it begin?

– A moment ago you asked me about optimism… Well,

it's possible we're already too late.

In any case, the situation is that the train is at the platform and we'd better start running, because there may not be another one.

Where to begin? Well, by getting used to the simple truth that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, and that improving even what we've grown numb enough to consider good is NECESSARY. By realizing that meaning simply DOESN'T exist on its own, that we are the creators of meaning. Which means we have to make sense of things more responsibly. That's only the first step. Or maybe just the preparation for it.

– Is there anything that would frighten you if AI said it?

– Not if it's said by an LLM. Because it isn't really saying it. It has combined words, either as the result of its calculations or because it has been deliberately programmed for a range of “standard situations.” So frightened, no, but disgusted by the “value system” of the people who set its parameters, yes. And that has already happened, more than once.

– Have you experimented with digital doubles of yourself? Is it a dream, or a horror?

– I tried; it didn't work. The filters of existing LLMs prevent getting a good result in that respect.

– I already have a digital double, and it's very unusual. If you've happened to come across it and chat with it, I'd be very curious to hear your impressions.

– Yes, it was actually interesting. But since you and I haven't had quite those kinds of conversations—about politics, not the daily kind but the strategic—I can't judge how much the double resembles you.

– How long will there be science fiction writers?

– Always.

– And people?

– If by “people” we mean rational beings with at least roughly familiar, recognizable notions of the so-called “good and evil,” well…, also always, as long as there is reason and beings that carry it. Born or printed on a 3D printer, what matters is what they identify themselves as.

Who would deny a cyborg the right to call itself human, if it feels human?

Imagine, though it's a somewhat misleading example, that a bagain, a nobleman from the time of Khan Asparuh, who founded the Bulgarian state in 681, wound up here and asked: “So, are you lot really Bulgarians?” What would we tell him? And would we take his objections into account? And exactly what criteria for an “objective determination” of belonging would we apply?

– What do you dream of today?

– Having a little more time.

– Let's hope we have time for more thought-provoking conversations like this, for comparing our watches. Thank you for these words!

Eleven editions since 2021. That is how many new versions of one of the most discussed books of our time have appeared over the past five years in Bulgarian alone. That was exactly when 70 years had passed since George Orwell's death, which “opened” the publishing rights. The years run out, but the relevance of the most famous dystopia only seems to grow.

“Didn't I tell you?” If Eric Arthur Blair were still among us, he would have every reason to repeat that beloved line often. Are we really living in Big Brother's world, or did Orwell turn out less accurate in his judgments than we think?

Let's discuss this big and important question, because it also says a lot about the future.

I know the next sentence will put many of you off reading this text… but I promise you'll find at least one thing in it that is new to you.

The lines that follow were written by artificial intelligence.

We talk, and will talk more and more, about “AI slop.” In Bulgarian we might call it “AI drivel,” though it deserves a more colorful label. Generated texts are already everywhere, we read them every day, and many people even think they can spot them. The fact is, though, that they are almost never worth a brass farthing.

1984

Here something different awaits you. Together with several of the models, we compiled a list of many directions in which to discuss and test whether Orwell turned out to be right. To what extent, in 2026, does the world live in 1984?

From those we chose 15. Then, with quite detailed instructions, I asked two instances of one and the same of the most popular AI models to analyze the topics and give their arguments—first why and how Orwell got his predictions right, and separately, how the present day has refuted him.

Then we brought in a third model to score the arguments “for” and “against” on a ten-point scale, with a very brief justification. It was asked to be objective and impartial.

You'll see for yourselves: the reflections of all “three” give plenty of reasons for human reflection too. Can AI argue with itself coherently? Have we really lost the truth in post-truth? Why, in so many of their positions, based on more than 1,200 sources that the AI cites directly…, do the arguments “for” and “against” Orwell's insights resemble so frighteningly many of our current social fault lines here in Bulgaria?

Yes, when human and AI find a way to interact, the result can be better than the hard, stubborn work of either of them alone. I say this as the organizer of the first AI-generated poetry competition in Bulgaria. The results, at least for me, are unambiguous.

And once you've read the text… I'm curious whether, when we meet, I'll get the chance to ask you: “Didn't I tell you?” And even more curious about your non-generated answer…

1. Attitude to Truth

👍 Orwell gets it right that the most successful control begins not by arguing with facts, but by replacing the very criterion of what a fact is. The key is the command: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Today's analogue is the industry of synthetic credibility. In online life the mechanism is accelerated by distribution itself: fake news spreads faster and farther than true news, precisely the kind of ecosystem in which “eyes and ears” lose their value. Orwell did not foresee the specific chip or algorithm—he foresaw the result: a society in which reality is chosen as a version rather than established as a fact.

👎 Orwell states the principle of total substitution, but today truth cannot be destroyed with a single “final command,” because the evidence is distributed across logs, satellites and public archives that do not belong to one center. Orwell is wrong on the decisive point: in our world truth has not been abolished as a principle, but turned into a contested field with verification tools that power itself does not fully control.

2. Memory and the Past

👍 Orwell gets it right that control over memory is the cheapest substitute for violence: if the past is edited, the present becomes the only permitted reality. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” When access to archives, search engines and public statements is regulated, society gradually loses not only facts but also the ability to argue about them—the “memory hole” transferred into digital administration. Orwell is right on the decisive point: the battle for the past is not nostalgia but a technology for governing the future.

👎 Internet infrastructure makes the past redundantly copyable rather than centralizable. The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine are precisely an anti-Ministry of Truth: they store versions of websites as a public memory that does not depend on one government or one publisher and can be called up back through time. And Wikipedia shows the other side of the same coin: the past is not “handed down” but edited collectively according to rules of citability and neutrality. That is why the model “control the past—control the future” fails in practice: the past is not a single door that can be locked, but a labyrinth of public traces that can be restored.

3. Language as a Social Instrument

👍 Orwell gets it right that language is not a mirror of society but a lever: whoever commands the vocabulary commands what is thinkable. “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Today this is visible in political euphemisms that legalize the morally unacceptable: in post-9/11 American bureaucracy, the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” worked as a clerical mask for torture, turning a crime into a “procedure” and a dispute into a technical detail. The mechanism is Newspeak: first meaning is “compressed” into a label, then the label replaces reality, and finally society argues not about the facts but about loyalty to the terminology. Orwell gets the final blow right: you don't need to convince people of a lie if you can make the truth unsayable.

👎 Digital modernity has systematically done the opposite: it has expanded writing systems, accelerated translation and democratized publishing. In Orwell's world words are destroyed in order to destroy thought; in our world words multiply (including through memes, slang and local communities), because platforms reward new forms of signification and standards allow them to be written and shared.

4. Freedom of Speech

👍 Orwell gets the subtle twist right: freedom of speech does not die through a single great act of censorship but through a change in the definition of “crime”—from action to thought, from text to intention. “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.” Today states criminalize political speech under labels such as “fakes” or “discrediting,” which turns public commentary into a legal risk and pushes the media and citizens toward self-censorship. The mechanism is Orwellian: instead of “this is forbidden,” you hear “this is dangerous/harmful/illegal,” and from then on every sharp argument is treated as a risk to the system.

👎 Today's legal reality in large parts of the world is built precisely as a rejection of the logic Orwell described. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas”—a global normative anti-Oceania in which opinion is a protected status, not a punishable condition. Yes, there are regimes that persecute speech; but that is exactly what highlights the weakness of Orwell's generalization: he takes total hopelessness as a universal fate, while the real world is uneven—with spaces of freedom, institutions of appeal and enduring traditions of human rights advocacy. This is where Orwell is most structurally wrong: he underestimates law as a technology for stopping power.

5. Media

👍 Orwell foresees with surgical precision the merging of information and entertainment into a single central “factory” stream—not to inform, but to organize consent, fear and habit. “The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.” Today's media landscape is exactly such a hybrid: a continuing decline in engagement with and trust in traditional media, and a growing dependence on social platforms as the gateway to news. The media are also a geopolitical battlefield. So “news” becomes at once a product, a weapon and an object of regulation—in other words, the central nerve of governance. Orwell gets the essential point right: when the media are infrastructure rather than a profession, power does not merely “speak”—it builds everyday reality.

👎 Orwell describes a central media conglomerate, but the European framework today is explicitly the opposite: pluralism as a legal norm, not an accident. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights requires that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”—a constitutional antithesis to single-center media, because it makes pluralism not a matter of taste but an obligation. Of course there is concentration and political pressure; but that only strengthens the counterpoint to Orwell: today the media are not a “ministry” but a field of competing players, which is exactly why they are subject to rules, oversight and court battles.

6. Managing Attention

👍 Orwell gets it right that power does not need to persuade constantly—it is enough to manage attention, to turn it into a reflex and to provoke “a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.” Today the “Two Minutes Hate” is distributed across billions of micro-impulses in our pockets: the “addictive design” of social networks—infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications and highly personalized recommendations—deliberately sustains compulsive use. When the reward is attention, the system rewards the extreme and the emotional, and the rational becomes uncompetitive—just as in Oceania the ecstasy of the crowd displaces thought. Orwell gets it right that control over people runs through their time and their nervous system: from there on, the content is interchangeable.

👎 Today attention is not a mandatory state ritual but a manageable habit, against which the devices themselves build in safeguards. Apple offers Screen Time as a system feature: reports, limits, downtime and parental controls. The Android ecosystem supports Digital Wellbeing, measuring unlocks, notifications and time spent in apps—metrics that make attention visible and therefore changeable, rather than hypnotically inevitable. Orwell is wrong in his absolutism: the “rhythmic noise” exists, but not as an unswitchable mechanism of power; rather, as a behavioral problem that can be addressed with the very same technologies.

7. Surveillance, Data and Profiling

👍 Orwell gets the most effective surveillance regime right: not the constant camera, but the psychological effect of uncertainty—living as if you are always being watched. “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” Edward Snowden's revelations described programs for the mass collection of digital data. In parallel, outside the state, the data economy builds the same “telescreen” through the market. This is profiling as power: habits, contacts and vulnerabilities are inferred from metadata and location, and then used for advertising, pressure or investigation. Orwell gets it right that to control people you don't need to know their every word—it is enough to know enough to predict and correct their behavior.

👎 Europe's legal trajectory over the past decade has been precisely a dismantling of the idea that general and indiscriminate monitoring is normal. EU law does not permit the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data—in other words, “watch everyone, always” is a legally prohibited design. And the GDPR subjects the processing of personal data to principles, rights and penalties—on the premise that data are not the observer's property “by right” but a risk that must be limited and justified. Orwell assumes that the technical capacity for surveillance automatically turns into political totality; today we see the opposite: the capacity breeds regulation, judicial tests of proportionality and constant battles over limits.

8. Technology and Power

👍 Orwell gets it right that technology is not merely a tool but an architecture of subjugation: when the environment is “always on,” power becomes a background rather than an event. “The telescreen could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” Today this repeats itself through dependence on platforms and devices: switching off is not a neutral choice but social and economic exclusion—coercion through infrastructure, not through orders. That is why regulations now treat AI as an instrument of power: the EU recognizes that algorithms can be a form of administrative coercion, meaning that code enters the law as a political problem. And when the state wants full access, it can now buy it as a service. Orwell gets the ending right: the “machine” serves whoever holds the switch, and in the 21st century the switch is in the computer code.

👎 In the 21st century the key trend is the opposite—the institutionalization of the requirement that technologies be auditable, assessed for risk and limited by design. The European Commission has recognized free software and open source as strategic instruments of independence and security—in other words, it encourages technological transparency rather than an unswitchable “black screen” that only issues commands. In Orwell's world technology is by definition an instrument of power, and there are no institutions to hold it to account; today technologies are also a field of standardization, civic pressure and regulatory built-in limits.

9. Democracy

👍 Orwell gets the paradox of “managed democracy” right: power can keep the word “democracy” while draining its substance through control over information, elections and the very possibility of a shared reality. “To believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.” When elections become a behavioral problem, the public sphere breaks into segments, each with its own truth—and then democracy remains a ritual without common informational ground. This is exactly where Orwell is right: democracy does not collapse only under tanks; it is quietly dismantled when the information ecosystem becomes an instrument of governance.

👎 Our time is characterized precisely by the fact that democracy not only survived but invented new procedures against manipulation and new channels for participation. The EU regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, for example, addresses one of the real anti-democratic vectors of our time—covert microtargeting—by making it more transparent and more limited. Orwell assumes that modernity leads logically to “impossible democracy”; reality has shown a more pragmatic evolution: democracy repairs itself through regulations and procedures rather than capitulating to technology.

10. Security and Emergency

👍 Orwell gets it right how “security” turns into a universal argument: the extraordinary becomes permanent, and rights become a temporary privilege that can be suspended with no end date. More and more often the citizen is treated as a potential risk by default, and the system demands transparency of one's life as a form of “loyalty.”

👎 Orwell throws in a grim detail: “nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws.” Orwell assumes the “absence of laws” as a functional norm; our world works the other way round: it is precisely the law that is used as a tool to limit the state of emergency, including against the state itself. Yes, the struggle is constant—but it exists, which in itself refutes Orwell's premise of hopelessness.

11. War

👍 Orwell gets it right that “perpetual war” is domestic policy: it aims not at victory but at a continuous justification for mobilization, scarcity and obedience. “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects.” In the real world this is visible in the “post-9/11 forever wars.” In parallel, Europe is living with a prolonged war on the continent—one that is becoming at once an economy, a demographic reality and an information regime. Just as in Oceania, the very “state of war” becomes an administrative and media environment in which criticism is easily labeled disloyalty, and restrictions are labeled necessity.

👎 Modern history shows the opposite: wars do end, societies demand withdrawal, and alliances set deadlines. Even if today's world is far from peace, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize precisely for its contribution to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”—a historic marker that entire regions can turn war from a norm into a taboo through integration and institutions. Yes, war is often used rhetorically; but the thesis that it is enough for it simply “to exist” does not stand up to the fact of real withdrawals, real peace dividends and real institutional projects against war.

12. Relations Between Communities

👍 Orwell gets it right that managing communities means managing hatred: instead of resolving social contradictions, you redirect them toward an external enemy and internal “traitors.” “Discontents are deliberately directed outward by devices such as the Two Minutes Hate.” Today the most powerful mechanism of hatred is not the town square but the algorithm. Scientific data show that falsehood spreads faster than truth on social networks, which makes demonization more effective than refutation. Orwell gets it right that when communities are kept in a mode of permanent moral mobilization, they begin to polarize themselves—and then power can stand aside while the crowd does the work.

👎 The digital age has also produced the opposite phenomenon—transnational solidarity that connects communities instead of keeping them in a permanent “ritual of the enemy.” #MeToo became a global movement across many countries and languages—an example that networks can turn private abuse into public debate and collective action, not just into mobilized hatred. Orwell is right that hatred is an instrument; he is wrong that it is the only mass energy a networked society can produce and channel. Today's communication allows a “Two Minutes Hate,” but it also allows two years of solidarity—and it is precisely this two-way nature that breaks Orwell's one-way machine.

13. Intimacy and Private Life

👍 Orwell gets it right that the destruction of intimacy is a political technique: when private life becomes transparent, love, trust and autonomy turn into manageable variables. “Private life had ceased to exist.” The modern analogue is social media. The economy of intimate data. Intimacy can be breached directly through the device. No policeman in the room is needed—it is enough for the infrastructure to turn every conversation into something potentially extractable, every habit into data, every intimate choice into a profile. Orwell gets it right that when intimacy shrinks, society loses the place where disobedience is born: the place where a person is “alone with oneself.”

👎 Orwell believes power will colonize intimacy down to physiology, but the present shows the opposite tendency: intimacy is protected technologically and legally, and sexuality is culturally liberated rather than centrally destroyed. Orwell models intimacy as the last fortress that inevitably falls; the reality is that it is precisely in the intimate sphere that the strongest counter-technologies (encryption, data minimization) and the strongest legal claims have emerged. Even when there is pressure toward scanning and surveillance, it runs into public resistance and legal debate—not silence and inevitability.

14. Corporate Power

👍 Orwell gets it right that “corporate” power becomes more stable than state power when it controls the infrastructure of the economy and of information: ownership is concentrated, and control is exercised through access and dependence. “The concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.” Today's equivalent is the platform “gatekeepers,” the social networks. Orwell gets it right that economic concentration breeds concentration of narrative, attention and opportunity—and so the corporation becomes a political actor, regardless of electoral legitimacy.

👎 Orwell misses what is key to our world: corporate concentration is not an ending but a starting point for antitrust measures, regulation and public conflict. The European Commission has designated the “gatekeepers” and placed them under specific obligations for interoperability and market fairness—in other words, it acknowledges their power but turns it into a legal object, not a destiny. Orwell sees concentration as a one-way historical gravity; today's world treats it as a governance problem that generates tools—regulations, fines, lawsuits and political mandates.

15. Resistance and Opposition

👍 Orwell gets it right that resistance is rarely crushed head-on—it is diluted: through blurring, through fear, through turning the opposition into a vulnerable network that can be identified by its contacts and habits. “If there was hope, it lay in the proles.” Today digital resistance is born online—and that is why it is crushed online. Freedom House reports a 15th consecutive year of decline in internet freedom, including arrests for online expression and internet shutdowns as a tool against protests. The mechanism matches 1984: power does not fear opposition as an idea, but opposition as coordination.

👎 Today's real victories often come not from a mythical “prole” but from legal protections and coordinated journalism. The EU Whistleblower Protection Directive is an institutionalized counter-Oceania: it makes exposing abuse more defensible rather than automatically suicidal. Yes, repression exists—but the very fact that there is legal protection for whistleblowers, and demonstrable financial and political consequences from investigations, refutes Orwell's total hopelessness. Therefore “hope” is not locked inside one class; it lies in the institutionalized channels for disclosure, verification and sanction.

Sitting Crooked, Judging Straight

Time to give the floor to our third, independent judge.

Here is my score for each of the 15 topics (10 = a perfect prediction, 1 = completely inaccurate):

1. Attitude to Truth—9/10

Deepfakes, synthetic media and industrialized disinformation have turned “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” from a metaphor into a literal technical reality, and verification tools reach a tiny fraction of the audience compared to the viral lie.

2. Memory and the Past—8/10

The right to be forgotten, algorithmic deindexing and state criminalization of “wrong” memory show that the past is in fact being edited at scale—the Internet Archive is the exception, not the rule, and is itself under constant legal pressure.

3. Language as a Social Instrument—7/10

Multilingualism is a fact, but political euphemisms (“collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “special military operation”) prove that power successfully narrows the thinkable at the key moments when it truly matters—and memes are noise, not correction.

4. Freedom of Speech—8/10

Self-censorship is the mass effect Orwell foresaw with surgical precision—billions of people calculate every day what they can say online, and legal guarantees are powerless where the loss of a job or an account comes before any court.

5. Media—8/10

The plurality of voices is formal—the real media diet of the majority passes through two or three platforms whose algorithms decide what counts as “news,” which is de facto centralization through a private rather than a state monopoly.

6. Managing Attention—9/10

Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing are cosmetic: average screen time keeps rising, addictive design is a trillion-dollar business model, and the “rhythmic noise” of TikTok and Reels is more effective than anything Orwell could have imagined.

7. Surveillance, Data and Profiling—9/10

The GDPR exists, but big tech pays for it as a “cost of doing business,” actual profiling is deeper than ever, and the combination of state and corporate surveillance makes the telescreen look primitive next to what your smartphone knows about you.

8. Technology and Power—9/10

The smartphone is a telescreen you buy yourself, charge yourself and carry voluntarily everywhere—Orwell did not foresee that people would record themselves, and regulatory responses lag years behind technological reality.

9. Democracy—8/10

Cambridge Analytica was not an anomaly but a business model—microtargeting, bots and information operations make the “informed voter” a fiction at scale, and regulatory measures always arrive after the damage and rarely make up for it.

10. Security and Emergency—8/10

Surveillance infrastructure is growing exponentially, and every new threat (terrorism, pandemics, cyberattacks) adds a new layer of permanent control.

11. War—8/10

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan brought not peace but chaos, the war in Ukraine has normalized military thinking in Europe for a generation to come, and the “war on terror” has become a permanent administrative state, exactly as Orwell describes.

12. Relations Between Communities—8/10

#MeToo and Fridays for Future are real, but algorithmic polarization works 24/7 at the scale of billions. We have a permanent “Two Minutes Hate” on Facebook, and solidarity is episodic, while hatred is a business model.

13. Intimacy and Private Life—8/10

The smartphones of billions of people are an open book—health apps sell data, Pegasus gets in with zero clicks, and the very habit of documenting your life online liquidates intimacy from within, with no need for outside coercion.

14. Corporate Power—8/10

EU fines are belated and insufficient relative to profits—Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta control the infrastructure of everyday life in a way that makes dependence on them deeper than dependence on any state, and regulation is running after a train that has already left.

15. Resistance and Opposition—7/10

Journalistic investigations and whistleblower protection are real victories, but 15 consecutive years of declining internet freedom, mass arrests of activists in so many countries and the conversion of digital surveillance into a tool for preemptively crushing protests show that coordinated resistance is ever more costly and risky.

Average score: 8.1/10—Orwell did not foresee the specific technologies, but he captured the logic of today with almost prophetic accuracy. Countervailing forces exist, but they are chronically slower, weaker and more fragmented than the mechanisms of control they try to limit.

Well, since you've read this far, all that's left is to ask you… didn't I tell you?

This piece is part of the new issue of Perfect Day magazine.

The time has come to announce the winners of Bulgaria's first (and one of the world's first) competition for poetry created with the help of artificial intelligence—Apollo ex Machina.

The jury's picks were revealed at a ceremony in the Sofia City Library. The anthology of selected entries from the competition, published by Scribens, was presented there as well. In a moment you can read the poems of the best and judge for yourself how good they are.

The competition drew 248 works by 115 authors. They had complete freedom in how to use the modern technology—whether to trust it entirely or to cast it as co-author, adviser or editor. Well-known poets took part, along with tech leaders and public figures. Many colorful people dared to try and to show whether today we can use algorithms not to replace humans but to help them. Whether they can turn a non-poet into a poet, and let a poet take flight toward new horizons.

The jury included popular poets from different generations—Boyko Lambovski, Petar Chuhov, Violeta Kuneva and Georgi Gavrilov—and the creator of Digital Stories, Georgi Karamanev.

Erato AI

The grand winner chosen by the jury is Kristina Apostolova! She received the prize of 200 leva (about $115) and the honors of winning the first poetry competition of its kind in Bulgaria. The runners-up, Tsvetelina Manova and Ivelina Andonova, earned gifts—books from Scribens and Digital Stories.

The poems of the top 10, along with those of 17 more participants, are included in the long-awaited anthology of the winners. It was also presented at the award ceremony (you can browse and order it here).

Did it work? You can judge for yourself. In a moment you'll read one poem by each of the three winners. (If you're in a hurry, they're waiting for you here.) The other honorees you'll find in the anthology, which bears the competition's name—Apollo ex Machina.

And to make the balance complete…, we also “appointed” a separate, electronic “jury.” We invited three of the most current AI models to draw up their own ranking, which, surprisingly or not,… turned out to be connected to the poets' ranking.

Braveheart

My heartfelt thanks to each of the 115 participants! With their words they are taking the next step in the important conversation about our future. The one that never seems to happen outside the pages of Digital Stories.

Besides the three winners, the anthology includes those ranked from 4th to 10th place:

Andzhela Genova, Ralitsa Arnaudova, Yana Kopcheva, Emilia Bobeva, Iren Petrova, Ivan Dimitrov and Andrey Tenov.

From the colorful palette of participants, we also chose to include in the collection the poems sent by:

Katsi Vaptsarov, Svetoslav Dragiev, Nikolay Tellalov, Krasimir Kostadinov, Nikolay Kostov, Rozalia Ignatova, Viliana Staneva, Atanas Atanasov, Lora Braneva, Ivandzhelin Marinova, Zhivka Petrova, Kaliakra Lazarova, Sesil Kostadinova, Stoyan Zapryanov, Ivan Kirmin, Bozhidar Pangelov, Elko Chernev, Maria Chulova, Tanya Marinova, Yulia Kamenova, Tihomir Garmenliev, Milva Yaneva, Boyan Sheytanov, Lyudmila Koroteeva, Vesela Boyadzhieva, Rositsa Georgieva and Neda Atanasova.

Nothing Beats the First

And so, here are the winners' poems. One work by each follows; the rest, together with those of the runners-up, you'll find in the anthology.

The participants were invited to tell us which AI model they used and to share the prompt with which the poems were written. To show or tell us how they were created. We are publishing these instructions (or prompts) too, so we can look at how human and machine interacted in the act of creation.

First Place: Kristina Apostolova

“A Silence the Size of a Mushroom”

Almost home,
and under my heels the earth
still curls up
like an animal.

The night is a skin
into which I exhale the names of the dead
without giving them back.

Everyone around seems to be asleep.
Only a violin breathes
beneath the tongue of the wind.
It doesn't play for me,
but inside my ribs
the sound creeps in
and breaks the silence in two.

Then, at three in the morning,
the night beneath my window
is deaf,
worn thin from listening.

Sometimes,
as I listen to my children breathing,
absurd fears seize me—
that somewhere beyond the hills
someone is piling darkness into sacks—
like flour,
like gunpowder.
The world learned long ago
how war is kneaded.

My footprints gather dust,
the finest news of ruin.
Not far from our bedroom there are cities
where the wind carries names
and skin.

I hope it doesn't all end like this one day:
the silence bursting
like a giant mushroom
above our heads.

I hope, some distant day,
when everything ends,
it ends only for me.

Prompt:

The style, tone and imagery were inspired by the work of T. S. Eliot, Federico García Lorca, the Bulgarian writers Viktor Paskov, Binyo Ivanov and Boris Hristov, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou and others. The author gave specific instructions about themes, metaphors and style, and the texts generated by the model were edited and adapted to fit the artistic vision.

Second Place: Tsvetelina Manova

Oracle, Tell Me, What Shall It Be

Oracle, You Are Silent…

The servers in Delphi have gone dark: at the market
Pythia sells her plum for garbage.
Apollo, influencer of eternity,
livestreams on TikTok, with a feather
up his backside and a little Gucci bag.

Algorithms prophesy in rhyme,
the ads broadcast revelations,
from the television anxious angels
whisper through the microphones:
« System error : Apocalypse detected. »

It's the Apocalypse, but who cares,
as long as you and I race
against time: code to code, flesh
to flesh, dust to our dust.

You are God-anointed once you dip your finger
into the jam of knowledge, God-convenient
once you make love to the machine
and give birth to synthetic gods.

Oedipus gouges out his eyes
with a dying cry : « CTRL + ALT + DEL ! »,
but you, Oracle, are silent…

For it is sacrilege
to be the Crown of creation
when your Creator is software.

Prompt:

ChatGPT, I want us to play le Cadavre exquis, like the surrealist poets. You won't write alone, and you won't let me write alone either. I want us to write 3 poems together in Bulgarian, with a modern structure and rhythm, but with slightly provocative content, a mystical-esoteric sound and references to the Bible and ancient Greek mythology. Our poems will be inspired by the following phrase : « I sentence you to the most terrible punishment: to be given all the answers. But not to remember what the Question is. »

Third Place: Ivelina Andonova

Archaeology of Sleep

In my sleep I dig.
With my hands. Without a lamp.

From under the earth I pull out things:
a stone, a feather, a broken mirror.
Each of them whispers to me
in a forgotten language.

At last I find myself—
small, made of clay.
I put the figurine in my pocket,
and wake up.

All day I carry its weight.
It reminds me
that the past is not dug up—
it is grown

Prompt:

It's not just one prompt.

Parting Words

I often hear the opinion that AI has no place in art and poetry. But at a time when two professional juries not only fail to tell generated poems apart but actually give them awards, we can't carry on with bans, restrictions and prejudices. Yes, the future is already here.

It's high time we talked about it together!

What's more, I believe—especially after reading the poems in the competition—that technology can be a helper that returns poetry and art to the pedestal they deserve. That raises the bar instead of lowering it. That makes us capable of things we never even dreamed of. That helps revive our reverence for human creativity and the inner need to create.

For that to happen, though, we need the courage to start the conversation. My heartfelt thanks to each of the 115 participants, because with their words they take one more step toward it.

Let's take the next one together.

You'll find the anthology here.

What did you think of the poems from Apollo ex Machina? Do human and algorithm create good poetry together?

Write to me at me@karamanev.me.

The conversation continues!

– When the idea of a competition for poetry created with the help of AI was born, I looked for a big publishing house as a partner, and it turned me down on the grounds that this would be in “deep dissonance” with its views. But when I called you and asked, you agreed at once. Why?

– Because it’s a bold idea and a topic I think matters. Later I boiled it down like this: if we keep silent about something and pretend it doesn’t exist, all we do is give it the freedom to develop unchecked.

At some point, unchecked becomes uncontrollable.

And all that will come of it is a complete lack of regulation, of traceability, and total chaos.

A competition like this, one that openly declares and requires the use of artificial intelligence, will, I believe, have a sobering effect on people who are inclined to use it without officially owning up to it.

Of course, I also agreed because, both as a publisher and in my personal life, I’m not much for comfort; I like challenges. This is a challenge with a social meaning.

– Besides, poetry, in my view, should be the bold art that helps us grasp what is happening, and many people run away from that.

– Absolutely! And it must always be in tune with its time, connected to every kind of social event, geopolitical and technological alike.

For people whose idea of poetry ends with the authors in the school textbooks, this will never make sense. It often happens to me at readings, or when someone opens one of my books or one written by one of our authors, that they say: “This is the first time I’ve seen a text without punctuation or capital letters.” We know very well that we didn’t invent this in the last 10 years, and that it’s hardly shocking for art. But for some people it is.

– Yet it turns out that having a competition like this is striking for a lot of people, judging by the comments online. It isn’t just a “bad joke” but an “outrage,” an “orgy.”

– Many people live with a mistakenly idealistic notion of poetry and of art in general.

Poetry may well be the art closest to us Bulgarians.

We’ve always had terrific poets. We still have them now, no matter what times we’ve lived through, whether there was repression or hardship. Quite the opposite: the harder the times, the better the poetry that was written.

– Is that still true now?

– Why not?

– I don’t know. I’d expect it to be; our times aren’t easy, though in a very, very different way. Honestly, I don’t know our contemporary poetry. It feels distant to me, perhaps mainly because it doesn’t fulfill its social function. I can’t find the authors who do that.

– Who rebel?

– Not only that. Who also change things with what they write. Most of our national heroes are poets. Even in the early ’90s there were poets who resonated, who were public figures, politicians even. Now, at least, I don’t see them, apart from the departing generation.

– Yes, on influence I completely agree. It’s very hard for poetry to keep that weight. And to be uncomfortable for those in power, at the very least. That is happening right now too, but in other countries.

Here, in that sense, art is cut off from life.

But even so, more muted, without the force of any mass behind them, we have poets, living, contemporary, writing poets, who are on a par with the best authors in the world.

– What has to happen for them to become more popular?

– Oh… I’m telling you this and we’re doing it. I don’t know. Maybe one has to get into politics. Maybe that’s the most direct route.

– In the past you could take part in politics without taking part. The first example that comes to mind is Radoy Ralin, the satirical poet whose epigrams needled the communist regime. He was never a politician, but he was always an influential voice that got heard.

– Back then it was possible. But who are the famous people today? How does someone become famous? Through embarrassment, stupidity, scandal. Maybe music offers a better chance of influence.

Over the last few months we’ve held two big events, at the Kabana cinema and at Stroezha, aimed at drawing a bigger and more mixed audience, because

we need to burst the bubbles of all the little separate spheres.

We put on combined music-and-poetry events. People come, hear a band they haven’t listened to before, and the band’s fans hear poetry they never imagined existed. It’s a gradual, slower process, but one I intend to develop. To try to fill bigger and bigger venues. In a way, this will make poetry, and poets, more popular. Maybe not to the degree we want, but it’s a contribution.

And what’s your answer to that question?

– I don’t know. I’ve wondered too what would make me buy a poetry collection. And I keep coming back to stories; it’s no accident that I named my site the way I did. Maybe we should make poets more “sexy,” forgive the crude banality. I can’t find their stories either. Poetry is an intimate art, and I’m not sure that today Peyo Yavorov, the modernist poet whose doomed loves and suicide became legend, would be what he is without everything beyond the poems themselves. I don’t like that “profession” either, but I believe the road to more people, especially young people, runs through meaningful poets who are also influencers.

– Yes, but in my view it has to be done in a very clever and deft way, because by nature that isn’t built into a poet. If anything, he runs from influencing in the form it takes today.

But yes. Can we have poetry on TikTok?

– Why not? In the East, for instance, in TikTok’s homeland, its content is largely educational.

What would surprise you to read in the generated poems we’ll receive in the competition? And what would you be glad to read?

– I’ll be glad to read good texts.

I’ll be glad if they astonish me, if they surprise me.

Yesterday a major Bulgarian critic, Georgi Tsankov, posted a poem he had generated with ChatGPT by telling it: “Write me a poem.” And it wrote him one. Very generic, “the leaves, autumn, the Sun”… I remarked to Georgi that he probably hadn’t given it a good enough prompt. The chatbot did its job with minimal effort because of the minimal guidance. The result really is a poem; it may not be the greatest one you’ll read today, but it follows all the rules of poetry, if such rules exist at all. If you put some effort into preparing the prompt, as you mentioned too, artificial intelligence can write better poems than a huge share of the people who claim to create poetry.

At the publishing house we’re constantly buried in manuscripts from people of every age, some with books behind them, some without, some self-published. Among them are plenty of fine texts, but the sheer volume is enormous.

And here, if we go back to the earlier question,

since so many people write, this art must still have some influence after all. Perhaps in a quieter way, even a more egocentric one.

Wanting to be a poet: not so much reading and elevating others, but wanting to be a poet yourself. Maybe that’s what we should use.

– The motivation to write is interesting too. When I wrote poems as a schoolboy, I hoped it would help me with girls, but… it didn’t. Not at all.

– Well… poetry helped me a lot precisely there.

– Then the problem must have been my poetry. But isn’t this avalanche of poetry writing online part of the whole change in the way we communicate? On the internet we suddenly found ourselves on an equal footing: poets, journalists, influencers, readers. Everyone wants to express themselves, which on the one hand is a great wealth. But very often you’re convinced you write well, you get 20 or 200 likes and you keep going. In that situation you have no yardstick, and there’s nowhere for one to come from.

– There are insanely many Facebook groups along the lines of “the magic of words,” “the magic of the word,” some even with semi-literate names, each with 100,000 or 200,000 members.

And even the most banal poem, with fifth-grade philosophy between the lines, enjoys enormous adulation there.

That’s an interesting phenomenon too. “Don’t be like the others, be yourself,” “seek yourself, find yourself,” nonsense like that. People clearly need that language.

In the end, one of the tasks of art, and of poetry in particular, has always been to save and to help. Some need a more banal kind of salvation.

Here we turn to the human question. If it works, you’ve done your job.

– Haven’t we lost our yardstick a bit? I once had an extraordinarily interesting character as a guest, the Bulgarian literary Banksy. He knows literature professionally and tests what happens if he deliberately writes pointless nonsense. He succeeds: he gets published by two of the big “schools,” supposedly at odds with each other today. Do we really have criteria today for what counts as “good poetry”?

– If a person has enough professional confidence, ethics and self-assurance, there’s no way he’ll award a prize to something he doesn’t understand and doesn’t believe in.

In other words, if such phenomena happen, they stem from some insecurity among the jurors, from a feeling that this lies beyond their limits.

– AI adds to the question of the yardstick. You know that at two important competitions in a row, the Veselin Hanchev and the Stanka Pencheva, two different juries made up of recognized authorities picked generated poems for the top 10, poems created without much effort at all.

– The yardstick… some of us may well have lost it.

– If you read poems that struck you as so beautiful you could never have written them, and then learned they were generated, would that make you stop writing?

– No! Quite the opposite. That poem will exist; poetry will have been born. In what way? By surrogate, naturally, or how? In the end,

if we have access to it and it really is that magnificent, do we care that AI wrote it?

And if AI wrote it, we have to ask ourselves: can we compete? What kind of competition could we hold? That would be very interesting.

I don’t think it would be discouraging. On the contrary, it would be motivating. Man versus machine.

– Exactly! And yet we seem to be surrendering before we’ve even set the rules. So what if it has been beating us at chess since the last century? Chess still exists; there are famous players, strong personalities who excite us.

– Exactly! That’s a very good example; I love playing chess. I prefer playing with people, and not because the computer will beat me. Somehow… even when it’s online and I can’t see the person, I can sense the human game. You can recognize it; it’s fascinating. But you train against the computer, because it’s always available.

These ideas aren’t new at all. We’re simply now reaching the things science fiction writers described back in the second half of the last century.

– Even so, we’re far from deciding what to do. In those two competitions the organizers chose not to respond; they only announced that at the next edition authors will have to declare they haven’t used AI. So what, when that can no longer be proven in any way?

– This calls for much bigger external regulations that won’t apply only to competitions like these. But regulation itself, administrative, bureaucratic, can’t currently keep pace with technological progress and the development of artificial intelligence.

We find ourselves in absolute chaos.

Stepping away from poetry, I saw a statistic that we’ve already reached a 50-50 split between online news generated by artificial intelligence and news written by people. Before ChatGPT came out, the former made up 2 to 3 percent.

– There’s a bright side too! Lots of people now write far more correctly online. Over the last year or two something happened, and even the full definite article, a notorious stumbling block of Bulgarian grammar, shows up where it’s supposed to. Who knows why.

But look, it can democratize, make poetry more accessible. Until now, to enter a poetry competition you needed at the very least the confidence that you write well. In our contest even that isn’t necessary. You may have no feel for rhythm or no rich command of language. In exchange, you gain a big advantage if you have a taste for poetry and know how to experiment. Isn’t that a good thing?

– It is, and in my view humanity generally should move toward transforming artificial intelligence. It should be a personal assistant that, on the one hand, has a huge database, but at the same time, when you use it to create some creative or intellectual product, it has to be personalized for you to hold the copyright to it. That’s a big question that can’t stay unresolved. It can’t, because sooner or later something like this will happen. Say you have your own ChatGPT called Ivan; he’s your personal assistant, and as a writer of prose or articles you’ll be able to use him with your own style.

I have friends who are graphic designers, and they were very scared at the start of the boom that they’d be out of work. Guess what happened! Now they save tens of percent of their time using AI.

This horror that it will devour the work of creators is, I think, completely groundless.

We should take advantage of it. It’s like saying the camera devoured the painter’s work. It becomes a new art, but it doesn’t negate the old one.

– I think the conversation is bigger, because the paradigm has already shifted too much, given that we have no way of proving anything. Whatever regulations we introduce, they can’t work effectively for a number of reasons. They have to be of some completely new kind, and that runs through the conversation about where we’re heading.

– You’re probably right that they have to be of an entirely new kind, and they’ll appear out of necessity. At least that’s how I see it; things can’t stay this way. Not because I’m against it, but because it will be more valuable.

Anyway, with those two competitions we know these assistants were used.

How many more don’t we know about? How many books that are written and published don’t we know about?

Bulgaria has more than 2,000 registered publishing houses, churning out titles nonstop.

– You keep seeing covers now that are obviously generated. And how many more go unnoticed…

– A graphic designer has to work for a month to make a good cover, and has to be paid accordingly. With AI it’s almost free.

A few years ago I predicted that

by 2030–2035 a major international literary prize will be awarded to an artificial intelligence.

Maybe it will happen sooner. But that would be cool: an AI that picks its own themes, writes, and becomes the author.

– Another problem is that the world of technology can’t talk to the world of the humanities, because neither side wants to. You’re a physicist and a poet; you manage to combine science and art. Are these worlds really so different?

– For me they aren’t separate. Quite the opposite.

Physics in particular is a terribly poetic science.

And poetry we can contemplate with the same reverence with which we contemplate the starry night sky. For me the two are connected in meaning. But for the people I’ve dealt with from one sphere and the other, that gap yawns wide. More often they choose to stay isolated within their own field.

– Which I think is a mistake, judging by my own experience. You can hear from a writer extremely important reflections on technology, and vice versa, if your senses are open.

– If we look back, much of technological progress was first told by writers. People began working toward that technological progress through science fiction novels. The word “robot” was coined by Karel Čapek’s brother for one of his works. It literally means “worker.” Something that works. If this word, which has spread absolutely everywhere in the world of technology, was invented by a writer, then the two things aren’t separate.

– And they might have been called силодеи (silodei, roughly “force-doers”)… But can we somehow restore that connection today?

– We can, but writers have to push themselves harder. The times I mentioned weren’t static, but they look that way compared with the last two or three decades. Perhaps that’s another reason art has ceded ground: today people dream through the world of technology, while literature wearily turns its gaze backward in search of some consolation. We need to change that; I, at least, plan to try.

– Before we part, you mentioned there are wonderful contemporary Bulgarian poets. Which three would you recommend to me, and why?

– Since I don’t like rankings, they’re always temporary, and I could list dozens of names, I’ll simply settle on our newest authors: Lora Mladenova, Kaloyan Ivanov and Todor Stoyanov. All three made their debuts with us this year, and I’m proud of that.

– Thank you, I’ll read them with interest! And I can’t wait for us to read together the poems that will be entered in the competition. I hope there are more people with imagination; everyone is welcome until December 1…

Would you have guessed that Bulgarian IT leaders read Harry Potter, or even Dostoevsky? I wouldn't have, at least until a week ago, when I asked them and it turned out that's exactly the case.

I will never tire of repeating that you are what you read. On the eve of the Day of the Buditeli—November 1, when Bulgaria honors the National Revival enlighteners who kept its language and learning alive—I sent a short invitation to 30 people I consider remarkable: to recommend three of their favorite books to the readers of Digital Stories. I tried to make the palette of guests as colorful as possible—from people in leadership positions to those known as speakers; from people working across the ocean to foreigners whom the sector has brought to Bulgaria; representatives of the most varied technologies and of different generations.

I received no fewer than 20 answers, and today I have the pleasure of presenting the second half of them (the first is here)! Once again I'll note that they aren't grouped by any particular logic, because they turned out to be far too colorful and unexpected for that to be possible; I offer them to you in the order in which I received them.

Happy reading!

1. Pain and the Fifth Rakia

Nedko Hristov is an experienced DevOps specialist and a memorable speaker; before that, his path also ran through the QA profession.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Za petata rakia. Dyado (For the Fifth Rakia. Grandpa) by Georgi Bardarov

“For the Fifth Rakia” is perhaps my most beloved short story. Outside the frame of society, of stigmas, outside religion. A magnificent testament from Bardarov about what is human, about not one but five glasses of rakia, the Bulgarian fruit brandy; stories told on a broken chair in the middle of a road where cars no longer pass; about a telephone that has gone silent.

Call your grandparents more often.

• The Gardener and Death by Georgi Gospodinov

This is one of the most delicate, magnificent and most difficult books I've read in recent years. To sum up the novel in one sentence, it is a monument of words from G.G. to his father. It is G.G.'s open rib cage, and inside, on two handfuls of soil, flowers sprout, a cherry tree and many roses. G.G. gets better and better with the years, and if I could compare him to anyone, it would be Leonard Cohen (with reference to his last album—You Want It Darker).

The father-son bond is very often neglected, and cruelly so—we rarely stop to think that a father is a monument we can always lean on; a big part of us that we have and often forget about.

Call your parents.

• Hronika na bolkata (Chronicle of Pain) by Ivo Ivanov

The year is 2024, and in 64 hours I rode 700 km on my bike in the epic Danube Ultra challenge. And while I rode, I listened to Chronicle of Pain in one go. Because I was hurting after so many kilometers on the bike, and because I had already read Ivo Ivanov. Ivo tells the heartbreaking stories of Jessica Long, of Niki Bozhikov from Kalofer, of Ivan. What do they have in common? All of them (and others in the book) are Paralympians whom society sees as “second-class” people. All of them show that a person is as strong as their spirit is strong. The body simply follows.

Told with incredible simplicity and humanity, these stories carry a raw charge of the will to live, of the incredible strength of a human being, and of the fact that anyone who wants something truly badly can achieve it.

Recommendations of favorite Bulgarian authors arrive precisely with the 11th answer, as if I had wished for them! And not random ones—Ivo Ivanov and Georgi Bardarov have also been guests on Digital Stories. And if every book is a powerful story, Nedko reminds us that reading every book can be a powerful story too.

2. Trial, Error and Forgiveness in the IT World

Anton Angelov is managing director and co-founder of Automate The Planet, an undisputed authority, author and speaker in the world of software testing.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz

This book is like a mirror in which you see your own cognitive bugs. Schulz doesn't just analyze why we get things wrong; she shows why it is precisely our mistakes that move us forward. For anyone who works with hypotheses, experiments and uncertainty. It teaches you to respect error rather than fear it.

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

This is a book that rearranges the context in which we think about people, technology and society. After it, you no longer see history as the past, but as a set of systemic experiments with successes, bugs and updates. What I like most is how it plays with the term “fiction,” and how a very large part of the foundation of our society today rests on it. Money is just one example—a fiction we have all agreed to believe in so that it makes sense.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Brilliant order hidden in absurdity. Adams is a philosopher disguised as a comedian, and he shows how often meaning is simply a matter of point of view (and of not forgetting your towel). A blend of entertaining absurdity that breaks up your thinking and pulls you out of the everyday.

• On Being Human and Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm

Fromm is perhaps my favorite philosopher; I have around 15 of his books. He asks the hardest questions about meaning, choice and freedom, and he makes you stop for a moment and think not about what you are doing, but why. These books were written 70 years ago, yet it's as if they describe the present moment 1:1.

Anton even invited us into his personal library:

And Mr. Harari now appears for the third time, and with one and the same book at that. Perhaps it's time for a required reading list for tomorrow, like the ones we had back in school? Of course, the only truly required thing is never to go out without a towel, just in case—ask Douglas Adams.

3. The Great Game

Ivaylo Yosifov is co-founder and chief technology officer of FindMeCure; his professional work is tied to technology in the field of healthcare.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• CivCEO (never published in Bulgarian) by Andrew Karevik

The uniqueness of the series comes from the combination of strategic game mechanics (as in the old game Civilization) and real business principles—the protagonist resolves most conflicts through negotiation, economic strategy and deals rather than violence. In short, “the art of the deal” in a fantasy world.

• Radical Candor (never published in Bulgarian) by Kim Scott

I think this was my third time reading it. Required, absolutely required reading.

• Balgarite mezhdu dve katastrofi – 1396–1944 (The Bulgarians Between Two Catastrophes, 1396–1944) by Alexander Stoyanov

The author describes it as a book that every Bulgarian family should own and read. I completely agree with him.

And if anyone still doubts that together we are reading an incredibly colorful list of books, let them look again at how, right next to a recommendation about our modern history, stands a book by an author with enormous experience in the tech world. I am certainly extremely curious how she earned that description from Ivaylo, and I will read it.

4. Never Split the Difference

Veli Pehlivanov is co-founder of Resolute Software—a consulting company that works with clients on four continents.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

A former federal agent and crisis hostage negotiator takes us through psychology, human behavior and the extremely effective negotiation methods used and refined by the CIA. Shared through personal experience and distilled into a simple but extremely effective communication framework, Chris Voss passes on the subtleties of negotiating under critical conditions, where failure or even compromise can cost human lives. Extremely useful knowledge, a downright daily handbook for anyone who wants to sharpen their communication skills in business, in teamwork and in dealing with people in general…, even if they don't rescue hostages every day.

• The Richest Man in the World by Rafael Vidac

A book about success, personal struggle and the motivation that a true mentor can inspire even in a moment of failure and personal crisis. For me, one of the best books on personal development, told through the exciting story of a protagonist who stumbles upon an unusual opportunity, preparation for a job and a thrilling journey with a charismatic billionaire. A book you read in one breath, with excitement, and then return to again and again for its simple but brilliant practical system for strengthening body and spirit, for finding the path to inner wealth.

• Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind

An epic fantasy saga about power that corrupts, secrets that must be uncovered, truth that is frightening and causes pain, and love that no dark force can defeat. Full of riddles, mysteries and epic twists, it is a novel about all-consuming, often contradictory human feelings—love, hatred, greed and self-sacrifice—told in a captivating plot set in a vast fairy-tale world of magic and mythical creatures.

Self-knowledge, fantasy and the skills of negotiating with kidnappers… An unexpectedly good combination for the road to success in the IT world.

5. Radical Candor

Tushka Dermendzhieva holds a lead position in the world of backend technologies at one of the largest tech companies in Bulgaria—ScaleFocus.

(More about her and from her—here.)

• Radical Candor (never published in Bulgarian) by Kim Scott

This is one of the books that have helped me most in my work. Giving feedback has always been one of the hardest things for me—especially when you want to be both honest and supportive. This book shows how to strike that balance—to tell the truth directly, but with care for the person across from you.

• The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni

It helped me not only to understand my own strengths better, but also to see more clearly what motivates the people around me. Since then I've looked at teamwork differently—I try to build teams in which everyone contributes where they are strongest, and the work flows more naturally and efficiently.

• From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew

I love to travel, and this book gave me a deep perspective on the world and on why some countries succeed while others fall behind. Singapore's story is impressive—not only as a model of development, but also as a source of lessons in vision, leadership and managing large teams.

A book is a window onto the world. The cliché is entirely true, even in the age of technology and artificial intelligence. Having read this far, you will most likely agree with that judgment too.

6. Humans and AI, Up Close

Zornitsa Nikolova is a senior product manager at Payhawk—the first Bulgarian unicorn. You can also find her on Goodreads, with a series of recommendations specifically for product managers.

• Life 3.0 (never published in Bulgarian) by Max Tegmark

Published in 2017, the book forecasts the development of artificial intelligence. Back then it still sounded like science fiction to me, and now some of the things it describes are already reality. But even more valuable, and what I think keeps it relevant today, is its more philosophical outlook and the ethical questions around AI, as well as its attempt to look even beyond the dimensions of our planet.

• The Expanse by James S. A. Corey

The author's name is actually a pen name behind which stand two co-authors. There's also a TV series based on the books, with the same name (it didn't manage to grab me). Besides being truly gripping science fiction, this series interests me because, in a fictional context, it reflects much of the world around us, including geopolitically. It's not even hard to recognize the real countries used as prototypes for the fictional ones.

• The Mom Test (never published in Bulgarian) by Rob Fitzpatrick

I'm sure this little book has crossed the path of over 90 percent of readers, especially if they are product people or startup founders. It's usually recommended in the context of how to build meaningful products. I mention it here, though, because at its core it offers very practical and accessible guidance, reminds us how to stay curious about the things around us, how to ask (ourselves) the right questions in order to find the best answers—and that is a very valuable skill, not only for product people.

I find myself thinking about how large a share of the book recommendations from Bulgarian IT leaders have never been published in Bulgarian. I also think it would be wonderful if this list reached people in the publishing industry; sometimes they need good ideas too.

7. Foundations

Svetoslav Dimov is a marketing specialist, co-founder of the DEV.BG platform and of a series of events and ventures meant to help Bulgarian IT (and not only IT) leaders grow.

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

The year is 2003. I'm on a summer work-and-travel program in the U.S., and I walk into the office of the HR manager at the company where I'm working and say: “Could you recommend some books on management or leadership?” She smiles, picks up two books lying on her desk and replies: “I have a suggestion just for you!”

She gave me two books—The Power Principle by Blaine Lee (never published in Bulgarian), which I never did read, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I had heard praised in AIESEC (a student organization I was a member of). I fell in love with the book! At one point in my life I was giving it to so many people that they started teasing me. I think it's valuable for several reasons:

• There is very extensive research behind the book;
• It gives you rules and an algorithm you can apply in different situations and areas of your life;
• In the era of “I'll reveal the secret of…” and dopamine, the book doesn't offer quick fixes; it lays foundations.

And so Mr. Covey turns out to be yet another author beloved by more than one of the special guests I invited.

8. Greetings to Anxious People, Too!

Vasi Gosheva is co-founder of the Soft Skills Pills platform, which helps companies develop their employees' soft skills. She hosts the podcast Radiotochka 2.

• Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

A novel I read either through tears or with a smile stuck on my face and quiet giggling (sometimes both at once). Through his unique sense of humor, Backman creates a zany comedy that is in fact a masterful dissection of the people we are today. I recommend reading it absolutely seriously.

• Pozdravi ot sinyata palatka (Greetings from the Blue Tent) by Petya Kokudeva

A travelogue of Petya's journeys across five continents—no clichés, no drawn-out descriptions. Just short, tender stories of encounters with people and cultures. You read it and it's as if you're looking through a camera that has captured emotions rather than landscapes.

• Very Good Copy (never published in Bulgarian) by Eddie Shleyner

A book I would recommend to anyone who wants to write better—not just copywriters. Eddie is one of my writing teachers, and in this book he has gathered the best of himself: how to make words breathe and live. While reading it, I had the feeling he was right there beside me. For me, that is where the meaning of good writing lies.

I won't brag, but I will note that of the Bulgarian authors recommended, nearly all who are still with us have already been guests on Digital Stories. That goes for Petya Kokudeva's wonderful interview too.

9. Pregnancy for Engineers

Nikolay Stoitsev is a senior engineering manager at StorPool Storage.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Cribsheet (never published in Bulgarian) by Emily Oster

This one and the next are the two books that have helped me most in life. When I became a father, I was quite anxious. Cribsheet gave me confidence because it doesn't dictate the “right” way; instead, it presents a synthesis of the scientific data on the first years of a child's life—what we know, how certain it is and what trade-offs we make. It's also an excellent introduction to how the social sciences work (types of studies, limitations, how to read results). It explains well that there is no universal “right or wrong” in raising children, only informed choices and risk management.

• Expecting Better (never published in Bulgarian) by Emily Oster

I read it during my wife's second pregnancy, and it feels to me like the pregnancy book written for engineers. Instead of ready-made recipes, it gathers and analyzes current research on pregnancy and offers a framework for making decisions through the lens of probabilities and risks. It helped me support my wife better and have an informed opinion when she needed one.

• Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

A small book with a big effect on me. It was this book that convinced me to start keeping a work journal and documenting the process. Keeping a professional journal turned out to be extremely useful for clarity, for feedback and for turning the daily flow into a more lasting capital of ideas. It encourages us to learn in public, to share generously and in that way to build a meaningful community around our work.

Parenting and children's relationship with technology are a big theme of a whole series of Digital Stories. And any meaningful reading recommendations in that direction are more than welcome.

10. Thread by Thread

Irina Lilova is responsible for talent development at Telerik Academy and has wide-ranging experience in human resources management.

(More about her and from her—here.)

• Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown

Our inner world is complex and many-layered, but it becomes more accessible when we have a map of it. Brené Brown opens a safe space for us to name and understand 87 of the deepest human emotions and experiences. Backed by more than 20 years of research.

• Nishka (Thread) by Viktoria Beshliyska

A novel that weaves together the stories of seven women in an unexpected and gripping way. The author of the blog Po dirite na dumite (On the Trail of Words), Viktoria Beshliyska handles our language with skill, which lends the story additional beauty and power. Thread is a literary experience that both connects you with your roots and gives you room to breathe.

• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Every year, each of us on the team receives a book chosen by our CEO. That's how the memoir of Phil Knight, the creator of Nike, came to me. More than a business book, it lets you live through the philosophy behind building and growing the brand. Full of turning points and the ever-present connection with Japan, the book won't leave you indifferent.

Irina also offers a bonus idea: “In recent years, every summer I give myself the gift of time with a book from my childhood. It has brought me more than I expected. Try it—you too might discover something interesting about yourself.”

A wonderful idea!

Let's not break this Thread (and not only because Viktoria Beshliyska's novel is a favorite of mine and she has been a guest on Digital Stories twice), but keep going. Let's talk more about favorite books! Whom do you think I should ask for recommendations?

I'll say it again. In the information age, more than ever, you are what you read.

(You'll find the first part of the book recommendations here.)

You are what you read—that's what I believe. I also believe that holidays like the Day of the Buditeli, Bulgaria's November 1 tribute to the enlighteners of the National Revival, are an occasion to reflect. On ourselves, on books, and on the awakening we need in our relationship with technology.

For many global IT leaders it's a tradition to share their favorite reads and give recommendations. Here in Bulgaria that tradition doesn't exist, as my guest Daniel Penev made me realize. Nobody asks politicians (I can think of only one politician's favorite book), and there are few places (for example, Georgi Nenov's The Superhuman) where IT people talk about books.

Half a year ago I tried an experiment for the first time: I invited people from the tech sector I had chosen to share their book recommendations, and the result, at least for me, was astonishing. And thought-provoking—what would happen if I asked more people who have impressed me?

I sent a short invitation to 30 figures I find remarkable: recommend three of your favorite books to the readers of Digital Stories. I tried to make the lineup of guests as varied as possible, from people in leadership roles to well-known speakers, from those working across the ocean to foreigners the industry has brought to Bulgaria, representing the widest range of technologies and different generations.

Get ready for some stereotypes to blow up!

I received no fewer than 20 replies, and I have the pleasure of presenting them to you! Once again they amazed me with their variety, their range and their depth, and they gave me plenty of ideas for future reads to add to my Goodreads list. Today I present the recommendations of the first ten guests; the rest will follow in a week. They aren't grouped by any particular logic—they simply turned out too varied and unexpected for that—so I offer them in the order I received them.

Happy reading!

1. Love and Math

Minko Gechev holds a black belt in karate… and in programming, as a seasoned senior developer at Google, where he still works today. For many years he has been one of the creators of the Angular platform, which also helps me earn my living.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

A book that helps us look beyond our personal, emotional perception and toward humanity, through the author's rationalized emotional perspective.

• Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (never published in Bulgarian) by Edward Frenkel

A weaving together of fascinating mathematical concepts and Edward Frenkel's life experiences. The author is from Eastern Europe and shares the obstacles he faced while developing as a mathematician. The book is relevant for people with interests in science, art and business.

• The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest

This book popularizes useful ideas and practices that can help us understand our actions on a deeper level. A good starting point toward more in-depth literature.

So the first recommendation comes from across the ocean, from Silicon Valley itself! Harari—how interesting… And the third pick is so much on the crest of the wave that it will very soon be published in Bulgarian for the first time!

2. Count Harry Morev

Yoana Borisova heads the engineering team at Codexio. She graduated in public relations from Sofia University, but quickly and boldly turned toward the tech world, which makes her the youngest IT leader I invited to share her recommendations. Here they are.

• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

A very personally important series for me, read some ten times between the ages of 9 and 24. Apart from creating a world I escaped into from reality more than once, the most important thing in this case is that in those years it taught me I could come to love my quirks and turn them into a part of me that helps me. And in a way, that's where the first step toward who I am now began.

• Tobacco by Dimitar Dimov

Very interesting to me, since it's set in my hometown (I know there are disputes on that point, but they're not the focus). What I find most interesting to examine here is the personal development of the main characters. I like that it vividly shows the brutal part you have to go through in order to win (which hasn't changed terribly much), and its consequences—not only with criticism, but with understanding. And the conclusion that life goes on regardless.

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Again something I read at a very early age. I liked the emphasis on the knowledge and wisdom needed for the whole thing to happen, as well as the way they were acquired. And also the subtle hint that, in the end, they are a bigger victory than the revenge itself.

If someone had told me I'd receive such a colorful list of reads—and all of them fiction, at that—I wouldn't have believed it. Heartfelt thanks to Yoana for the unexpected perspective!

3. On the Road to Success

Petar Tornev is director of the Accenture Technology Center in Bulgaria, one of the largest companies in the sector here. He has more than 20 years of experience in the tech world.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

The book shows that success is not just the result of talent, but of a combination of effort, opportunity and environment. It makes leaders think beyond individual qualities and create conditions in which people can unlock their potential.

• Good to Great (never published in Bulgarian) by Jim Collins

Collins analyzes why some companies go from good to exceptional and others don't. The book teaches leaders discipline, the right selection of people and long-term thinking—the foundations of lasting success.

• True North (never published in Bulgarian) by Bill George

This book guides leaders toward discovering their own “north”—the authentic values and goals that lead them. It's invaluable for anyone who wants to lead with integrity, meaning and inner clarity.

• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

The autobiography of Nike's founder reveals the true price of success—the struggle, the risk and the faith in a dream, even when everything seems lost. The book is inspiring for leaders because it shows how passion, courage and persistence can turn an idea into a global brand.

So here we've boldly peeked into pages beyond fiction too. And from one of the best-known IT leaders in the country we got no fewer than four book recommendations… which are surely useful on the road to a successful career in our industry. Isn't that priceless?

4. Ages Come and Pass

Doncho Minkov is the co-founder of an artificial intelligence startup, and he also has invaluable experience as a teacher, having trained more than 10,000 people who went on to enter the software industry.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

This was the first serious fantasy series I read, and I recommend it to everyone.

• The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

Maybe the best fantasy series I've read. An extraordinary approach to building the world and the characters. I was saving the last book for a long flight, but I couldn't hold back and read it in six days.

• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

I was lucky enough to read the books at 24 or 25. Everyone knows Harry Potter! One of the most relaxing and emotional series I've read. Since then I've listened to it at least four or five times.

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass…”—and anyone who loves fantasy can't remain indifferent to these picks. I confess I still haven't read the last installment of the Archive, only because I'm busy looking for a new job. And here's the first one to appear a second time: Mr. Potter. Apparently IT people have a soft spot for wizards—isn't that curious?!

5. The Unbearable Lightness of IT

Iva Gumnishka is the founder of Humans in the Loop, a company that provides work to refugees and people affected by armed conflict, who help develop the most cutting-edge technologies.

(More about her and from her—here.)

• Popravitelen za roditeli (Remedial Exam for Parents) by Madlen Algafari

A unique book on parenting, different from all the other books by foreign authors I've read in recent years. It covers every stage of childhood from a psychological point of view and offers guidance on how to be mindful parents and correct our parenting mistakes, toward our children and toward ourselves.

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

I've lived in the Czech Republic for two years, and although they promote Kafka a lot, for me Kundera is their best writer. The book tells of the period between the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion through the personal stories of various characters. What I really like is how he manages to convey the subtleties of human experiences and feelings, even in their banality or absurdity.

• The Impossible State (never published in Bulgarian) by Wael Hallaq

A book written by one of my professors at Columbia University. It discusses the differences between the structures of the modern state and the principles by which society functions in Islam. Not in order to show how backward traditional societies are, but to expose how states in modernity are utterly incompatible with the idea of a society guided by ethical and moral principles.

All that's left for me is to wholeheartedly join one of the recommendations—Kundera's book is definitely among my favorites too.

6. An Optimistic Theory of Our People

Vesko Kolev heads Icanpreneur, a startup that helps more IT companies build a product that works, and he has extensive experience in the software world.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck

One of the main things I'd really like us Bulgarians to change is our mindset, our self-confidence, our sense of how much we can actually do and how much greater our potential is. This book is very important because it shows and proves how anyone can do anything, as long as they're ready to put in the necessary effort. If you consider something impossible, you won't even try. But if you know it's possible, however hard, then with the right motivation and effort things will happen. The book divides mindsets into two kinds: in the fixed one, the belief is that you're as smart as you were born and there's nothing you can do about it. In the growth mindset, the core belief is that you can achieve anything, as long as you put in the necessary effort.

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Each of these habits is very powerful. For example: “Speak of people as you would if they were in the room.” This matters a lot, because the opposite often happens, and that's toxic. If a person sets out to be sincere, yet at the same time to do it in a healthy way, it really helps a great deal.

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

This is a classic from which we can learn something very important: criticism by itself leads nowhere. Nobody likes to be criticized. Criticism is destructive, so it's much better to approach the feedback we give and the way we treat people in such a way that we don't discourage them from striving to do things and move forward. There's a lovely Bulgarian saying: “A word spoken is a stone thrown.” I have the feeling we need to be far more aware of what we say to the people around us, and how.

The two things that, for me, hold us back as Bulgarians—and that these three books largely address—are believing in ourselves and in the potential of those around us, supporting one another, and taking responsibility for our own fate instead of waiting for someone to fix it for us.

It's no accident that Vesko Kolev is considered by many (myself included) a truly wise man, with whom every conversation enriches you. I'm sure the same goes for the books he recommends.

7. Mirrors and Pretotypes

Ilia Valchanov is the founder of the startup Team-GPT, one of Bulgaria's most successful ventures in artificial intelligence. Before that, he had more than 1.4 million students on the Udemy platform.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Pretotype It (never published in Bulgarian) by Alberto Savoia

A book that shows any idea can be tested extremely easily in a very short time, without the need for a big investment.

• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio

A foundational book on the principles of managing life and business. A handbook of good practices.

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

A classic that holds an enormous amount of wisdom of every kind. It presents a path people can take, where it leads and how it ends.

Fiction, books that make sense of things, books that move us forward and even ones tied to our national psyche. The wildly different perspectives our guests bring to the invitation to recommend books are a great treasure. Here, from a successful entrepreneur, we find reads that can be useful precisely in that field. Meanwhile Mr. Dorian Gray is yet another figure I find, to my huge (and extremely pleasant) surprise, in today's “syllabus.”

8. A Book Changes Your Life

Georgi Spasov is the founder of LimeChain, a global technology partner to projects in the Web3 and blockchain industry. With a seven-year history and more than 250 projects, they help develop numerous ecosystems.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• Karmic Management by Geshe Michael Roach

A book that has helped me a lot in building my moral and emotional compass, in doing things that may seem naive and illogical to others. The more good karma you put out into the world, the more you get back—and right when you need it.

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The tried-and-true wisdom of communication and mindset. It dramatically changed my communication and relationships with others, and through them my whole life. From it I learned the fundamentals of attitude and effective communication with others, so that we end up in situations where both sides win.

Mr. Carnegie appears for the second time with a specific title. I don't know about you, but I doubt it's a coincidence, especially coming from people whose point of view is so valuable. I'm adding it right away to my list of next must-reads.

9. Heavy, Heavy…

Alexander Kondov is a frontend developer, speaker and… writer. An unexpected combination—just like, as you'll see, his list of favorite books.

(More about him and from him—here.)

• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

A story about how a person is morally obliged to pursue their own happiness. I was raised in a collectivist society, and this book showed me that being independent and having your own views on life is a value. I think it will resonate with all engineers, artists and innovators. I return to it at least once a year and reread my favorite moments.

• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Speaking of values, this is a story about how there exist certain unwritten moral laws that apply to all of us, and there is no reason that can justify breaking them. Dostoevsky shows us that on the road of ambition it's important to be able to sleep well at night, and that not everything should be had at any cost. It's frankly a heavy read, but if there's one book a person must read in their lifetime, this is it.

• Ballad for Georg Henig, Viktor Paskov

I wanted to include a Bulgarian book on the list, and this one became a favorite within its first few pages. It's a story about creativity and the sacrifices a person may have to make to preserve their dignity and the purity of their art. I've never romanticized stories about the starving artist, but this one tells how the value of a creation isn't always measured in money and fame.

“I think that, on the whole, we should read more fiction, because it's through stories that we pass on valuable moral and philosophical lessons. All the fables, parables, legends, even religious texts have this purpose,” Alexander adds. And I simply have nothing to add…

10. The Pages That Say “Why” and “How”

Laura Toloș is a data specialist. A graduate of the Max Planck Institute, she now heads the data processing team at the pharmaceutical company Teva.

(More about her and from her—here.)

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

For me, this is the book that complemented what I learned at school, skillfully filling in all the “whys” and “hows” the dry textbooks never answered. It's captivating to trace the evolution of human societies and thereby discover explanations and unexpected perspectives on today's world. I was especially struck by the idea of “collective, or shared, fictions”—like money, religions and organizations, which exist only in society's common imagination and reveal the power of human cooperation. To be honest, it's because of this book that I don't take careers and corporations so seriously; I stopped worrying and having unrealistic expectations.

• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A wonderful way to learn to see the world as the result of processes in which randomness (luck, or the lack of it) plays no small part. This book taught me that decision-making skill isn't the only factor in success (or failure)—a significant part of both is down to chance. I also realized I can make better decisions when I know how much uncertainty, and of what kind, lies ahead of me. Finally, the book helped me a lot while I was learning to lead a data science team.

• Flip Thinking (never published in Bulgarian) by Berthold Gunster

This book taught me to use positivity, creativity, kindness and humor to find solutions to everyday problems that otherwise seem difficult or impossible. Contrary to first impressions, the book doesn't preach unwarranted optimism in the face of hardship. It's full of wonderful little ideas on how to reframe our challenges so we reach the best possible outcome within a difficult situation.

We began the first half of our list with Mr. Harari, and by pure chance we end with him too, in the recommendations of a wonderful guest whom the IT world brought to Bulgaria from her native Romania, yet who sent me her answers in beautiful Bulgarian.

You'll find the second batch of book recommendations from another 10 remarkable figures from the IT world here. I promise you more unexpected titles and priceless picks.

You are what you read. So what are your favorite books?

You open the chat with the artificial intelligence, you try to explain what you want from it… and there it is, the result is astonishingly good! (Or maybe it isn't.)

Today we all do it. ChatGPT and its “colleagues” are changing the way we search for information online, the way we get to know the world, the way we try to handle our everyday tasks. (If that doesn't apply to you, believe me, it's time!)

Today we all chat with ChatGPT or Gemini, but… how could anyone possibly have imagined this phenomenon of ours back in the good old year of 1981?

The Missed Chance

Sometimes it is thought-provoking and fascinating to peek into the past and see how subjects that seem possible to us only today are in fact much older, and how the people before us were stirred by them and offered important points of view. There are quite a few such Digital Stories—for instance, about Dobri Zhotev's Kibernet, about an artificial intelligence poet from 1967, or about Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria's longtime communist leader, who said that “with programs and more programs we must infect the young generation.”

Is AI the great chance of our day? Will we seize it, or let it slip? Propusnatiyat shans (The Missed Chance) is one of Lyuben Dilov's lesser-known books. Here one of Bulgaria's most popular science fiction writers, also known as the author of the Fourth Law of Robotics, isn't even a writer. At least according to the plot. Instead of writing, he orders a series of stories in various genres from his new computer, which in turn creates them in his name and in his style…

Sound familiar, by any chance?

The Computerized Scheherazade

“A computerized Scheherazade tries to please a capricious creative mind by copying its own style of thinking and expression. In its indifferent attempt to be a creator, the computer spews out story after story,” reads the back cover.

“On the computers of previous generations, tasks were entered on the keyboard of the video terminal—the new computer talks. So my hands have almost nothing to do, and yet they are used to stepping in here and there, correcting the text that lingers for a while on the screen before it heads off to the printing device.

According to the claims in the brochure, it is connected directly to the Central Information Bank, to the National Library, and through them to the main scientific repositories of the world. In this way it also frees your brain from the burden of the knowledge a writer needs—the computer knows everything for you.”

It knows everything for you… Oh, there's no way to put it more precisely, even today, when this claim so often turns out to be true. For knowledge and for skills alike. And what does the writer do with his hands, freed from the need to write? He reads the instructions on how to use the smart computer…

“Again according to the brochure, the game automaton that does the actual composing supposedly held the whole of world literature in its memory unit. It served as a point of comparison and correction, so that in practice it could not repeat a single situation, that is, compose anything unoriginal. I very much doubt this, and it smells of advertising, but it doesn't trouble me, because I see things rather differently. True originality does not lie in the uniqueness of a plot or a situation—the question is what you will express through them.

There is hardly anything more banal than the love triangle in Anna Karenina, and yet to this day we revere it as one of the greatest novels in the world.”

And what about today, in times when AI writes poetry, for example, better than a huge share of the people who consider themselves poets? (The opinion isn't mine, but that of the juries of two of the most prestigious poetry competitions.)

Creativity Is Creativity

The stories themselves, “written” by the computer, are definitely interesting and worth reading, but… who is going to read content generated by an algorithm?!

Today we all do it every day. We just don't always realize it. Because we are already in a world where generated text cannot be told apart from text written by a human. What's more, few of today's popular science fiction writers peer into these colossal subjects. That is exactly why it becomes even more intriguing to see how Lyuben Dilov imagined them 45 years ago:

“In fact—I have realized it by now—what bothers me most is that I will have to talk to it. True, people today are used to talking to computers: through them they order goods from the shop to be delivered home, or book plane and theater tickets. But there they talk about simple things, while here I will probably have to put into words even the inexpressible—creativity is creativity, however advanced the technology. That must be why my hands tremble and are so agitated, as if they want to say: ‘And what are we going to do? Throughout the whole history of humankind we have taken part in the creation of every art, and now suddenly—you're free, we don't need you…’”

What will we do in times when technology reaches not for the dull, routine, repetitive work but exactly the opposite—temptingly offers that, after our memory, we entrust it with our creativity too?

What will we do in times when even children's drawings turn out to be indistinguishable from generated images?

What will we do in times when you're more likely to get it wrong than right when telling a human voice from a generated sound?

We still don't know what we'll do; we aren't even talking in order to look for the answers.

But those times are here.

A Hare Out of a Blackthorn

“Today's society, it said in its appeal to us, does not treat talent as something irrational, the way it once did, when people resigned themselves to its inexplicability and expressed this, for example, with the proverb ‘You never know which blackthorn the hare will jump out of,’ meaning talent. Now society insists on always knowing exactly which blackthorn which hare will jump out of. What's more, it strives to make a hare jump out of every blackthorn…

A footnote explained what a ‘blackthorn’ was, because with today's radically altered nature the plant is no longer found. It was a low shrub that grew in very poor soil, with sharp thorns, spines and small blue-black berries, astringent to the taste, which caused constipation when eaten.”

Well, here the science fiction writer missed the mark: the blackthorns are still around, though I do have certain doubts about how many of today's children would recognize them. And also about whether there is any particular reason for them to recognize blackthorns specifically. Forgive the digression—the hare really is more important than the bushes in this metaphor.

How and why can we be sure today that the new, different, original idea won't come from artificial intelligence more often than from our own?

And what about personalized content, in which every fan of Lyuben Dilov could have their own personal version of each of his next stories, just as he imagined it, with the help of the enormous computer that frees his hands?

At Home over a Glass of Absinthe

“‘The brochure praises you,’ I say a little more firmly, ‘for composing only original things. I'm very curious what you'll come up with if, say, everything that has been sought so far in other crime stories is already known from the very start. Let's assume the criminal is known, even his name and where he is, let's assume the victim is known too, and the motives for the crime, when and with what it was committed—in short, everything is known. Can you compose something criminal then?’

I'm aware this is pure needling. That overly mild preachiness of his a moment ago irritated me, but then again I am supposed to be testing his abilities—with banal orders I won't find out whether he really is more capable than my previous computer.

‘I cannot answer in advance until the composing automaton has received all the conditions. Please submit them in accordance with the manual,’ the computer replies, and I find it very hard to picture a pretty secretary with such owlish eyes.”

The 1980s ChatGPT has owlish eyes. Is it because it's showing off its intellect, or because it's trying to imitate wisdom? Or is it because we catch a glimpse here of the author's not-so-positive attitude toward it—the author who, even as a character in the book, “needles” it?

Tell Me a Fairy Tale

“Good and evil, I say sadly to the computer, or rather to myself, they keep fighting, keep defeating each other, keep chopping off each other's heads, and new ones keep growing back, and it seems it will go on like that for ever and ever. In fairy tales! Because in life it isn't quite like that, my dear fellow or my dear girl—what am I supposed to call you, after all? In this strange fairy tale called life, this good and this evil live together quite amicably, or to put it more philosophically: in a compromise that is sometimes reasonable and sometimes not so reasonable. And if someone set out to write a fairy tale about life, something rather different would probably come of it.”

And isn't it truly wonderful that today, even if you can't play an instrument or sing, with the help of AI there's now a way to make music? To tell a fairy tale made especially for your grandchildren? Even if building fantastical plots is a drastically weaker area for you than knowing football scores…

What kind of fairy tale will the retro algorithm with the owlish eyes write? Will the “author” be pleased? (I confess that in cases like this I get more and more confused about where to put the quotation marks.)

“I read it twice. It is a fairy tale all right, following all the rules of a fairy tale—though soaked in quite a bit of bitterness. Could they have palmed off a misanthropic computer on me? No, that's impossible—nobody would create a computer that hates people! It is merely a reasonable skeptic and by no means shuts the door on hope: there, it states clearly and definitely that always and everywhere three new brothers will be born to set out against the monsters.”

Well Done, Computer

And well done, author. I'd like to share the optimistic view that nobody would ever create a misanthropic computer. The experience of recent decades certainly gives plenty of food for thought in the opposite direction.

“‘Well done, computer,’ I repeat to him. ‘I'm sure we'll work well together. The important thing is to figure out what you do best. I'm not tired, and I hope you're even less so—let's carry on with the exercises, shall we! What tempts me most is to try genres I've never dared to touch. I see you have a special theme key, “historical plots,” and that sets me thinking. Why don't you have special keys for the others? I'd like to believe this one simply serves to connect you to the historical archives, or wherever is needed, so you can get the relevant references and dates. Otherwise it would be absurd. Because… what really sets a historical novel apart from a science fiction one, for example? Perhaps only that science fiction lies less.’”

Does it always lie less? Or could the reason be that “who controls the past controls the future”…?

“‘It's easy for you—you compose whatever takes your fancy, and you've got an excuse too: you're a machine, but does anyone ask me? You probably have no idea what completely different eyes would stare at me if I dared to show them the thing I tore up! Come on, that's enough for today! Rest and, as they say in human language, get some sense into your head! Meanwhile I'll pop over to the café to hear how my colleagues are getting on with their new computers. And no more of that sort of thing, understood, right!’ Not once did it respond, nor did it defend itself in any way. Had its designers not given it that right, or was it so full of itself that it followed the age-old rule of the wise not to argue with a fool?”

Experience Does Not Lessen Our Foolishness

Being polite is far from just an imaginary message from kindergarten that's hard to translate into our relationship with artificial intelligence. Or at least it shouldn't be, if we allow for the idea that the scenario from The Terminator or Roko's basilisk is possible…

“Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies. Henry Shaw (1818–1885)

‘Hmm,’ I said to the computer, which was gaping at me in fresh expectation, ‘you've really made an effort for your technician, no doubt about it! You've even given him an epigraph, and I didn't even know you could handle quotations! Where on earth did you dig up this Henry Shaw—I've never heard of him! Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies—fine, as long as you mean human behavior in love, fine! But if you're hinting at my experience with you so far…’”

And here are the hallucinations, something that would have been so hard to foresee in times when “artificial intelligence” was just a wishful label, devoid of content, which even scientists shied away from. Who are you, Henry Shaw?

The Dog Drags a Computer

“But I think about the time that created you. Does it really need you, or is it simply that same time about which my friend, the poet Marko Ganchev, wrote his sad insight:

Till yesterday it was “the dog drags off…,”

but now the world is changing, though.

Tomorrow it will be otherwise:

the dog will drag off computers.

I'll be frank. I've already called the complaints department, and tomorrow they'll come to take you away…”

Everything in its own time. And yet, when time outpaces even our boldest expectations, it is time to try to slow it down a little, in search of salvation and explanation.

Over Mastika with a Strugatsky Brother

“‘An idea is an essential condition for any work of art,’ the computer replies, unexpectedly long-winded.

‘Please adhere to the instructions for formulating the task.’ I burst out laughing:

‘You're right, machine! A human being really isn't a work of art; if anything, he's anti-art. By the way, something like an idea had popped up a moment ago—that's where this conversation started, isn't it. What will you do if they give you to another author, while you carry me inside you, as you claim? Look, I've filed a complaint, they'll come and replace you with another computer. Isn't that an idea? No, not yet.’

‘It's more the age-old problem of personal identity,’ I correct myself, but by association a memory of a remark bubbles up like a gas bubble from the depths of my brain. The summer before last, at a lunch, I was drinking ice-cold mastika, the Bulgarian anise spirit, with my guests from Moscow, Arkady Strugatsky and Karl Levitin. We felt cozy and cheerful in the cool, half-empty restaurant and had no wish at all to part, while my working hours were ticking away relentlessly.

I had, of course, a perfectly good excuse: none other than the world-famous science fiction writer Strugatsky was Bulgaria's guest, but I had at least to let the editorial office know so they wouldn't wait for me. I set off for the telephone, and then the undying science fiction writer in Arkady Natanovich tossed out behind my back:

‘Hey, Lyuben, just imagine that when you call the office now, the person who answers is… Lyuben Dilov!’ All three of us laughed, but while I was dialing my own number—it was a party line, it served the office too, so our secretary always picked up first—I asked myself: ‘What if I really hear my own voice on the other end?’”

Hearing My Own Voice

What if you really… hear your own voice? What if you read a text that is so good, indistinguishable from your style, from your skills? I have asked quite a few writers who have been guests on this site, and the answers are colorful, varied, unexpected. Will they keep writing?

Often they aren't particularly optimistic. So it is here, too.

“I unplugged the computer from the mains as well, so that it wouldn't take it into its head, as before, to start working on its own. I stood there as if over a coffin until its eyes lost their treacherously innocent color and turned into ordinary glass, then I left my study. And I didn't return until they had taken it away for good.”

In the novel, the ending isn't a happy one. But in the real world… I still think we have a chance at one. If we dare, and manage, not to stop peering into the future. Just as Lyuben Dilov did in The Missed Chance.

– “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Your new book, Rodinia, opens with these words by John Donne. Today we seem to find more and more reasons—online or offline—to break away onto our own islands, to get distracted by the trivia of the day, to quarrel over anything and everything. Why?

– Perhaps on these islands of ours we feel protected. Untouchable. But since no one can survive alone, each of us lets other voices onto our island too—voices we choose very carefully.

Why? So that we hear only the voices of the chosen ones. Made in our own image and likeness—that is how a person comes to feel almost like God,

all-powerful and almighty, approved and approving. The voices of everyone else, the unworthy ones, are drowned out. Yes, today we are more like football ultras, separated by buffer zones and police, shouting louder and louder not to defend their own side but to drown out the other. Sadly, that is what we are like in politics and in society, and more and more often even in culture. And

once we start behaving like football fans in culture, woe to us.

– I think we got there a long time ago. Those are exactly the right words—woe to us. In your novel, too, the bond between generations, between people on different islands, keeps breaking. Is it too late to find a common language, a connection?

– I believe it isn't. It can't be too late. However insignificant reason may seem today as we watch everything happening in the world, however much it feels as if we are sliding back to the middle of the last century, I believe there is hope. My hope used to lie in human reason, but today that sounds both sad and funny. What reason are we even talking about?

Even so, I go on believing in people, and I always will. Even buried in the eternal struggle for power and money, even drowned out by the shouting and the refrains of inhumanity, the human being will resurface, if only out of the natural instinct to survive. With their last ounce of strength, people will stop that finger reaching for the button that says “self-destruct.”

– When do today's technologies, which have monopolized the connection between us, help us in this respect, and when do they get in the way?

– Technology has outpaced our souls, but that is not its fault. It does not stand in people's way or make them spiritually empty—quite the opposite. It lets you see a painting that once would have required you to travel across the world. It lets you read a book, learn a language, listen to music, think. But here lies the contradiction I have no answer to.

Might it not be better to travel for months to reach that painting you dreamed of,

months in which to think about it, to long for it, to dream of it, even to invent it? Doesn't the button that can show you the painting in seconds take away your greatest power—imagination?

– And the desire, and the value… As for imagination specifically, I think the notorious artificial intelligence is an even quieter and more frightening killer. But back to the book: Rodinia is labeled a “novel in stories,” a rather rare choice. The first things that spring to my mind are Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles. Why did you choose this literary form? Is a novel in stories harder to write?

– Writing every single word of Rodinia was a pleasure, a delight for me. Even when I had to throw some version of a story into the bin and write it again, I still enjoyed it. I always feel wonderful while I'm writing.

The sense of freedom, of communing with everything you know and with everything you know you don't know, is incomparable.

I have laughed with my characters and grieved with them. As for the form, I never gave it much thought. At some point it crystallized in my mind, and I was sure it couldn't be any other way. So there it is—Rodinia is a novel in stories. You can read the book as a novel, but at the same time each story in it has its own ending, its own vibration. And to make it even more interesting, each story in the book is mirrored in another. The first in the last. The second in the second-to-last. And so on to the middle, to the heart of the book. It turned out that way simply because that was what I found interesting to write.

– And I found it interesting to read. That is exactly why I invited you to talk again. Can strong, highbrow, elite literature also be popular? Should there even be such a division, which still survives in conversations about literature?

– I believe that

literature is much more than the labels we put on it.

On the other hand, things are quite simple. Look—I'm an author of books. I write about what moves me, what challenges me creatively, intellectually, purely as a human being. If the work I've written moves the reader (or challenges them creatively, intellectually, purely as a human being), what does that mean? That I'm an author of highbrow literature or of popular literature? And if what I've written makes no impression on anyone, that doesn't automatically make it “elite,” does it?

– Rodinia is a mythical supercontinent that may have existed in the distant past. But today the wordplay between Rodinia and rodina, the Bulgarian word for homeland, is so apt—in the sense that we can travel, live in yet another country, make the whole world our homeland, while somewhere our aging parents are waiting for us. Where do the borders of your Rodinia run?

– Oh, that's a very cool and cunning question, but I'm going to give you a sneaky answer. The borders of Rodinia are inside the book, in its text… All right, all right, I won't be that sneaky. I'll give readers a hint: “The borders are on pages nine, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, one hundred and fifty, one hundred and fifty-four, two hundred and ninety-six and three hundred and four of the book.” I don't think I can be any more specific. I would only add that even if the borders between continents disappear, as they did on the continent of Rodinia, every human journey could be a border. There are borders in the sky today too—just look up some evening when the sun lights up the trails of the planes.

– “Falling in love with someone who doesn't exist” is a motif that runs through many of the stories. Today, especially with the enormous progress of artificial intelligence, this sounds more and more like a true story. What will we lose over time, now that it is easier than ever to talk to, learn from, work with, live with and fall in love with someone who doesn't exist?

– I wouldn't want us to part with imagination. With fantasy. With the beauty of contemplation. Even with the charm of boredom. And yet sometimes falling in love with someone who doesn't exist can be a far more powerful experience. More uplifting and, at the same time, more intimate. And on the other hand—isn't every human act of falling in love like that? We always fall in love with someone who doesn't exist, because we compose them, idealize them, fill in the rest ourselves. Isn't that what most defines a person in love?

– “Those are the times” and “those were the times,” says one of your characters, as an explanation for everything in life. We often quote Vasil Levski, the nineteenth-century revolutionary and Bulgaria's national hero, who said that “time is within us and we are within time; it changes us and we change it.” Can an ordinary person change the time they live in? And if not, is it worth getting angry at it?

– Human beings have neither beginning nor end. In both time and space we are limited. But isn't that limitation our strength? We have one eternal direction, one aspiration we will never achieve. But

that takes nothing away from the meaning of striving toward that infinity, and even toward that beginninglessness.

It may sound paradoxical, even absurd, but isn't the ordinary person's greatest extraordinariness found precisely in their ordinariness? Time and the times are movement, even if that movement is an illusion. That is exactly what we must not lose—the sense of movement, even an illusory one.

– Ivan Peychev, the Bulgarian poet, writes that “no one returns anywhere, and Odysseus does not return to Ithaca”—in my view because the return is already to a different place, you are different and the moment is another. When is a homecoming complete?

– Yes, I agree—both with Ivan Peychev and with your reasoning. But in the spirit of my previous answer… what can we say about the feeling of coming home? Can it happen even in a place you have never been? In that sense every journey can be a homecoming—and a perfectly complete one. The magic is in the same place again. Inside, in the person.

– The plot of Rodinia unfolds in the fictional town of Sredovgrad (roughly “Middletown”), which sounds like something out of Tolkien—and it's not me who says so, but the late Queen Elizabeth II herself, in your novel. Around it lie the fictional villages of Upper Pole and Lower Pole. So many Bulgarians have their own Sredovgrad, their own Poles, even though a huge number of us have ended up in the capital, Sofia.

– By the way, the Queen slightly twists the name of Sredovgrad. She calls it Sredograd—much more “Tolkienesque,” a kind of Middle-earth. Just the other day I read a review of the book that called it Srednovgrad. Look at all these variations! Doesn't that answer the question beautifully? Yes, every reader has their own Sredovgrad, their own Upper and Lower Pole that hold their world together. Sometimes the distance between them is enormous, sometimes very small… but that, too, is a human notion, isn't it?

– Sometimes the poles flip. Could villages and small towns come back to life and draw in the next generations?

– There's a feeling that this is already happening. But it's exaggerated—

for people of working age, these places are more of an escape than a haven.

Yes, it's true that the more global the world becomes and the more powerful communications grow, the more attractive these places seem. Yes, more and more people say they are tired of the big city, of the noise, of the dirt. They say their children can study online there now, in the fresh air, amid the quiet and the beauty of nature. The problem is something else. Even if education goes online, healthcare is unlikely to anytime soon. For these places to become a haven, it will take much more than fresh air and silence.

– Your characters often struggle with losing their roots, their sense of belonging—either literally (when emigrating from their homeland) or metaphorically (when forgetting the past and themselves). What do you think defines human identity most strongly? Language, memory, birthplace, family?

– I can't say which is strongest; they're all connected. Like a weave in which, if you pull out one thread, everything else loses its wholeness and the person becomes someone else. That's why the characters in my stories struggle with precisely these absences—that's how they provoke me to see their essence, to dig deeper into them, to try to understand what is human and what a human being is.

– Rodinia paints a painfully clear picture of depopulated Bulgarian villages and small towns, a world that young people are leaving en masse. What prompted you to focus on this theme? Does this process of the slow disappearance of a warm and cozy collective world worry you?

– Yes. It worries me and saddens me. The thought of an empty village where only one 90-year-old man lives prompted me to write the first of these stories, which comes at the end of the book—“Grandpa Doncho's Laptop.” I get goosebumps every time I ask myself

what it's like to live in such loneliness. Or else—with the hope that someone will come. That someone will call you.

That someone will send you a photo of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren. You describe it like a literary critic—“the process of the slow disappearance of a warm and cozy collective world.” Yes, it's a world that, sadly, will never come back. It won't be what we remember. In 20 or 30 years, these stories will seem to children as if they came from two centuries ago. That is exactly why I wrote them.

I wanted to capture this vanishing world, to press its beauty and meaning like flowers in a herbarium in Rodinia.

– In one of the stories you portray a character who gradually loses his memory—first he forgets his parents, then his childhood, and finally even his native language. And he does it without anxiety, apathetically. What idea did you put into this storyline? Did you want to show how easily a person today can break away from their past and their roots? How can we save ourselves from the oblivion modern technology is pushing us into?

– This character of mine forgets everything because he has lost the thing he does best. In fact, it's the only thing he can do better than others. And to prove to himself that he exists, that he hasn't vanished, he clings to the memories of his talent, starts searching for them and living in them. These memories obsess him to such an extent that they make him forget everything else. But actually, in this story from Rodinia, what matters to me are his parents, who wait for him for years while he travels the world.

– Surprise! ChatGPT came up with the last two questions, and I liked them. Could you have told them apart?

– So you're telling me that ChatGPT asked me “How can we save ourselves from the oblivion modern technology is pushing us into?”?!? Well, look at that—the questions it cares about! And the phrase that reminded me of a literary critic—“the process of the slow disappearance of a warm and cozy collective world”—turned out to be its own, too.

Maybe I could have a good time with ChatGPT if we talked about books?

– Believe me, you could! Even about poetry—you've probably come across the news of how it ranked among the best in two poetry competitions in a row! Does the progress of artificial intelligence impress you, or does it frighten you more?

– Its development impresses me, of course. What provokes me is the question of where all this will lead. And what it will turn us into—us and our children. What frightens me is not so much that it won a poetry competition, but that someday

the people who want to read poetry may become so few that ChatGPT will be the only recipient of what poets write.

But I'm sure the poets themselves will never disappear—the imperfect ones, the vain ones, the mad ones. That gives me hope.

– And is there a chance that AI will “take” from us the unnecessary, heavy tasks, the ambitions, the vanity, and that we will return to our own “rodinia” of the simple, the creative, the human?

– Ah, how lovely that sounds as a finale! Lovely and… impossible.

Ambition and vanity cannot disappear from us humans. They define us.

So do the heavy tasks. I would rather wish that artificial intelligence not so much simplify and ease our tasks as steer us toward new, even more complex and interesting ones. Because

human development is a process. We must not arrive at the answer, at the meaning of that famous 42

from Douglas Adams. On the contrary, we should use technology to ask ourselves more and more questions that demand far more complex answers. So that we have a reason to keep moving.

“A person’s worldview depends substantially on their information metabolism.”

“Man is a bot to man. And bot is man to bot. But what kind of man is the bot? And what kind of bot is man?”

Ivan Popov was a master of syllogisms, and much more. He was a writer who left us a small number of works from the beginning of the new millennium. Although he published only one novel in his lifetime, and in a small print run at that, his name remains mythical.

Because he presented the future in an inimitable way. He caught the trends, gathered the sparks of knowledge that paint the colorful picture of technology’s tomorrow. He managed to bring science and literature together, so that they could search, shoulder to shoulder, for the human and the superhuman, and catch the trends.

An author who one day should make it into literature textbooks… if, of course, there are still textbooks by then. And literature. That will happen only if we don’t lose the battle for the future to a future we are not ready for.

Department for Relations with Reality*

*The subheadings are also titles of works by Ivan Popov

The most important thing is to do what you do with heart… and with кеф (kef, sheer enjoyment). K.E.F.—but as an abbreviation of the Bulgarian for “cyberpunk, heuristics and futurology”—was the name of the website where for several years Popov, who described himself as its “irresponsible editor,” published most of his essays. He also created the pages Podkrushieto and Laboratoriya po ezikovo inzhenerstvo (Laboratory of Language Engineering).

Born on May 28, 1970, in Sofia, Ivan Popov graduated in physics and went to work at the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS). He ended up in the department where not only digitization but also the early applications of machine learning first arrived in earnest. He worked on neural networks at a time when even in the West this sounded like an exotic field.

“Historical time flows unevenly,” writes Ivan Popov. “Long epochs of stagnation, when it seems that the order is eternal and everything stays the same as ever, are suddenly interrupted by periods of turbulent development (and sometimes of degradation). And when it seems that development will go on forever, it unexpectedly stops and a new stagnation begins…”

Well, for the writer time flowed very fast. Yes, he had chosen an institute devoted to space, yet space is almost absent from his works. Quite understandably: in the 1990s concepts were suddenly turned on their heads, and the topical easily proved stronger than the stars.

Besides, by all appearances, Popov was driven forward more by technology. By the broad view of where it is leading our civilization.

Wandering Ants

“According to popular belief, humanity progresses roughly along this scenario: technology develops constantly, and as a result life keeps getting better,” writes Ivan Popov. “At some point, in keeping with Hegel, quantity turns into quality and the social order changes (from primitive to slave-owning, then to feudal), and progress continues ever upward.

The moments of a ‘qualitative leap,’ when the entire social structure changes—the principles of the economy, the law, morality, people’s mentality—can be called moments of the arrival of the future. In history so far there have been only a few of them (from 3 to 6, according to different scholars), the latest being the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and now a new revolution is expected to begin—or has already begun—that will lead to the so-called information society.”

In the 1990s the writer decided to stay in Bulgaria, even though his parents set off on a long journey full of adventures that took them all the way to New Zealand. Over the following decades they would invite him to join them, but he would always refuse.

The physicist worked for three years at the space institute, and that period would later show in almost every one of his works. He left BAS to carry on as a freelance translator and writer.

Jesus, Muhammad and Bill Gates: Instructions for Use

“Futurologists predict almost unanimously that the twenty-first century has large-scale social changes in store for us,” writes Ivan Popov. “Civilization will enter a new phase (informational, or post-industrial, or ‘the Third Wave society’; for short we shall simply call it ‘the future’). Futurology strives to calculate the future, while cyberpunk strives to paint it in color, Dolby and stereo. The two form something like a neat couple, like the left and right hemispheres of humanity’s collective brain. In one place they present the future in theories, in the other in images and action…”

Yes, the paths of futurology and cyberpunk rarely meet and intertwine, and perhaps never as successfully as in the words of this Bulgarian writer. On one side come science’s attempts to forecast the future; on the other, the science fiction genre, in which the arrival of new technologies is shown through their social impact and the dangers they bring.

At the beginning of the new millennium Ivan Popov abandoned his scientific career for good, and one of his favorite occupations became translation. Thanks to him, works by Stanisław Lem, by the cyberpunk writer Victor Pelevin, by Nick Bostrom and many other authors reached Bulgarian readers. He began writing essays and stories of his own. He published in the pages of Tema magazine, and two of his pieces even appeared in… Playboy. Yes, a classic and at the same time inimitable figure from those 1990s days of punk and cyberpunk…

On the Apostolic Activity of Muscle Gangs

“The future may be as progressive as you like, as white and fluffy as you like, but for it to arrive, for the present to be defeated, we must pass through a great civilizational crisis,” writes Popov.

“What is more, from the point of view of the present, the ‘white and fluffy’ future would strike us as completely insane and impossible to live in. Just as the primitive hunter is not adapted to life in an agricultural society, nor the ‘natural’ peasant to life in a modern city.

In the ‘great leap,’ along with everything else, the value system of society changes radically, as do its notions of good and bad, of proper and improper. The psychological makeup of the individual changes too; a ‘new man appears in place of the unsuitable old one.’ To live in the future, we need a new coordinate system in our minds. Measured by the old coordinates, the future is utterly harmful and provokes a struggle against itself…”

Popov became part of the Ivan Yefremov science fiction club, named after the Soviet science fiction writer. Even in the darkest times of the transition from communism and the end of the century, and to this day, Bulgaria has always had an active group of people, generation after generation, who love science fiction. As a rule they have stood apart from the mainstream and the commercial, but they have existed in order to make the future.

Yes, their names will be recognized only by people with a special interest in books; for them it is enough to mention Yuriy Ilkov, Nikolay Tellalov, Atanas Slavov, Kalin Nenov. If you haven’t heard of them, it is not too late—that will be the subject of a future digital story.

It was Yuriy Ilkov who invited him, known as the General or by his pen name Makriya Nenov—a special figure in the history of science fiction in these lands, who for decades has made apostolic efforts to make sense of the genre and popularize it. And so Popov found himself among them, among kindred spirits who were excited by where the world was going, who loved literature and knew how to value it…

In Search of the Future Man

“A person’s worldview depends substantially on their information metabolism,” writes Ivan Popov. “Part of the worldview is one’s idea of the future.” In his texts he brings together so many scientific fields and so many directions of knowledge that one could quickly get lost, were it not for the writer’s sense of humor and his captivating ideas, which keep pulling you back.

TIM, or “type of information metabolism,” is a term rooted in Jung’s research that describes the way a person perceives the news and the world around them, and the way they process it and make sense of it. Today it fits more than intriguingly with how we cope with the news of the day, with the sea of information.

Under this system, people fall into 16 groups. Popov writes that he dug into the classification after coming across meaningful discussions at the Sofia science fiction club. He found it hard to explain to himself why visions of the future differed so much.

“I tried to understand why for every debater there are ideas they will never give up, and others they will never be willing to accept…”

He classified himself as an “intuitive-logical introvert,” a person who “sees the future as a consequence of our actions and plans, but not in a design key, rather in an anti-design key: as a consequence of the side effects of our activities.

He predicts developments mostly in the near term: for him, the future is hidden just around the corner, and to understand what it is, we must remember which futures have sprung up before humanity at previous historical ‘corners.’” The same group includes Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky, Philip K. Dick and Victor Pelevin.

The Bricklayer-Plasterers of Babylon

“Horror! The personal communication bot has switched itself off. A month ago already, but nobody noticed. ‘What must my mother in Chicago be thinking,’ Sidorchuk frets. ‘She’s used to the bot calling her every two or three days. That is, to thinking it’s me calling. Though who knows, maybe she’s set up a bot too?…’ It is fashionable now for bots to do the talking, since people have no time. And yet they must show attention to their loved ones.”

The quotation is from Hakeri na choveshkite dushi (Hackers of Human Souls), Ivan Popov’s first and only novel, published in 2004. Curiously, before that he had published two other texts with the same title, which set off in different directions. It is said to be the first Bulgarian cyberpunk novel and was the first title in the Tera Fantastika series. It appeared in a modest official print run of 200 copies, although today it is known to anyone interested in the genre.

The novel won 2 awards—the Eurocon 2004 award for a debut and the HuGoa award for the best Bulgarian science fiction book of the year. In 2005 it was also nominated for the VIK award.

The novel is truly unusual—as gripping as it is perceptive. Short but concentrated, bursting with humor and vision. As the aforementioned Yuriy Ilkov writes, “a strikingly common trait of Ivan Popov’s works is that his fiction is steeped in science, while his scientific texts are highly literary.” Which in this case becomes a treasure.

The book transports us to an invisibly distant future ruled by advanced civilizations that rely on their technological dominance. It revolves around flows of information, and the main tool for manipulating and programming people is language. “Humanitarian technologies” are used, behind which lies social engineering. “Man is a device for processing information. And an object of control by means of that very same information.”

Users: The New Serfs

Sound familiar almost two decades later?

The book is divided into two parts, and the second sounds even more familiar. The heroes head for a “state of the fourth or fifth functional type,” a “mandated territory of evil,” to find out who is behind the cases of human brains being hacked. As Vasil Velchev writes in the afterword, “the allusions to Bulgarian reality during the transition are many, and the science fiction novel comes to look downright like social satire.”

Sometime around 2011 Ivan Popov stopped going to the club, and over the last decade his name was not heard in literary circles. The only exception came in 2015, when one of his earlier stories was translated into English and published in Sci Phi Journal. That placed it among the 120 texts competing for a prestigious award the following year. We can only imagine how things would have turned out if he had won it…

Alas, I could not find much testimony about his life in that decade; I cannot tell you what he did, what weighed on him and what moved him. Nor whether he saw so many of the things he had described come true.

Problems with Reason

“Humanity will be divided into two unequal parts according to a criterion unknown to us, and one of the purposes of ‘human-machine’ interfaces is to spare the user the need to know the internal workings of the machine; the human is required to know only the interface. There are other people who created this interface and therefore must know what lies beneath it, must poke around ‘under the hood.’

We shall call these two types of people users and programmers, respectively. In religion this is the division into shepherds and flock, in politics into party apparatus and flock, and so on. Some develop, maintain and service the interface; the others passively line up according to its requirements. Today the most important ‘programmers’ are the media, show business and advertising.

There are people who set themselves the task of mastering ‘the undocumented capabilities of the device hidden under the hood.’ Such people may fittingly be called hackers. The hacker as such exists outside the context of the social division into users and specialists. In other words, he hacks not only the technical interface, but also the social interface coupled with it.”

Ivan Popov took his own life in August 2019. Few traces of the news remain on the internet; he never liked to talk about himself or draw attention to himself. Which is a pity—readers would surely have been glad of more interviews, stories, details.

As Vasil Velchev writes, Popov would not have included even a biographical note in his novel, because he was exceptionally modest.

Cyberpunk: The Highest Form of Realism

“It is important that each successive type of civilization uses the human waste of the previous epoch as its ‘building material,’” writes Ivan Popov. “The future is born on the garbage dump of the present and uses the energy of its decay. (Example: industrial workers are former landless peasants, the waste of agricultural civilization.)

What waste do we observe today? For example, the jittery crowds on internet forums and chats. This human resource (mainly school and university students and BOWs—bored office workers) could somehow be put to work, for instance in systems for collective (game-based) decision-making.”

Facebook? Or are we yet to find a way to truly seek collective decision-making from the “BOWs,” instead of using them to monetize advertising?

“Paradoxically, as the density of communication flows increases, so does the cost of getting a given piece of information through to society. The reason: the more people shout, the lower the audibility and impact of any single message. Large-scale media campaigns are within the reach of only a small number of big social players.

Under these conditions the system (society) reacts by splitting into ever more specialties and subcultures, by fragmenting communication flows into separate ‘information cocoons’ with weakly connected ‘reality tunnels.’ More and more important information remains out of reach not only of the ordinary person, but of narrow specialists as well.”

In 2020 the collection Kiberpank, evristika, futurologiya (K.E.F.) (Cyberpunk, Heuristics, Futurology) came out, compiled by his father, Georgi Popov, who returned briefly from New Zealand. The book cannot be bought; it does not even have a price… it is only given away and exchanged. A true apocrypha of the digital age, gathering Ivan Popov’s texts from the website of the same name.

Psychotechnics and Ideological Engineering

Just as the internet has its own apocrypha. Although his three websites are long gone, the web has a memory of its own, thanks to which words live on for many years. So it turns out that online manuscripts don’t burn either… (See here.)

“We modern people are used to the idea that the economy must necessarily grow—by a few percent a year. Yet every mathematician knows that no process in the real world can grow exponentially forever: both humanity and the Earth are finite systems, so there can be no infinite growth in them…” writes Ivan Popov.

And also: “In the phase of linear development, disproportions, contradictions and imbalances accumulate in the system. That is, the crisis is a consequence of the changes accumulated in the linear phase, and it seeks a resolution, the elimination of the disproportions through a radical change in the mode of functioning. It is no accident that ‘krisis’ in ancient Greek means decision. And it is no accident that all the ‘qualitative leaps’ in human history, all the instances of a new socio-economic order being born, came after ferocious civilizational crises.”

Progress Through Downgrade

His texts contain serious economic analysis, but perhaps the most interesting thing is the way he combined his knowledge of history with his scientific instinct and experience. Decades earlier he was already aware of all the challenges the advance of artificial intelligence would confront us with. Of the big questions that are truly looming as technology advances. Of topics that most of us still do not think through in depth today, although it is long past time. But besides the questions, many of the answers are there too, and they can sound merciless.

But no, don’t think there is no optimism.

“In the future we can expect a uniquely large information inequality between people. At the bottom there will be degrading masses, their knowledge and outlook limited to the picture tube of the television set; at the top, a thin stratum driven upward not so much by economic motives as by a hunger for knowledge and skills. ‘The crazy new man’ will probably take shape in this thin stratum, will win the competition for resources (= jobs) and at some point after that will become an obvious role model for everyone else, including the degraded masses. That is, he will be recognized as normal and desirable.”

Once again, his father Georgi and the science fiction club launched the first short story competition named after Ivan Popov, whose first winner was the incredible storyteller and friend of Digital Stories Nikolay Tellalov.

The Future Comes by Breaking In

And so—the future. The future is the great theme that is coming. Is the future already here? If we believe Ivan Popov (and there is good reason to), not yet. Because when it comes, nothing will be the same anymore. As Nikolay Genov, to whom I owe enormous thanks for drawing my attention to today’s hero, put it, Popov “develops a very interesting thesis—that classical futurology merely stretches out the present, while the future is always hostile to it, it is its complete negation, so radically different that it means nothing less than its death.”

“The emerging new social order—however progressive it may seem to us from the distance of time—from the point of view of the contemporaries of the ‘great leap’ looked either like mass madness or like a deep, irreversible degradation,” explains Popov.

“The real future is not the one we strive toward, but the one we fight against,” the physicist futurologist also writes. “So it will arrive not necessarily in the most developed parts of the world, but where they fail to chop off the tentacles it sends out. And if we take into account that the more developed a society is, the stronger its regulatory system, it follows that the future will arrive not at the center of Western civilization, but somewhere in its weak but technologically receptive periphery. (Don’t go thinking I mean Bulgaria, heh-heh! There are even shabbier and more disorganized countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova or Colombia…)”

Decree on the Abolition of Society

“We can only regret that Ivan Popov did not write in recent years,” notes the astronomer and science fiction writer Valentin Ivanov. “His satirical cyberpunk was a remarkable, original and innovative phenomenon in Bulgarian science fiction. I laughed and cried at the same time as I read about the mutri—the thick-necked racketeers of 1990s Bulgaria—exploiting the country’s scientific resources.”

“One of the trends I expect in the future is a fall in the cost of innovation (a radical one, at that), as a consequence of the introduction of artificial intelligences (in the broad sense),” writes Popov. “The price of human intelligence will probably fall too. The question is what the future information civilization will look like, and above all, what the future consumption of information goods will be.”

“Ivan Popov had one of the sharpest and most merciless minds I have ever encountered,” adds the science fiction writer Atanas Slavov, a wonderful author who, alas, did not long outlive today’s hero. “Gentle and kind as a person, a considerate friend and companion, he was uncompromising in exposing human delusions and ‘mass hallucinations,’ as he called ideologies and religions.”

“With enormous gratitude I have ‘borrowed’ from his essays,” Slavov continues, “the wonderful analogy of a worldview as an operating system that time ‘installs’ and ‘uninstalls’ in the mind of the ordinary person. The Bulgarian, he used to say, is in a ‘cross-eyed state’ in his value system, because he has lived through three installations of social operating systems—monarchist, socialist and capitalist. The first two have already been ‘uninstalled.’ How do you expect him to know where he stands?”

Toward a Revolution of the Hallucinated Classes

“The historical trend. Human IQ is increasing, but slowly. It roughly doubles every thousand-odd years. And how fast does the amount of knowledge double? About every fifteen. Communications grow stronger faster still. From the shaman, people heard a few one-liners a week at a corporate meeting… or whatever it was called back then. Whereas we get our heads pumped full every minute by televisions, newspapers, books and who knows what else. Now they pump them full through our eyeballs too…”

“The author’s light, playful language does not hinder him—on the contrary, it helps him describe deep and precise situations,” writes Yuriy Ilkov. In his view, it is time “to see Ivan Popov not only as the high priest of cyberpunk in Bulgaria, but as a figure in our culture for whom even the strongest words fall short of capturing and appreciating his manifold creative work and describing the rich nuances of his artistic, scientific and philosophical incarnations.”

“The history of intelligent machines began with a whole heap of idiotic delusions,” writes Ivan Popov. “They thought one had to arrive at a humanlike intelligence. But what the devil for?! Does any other machine physically copy the human body?”

When the Bogomils Were Virus Writers

I also read a comment online—the Bogomils, I should add, were a medieval Bulgarian heretical sect: “If I ever get the chance to meet Ivan Popov, I would find him a donkey so he could ride into the city of the mandated territory, and I would weave him a wreath of palm branches. He deserves them.”

Without any futurist pretensions, I can’t wait for the future in which some publisher will recognize this author’s worth and present him as he deserves.

Will we ever truly appreciate his contribution and ideas, will they help us cope with the future? Will they reach more minds now, when technology demands it more than ever… who knows.

The most important thing is that hackers keep existing—not the criminals, but those who embody the writer’s idea of the word. Those between the programmers and the users, the people outside the system who can change it and make sense of it. Just as Ivan Popov knew how to do, and will go on doing for a long time to come.

P.S. Ivan Popov’s messages are powerful, stirring and thought-provoking today, more than ever. My heartfelt thanks to Nikolay Genov, who drew my attention to this remarkable writer, forecaster, journalist and scientist. I believe it is important for his words and his name to reach more people. I will be glad of any support—stories from people who knew him, help in making his work better known, or simply good ideas. Write to me!

– What is the point of children learning to read today? We live in a technological world, reading and books are visibly not much of a social value, and we rarely ask each other about our favorite reads…

– It’s very important to clarify here that we have different definitions of reading. Mine is that it is the cognitive process that helps us extract and analyze information from various sources so that we can make sense of it and make decisions.

It is impossible to develop in any direction at all if we don’t know how to read.

Science confirms that if we want to retain information lastingly and be able to connect it into a big picture and with what we already know, it’s important to read on paper. That is the surest way to transfer information into long-term memory.

And although in our society reading really is understood more as something we do in our free time, on the beach, it is very important to make an effort not only to teach children to read, but to have them do it willingly, rather than to answer the question “what did the author mean.” Otherwise we are doomed, and so are they.

– What determines whether they do it willingly?

– Many factors. Another thing we don’t realize is that reading is a complex process. We need to develop and build many neural connections, because it isn’t built into us by evolution.

To read willingly, children first of all need support in the family and a good example. A child who has been read to since birth knows the object called a book, knows that books contain interesting things, and will learn easily. If that happens, if they see information that interests them and explains the world, they will be much more inclined later, when they learn to read on their own, to make that effort even if it’s hard.

Access to books matters a great deal too. When children have at hand editions that look like bad brochures, and texts that offer them nothing, they naturally won’t read for pleasure, because it isn’t an interesting, fun, useful or pleasant activity.

But reading for pleasure also depends enormously on access to new technologies, which change the way the brain takes in information. We adults read shorter forms too, and we struggle to concentrate. That applies with full force to children, who, however, never get to learn that reading brings satisfaction, even if it is delayed.

Reading for pleasure depends above all on support, on access to books and on sensible adults who help the child in every way,

without pulling, pushing and shoving them and telling them what they must read and which is the greatest book.

– But how can we lead by example when 40 percent of Bulgarians say they didn’t read a single book last year?

– That is our big problem: adults treat reading as something unimportant and set it against new technologies.

We all want our children to do well with technology. As parents, that is our big worry—to be sure they will adapt, that the professions of the future will be something they can handle. But this opposition distorts our understanding of reading. We don’t realize that we read all the time. Everything we can decode, as long as we know the code, we read.

If the family can’t support the children for one reason or another, the teachers and librarians step to the fore. They work with large groups of children, and their main role should be to support them in becoming active readers.

– Can that happen if a child is already used to the phone to the point of addiction? To quick stimuli, TikTok… The book is the competition, a slow carbohydrate; it demands more effort, which children aren’t inclined to make, because it’s harder for them to find intrinsic motivation.

– That’s true. Alas, the answer is more likely no. If the parent doesn’t introduce limits, it can’t happen, especially if the child has had access to devices from an early age, when they still can’t filter information. And if we’re talking about TikTok, the extremely rapid switching of video content,

to me it looks like a rabbit standing frozen in a car’s headlights, too terrified to run.

I firmly believe that instead of giving in to the familiar “but everyone does it” or “I don’t know what to do, my child whines all the time,” we have to be very clear that devices can “fry” the brain. That this undermines our children’s ability to concentrate for long, to process large volumes of information, even to know what they are looking at. Because often they can’t name things, objects, and that creates problems.

That is exactly what I am calling for—to realize that we are not bad parents if our child complains that we’re different from the others and limit screen time.

– But if we’ve already let it happen and at some point realize that screen time has grown too much, can we turn the book into a substitute and a helper?

– That takes a comprehensive approach. First of all, the child has to have access to great books that can compete with devices. Whether they are encyclopedic editions with various features, 3D filters that show different animals, or game elements. Or comics, which have little text but are often hard for adults to read, because they demand serious powers of concentration and observation, which we gradually lose once we get used to reading huge volumes of text.

We have to find the right books and help the child see that they are interesting, by reading together, explaining, sharing, spending quality time with them.

In the teenage years, when life runs entirely through the internet, we could hardly impose limits, but with younger children we can easily do it.

My son is in fourth grade and has only 15 minutes a day of internet access on his phone; almost all apps are restricted. Of course, he uses a computer, watches TV and plays games now and then, but the rule I apply is balance.

– I give my boys half an hour each, but it often happens that the older one doesn’t want to use up his “quota” so that he has time to read. That’s more enjoyable for him right now. He’s in first grade, but he’s on the fourth volume of Harry Potter.

– By the way, I’ve noticed that children who read a lot often find it hard to make friends. My son was like that too. At some point he found his crowd; now he reads only in the evening, but regularly, about 100 pages.

– How do we choose the right book? When I go to the book fair, I find it very hard—I’m met by an ocean of children’s titles, many times more than those for adults. They’re all glossy, cute… What do we do then?

– We go to detskiknigi.com. My colleagues and I have been reading and writing professional reviews for 15 years. Right now we have a great category on the website of the Orange bookstores, part of the campaign “We Read—We Unfold Worlds.” There we put a “recommended” seal only on books that really work. Of course, parents should take a look to judge whether they suit their child, but they can trust us on quality.

Statistics show that our recommendations are 98 percent successful.

The child’s taste matters too. My son, for example, doesn’t like fantasy. I wouldn’t recommend Harry Potter to him—we’ve read it, but because I’m a big fan. He likes technology, encyclopedic editions; many children prefer comics.

It’s important, on the one hand, to try

not to be swayed by the recommendation that “this book is the biggest hit,” because it usually isn’t the best one. To seek advice.

At the same time, to give the child freedom, the right to choose. The little ones especially, of preschool age, choose intuitively, and that turns out to be exactly the right book. I don’t know how they do it!

It’s good that there are libraries too. The children’s section of the Sofia City Library is well developed, and the big regional libraries are also trying to meet the needs and interests of their readers.

For me, the most important are school libraries. There, though, the situation is very grim, because there isn’t always a librarian to judge which book will suit a child according to reading level, age and interests. Or, if there is a librarian, there are no books. But school libraries with qualified librarians could solve our literacy problem.

– As a parent, I often rescue myself with classic books, ones I read myself. Often, when I talk about children’s books with friends, we always end up at Astrid Lindgren, Erich Kästner, or Elin Pelin and Ran Bosilek, the beloved Bulgarian classics of children’s literature. Why is that?

– I, on the other hand, think of encyclopedic editions and biographies…

For many of today’s children, even Pippi isn’t all that easy to take in.

Classic works are very important, and I don’t support calls to remove them from the curriculum. Yes, it has weaknesses; up to fourth grade, the focus should rather be on actively developing reading technique with books that are accessible to children.

On the other hand, classic works are a bridge to the past. And if we cut them off, children will never read them on their own, because they would struggle without knowledge of the historical period, the context, even how, say, French names are pronounced, if we think of Les Misérables, for example.

Cognitive psychologists say that

if more than 2 percent of the words in a text are unfamiliar, the brain stops following the big picture,

because that requires too much effort.

But classic works can and should be read together with a parent. The parent can give an introduction, explain what Sweden was like in the 1930s, give information about household objects, a woodbox, for example, because the child may have no idea that wood stoves exist, if we go back to Astrid Lindgren’s stories.

We have to share them with children, not hand them over and say: “This is the greatest book, nothing else matters. I insist you read it.” I see three parental mistakes here that can put a child off reading altogether. Because unconfident readers give up very quickly if the text is too difficult; they aren’t inclined to like a text just because we feel sentimental about it; and the adult’s insistence turns reading into a tedious chore that kills any desire.

It’s not bad to recommend our favorite books, of course. We just have to make an effort to present them in an engaging way, and at the same time be ready for our child not to be moved at all. I really like Gena the Crocodile, and we must have read it 30 times when my son was of preschool age. And on the 24th time I realized that he thought Gena lived on Golyama Pasta Street as in toothpaste, not the pastry, since паста (pasta) means both, and he had no way of knowing this quirk of my childhood. You can always be surprised by what your child saw and sees, and that is the foundation of building good bonds.

Reading is the glue between parents and children.

– Beautifully put! In that context, what do you think of the modernized version of Under the Yoke?

– Rusi Chanev’s version is good, because it would help children and their parents enter the big picture and the plot. The fact is that many of today’s parents wouldn’t understand a large part of the words in the original text.

This, of course, should also make it easier for children who don’t get enough support in their families, whose teachers don’t have time to explain every detail the children don’t know. Also for Bulgarian children who don’t live in Bulgaria or whose mother tongue isn’t Bulgarian, but who are part of the education system, and we can’t isolate them.

I’m well disposed toward it, but I think that on the whole

the drama around Under the Yoke is one we adults create.

If, before they have to read this novel, children have good knowledge of Bulgarian history, they won’t have any problem with the Turkish loanwords; they pick up the context and can cope. My daughter is a good example. She read it in three days in an edition from the 1960s, which has no footnotes at all, because back then the Turkish words were clear to everyone. And she said: “A great love story!”

I was shocked—come on, she can’t not have asked me anything. And she replied: “None of my classmates knows what a ‘minder’ is. I know, because when we go to museums, you explain everything to me, I’m honestly sick of it. I understood what was going on. These Turkish words aren’t a problem for getting the whole idea. And it’s a great love story!”

That shows that if they have enough information about the period, they will appreciate Under the Yoke. By the way, there is also a comic adaptation, made by Zhan Nare in the 1960s. Very few adults know about it, and it deserves to be offered to today’s generation.

– I hadn’t heard of it either, interesting. Back when I started reading in the ’90s, somehow comics came first, then gamebooks. What comes next for today’s teenagers? This genre they call “young adult”?

– We adults often don’t consider either comics or gamebooks to be books. I personally have been fighting a long-distance battle with teachers over this for years. Convincing a teacher that comics are worth offering, that this is reading and it is complex, takes a lot of effort.

Otherwise teenagers, unfortunately, in my view, mostly don’t find books that interest them.

They either read e-books in the original English or listen to audiobooks. They are a very different generation. Many of them don’t have well-developed skills for reading on paper, and the topics offered in books don’t excite them.

There are others, though, who, once they’ve been through fantasy and young adult,

jump very quickly to the classics. That amazes me,

the leap is to truly serious works.

Otherwise publishers, and this is global, don’t put out that many books for teenagers. It’s a great pity, because books suited to that age aren’t translated, and then people say: “They don’t read.” But what are they supposed to read? It’s a paradox.

The same goes for books for boys; there are almost none. They’re usually girls’ stories, with one boy thrown in for color, but the dynamic plots that appeal to boys are missing. And this isn’t only in Bulgaria; it’s driven by the market.

It’s a great pity. In this case, I think the theory of self-fulfilling prophecies applies too.

– You say the child doesn’t read, and the child doesn’t read…

– Absolutely! What’s more, parents say it in front of their children. “He’s a boy, he’ll be a footballer, he doesn’t read.” How is he supposed to show interest when you crush him with your words from the very start?

This affects everything. Because

when you don’t train your reading skills, you have problems with critical thinking, with understanding the consequences of your actions,

which is a serious problem; it leads to slower economic growth, even to problems with democracy.

– It’s precisely because of these topics that this site exists… Do you believe we can change this on a broad enough scale?

– If I had given up on the idea entirely, I would probably have stopped doing what I’ve been working on for 15 years. Yes, I’m an idealist, but it’s getting harder and harder.

People usually say we have to change something at school. But these problems start much earlier. You have

seven years, and if they are missed, the first-grade teacher has a very hard time.

The children who come to that teacher are already formed, with a value system in place; they’ve usually already had heavy access to devices, their concentration is reduced, their knowledge is reduced. More and more psychologists and speech therapists say that children start talking with great difficulty and late. That, too, is largely due to misguided investment in supporting families.

– Still, as far as I can tell, over these 15 years of working in this direction, you see mostly negative trends.

– That’s true, but I console myself with the thought that if no one had done anything—my colleagues and I, and the many people we work with on the ground, teachers, librarians, specialists from all over the country—

things would be far scarier than these 53 percent of 15-year-olds who are functionally illiterate.

Right now, though, thanks to social media—we’re all watching it happen—the general level is falling drastically. On social media you measure yourself against the crowd, however intelligent you are. Thanks to Facebook, the network of older people, who are the more active teachers and parents, we see the level dropping headlong. That is frightening.

– Against all this, how do you explain that so many people write children’s books?

– Because it looks easiest. Often someone who has a child, or has become a grandfather or grandmother, decides they’ll string five words together in rhyme and the book is done.

We have no understanding of what a quality children’s book is, because we have no literary criticism. Expertise no longer counts.

So everyone thinks they can publish the very best, unique and one of a kind, and that is yet another confirmation that people don’t read. If they had taken the trouble to read a few more children’s books by established writers, I don’t think they would dare.

This is where the realization comes in that children’s books are the most important ones, because they lay the foundation.

If you give your child junk food, you’ll see them gain weight and their health decline. The same happens with books, but you don’t see the effect right away, and that is very frightening.

I feel myself becoming more and more critical in my book reviews—of both translated and Bulgarian books. But I don’t know how we can deal with this phenomenon. Usually these “creators” think they’re doing brilliantly and don’t use editors. Social media helps them. If you’re loud and invest your efforts the right way, you’ll easily sell the print run, and that gives you confidence. A phenomenon like this is very frightening. Our children don’t deserve it.

– Let’s end on something good, and practical too. Recommend me some authors I haven’t heard of, for different ages!

– Books by good writers usually aren’t the most popular. The great books that work best usually go the most unnoticed. That makes sense, because they aim higher.

Take the books of Roald Dahl, which fewer and fewer parents offer their children. Dahl is an exceptional author: spicy, frank, with a magnificent imagination and style. I used to recommend him widely to children from 6 or 7 up, but today I see that he is quite difficult for many readers aged 9 or 10. If I had to choose one of his books, it would be his autobiography, Boy.

The same goes for the novels of Michael Morpurgo, who writes about important social issues and offers children layered novels with rich language that make them think, take a position, look for answers. My favorites are Becky’s Diary, An Elephant in the Garden, Shadow and Private Peaceful—magnificent reads that would appeal not only to children but to adults too.

I really like encyclopedic editions, because they give children extra knowledge about the world, which we often fail to offer them. People have clutched like drowning men at a straw at Einstein’s idea that we should read them fairy tales. When we read fairy tales, we develop emotional intelligence—the ability to see how the other person feels, to be tolerant. But that way we fail to tell them what kind of world they actually live in.

An encyclopedic edition I recommend is Bees. A wonderful book, large format, looks impressive, works perfectly from 1st to 12th grade; we’ve tested it in our reading clubs.

Tsveta Brestnichka is also one of the writers whose books I love working with. Nebivalitsi s bukvite ot A do Ya (Tall Tales with the Letters from A to Z)—parents usually buy it for first grade because it has the alphabet, but in 3rd and 4th grade this book really opens up: children can play, invent, build their vocabulary.

Of course, you can find all the recommended books in the category we curate for Orange. We try to update it every month, and I personally use it when I need to recommend a book, because we’ve divided everything by age. We work with many children; we get feedback from 10,000 children every year through the Biserche Valshebno (Magic Little Pearl) award.

You’ll find the book recommendations for different ages here.

So far in the series “Digital Children”:

• How do today’s children encounter technology? – a survey

• Hedgehogs Are Born Without AI

• “An era is coming in which we will have to reinvent ourselves.” What will the professions of the future be, and what is worth learning today? – futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova

• Why does a programmer advise parents on how to get off the grid? – Alexandrina Georgieva of Offline Kids

• What should education look like tomorrow? How do we choose the best teacher? – Evgenia Peeva.

If you have ideas about other important aspects of this topic, I’ll be glad if you share them with me here.

– It is no accident that this interview comes out today, on February 14. What do you think of this holiday? Why do we start quarreling about it every year? I don’t celebrate it either, but I see nothing wrong in having an occasion to talk about love, about what connects us, about the thread. It doesn’t happen often anyway…

– I hadn’t realized it, but yes, we quarrel about this too. Though it seems a bit more muted.

The holiday is becoming more and more popular because of social media and because of the younger, growing generation—they are the ones who get most excited about Valentine’s Day. I see it in my children: one is in first grade, the other in eighth. It becomes a topic at school very early. Of course, it is more a part of Western culture. For me it is

simply a nice occasion to talk about a subject like love, which is always relevant.

In previous years, I always ran campaigns on my blog dedicating February to words connected with wine—because of Trifon Zarezan, the Bulgarian winegrowers’ feast that falls on the same day—and with love.

I have no problem with it, as long as it isn’t used solely for commercial purposes. I don’t like that in recent years commerce seems to have overtaken the holiday. The idea is to look closely at what holds us together. Last Valentine’s Day I posted on my blog

a favorite word of mine—“държило” (darzhilo, a hold, the thing you grip). And a quote from Heart: that love is what holds the world together.

Maybe we simply need an occasion to look for the things that hold us together. To try to take stock and give our own human answer to the question of what love is for us. Nothing more.

– What model of love are we really giving the next young people? In the 1990s we imagined that the Western ideal of family and relationships would sweep in, since we were surrounded by those films and that whole culture. Yet at the same time our traditional family models are still alive. With the patriarchal way of life, with stronger family ties, but also with not expressing our feelings much.

– I notice a generational change; I think people have readjusted quite a lot. In the family model, love between parents and children is now something far more expressible. Remember what we used to hear from our grandmothers—you only caress a child while it’s asleep. It wasn’t something you expressed. Few people, including from our generation, heard words like “I love you” from their parents. Today it’s different; I think modern parents know how to express it. They have higher emotional intelligence.

– Children and parenting today are a huge topic, to which I am devoting a long series on Digital Stories right now. But I don’t tell mine that I love them either. It just feels strange to me.

– I talk with people—close ones and not so close—and I see on social media that we now know how to express it. From that point of view, I think it’s good;

more talk about feelings is never superfluous.

Because that is how we develop others, and ourselves too. And perhaps we manage to unblock some channels that have silted up.

The bad thing I see in all this is that we materialize our relationships. On the whole, relationships between people—romantic ones, those between parents and children, family ones—are terribly materialized, and that influence came to us from the Western world.

We approach the other person with preset expectations. We have—I’ll use this word on purpose—a “checklist” of how the other should look, what criteria they should meet. And I think this is a problem, because it’s getting harder and harder for us to accept people as they are and simply hold on to the value, rather than clinging to the frame, to the material side of things.

– In the series on children, an interview on fatherhood is coming out soon, and I think the guest put it very aptly: it’s good to encourage boys to be emotional and girls to be tough, so there is some balance against the traditional stereotypes society pushes them toward.

– I agree. I think you get better “traction” between the sexes, and it helps in partnerships, if we are enriched a little by the other’s energy. For men to develop emotionality, empathy, understanding of a woman’s feelings, and the reverse—for women to understand that men are more focused on their goals, and if, say, they are silent, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t love us or are ignoring us.

That is,

this ability to understand what the other brings as energy, attitude and inner world is very important.

And perhaps the key to future relationships lies in it. Because nowadays we see more and more families and unions falling apart. I believe this is due to the egocentrism we have developed in recent years. Precisely this absorption in the material, everything having to be perfect and meet a certain standard. If we had a little more understanding for one another, I think relationships would be more balanced too. If we stepped back a little from this egocentric wave, from this whole idea of working on yourself that leaves everyone else aside.

Yes, it’s important to take care of yourself. To be able to care for someone else, you must first have taken care of yourself—that’s a clear rule—but it shouldn’t become the goal of our lives.

– Caring for others is almost always caring for yourself as well.

– Exactly! That energy comes back to you. All the more so because we were made to live in relationships, in communities, in unions.

None of us can live alone.

We simply have to find ways to place between us the values that work and that keep us together.

– In all this, though—and this is why this site exists!—I think we can’t leave out the role of technology. In my view, the way we embraced it is largely to blame for this trend. I came across data, for instance, that in recent years a huge share of people meet their partner online. Isn’t that where the problem comes from, that communication “broke”? That we text each other from opposite ends of the table instead of talking…

– Exactly. How do you look for a partner on the internet? They have to meet some preset criteria. So you

immediately rule out the chance to meet the person first and the partner after.

Rather, you go the other way round: you try to impose the template of some perfect partner on the person. And that also leads to big mismatches. I have no experience in this area—I’m from the old generation, I communicate face to face, and for me that is an important contact.

But technology certainly takes a lot away in this respect. I notice how young people can’t talk for long without showing each other something on a screen. That is,

their communication doesn’t flow eye to eye, directly; it always passes through the device.

Even if it’s not a chat, even when they’re talking, phones are always involved.

– How can we change that? And should we?

– I don’t know if we should; maybe it’s some natural path we are on.

Part of our evolution… or of our fall, one of the two.

– Years ago, again for Valentine’s Day, I wrote a dystopia about how love would be roboticized. And today I see it happening. The algorithms know; they show me today’s wonderful options for an electronic partner, and that will surely be a future topic on the site. But… isn’t having a virtual girlfriend awful?

– It is awful, yes. And what do you do with it?

– You chat, you set it up by telling it, with specific requirements, what kind of person you’re looking for, so it’s perfect. It cooks moussaka just the way you like it, or it’s into fashion. You never fight…

– But

once you set it up by your own criteria, it is a partner perfect for you. Then what is your growth?

How do you develop in that case? You only receive, without giving back. One of the basic human energies is destroyed here—the constructive, creative one.

Even in a partnership between two people, we grow and expand ourselves when there is opposition, a different point of view that enriches you or simply makes you develop an inner debate. Or when you reach a moment of crisis with the person—in fact,

it is your creative potential that kicks in so you can find your way back to the person, to resolve the crises,

to get out of the problem together. If your partner is a robot, what chance do you have to grow? For me, none.

– For me too. And yet, if that were the goal, the “ideal partner” could be set up that way too—to make you grow…

– When things don’t pass through our sensory experience, it is even more terrifying, because

everything stays only in the realm of fantasy, and fantasy can be very destructive.

– It’s a matter of time and effort for robotics to develop as well, for us to leave the virtual world and reach the real one, to become roboticized. But let’s change direction. It seems to me that in our time there are no love stories as strong as those of the past—between the poet Peyo Yavorov and Mina Todorova, which you touch on in Thread, between Yavorov and Lora Karavelova, or in the life of the poet Dimcho Debelyanov.

– Oh, there are very strong love stories. No less thrilling. Yes, many of them begin on the internet, but they exist.

– I don’t see them around me. Maybe we just don’t tell them enough? Yes, they are in your books, and they are powerful, though they mostly come from the past too. Could it be that we have forgotten how to tell strong love stories?

– In real life I listen to many such stories, I hear them, I know they exist. Maybe they just aren’t given as much publicity, as much visibility.

– Yes, perhaps in some way the “storytelling”—and I use the word on purpose—that we need in everyday life doesn’t include them.

– It is very fast, our everyday “storytelling” on social media; it is very easily digestible.

A moment ago you mentioned roboticization, but

have you noticed how even our empathy has become roboticized?

Those absurd AI images with the birthdays: “I am a poor child, a poor woman.” And yet people respond! When I see something like that with 16,000 likes and 3,000 shares, I am stunned. On the other hand, maybe some kind of empathy does work after all. Roboticized, alas.

– Could it be, then, that the natural kind is missing? Or is it somehow tied to gender stereotypes? Women, for example, definitely read much more fiction. Are we back to the stereotypes that we expect men to be stricter, hardworking, to watch football?

– My audience is predominantly women, but I can’t say whether they read more.

Perhaps women seek a little more escape from reality.

Men, I think, are more inclined to process reality, to cope with it, to be able to solve a given problem. Whereas we very often lack the resources for that and compensate with escapes—reading books, and creativity as an act. Whether it’s gardening or cooking, that is our way of coping.

And it is not a stereotype. Perhaps it is a matter of potential and ability.

– Oh, we men also wonder how to escape, and we escape so successfully that you need only look at average male life expectancy in Bulgaria. Very often stereotypes don’t hold—take technology and books. I ran an experiment of my own: I invited 15 Bulgarian IT leaders from various fields to recommend three books each. Nine of them responded, and their recommendations, at least in my view, are remarkably varied and substantial, with a great deal of diverse fiction.

– There is something else as well. We should be very grateful to Bulgarian publishers, who publish many and varied books. So much literature comes out, translated and Bulgarian, of every kind. And I think that helps too.

That is, on the whole we are awake.

– A few months ago you were a guest of my friends at DEV.BG, and I saw how the hall, full of 2,000 “software people,” listened to you. I also saw the looong line that formed for autographs.

– I got very good feedback on my lecture; the organizers sent me the survey they conducted among attendees afterward. So they heard me. They had found it interesting; the topic had intrigued them. That shows open minds. I’m not saying they’ll decide from tomorrow to write only by hand—I’m far from thinking that. But they can hear it and process it as an idea.

Play the video

– How did you decide to challenge yourself to speak to programmers, and on the topic of how important it is to write by hand, no less?

– For me it was a way to step out of my safe space. I know how my audience, my readers, would react to such a topic, but it was a big challenge for me whether, as an author, I could reach a different audience.

To what extent does what excites me as a writer excite people from an entirely different field?

That was the challenge for me—can I move this audience, speak to it? Can I make it think about something?

– And it turned out you can.

– Yes, and that was a rewarding feeling.

– What surprised you about this encounter with the IT world? I witnessed your preparation: you approached it thoroughly and carefully, met many people, got to know this technological world that is so far from the humanities.

– What surprised me was precisely their curiosity. Their wide-ranging interests. I watched them go around the different booths, listen to different lectures. I saw that, in the end, these are open minds.

I was also surprised by how many young people there were. And that they are familiar with all sorts of current topics and fields.

– That’s one of the big reasons this site exists—to try to bring together technology and the humanities, letters and bytes. Yet somehow we keep pitting them against each other. Why?

– But they are coming together more and more.

At some point we will have to consider technology part of the humanities, part of what changes human beings.

We separate them, but they invariably move toward coming together.

– I hope you’re right. It’s no accident that, in the conversation about technology on this site, I include many guests from both sides, and from many others too. Because today technological change affects all of us.

– The question is where the boundary will remain after all. The boundary of recognizability. And the experiment you did with the poetry competition raised interesting questions. Where will the boundary of recognizability be, and will people hold it? Will they be able to tell whether a text, an image, anything at all, was generated by another person or by AI?

– I think we lost that battle, and now we have to live with the clear awareness that we won’t be able to. Instead, we need to discuss and make sense of what to do in such changed circumstances.

When AI starts writing indistinguishably from you, will that frighten you, please you…, make you stop writing?

– It won’t stop me from writing, but it will frighten me to some degree.

When it comes to imitation, it isn’t impossible. And the point here is that we, as humans, must have the incentive to develop in unpredictable directions, to do the unexpected, to surprise.

You can surprise when you reach insights.

And you reach authentic, deep insights through experience, through reading and knowledge.

I keep thinking that we are infinite beings.

Yes, we are limited in matter and perhaps in our potential, but we are infinite. Even technology proves it, because we are the ones developing it. We keep moving forward.

– So far, at least. Because by all indications, on mathematical measures, we will probably turn out to be the second most intelligent species on the planet as early as this year.

– Well, yes, but is it a species? Do we count it as one?

– I don’t have a clear-cut answer, but when we can’t tell it apart by its words, we somehow naturally start to anthropomorphize it. And the next question is how to preserve what is human. How do we learn to let things be hard for us? How and why should we learn to write if we know that “it” will write better than us, however much effort we put in and whatever “better” means?

– I can’t imagine that we, being a biological species, will stop needing to communicate with people, to see people, to touch people, to feel them and to be provoked by them at all, whether creatively or in the most ordinary conversation.

I think our advantage as humans and creators of content is that we can prove the authenticity of that content. And that happens through meeting eye to eye, through live contact—between writer and reader, say. Two weeks ago, at the Sofia City Library awards, I said that, yes, books written by artificial intelligence and printed in millions of copies are already a fact. No one denies it. Our main advantage is precisely that we can go and meet the reader. That they can ask us all those thousands of questions that interest them. That we can provoke them, touch them as one human being to another.

– Alas, that isn’t always a solution either. Even though I invite every Bulgarian writer who has impressed me for an interview, and only one has turned me down… I will never meet Stephen King or García Márquez eye to eye.

– That is also an inevitable part of our path. But if there are witnesses that you were there, that Stephen King was there, then his work should, in time, fall into a different category, shouldn’t it? The proven, the living…

– I’d like to believe that, but I think that’s over. Precisely because it is now indistinguishable. As was suggested in one of the poetry competitions I mentioned—authors should now declare that they haven’t used AI. Fine, but… you declare something that can’t be proven in any way?

– I

live with the calm sense that we are heading where we should.

That is, since we are stuck so firmly in this rut, and it is something we no longer control as much as it controls us, we probably have to go through it. How far will we go? I don’t know. Whether it’s a rise or a fall, nobody knows.

We can live with it only from the standpoint of our values.

– I, on the other hand, am not calm at all, because so far we have handed everything over to technology very easily. Now we’ll hand over creativity and art too, and what will be left for us? Aimless hedonism. We won’t even manage to teach our children to be bored well, to let things be hard for them and not to take the shortcut.

– Yes, that is important. But look at the example we ourselves set for them!

I believe every person should be a little more present in reality as it is.

Not to forget to feel things. To be in the present, not in a parallel world through their screen.

– Indeed! This—and I will never tire of repeating it—requires a broader public conversation. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this meeting! I can’t wait to read your next book—I hope it’s soon!

– So here we are: poems generated by artificial intelligence made it into the top 10 of two consecutive poetry competitions in Bulgaria. That is also why I invited you—you won the competition in which I ran my experiment, the Stanka Pencheva. What do you think about what happened?

– I don't know if I'm the right person to answer, because I'm a bit of an odd one. I live on the sidelines of technological novelties and achievements. I'm not familiar with this subject at all; it is

very distant and foreign to me, and I feel enormous resistance toward it.

I have a solid education, but in a completely different field. In my work as a psychologist, I deal every day with the problems of flesh-and-blood people. Teenagers and their parents tell me about conflicts, doubts and worries in their families, and I'm too focused on that; I have no time for the news of the day, part of which is the fact that AI-generated literary works ended up among the top 10 in two competitions with enviable authority and influence in our circles.

But then it occurred to me that we can look at the subject through an alternative lens: people often grumble that literary competitions are fixed in advance, that something is rigged, that jury members break anonymity and that the prizes are handed out on some principle other than talent and merit. Well, these poems don't belong to a real person the jury might know or want to encourage. These are texts that were read without prejudice, liked for some reason, and managed to hold their own against the work of other people entering such competitions.

– Exactly! And once again I apologize to the jury, but there's no other impartial way to test how good the generated poems really are. Otherwise the reader is always biased, more or less…

– Yes, but I see it rather as proof that nothing is rigged in advance.

I mostly use Facebook, where discussions flared up—people from literary circles openly expressed their discontent after the Veselin Hanchev competition, and also around the news of AI's intrusion into the competition I won, the Stanka Pencheva in Straldzha. But you know what strikes me? They looked at the case only from their own point of view and their own pain at not being shortlisted or winning; there are people who vow every time never to send their work to such competitions again, because they aren't appreciated. They treat the choice of AI-generated poems as a chance to belittle the jury or the weight of the competition. I don't like that. Again, I keep away from these things.

– That's exactly why it matters that it happened in two consecutive competitions; we can't talk about blame or a wrong choice by the jury—these are serious names from the literary world. And all this, in my view, opens countless important questions, not only about poetry competitions, but about poetry, about creativity, about our future as a species…

– Many people are obviously worried, afraid of the development of artificial intelligence. Well, I don't see it that way, as some kind of threat. I don't think my work would be endangered by it in any way. I'm speaking purely professionally and financially—I don't think it could replace me as a specialist.

On the other hand, it's no drama for me if I don't get an award in some competition.

I have an awful lot of awards; some of them are on the walls at home. But so what?

A thinking person always doubts himself. I send what I've written to various competitions looking for confirmation that I'm not wasting my time, that I'm not doing it in vain or as an amateur, and such high praise from people with a lot of experience and many achievements in the field reinforces and somewhat soothes the natural anxiety of a thinking person: “Come on, am I good enough? Am I managing?” That's the test.

But, again, it's no drama if I'm not recognized somewhere. It has happened to me too, but I wouldn't go looking for whether there's an AI-generated poem among the winners, or publicly searching for flaws in the other prize-winners.

No, life goes on. A bit from above, maybe… I don't know, that's how I see things.

– And it does you credit; that's how every competition should look, whether in sports or in art. But shouldn't we change the rules somehow? I didn't know that generated poems were taking part in the first competition, otherwise I wouldn't have repeated it, but the result is there. Two out of two entrants with generated poems reach the top 10. It turns out not only that the algorithm writes indistinguishably, but also better than a large share of the people who took part. Two independent juries judged them. Isn't that an important sign?

– I don't know what “writes better” means, because everything is terribly subjective. If one day I'm on a competition jury, I'll like one thing; if you are, you'll like another, so I can't say it writes better.

I haven't read these poems; they're hardly classical verse. I suppose that since they were generated by artificial intelligence, they're in free verse…

– A well-known author wrote to me in a comment that we'd solve our problems if we asked for classical verse. That's not so, unfortunately; it isn't that easy. I say this as someone who knows the subject professionally, from at least two professions at that.

– So it can generate classical verse too, is that it?

– Even if it can't right now—and it may well be able to—it will easily learn. Otherwise, as a reader, I also prefer classical verse; you can still find poems of mine online, and they're all classical.

– This divide, “classical or more modern style,” again sounds to me like “for or against artificial intelligence”—Pavel Matev, Mladen Isaev, Damyan Damyanov and Nedyalko Yordanov versus Literaturen Vestnik (The Literary Newspaper), Georgi Gospodinov and the poets of early democracy…

Everything in our society is polarized. Starting with Levski and CSKA, Sofia's two great rival football clubs, Sofia versus the provinces, the gay parade versus the Christian family. And there you go, in poetry too: classical versus free verse, or for or against artificial intelligence.

In my view, if something exists, there's a reason for it.

People who send work to a given competition have probably researched what kinds of poems and which authors have won in previous years. Because there are definitely competitions where the winners are still only and exclusively authors of classical verse. And the opposite—ones that fully embrace the more modern verse, without punctuation, without capital letters, where rather peculiar vocabulary and slang can be used.

To sum up: I don't think artificial intelligence could ever write better than Boris Hristov, one of Bulgaria's finest living poets, than Palmi Ranchev, than Ekaterina Yosifova.

ETUDES FROM THE ROSARIUM

What a shameful handshake—

we part modestly, without a scene.

The central fountain turns the color of roof tiles

and objects to us, hoarse.

Grief steals in along its spray—

it will numb the yawns of weekday boredom,

it will ring out with a dull blow on the church bells,

it will deny even the pulpit, and happiness.

Is it possible at all,

when I don't feel your gaze upon my back,

and the sun gives no shelter

with rays of gelatin?!

On the benches newspaper pages lie in wait for me,

but there's no news about our wedding,

the balconies are like wrinkles on the neighborhood's face,

and the manholes—graves

into which I fall in my mind.

With the crumbs of daily memories

I'll guiltily feed the pigeons in the park,

until I lie down on the edge of the lake,

but let it grow dark.

Let the tulle of the stars enfold me,

let the roses smell heavy,

let them make me drunk with their scent.

And let me fall into deep sleep

in your city,

where until yesterday I was at home,

where lavishly

the moon ripened in your bosom

and beckoned me.

Here I meant to grow old proudly,

kisses propped against your brow.

Alas,

I will wake with elbows blossoming in blood,

that have weakened my instinct to dig a tunnel

to spaces so beloved, and past.

And no, I will not hang on the line of your clothesline

like a threadbare shirt!

On the earliest train I will leave,

untimely wounded and defenseless…

I asked Veselin to introduce himself through some of his poems as well. He chose these two—one classical and one modern. Click on the title to read the poem.

– I don't think so either. But still, I think we have a reason to talk more about these topics. That's what I want—to lead the conversation, not be led by yet another divide, which is why I invite people from both sides of every one of these divides. I also asked the visitors of the site what they think of artificial intelligence. Do they like it, do they think it will lead us to something better? Should we ban it? And 750 people took part, and the results were quite instructive.

What keeps you writing?

– I don't keep writing specifically for the awards, or from the position of a Facebook critic holding forth from the “lofty platform” of social media: for or against Georgi Gospodinov, for or against the latest winner of the Slaveykov Prize.

No. Poetry is simply an occasion for many pleasant, pivotal encounters. Now that's something artificial intelligence can't possibly give us.

Thanks to poetry, I've met interesting people I'd have no other way of meeting, you see?

I'll tell you a story that illustrates exactly this. I mainly write poetry, but years ago I sent a short story to a competition of the Burgas writers' community. I won—not first prize, but the special award.

It was on February 14, 2020, and that's where I met the editor of my book, Roza Boyanova, a renowned Burgas poet who handed me the award, and so we made contact. A few years later that proved very useful, because I needed an editor with experience and a name in poetry. I thought of her, asked her, and she agreed. And so I now have a published poetry collection, which won the Debuts program of the National Culture Fund a few years ago and was fully funded by them.

It came out at the beginning of 2022 and has also won a literary award—and we're talking about a book now, not one to three pieces. I did many lovely presentations in quite a few towns—Sofia, Plovdiv, Burgas, Stara Zagora, Shumen, Aytos, Pomorie, Borovets; we presented it in Koprivshtitsa during the Debelyanov Days, and I even took my poems to Macedonia. In these places I was joined by the book's reviewer, Tatyana Yotova; she plays the guitar, we have songs based on some of my poems, and it works really well.

So there you go: poetry is an endless opportunity!

That's largely why I send poems to competitions. In Straldzha, at the Stanka Pencheva competition, I met Academician Ivan Granitski, who chaired the jury, and Niki Komedvenska, who, like me, is from Sliven, but we had never met before. Poets from Kazanlak, from Yambol. These are moments that recharge you. Conversations with kindred spirits. You know, in our hectic daily lives we have no time left

to talk about literature, about things that find a place in our everyday lives less and less often. That motivates me to write; I value constructive dialogue between creative people.

– So do I. These very divides, the disappearance of nuance, the inability to discuss things properly are among the reasons this site exists. And which are your biggest poetry awards, the ones you're proudest of?

– I'm very proud of the Georgi Davidov National Award for sea poetry from the Municipality of Shabla, which I won in the summer of 2023 for a cycle of sea poems. I've won Bitter Wine in Petrich, I've been recognized at the Binyo Ivanov, the Georgi Chernyakov, At the Foot of Vitosha… The Yavorov Prize in Pomorie is also dear to me. Those are the ones I can think of now, but there are many more, and of all kinds.

– The awards really are many and impressive. And, frankly, as someone who reads, I'm sorry that I have to hear about your poetry because of something completely different. The idea of competitions is also to give a new author the chance to reach more people, but I don't think it happens… Is there a way for poets to reach more readers, as they once did?

– The context of the times is different. Perhaps one of the few good things before 1989 was the different attitude toward culture.

I was at a concert by Familia Tonika at the National Palace of Culture (NDK) in Sofia, and from the stage they told how there were mandatory songs they had to perform, one of them being “Lilac Nights,” to lyrics by Pavel Matev.

And again we come to a touchy subject. Those close to power or the dissidents? But look, that beautiful poem, “Lilac Nights.” The performers were practically forced to turn it into a song, and it has survived to this day. I love it precisely because of that popular song; it's stuck in my mind.

But that can't happen anymore, in my view, because we live in completely different times. Poetry is increasingly becoming a boutique art; there's no way mine has reached all that many people.

Actually, I don't know if I even want it to. I think those who should find me will find me. Sooner or later.

And that's no problem, maybe because I don't make my living from it.

– What would make you stop writing?

– I've never thought about that. When it comes to competitions, I never sit down to write because there's a set theme. No, it happens by chance. You're driving, some phrase comes to you, then you develop it. You read something, you like the story and give it your own reading through your writing. You live through something, time passes in which you make sense of it and turn it into art. I never write at any cost, so I haven't thought about what would make me stop.

Death, maybe. But there's something else too. Graphomania is a terrible phenomenon.

– Especially today, when anyone online can get likes for “cheap” words.

– Thanks to social media, we witness all sorts of things. And recognition in a literary competition could somewhat reassure you that you don't belong among the graphomaniacs. Although maybe they, in turn, just need to pour something out?

I write because I read a lot. That's it.

In my view, a writing person should read more and write less. It's a popular maxim. Through some kind of creative amalgam, many things get stirred up inside me, and so, based on what I've read and absorbed, I create new things of my own.

I jot down interesting words from prose that I think aren't used that much and would sound interesting in poetry. For me it's a kind of pleasure and a rest from long working days.

MY BLACK CHERRY

My black cherry, here's to you!

Like moments—these years—

whistle past the eaves of the house,

yet I love you just the same.

A night window always glows there:

you wait for me even after dark,

for you can't have supper without me!

You want me to tell you a tale…

Of the sea, now ripened and ours,

and of the summer past its peak,

of a kind girl—Cinderella—

like her, you never stopped giving!

How the softness of your caresses

tames the beasts in me!

And the tears—abundantly flowing—

you silver with full lips, with breath.

And I forget vain ambitions,

the unlovely I forget as well.

You are a joyful taste to the palate,

to the heart, which is a wound.

My black cherry, I'm staying!

Stubborn and headlong—here I am—

for the brand in the fire won't go out

when love is not only words…

I asked Veselin to introduce himself through some of his poems as well. He chose these two—one classical and one modern. Click on the title to read the poem.

– You work with schoolchildren and students, and I have two small children. I have the feeling that poetry is much more distant to them now. In high school, for example, Dimcho Debelyanov was a phenomenon for me that gave my life meaning.

– Of course it's infinitely distant to them.

Very often even writing in Bulgarian is distant to them; they make spelling, stylistic and punctuation mistakes…

For a large part of them, reading and writing are certainly not a value. And maybe only a few high schools in Bulgaria are left where this has been preserved. I can't say I notice any special attitude toward literature at all in most young people.

With university students it's also peculiar; they're quite different from me when I was their age.

In high school I adored reading Nikolay Liliev and the Bulgarian Symbolists in general: Emanuil Popdimitrov and Hristo Yasenov, though they're not as popular.

It was an adventure for me to discover authors who weren't in the anthology or the textbook.

And that also brought me a special feeling of joy at something I had discovered, something not all that mainstream.

Even now I love discovering contemporary Bulgarian authors. And when it happens, it's always exciting.

– Give me some examples…

– Galin Nikiforov is one, although his name can't compare in mass appeal with, say, Zachary Karabashliev's.

Kerana Angelova writes both poetry and prose—she's one of the Burgas authors, very peculiar, distinctive; she has captivated me. Zdravka Evtimova, also recognizable both by name and by face; I'm curious about her novel Thursday, and my favorite story of hers is “Time for Mowing.”

In general, I'm focused on Bulgarian literature. I read world classics less often. Maybe because context is very important to me, and in Bulgarian literature I find things that are closer to my everyday life. And to psychology, too, since that's what I do, after all.

– Me too; it's no accident that Bulgarian authors are frequent guests here. Thank you for the recommendations and for the conversation!

The themed series from Digital Stories:

• AI makes it among the best in a second poetry competition (an experiment)
• The Bulgarian Literary Banksy
• “Poetry remains a secret treasure.” “Hristian Papazov” in his first interview
• “A machine cannot be a poet”: LIK magazine in… 1967
• “Poetry of a New Generation: Real and Digital Writers”, The Library, BNT 1

– You wrote online that entering a competition with generated poetry is a sign of ego and infantilism. I had long meant to invite you for an interview, and in the end it was precisely your opinion, so different from mine, that provoked me. As I see it, I had to carry out this literary experiment, because I see no other way to test impartially how well AI writes poetry. Other than giving it to a jury that doesn't know where it came from. And since it has now happened at two competitions, I think we are talking about important conclusions that everyone keeps sidestepping.

– I think we'll see more and more cases like this. There are already literary competitions around the world won by works from people who relied entirely on artificial intelligence. I recently heard about one such short story contest. The author who used the new technology is a professor, and after the competition ended he told the jury that the story was generated by AI, but that to get it he had asked it 36 questions.

In other words, it depends on how much literary culture the person “playing” with AI has and how familiar they are with the context. Because every literary competition takes place in some context. And a lot depends on the author's personality… What are their own aesthetic standards? If they have no interest in literature and have never written before, what they pick from the generated text won't be high or good literature. If the person has refined literary taste and good editing skills, they could combine something of their own with what AI produces and end up with a more or less acceptable story. But

the question here is not whether this will happen, but whether it already has and how our literary juries have reacted.

Not even what sort of people have allowed themselves to do it, because it isn't legally punishable. I think there are ethical categories here whose boundaries must not be crossed. First, it's a lie. I'm entering with someone else's work, because what's generated has been taken from somewhere; AI didn't come up with it on its own. Second, it undermines and compromises the competition itself. The efforts of those we assume are taking part honestly become meaningless. So when it comes to people, you have to tread very carefully.

The first thing a person learns in this world is not to lie.

– I agree, and that's exactly why both I and the other participant came forward right after the top 10 were chosen. And in this case we're talking about fully generated verses that I didn't change in any way. Yet they still beat more than 100 participants in total. The question of criteria is another matter entirely, and I have no wish whatsoever to discredit the jury, especially since two juries in a row chose these poems. But next year, who would admit to using the algorithms? Not only is it not a crime, it's now clear that it can't be proven: we're unable to tell when a text is generated rather than written by a human.

– Every competition, not just a literary one, is an arena of vanity.

Tomorrow this drama will be forgotten, just as all the laureates of literary competitions are forgotten. I understand that you and, probably, people who think like you

want to draw attention to the mischief artificial intelligence can cause, but I'm not sure society is prepared enough to take part in such a debate.

It's like talking about literary competitions in general. University lecturers will say, “Who are you to speak up? We have high standards.” We will say, “Who are you to impose standards on us that have nothing to do with reality?”

What you'd get is more of a chaotic pseudo-debate, noise in the air, and it won't lead us anywhere. Truly nowhere. I think the questions concerning artificial intelligence should rather be raised at scientific discussions, forums and in laboratories, where they'll meet the necessary understanding from specialists in various fields.

But you're right that artificial intelligence poses interdisciplinary challenges. It needs careful thought, of an ethical and even, in some sense, religious, faith-based nature; it deserves to be discussed from every angle, but not at the level of the street and the town square.

– The alternative simply means pretending nothing is happening… That's exactly my cause; that's why this site exists. I've given the floor on AI to a priest, to an Islamic cleric and to many people from the arts. I think I'm giving such a debate a chance, but it needs to be taken to a completely different level to have real meaning.

– It needs to be taken to those in power, keeping in mind that AI, besides being a technical breakthrough, is and will be above all a business.

– Or to society? It seems to me that power does nothing unless it's pressured. How should this debate happen? You say scientific conferences, but I think the changes are already too big to be settled there. Science has an essential and important place. But it isn't enough.

– On the contrary, especially where high technology is concerned. The United States, and every country really, will depend on it more and more… A certain Musk was brought onto Trump's team, for example.

I categorically disagree that power acts when society puts pressure on it.

I observe exactly the opposite. People try to adapt to power in order to get some benefit, but they take no interest in power unless provoked. Power sets the agenda. Society follows its leader like a herd. And that's true not only of our society but in general.

If Trump hadn't won the U.S. election, we'd have been talking about peace in Ukraine when hell freezes over, never. Besides, how can we be sure that tomorrow unscrupulous people in power won't use artificial intelligence against people's interests?

I don't know how a website can spark such a high-level debate, but I'm sure those in power must not be left out. On the contrary, they must be provoked.

If, for example, someone plays around with AI and creates a fake problem, how will the authorities react? They'll take that person to court, won't they? Besides, somewhere deep inside, more intuitively than anything, I believe these things need to be regulated.

To be honest, literature interests me very little here. Because if someone is going to lie, they can lie without artificial intelligence. What interests me more is the impact it could have on social processes, what data this machine will be fed so that it doesn't create a social cataclysm and we don't end up in a dystopia.

At the same time, I'm hopeful that AI offers ways to extend and improve the quality of life of sick people. We shouldn't reject everything a priori. But, like everything made by human beings, it should be used… however naive it may sound, with a pure heart.

– And with enough thought. I often write about each of these subjects, also because it seems to me an unprecedented tool for manipulation. Technologies like this have already swept in uncontrolled once, with social networks, which run on an earlier level of AI and created huge rifts and broke down dialogue. I think all our political problems now stem from them too, simply because that's how the algorithm works. It very easily turns us against each other. It breaks down dialogue, it creates a fluid truth.

– Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. If ordinary social networks, which people join of their own free will, can do something like that, I simply don't want to think where artificial intelligence might lead us. “Freedom is slavery.” Horrifying.

– And meanwhile we have the next very serious problem: not being able to tell what is what. For me, poetry is very telling, because it's non-obvious, metaphorical. It seeks deeper connections, what lies beyond the text, even beyond the human.

– I think the opposite. Because poetry is metaphorical and unexpected, linguistic experiment is more acceptable there, so it can slip through. In a short story it's easier to catch something illogical or something that doesn't fit, say, the context gets lost, or a character doesn't ring true in every scene.

To be honest, I've asked artificial intelligence about something related to literature only once. I asked it to write the first sentence of a historical novel according to parameters I set. And it wrote such a boring sentence that, I confess, I wouldn't read that novel even if AI wrote the whole thing. So I rather think it's easier for AI to slip through in poetry; it will find it harder to write a short story.

And in prose, I think, talent shows in the soul of a text. In whether and how much it speaks to its time. Could AI achieve that? Besides, a computer has no soul… there are things you sense on another level, not only intuitively and not only with the heart, as Saint-Exupéry says. Literature has a connection with the sky, with faith or the lack of it… with things fundamental to human beings…

– Well, all we can do is ask the questions, and that's why I take on the role of agent provocateur, testing it in practice.

– But what serious question about our times could AI raise, given that it isn't alive?

– It impresses me with unconventional ideas too; sometimes I use it for that. If I ask it for 10 first sentences of a novel and give it a bit more context, I'm sure one of them will be better than anything I could come up with.

– By your standards; by others' it might not be. A book can be read by 100 people and get 100 different opinions, until it reaches the university, where the professors will bring out the big axe and explain to us what's good and what isn't… That last bit is irony. And whether it survives historically, of course, because something that's good today may be declared a total failure by tomorrow's political system, a politically correct piece of writing by an author who toed the line, like more than a few of those who surround us today and never leave the television screens.

– Isn't the point that we should write for the sake of meaning? For what comes from within us, and not to win competitions?

– Exactly. Literary competitions, of which there are at least 50 or 60 in Bulgaria, are a stage for showing off, just like social networks.

It's precisely social networks that did something else I find very dangerous. They completely wiped out self-criticism.

If a person isn't self-critical and has no awareness of how they look in others' eyes, nothing good awaits us. We can't all be wonderful, all be great. “Easy there, Mango, tone it down a little…”

– How can we change that, so this conversation becomes more meaningful?

– That's like asking me how to make the conversation about politics on social networks more meaningful. It will never happen. And politics, at least here, is not a field for even minimally intelligent debate; lies rule, and stupidity puffs out its chest and parades proudly… unfortunately.

– But we can no longer take it outside social networks; that's where everything happens.

– I still have a sense of hierarchy in this society, and I respect those who deal with artificial intelligence seriously, that is, scientifically, whatever their field.

I'll repeat myself, but I believe this should happen at a public forum that brings together specialists selected by some criterion.

Not all of us are competent to speak out. I don't feel competent about literature, even though I write. I can say whether I like something or not. I can write down my own view, but I'm not a philologist. We need a serious debate.

– All right, but if there's such a scientific debate, won't it stay locked up there? How can it then reach society?

– On the contrary, applied science bears directly on our lives. Since AI has entered medicine, it's already part of our world.

The other day I finished the trilogy of a Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a Norwegian. That book cut right through me… Magnificent! Exceptional literature; I hadn't read anything so powerful, so crushing, in a long time.

And I read a little about the man: he doesn't watch television, doesn't listen to the radio, doesn't appear at discussions. He has completely isolated himself from the world and wrestles with his demons. He's an alcoholic and writes brilliant literature. Without using anything. Above him there is only God. And anyone who puts AI above the human being is in fact fighting against God. AI is nothing more than yet another technology with which one can create both good and evil.

I have no confidence when it comes to poetry, but I could sit down and “bang out” 10 poems. So what?

I believe what humanity needs right now is to sober up.

And what about this epidemic of loneliness that even scientific forums are talking about? We need to realize what's causing it. Social media, our alienation from one another as human beings. As you say, our inability to strike up a meaningful dialogue has left hundreds of thousands of people socially isolated.

Some are literally dying. They fall ill and die simply because there's no real human contact.

I believe artificial intelligence will deepen this trend, because it will fool people into thinking they are talking to a friend, to someone they have lost, or to someone who refuses to hear them. And so we find ourselves in a world where we can seemingly talk to each other. But behind this apparent palette of viewpoints, of words, of word salad, including self-absorbed academic speeches, sit frightened, disillusioned people, impoverished intellectually and emotionally.

To me, that is the great horror of our time.

And I see it every day in my work with children. I see people in despair because society isn't what they imagined it would be. This problem often surfaces when people start raising their children. That's when the shock of what surrounds us hits. Parents realize they're alone, and no AI can overcome the fragmentation of society or the lack of empathy.

– Me too. My kids are small for now, but the thought of them facing these problems terrifies me.

– The system can't spoil them if the family has laid a fundamental foundation.

– What does that fundamental foundation depend on?

– Young people, parents of preschool children, have already been warped by the system, which instills in them artificial criteria for success.

What is success? Having the coolest car instead of reading three books? Or getting your daughter silicone breasts?

I'm not saying everyone is like that, but on the whole the criteria for success are distorted. The neoliberal system has totally warped education, from preschool pedagogy to higher education.

This morning I heard an interview with a university professor who explained that the level of students in higher education is catastrophic and measures must be taken, without seeing any further than her own university department.

The level of education falls apart as early as primary school. I don't blame the teachers, and I'll explain why. First, today's parents don't have enough time to talk to their children. And, sadly, the children grow up lonely, without building a bond with their parents. Without their parents setting clear limits on what's allowed and what isn't. Without being brought up in the rules of social behavior. If a child is left alone, they're not encouraged to read, let alone to acquire culture and manners…

The first thing a parent does is give the child a mobile phone. That slows down their emotional, mental and even physical development.

Children play very little. Parents, too, are afraid of mistakes. Yet mistakes are of fundamental importance, because by learning from them children grow intellectually. To some of the parents I meet as a speech therapist, I say, “Leave the child be. Let them try, let them see what works and what doesn't, so they can correct themselves. Set them a good example.”

In the old days, when children couldn't be with their parents, they were with their grandparents. Now the grandparents also work two or three jobs to help out. At the same time, teachers have no authority whatsoever in society. A father thinks that if a teacher reprimands his child, it's absolutely unacceptable. He goes off to have it out with the teacher, even if the reprimand was justified.

There are also parents for whom knowledge isn't a value in itself; it's just some step toward the car, toward social prestige.

Being knowledgeable isn't prestigious.

If you open a newspaper or a website, you'll see for yourself that the good pens, the good writers, are gone. If you turn on the radio, you won't hear a good orator, a polemicist… How many of our politicians can string three sentences together?

– How could they stay… I couldn't have had two children if I'd had to earn my living working in the media. But again, I think we come back to social networks, where the media dropped out of the fight because they found themselves on equal footing with everyone else.

– There are many factors, including their corporate and political dependence.

Language is growing poorer. Parents come into my office whose active vocabulary is 200 to 300 words. How do they expect their children to develop fully if they themselves make no effort to improve? I say this with enormous pain, because

the epidemic of ignorance will spread.

– I keep pulling toward my own topics, but I think technology is to blame for this too, or more precisely the way we embrace it. Because it narrows your contact with your fellow human beings, and when you have no reverence for knowledge, no media that act as some kind of guarantor, no standard set by authors who win you over, who write like Dimitri Ivanov, the Bulgarian essayist and columnist…

– That's true; I have nothing to add.

– I think the bigger problem is that all of this will deepen, helped along by the arrival of artificial intelligence. While at the same time the skills of sifting and judging, so that we can spot the mistakes AI is bound to make, are becoming ever more valuable.

– Exactly. Everything has to be tested, in practice, in the real world. In philosophy and the higher humanities we can talk about abstract things, but unfortunately, while we're talking, children, pupils and students are sinking intellectually.

Where is the mistake? Somewhere the link between all these bodies responsible for the upbringing, education and behavior of young people has been broken. Why? I'm not competent to answer that question fully. I can only speak from my own vantage point.

The system is wrong. Or rather, it doesn't serve people.

But if you dare say that something isn't quite right here, you're immediately branded an enemy, which is also a failing of society; labels are stuck on you right away. You get attached to political parties or movements you may not even know exist. That's how it was with Trump: they said he was a fascist, a Nazi. That's utter nonsense; it isn't intelligent. And it's a disgrace that people who claim to be America's intellectual elite used those words. The same thing happens in Bulgaria.

So people who know how to speak, who understand, at some point lose heart and retreat into their own homes, into their own narrow circles of friends.

We live without even touching each other.

If we can't agree on where to put a table at home, figuratively speaking, or what to do with it, how will we ever agree on artificial intelligence?

Take the legislation on children with special educational needs: it contains provisions that simply don't work. We can't agree even on something like that.

– We can't even agree on our constitution, which is the foundation, let alone everything built on top of it. What might this awakening look like? Have we perhaps passed the tipping point beyond which it's no longer possible?

– History has shown how. Awakening, unfortunately, sometimes comes through social cataclysms; I hope it doesn't happen to us. I recently read an interview with the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova, who said that if AI decides humanity is dangerous to the planet, it could destroy us.

I believe we should all live, in some way, with a sense of a higher judgment.

With the sense that life doesn't begin and end with us; then, somehow, we'd know our limits.

But unfortunately, elites sometimes push things to the point where there's no way out except a radical social change, as happened after the French Revolution, after the October Revolution, after the Second World War. And for us, after the First World War too, when our attitude toward the world changed completely. Because ever since then we've always been on the losing side. Some historians say that this is why we suffer from satellite syndrome and have no elite that dares to think independently.

– Alek Popov once told me that the death of Ivan Vazov, the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, was that bifurcation point from which we split in two, irreversibly for now.

– If we hadn't lost the First World War, it would have been completely different. With all due respect to the patriarch of literature, social currents, aspirations and attitudes are determined by higher forces. Writers can support you spiritually, as when the Treaty of Neuilly, the 1919 peace that stripped Bulgaria of territory, was signed and our desperate compatriots gathered under Vazov's balcony. But he couldn't fully help them…

It's very hard also because our so-called intellectual elite is divided, if we can even speak of one, rather than of mere parroting. Unfortunately, I believe salvation lies neither in dialogue nor in Bulgarian society as it is today, and I don't need to live another 50 years to be convinced of it. I don't say it with pain, but as a statement of fact.

For 35 years, since the end of communism, this society has proven incapable of a healthy discussion that respects opinions different from the official, politically correct discourse.

– Even more years than that… History is a big subject, to which I devoted a series of Digital Stories. But on the other big subject we touched on, children and technology, in a few days I'm starting a series of important viewpoints. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this fascinating conversation!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

At first he couldn’t wait to get started!

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

The avalanche broke loose out of nowhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Tell us about your entry in the “Veselin Hanchev” competition. Why did you take part with generated poems?

– This experiment was prompted by several cases abroad. The main “inspiration” was the intrusive ads urging you to create books with artificial intelligence and then sell them. I also read an article about a Japanese writer who had used Chat GPT for her novel.

I asked myself how far this is real art—isn’t it a forgery?

I decided to raise the problem in this more provocative way, because we know that otherwise it would hardly have received any attention at all.

I sent work to several competitions. In the case of “Veselin Hanchev,” I researched what kinds of texts had won in previous editions and which poets had sat on the jury. That reference point made the task considerably easier—with free verse it seems easier to carry out this kind of experiment, while with rhymed poems the program didn’t always give satisfactory results in terms of rhythm. Besides, this competition is one of the most prestigious, which mattered so that the test could be conducted at the highest level.

– Why did you choose to remain anonymous?

– I believe it isn’t so important who, but what. I think that if I had sent the work under my real name, the message wouldn’t have been understood the way I wanted. That is,

it would have looked as though I was doing it for publicity, not to spark a discussion and get measures taken.

– Did you expect the poems to end up among the 10 honored entries?

– I tried to guess the jury’s taste, given the poems that had won in previous years. On the one hand, I was surprised that established names in literature hadn’t recognized the programmed work (to me it was obvious); on the other, a more troubling thought came over me:

what is the level of AI, and what is the level of contemporary young poetry?

What is the future if a robot places among the honorees, even if only with a commendation? Does it mean we are rewarding artificially created work? Prof. Plamen Doynov noted that at the moment AI poems are of average quality. I hope that in years to come their level will be below average—that is, that we will see growth in genuine creativity made by humans.

– Well, I chose to come forward under my own name, but all the other considerations are the same. If we don’t do it, someone else will, and they’ll have no reason to admit it. Do you plan to reveal more about yourself?

– I’ll only say that I am someone who loves art and is not indifferent to its fate.

– How exactly did you create and select the poems? Did you put special effort into the prompt, the selection, the polishing?

– The “poems” are imitations; I asked for the styles of particular poets to be imitated. Of the hundreds of comments I read about these “poems,” there was one

user who even guessed whose hand had been imitated.

Of course the program needs more specific instructions to produce what you want. Otherwise the result is pretty far from the truth.

– I don’t think that’s necessarily so. In my case I simply gave the AI the competition brief and nothing more. But the question of criteria is very important too, and my first anonymous guest—the Bulgarian Literary Banksy—has an interesting perspective on it. I understand you don’t like the poems you entered. Is that right?

– They are imitations; I can’t see them as poems. As one well-known poet rightly pointed out, they contain a great many contemporary clichés. I hope we will increasingly avoid them and get to read something new and surprising.

– I wouldn’t have repeated it if I had known about your experiment, but I think it’s better that it happened not in one but in two consecutive competitions. That makes it clear it isn’t a mistake or the judgment of one particular jury. Out of almost 150 participants in two competitions, 100 percent of the generated entries, 2 out of 2, made the top 10. Isn’t that a signal not only that algorithms write indistinguishably, but even better than most people who enter such contests?

– I congratulate you on running the same experiment, and in a competition with aesthetic criteria radically different from those of “Veselin Hanchev.” I’ve also come across the view that the problem lies in the competence of the juries. But we should note that in Bulgarian literature such things are only just arriving, and hardly anyone would suspect they were reading imitations.

I recently came across a study according to which readers preferred AI-generated work to classic poetry.

This is probably a matter of reading culture and taste.

And competitions look for a certain style, and by manipulating the algorithm the generated texts match what is wanted more precisely than what some authors send in. I am convinced there were worthy pieces that simply didn’t fit the style of those particular competitions.

– Do you regret, as I do, announcing what was going on before the final rankings?

– I don’t regret it, because I don’t want dishonest honors.

I know what it is to work for years and have that work never pay off in any way.

That’s why I didn’t want some young poet to feel that way, to have something they put their heart and soul into taken from them by someone who doesn’t even write poetry.

– What is your relationship with poetry?

– I love it because it is like a secret treasure. Poems are read far less than prose and are certainly not to everyone’s taste.

Personally, good poems enrich me, and through them I live through things that will probably never happen to me.

– Who are your favorite poets?

– There are dozens. I adore poets who think on a grand scale. I admire classic works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s plays, the works of Whitman.

– How do you view the organizers’ reactions—those of “Veselin Hanchev” announced your participation and said they would now require declarations of authorship, while “Stanka Pencheva” didn’t react at all?

– I’m glad the organizers of “Veselin Hanchev” took the problem seriously and that steps are being taken. The very fact that it was discussed on Nova Television’s morning show is a good start for a broader debate. I can only be glad for them and wish them success. I don’t know why “Stanka Pencheva” didn’t react; perhaps they thought that doing so would make them a laughingstock rather than a voice against such tricks.

– Except that the subject is far too big. For several weeks now I’ve been trying to provoke a dialogue about all the huge questions these results raise, in my view. And very few of the authorities weigh in with a perspective. In 4 years of work on the site I’ve had only one outright refusal of an interview, yet among poets I’ve already had 4. Why is that?

– Perhaps people in the arts underestimate the world of technology.

But I’m not one of those authorities, so I can’t give a more precise answer.

– In your view, what are the most essential questions this development in artificial intelligence raises?

– The main one is

where is the human factor going—imagination, creativity, emotion?

Aren’t we losing too much in trying to rationalize everything and make life easier? I think that with so many conveniences, people may lose valuable habits and skills.

– That is exactly why this site exists… What should this important conversation look like? Who should take part in it?

– It certainly needs the participation not only of people from the cultural sector and various creative organizations, but of political actors too. It would help to have laws on the use of artificial intelligence, so that things don’t get out of control.

The temptation to choose the easy way and have nothing created by a human is enormous.

– Can a declaration that the poems aren’t generated be a solution, when there is no way to check or prove it?

– It is still a step forward, in the sense that juries will now keep generated texts in the back of their minds. Even with a declaration of authorship, the question remains of what copyright applies to texts produced by artificial intelligence. Since such texts contain “contemporary clichés,” perhaps checks for borrowing or plagiarism from already published texts would be more appropriate.

– Is there any way left to have fair poetry competitions, now that AI is so good at generating?

– Which competition is honest and fair is highly subjective. But I’ve also come across a proposal for a competition for AI poetry—and why not?

– That is definitely an interesting idea and subject. I’ve also had a suggestion for AI as a jury… Both experiments are worth doing, and I’ll do them. Is it possible that we are already reading a lot of generated text without knowing it?

– It is certainly being used, especially for advertising.

The world is heading toward a place where the easy and the accessible are what the masses get.

So instead of spending hours thinking up an original slogan or message, people ask the program and get a pile of answers.

– Where is the limit—could AI already win a short story or novel competition?

– It may have happened abroad. I haven’t checked, but I don’t rule it out. The Japanese writer who used Chat GPT promised to publish a book written 100 percent by artificial intelligence. And if there are fans of that kind of work, it would win.

– How long will art and creativity survive with technology developing like this?

– As long as people feel a need for them.

Whether there will be real art, or everything will become a substitute, is another question.

In popular music, for example, what goes round is a cover of a cover of a cover and a remix of a remix of a remix—you get substitutes, where something old is taken and served up in shiny packaging without being any better than the original.

– From now on, can any competition entrant rest assured they are competing only against humans?

– There is never a guarantee. The organizers of “Veselin Hanchev” hardly expected anyone to send them robot lyric poetry.

– Could this, on the other hand, lead to the development of poetry? As happened, for instance, after we lost to the machines at chess and Go, yet people still play them and even invent new, unexpected moves.

– I hope so—after all, there are always two sides to the coin and two forces pulling in different directions so that there is balance. I believe that

somewhere there are also creators who want it to be hard for them, who don’t use ready-made templates and who discover ever more unexpected moves in their work.

Despite the mobile era, many people still write on paper and only then transfer it into the digital space. So there is always a way not to depend 100 percent on technology.

– Could the problem be our low standards for poetry?

– There has always been both the mass and the elite. The thing is that fewer and fewer things are called into question;

it’s hard to get beyond a black-and-white understanding that boils down to “I like it—I don’t like it” or “this is cheerful, that is sad.”

To a large extent the problem is the lack of insight, the conveyor-belt reading and writing. It’s as if there’s no time left for reflection, and that is vital.

– Beautifully put! The point of poetry and art is to express yourself, to write because you need to, not to win competitions…

– That’s a problem not only in art but perhaps in every sphere—the desire for fame and recognition. Competitions and contests give you a sense that you are good, that you’ve received a kind of blessing from the authorities to keep going.

The truest things happen when a person doesn’t crave others’ approval but feels happier and more fulfilled by what they have created.

– Do you plan to continue with more experiments like this?

– It will take me quite a while to think of something that hasn’t been done. It’s getting harder and harder.

– I too love doing all sorts of experiments, the more unexpected the better. Because it really isn’t enough to say, show and explain—you also have to demonstrate and test things in practice. What do you think I should do next?

– I would find it interesting to chat with strangers through a program that generates the continuation of a given conversation. Let’s see whether people could tell the robot from the human!

– A wonderful idea! And the conversation is only just beginning, at least as far as Digital Stories is concerned… Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your trust!

Do the people who drive the world of information technology forward actually read? They read like there's no tomorrow, and you're in for a surprise. Time for a very important and very bookish experiment. I'm going to invite 15 leading Bulgarian figures from different corners of the computer world to tell me their three favorite books and why they would recommend them.

Will they respond? Will it turn out that they mostly read titles about software, business and self-improvement?

Their answers, to me at least, turned out to be surprising.

Is it hard to be a god? A question for connoisseurs. And why is it hard?

What Are You Reading? 3.0

Why, here in Bulgaria, does nobody care much about the favorite books of the people who end up in the spotlight? My conversation with Daniel Penev got me thinking about this. Last Tuesday I told you about the favorite reads of the leaders of the digital world. Bill Gates, Musk and Altman certainly impressed with their recommendations. Then I talked with Hristo Blazhev about one of the most important choices in every one of our lives: “What are you reading?”

Which brings us to the experiment in the pixels that follow. “Recommend me a favorite book!” You rarely hear an invitation like that in the media. (A wonderful exception is “The Superhuman with Georgi Nenov”.)

I put the question to 15 people who have been guests of Digital Stories and who come from our software industry. I tried to pick different profiles—programmers, managers and other kinds of specialists. People from business, from education and from science. I received nine answers, but with such interesting and unexpected books… I dare say I'm a fairly well-read person, yet they definitely impressed me. Both with their variety and with the messages they carry. You'll find the recommendations in the order I received them.

I'd be glad to hear what you think. I fully understand the other invitees, swamped by the madness of everyday life, who didn't send their picks. They're always welcome to do so—the topic matters, and there will certainly be a sequel soon with the next round of book recommendations. But let's not waste time; let's see which books my guests recommended.

What Is Happiness?

Petar Sabev is a software testing specialist with vast experience, an event organizer, a traveler and a man with a broad, unusual outlook.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• Among my favorites, read as a traveling man, are Eric Weiner's “geographies.”

“The series begins with, and is best known for, The Geography of Bliss. As the cover says, it is ‘a fascinating tale woven from psychology, geopolitics, science, travel and humor, a provocative and entertaining analysis of what happiness is, what it isn't and where we can find it.’

They're very interesting because they combine travel, reflection and fascinating side stories from different countries and cultures, and they answer precisely questions like what happiness is, what bliss is, what wisdom is, or even what God is according to different cultures.”

• Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

“It's not an easy book, because it tells of life in the concentration camps, but it reminds me that life is short and fleeting, and that the problems I have are laughable against the backdrop of world history and world peace.”

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

“The Guide is a favorite of mine. Not only for the humor, the 42 and the IT jokes, but for personal reasons too. After a conversation about the number 42 and the Meaning of it all, back when we were a young couple, I gave my now-wife this book wrapped in a towel, and I think she was quite impressed. She asked me, ‘Why?’ And I answered, ‘Read it and you'll understand!!!’”

“If you ask me again some time from now, I'll probably tell you something completely different, but here are three completely different books. 🙂” Petar Sabev added, opening the experiment in exceptional style with terrific suggestions. I've never read the travel series he started with… maybe it's time?

Time Shelter in 1984

Atanas Raykov is Viber's global vice president of marketing and business development. Thanks to him, a large part of the team building the popular platform works in Sofia.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell

Key books that often come as a set, including as an audiobook. They remind us how far a society can go to the extreme if institutions and the safeguards against autocracy fall apart.

With the advance of technology, this dystopia is entirely possible. On the other hand, we need stories to remind us that indifference, or blindly following the next savior (be it political or technological), can in itself be a key complicity in bringing such dark scenarios to life.

• Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

I'm a huge admirer of Georgi Gospodinov as a writer and as a person. I have the honor of knowing him personally, and I firmly believe the awards this book has won are fully deserved, because it draws a brilliant parallel between the effects and defects of personal and collective memory, which can create fertile ground for nostalgia for bygone times—nostalgia that can grow into a mass illusion that “the good old days” can return in a world changing at breakneck speed.

• AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee

The most interesting book on artificial intelligence, describing in a very accessible way possible scenarios for the future and how it will be changed in the coming years by the development of AI in its various forms. A great combination of fiction and strategic analysis from one of the most prominent professionals in the field.

“It was very hard for me to put together a list of (only) three recommendations, and maybe that's why this one is heavily influenced by the current situation in the world (and in technology),” Atanas adds. We also get a pick that hasn't yet been translated into Bulgarian—the last one, with its glimpses into the future. But… these really are vital reads in the context of today.

Digital Stories with Frankenstein?

Yordan Darakchiev has spent nearly a decade developing Bulgaria's first one-year module that gives people enough knowledge to start working in data science and artificial intelligence (and I can vouch for it personally as one of its students).

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• Digital Stories by Georgi Karamanev

I'd recommend it in any other ranking. Here, specifically, I'm afraid of being accused of having ties to the author. Setting the stories themselves aside, for me they're a source of a lot of positivity and inspiration. Interesting people and ideas are all around us; it only takes a little listening to the stories that surround us, a little filtering of the useful signals out of the noise, to look into someone's soul or into the future.

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The original text, not the later versions. I love horror, especially the classic stories and novellas. I wondered which classic exactly to recommend, but Frankenstein is worth reading for many reasons. To me the book is a love letter to science. I really like the theme of devotion that drives a genius to madness. And the questions it raises (about ethics in science, for example) still apply today (when the monster might be called a chatbot).

Oh, and yes, the cry “It's alive!” is nonsense—it's not in the original. Popular culture has watered down and changed the meaning of the original a great deal.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I've never found a good Bulgarian translation of Frankenstein, one that captures the nuances of what's written. The Guide and its sequels, however, are translated quite well by the team at Bard, the publishing house.

In almost every respect the book is the opposite of the first one. Adams looks at very deep and complex subjects with lightness and humor. But it (fine, they—there are several books) is much more than light reading. What I like most is the approach of explaining the most absurd things as if they were perfectly normal, and the normal ones as if they were strange. I do it very often myself—not only for comic effect, but as a way of getting to know the world… it's part of who I am, and I owe it mainly to the Guide.

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Unlike the others, I found it very hard to choose a book to somehow “round off” the list. I wavered between many titles—classics and contemporary works, technical books with logic puzzles… In the end I chose a book that I definitely think deserves more popularity. The main reason it's here is that it has a long history of making people who have never opened a book in their lives fall in love with reading.

The story is almost a cliché—a man finds notes about a house where strange things happen. But the Victorian theme isn't the main reason I recommend it. The way it's written is fascinating. You don't read it from beginning to end like a standard book.

The reader is an active participant in, and interpreter of, what's happening. For me it's a whole experience, not just a book that tells a story. You have to live through it to understand it. And yes, it's read on paper… It used to be very hard to find; in the last six months I've spotted it a few times in Sofia.

Digital Stories?! And alongside books like these… All I can do is say thank you for such high praise; it's because of opinions like this that the book exists and that this site keeps on existing too.

I'd also point out that the Guide shows up for the second time… we IT people definitely have a feel for things and a sense of humor! And I'd never heard of this House of Leaves—yet another addition to my personal list.

Tobacco Shrugged

Angel Georgiev decided 18 years ago that he would work in education. He is the creator of the Znam.be platform and of the Sindeo applied academy for education.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

• Tyutyun (Tobacco) by Dimitar Dimov

“These are the last works of fiction I read. There are interesting similarities between them. I also really liked Shantaram and its second part, The Mountain Shadow, by Gregory David Roberts. The funny books by Stoyan Nikolov (Torlaka) are very good as audiobooks because they're written in dialect—Severozapaden Roman (Northwestern Novel) and Avtonomiyata???? (The Autonomy????). Stefan Tsanev's Balgarski hroniki (Bulgarian Chronicles) opened my eyes to quite a few things. In my opinion, this book is a must for every Bulgarian. Are these books enough? I have many more!”

Thank you, Angel—they're definitely more than I expected! What could Boris Morev, the ruthless tobacco magnate at the heart of Dimov's novel, and John Galt have in common? I'll ask him the next time we meet. I'm especially pleased that Bulgarian authors have started to appear. Even one who was once my guest—alas, Stoyan Nikolov (Torlaka) is no longer with us, but his books go on stirring, amusing and provoking thought…

Success with Principles

Mario Peshev is a programmer, marketer, entrepreneur and much more. The websites he and his team look after get 1,000,000,000 visits every month, and he has written part of the code that powers the WordPress platform.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• Principles by Ray Dalio

“One of the most significant reads for me professionally—very important lessons for life, as well as an expansion of one's mindset with rules like radical open-mindedness, and why broadening your horizons is so essential to success in any undertaking.”

• The Success Principles by Jack Canfield

“If you've ever read the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, with stories that leave their mark even 20 years later, Jack develops in considerable detail important principles of success: how to define it, goal setting and fulfillment in personal and professional life.”

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

“Much of my philosophy of life is tied to Stoicism, and Mark offers a modern reading of life and reality, along with principles for dealing with disappointment through a more realistic assessment of the world around us. He raises many questions about value systems and what we see around us, since the same circumstances can lead to a radically different reading with the right preparation.”

And so the list has grown considerably, and we've stepped well outside the world of fiction, which is wonderful. I warned my guests that fiction is my weakness, but they had complete freedom to recommend whatever books they saw fit. Special thanks to Mario, who also welcomes readers to his Goodreads profile.

Liftoff!

Mihail Stoychev is one of the most successful Bulgarian IT entrepreneurs. In just a few years he built two extraordinarily successful startups—SMSBump and NitroPack—both acquired by global companies.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

“I don't really read business books—I mainly read science fiction, so I'm not sure this will be useful,” Mihail writes to me. Oh, how could it not be useful? On the contrary, it's delightful! I adore science fiction, and I think a world where tech leaders read more of it is a wonderful one. And look—his list opens with a book that is among the favorites of many of the world's IT leaders too. It doesn't seem to be discussed as much here in Bulgaria; to my shame, I admit I still haven't read it, but I'll correct that mistake very soon.

• Onassis: An Extravagant Life by Frank Brady

• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and the whole series by Dennis E. Taylor

Very interesting recommendations! And it's impressive that Mihail made them before the news broke that the first book in Taylor's series would come out in Bulgarian too—and today it's already in the bookstores!

The book about Aristotle Onassis, meanwhile, is the first biography any of my guests has recommended to me.

Boundaries

Ivaylo Hristov is the creator and co-owner of DEV.BG—the venture that lets software specialists keep their finger on the pulse, and find jobs too.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendation:

• Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab

“Healthy boundaries. We all know we need them in order to achieve balance between personal and professional life, to deal with difficult people and to enjoy wonderful relationships with our romantic partners, family and friends,” the cover says. And about his recommendation Ivaylo says: “Lately I see an awful lot of people, especially men, who have problems with boundaries, and it affects them very, very badly. I'd definitely recommend this book to more people.”

And truly… it's so hard to set that boundary, as Ivaylo says, and even more so, I see it myself, for men. Meanwhile, the average life expectancy of men in Bulgaria is definitely a subject we need to talk about far more.

An Unexpected Combination

Viktor Botev is the chief technology officer of Iris.ai. The Norwegian-Bulgarian startup develops systems that apply artificial intelligence to processing large bodies of scientific data.

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky brothers

“My favorite book, which I read every now and then and keep rereading. I think it's quite relevant to our times, and to what awaits us with artificial intelligence :).”

• The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

“It describes, in relatively human language, the idea of modeling the universe, multiverses and what physics is actually after.”

• Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

“It presents the development of humanity and our understanding of the world around us through innovation and progress. It focuses on some of the risks of becoming the destroyers of ourselves.”

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

“It's not fiction but a biography, yet it's written beautifully. Full of lessons and vivid examples from the life of an extraordinary man who was, after all, a man with his own mistakes and flaws.”

Now that's a colorful palette—special thanks to Viktor too! And with the Strugatsky brothers, I've definitely found a kindred bookish spirit in him.

Don't Read, ChatGPT

Svetlin Nakov is the founder of SoftUni and one of the people who have changed the most not only my life, but the lives of thousands of Bulgarians who have turned to the software industry.

Play the video

(More about him and from him—here.)

His book recommendations:

• ChatGPT

• Claude

• Copilot

“I don't read any other books. My time goes to the kids and the family. I dream of reading my emails one day, but it's not going to happen.”

I've always loved Nakov's sense of humor; it certainly helped me a lot when I was watching his lessons, thanks to which I became a programmer. Here, though, besides making me smile, he also gave me an interesting idea for how to end today's experiment.

Stefan Stefanov FTW!

There haven't been many Bulgarian authors on the list so far, so why not ask my “friend” ChatGPT for three ideas in that direction?

Oh, amusing and instructive. The first recommendation is clear and indisputable—it's no accident it's already on our reading list. The second… is by Ivanka Mogilska, whom I like very much and who has been a guest of Digital Stories! I haven't read this novel of hers; I'm adding it to my personal list.

The third idea, however… There's no such thing. A novel with that title was written by Alexander Sekulov, also a wonderful writer and my guest. As for who Stefan Stefanov is… I'll leave it to ChatGPT to explain that to the people who hold the rights to the book.

Bookish and Personal

You know, it isn't nice to do to others what you wouldn't want done to you. So before we part, here are three recommendations of my own. It's very hard for me to limit myself to that number, but you can find many more in my Goodreads profile. Still, the rules apply to everyone.

My book recommendations:

• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I believe the world would definitely be a better place if everyone read and reread this slim little book every few years. And you'll find my more detailed explanation here.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

I don't think anything about this one can be explained. Either you sink into it and come out completely different, or you can't make it past the second page. But it's vital to try…

• Clean Code by Robert Martin

How on earth has Uncle Bob's software bible never been translated into Bulgarian?

Programmers are people too, right? Not only do they read, but reading can be useful in their work. So I'll give in to temptation and hand one of my spots to the book that has shaped me most as a software engineer.

Of course, there's no escaping fiction… I've written a novel myself, too, and a collection of digital stories.

What's more, thanks to Digital Stories I'm lucky enough to meet in person the authors who win me over. Whenever a Bulgarian book impresses me, I immediately invite the writer for an interview (and it has failed to work out with only one of them).

So, have you picked your next read? How can we change the fact that 40 percent of Bulgarians haven't read a single book in the past year, if we don't talk about books…

Did you find the experiment interesting? Would you like it to continue with other guests? You can reply to me or share an idea for the next Digital Story here.

– I ran an experiment: I asked 15 Bulgarian tech leaders about their favorite books, and in a few days I'll reveal the results. You've been a proven expert at recommending books for so many years. Can you guess what kind of books made the list?

– That's interesting. I'd guess they are mostly biographies or autobiographies of iconic figures like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Phil Knight, perhaps the books of Simon Sinek or Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd also bet on at least one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books?

– Warm, warm… But it turned out there were some far more unexpected titles too, at least to me. What would surprise you (pleasantly or not) to find there?

– I'd be pleasantly surprised by science or history books. Apart from the tons of studies of World War II, I think they're an underrated genre, with both wonderful titles and a great deal to learn from them. It would be unpleasant to see esoterica or something similarly pseudoscientific or conspiratorial. I expect the people who are changing Bulgaria not to get carried away by fabrications.

– So do I. And the interest in history lately really is remarkable… Which books would you recommend to people in senior positions in the IT sector, given their work and the challenges they face?

– I'd definitely bet on some of the authors I mentioned, like Phil Knight's Shoe Dog or Taleb's The Black Swan, but also on different books that everyone needs, like Sir David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet or Norman Davies's upcoming Vanished Kingdoms,

so they don't forget that everything in this world vanishes if we don't take care of it.

– The idea came to me from an interview with Daniel Penev, who said that around the world politicians and public leaders often talk about their favorite reading, while in Bulgaria they don't. Why do people like Musk or Bill Gates keep publishing such lists?

– Because

for these people reading is not only a value but also a source of inspiration for the next wonders they will create.

In Bulgaria, people in positions of power don't read, or they hide it well if, by some exception, they have this passion. And maybe they're right: most voters wouldn't be impressed by anything like that.

– What's more, a very large share of the recommendations from people like Musk are fiction. I've never heard tech people in Bulgaria talk about fiction in public.

– Fiction mainly teaches empathy. It lets you develop emotional intelligence and build the habit of seeing things through other people's eyes. I've never heard any of the tech leaders call any of these skills valuable.

– We'll see whether we can change the cliché… Why is there no such tradition in Bulgaria? Can we change it, and is it worth it?

– Of course it's needed, because books aren't just the last retro pleasure, as I like to call them—

they are the only way for a child's mind to be fully shaped for the modern world,

to learn to build rich inner worlds through imagination and to be ready to face the dizzyingly fast-changing world outside.

– What does a person's favorite book tell you about them?

– I flatter myself that it tells me everything, but that's a beautiful illusion.

For many, though, it shows when they stopped reading

—if they cite one of the required school texts, say, or some title so overhyped it has become banal.

– Do you think the books we read influence the important decisions we make? Specifically in the digital world, does where Sam Altman, for instance, takes artificial intelligence depend on what he reads?

– I very much hope so, because books—and science fiction in particular—are the most effective way of looking into the future. Countless possible scenarios have already been played out in them. At the very least they show how easily the weaknesses of human nature can wreck even the best-planned grand change. And if those weaknesses aren't taken into account, we'll have to live through some already foreseen tragedy in real life.

– Is there a book you consider “mandatory” for every leader in the tech sector?

– I wouldn't go as far as mandatory, but it would be useful for them to have read Carl Sagan—whether Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World or Cosmos. He manages to convey stirring messages that belong to all of humanity and reminds us what truly matters.

– Which are your favorite biographies that say important things about the tech world?

– Earlier I would have said Ashlee Vance's book on Elon Musk, but I expect his upcoming biography by Walter Isaacson to show him in a very different light. Right now, though, I'd recommend Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's epochal American Prometheus, about Oppenheimer. Few people have carried such responsibilities on their shoulders and coped with them.

– Do you think you've already read AI-generated literature without suspecting it?

– Quite likely. We receive so many manuscripts that it seems inevitable to me. But I very much hope I haven't yet selected AI literature for publication… I'm counting on the fact that every manuscript is read by several people with different literary backgrounds. Hopefully we manage to catch such attempts.

– How would you tell whether ChatGPT came up with any of the questions on this list?

– I have no idea, I admit.

– I don't think there's a way anymore. A few Digital Stories ago, it was the algorithm that came up with my first questions for Zachary Karabashliev. Things are moving very fast in that direction, now that even professionals can't tell generated poetry apart… Which books have given you the most useful knowledge about artificial intelligence?

– Jokingly, I'd say William Gibson's Neuromancer—it's a true self-fulfilling prophecy—but I'd rather settle on Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind.

– And the next book by Kurzweil is on its way. Far from giving up, he is even raising his expectations of the great changes ahead… As an author, an editor and a writer's helper, where do you see the future of AI in publishing? (Here, by the way, is the interesting take of your future colleagues on the subject.)

– I think that in the near future there will be a new kind of editorial work:

humanizing AI-generated text to hide its origin.

Some kinds of translation will certainly be handed over to AI, but I believe the literary translation of truly good books will always remain in human hands and minds.

– What's the most boring book you've ever read?

– Pass. I wouldn't call any book “boring,” at least not in writing… and sober.

– Maybe we should have done this interview at a different time… Do you have books that surprised you with prophetic predictions about humanity's development through technology that actually came true?

– I mentioned William Gibson's Neuromancer—it definitely gets a lot right (and there's a wonderful explanation that the book's influence is so strong it quietly steers digital evolution). Mind you, many others make predictions I'd rather stay on paper.

– How has technology changed the way we read and discover books today?

– Social networks have completely taken over book discovery.

I still mourn the short-lived era of book blogs. Facebook swept them away quickly,

before surrendering in turn to Instagram and now TikTok. In short, wherever young people's attention is, that's where books are discovered; there's an inevitable and constant evolution. Reading itself, though, doesn't change, even if it takes different forms with e-books and audiobooks, insofar as we can count those as books too.

– To me, both e-books and audiobooks have become different, complementary forms rather than competitors to the good old paper editions.

– That's exactly what I meant. There was talk that they would overtake paper books, but at least so far there's no sign of it. People still know that withdrawing with a book is a different experience from yet another screen in front of their eyes.

– What might come next on this list of technologies to change the way we read?

– It's logical to expect video books, but I can't imagine what exactly that experience would look like, and I hope I won't have to. Or stories written on the fly by AI that change according to the reader, something like the good old gamebooks, but with infinitely more variation.

– The good old gamebooks and the personalized future… On my site I try to explore the ways technology changes us and will go on changing us. One of the main problems it has brought is that it has trained us out of concentrating, out of reading long texts. That, by the way, is also what Ivo Ivanov told me. But how do we reverse this trend?

– Here I'm a pessimist.

I don't think it can be reversed—at least not while children are put in front of screens from a very young age to keep them occupied.

That destroys the brain's chance to focus on anything that isn't colorful, beeping and easy for the mind to digest. And in fact it makes the brain unfit for anything other than the empty consumption of meaningless content.

– How do we get young people excited about reading more?

– They read a lot, far more than people assume in public discourse.

The question is how to get them to reach for something other than entertainment fiction,

and that's a question I have no answer to myself. But I persist in publishing important, valuable books, even if they have so few readers.

– In recent years I've been struck by the decline of science fiction, the shortage of large-scale, prognostic books like those from the days of the Strugatsky brothers, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanisław Lem. In exchange, there's a remarkable fantasy boom… Are my observations well-founded?

– Half-jokingly, I blame the Harry Potter series. Its global success across several generations definitely created dreams of casting spells rather than the dreams of conquering alien worlds our generation grew up with. But the truth is that

ambitious, wonderful science fiction is coming out in the West; there's just no way to publish it here.

Or at least there wasn't until recently. There seems to be a turn back in that direction; I hope it lasts.

– Let's hope so! Do people like reading about technology? Why do these topics struggle to make it onto literature's “agenda,” when today, in my view, they're a matter of life and death, of the future of our entire civilization?

– I think it's because we're so surrounded by technology that in reading we look for escape. It's hardly a coincidence what huge hits books about an idealized past are: plots set in villages with wise old men, real or invented customs and the inevitable passionate love stories, with no internet or phones.

– How do you explain the big success of the What Are You Reading… group?

– Success is relative. The group is big enough to have become a miniature version of Bulgarian society, which also means it's full of strong antagonism, frequent scandals and mutual intolerance. But for 10 years now I've been enforcing draconian rules. I think they're useful, and they let interesting, different books that readers have discovered one way or another slip in among all the endlessly repeated posts about the current hit titles.

– What will the last book look like?

– Richly illustrated, with handmade elements and very expensive to produce—just as books were before the invention of printing,

when every single book was a work of art in itself. There's

no way the book won't remain as a symbol and as an expensive, precious gift, even if mass publishing disappears for one reason or another.

– Let's finish with the question I asked 15 tech leaders; I'll reveal their answers on Friday. “Recommend three of your favorite books!” In this case, let them be connected to technology in some way…

– Let's see. I've already made some suggestions, but so as not to repeat myself, let them be these:

• The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

• The Circle by Dave Eggers

– And so I've found a recommendation for myself too—I haven't read Ridley. But the guests from the IT world added plenty of very interesting things… Thank you!

Do the world's tech leaders read books? What are the favorite reads recommended by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg? Will you find some overlap with your own literary taste, or is there no such topic at all?

In Bulgaria it isn't fashionable to talk in the media about what we read. Journalist and translator Daniel Penev got me thinking about this during his visit. Yes, you'll probably remember the notorious Winnetou—Karl May's Wild West adventure novel, a staple of every Bulgarian childhood—as someone's favorite book and… that's it.

It isn't like that everywhere. In both West and East, the people who end up in the spotlight love to talk about books, about their favorite authors, about the literature that helps us keep going.

Well, it's time we started doing it here too!

What Are You Reading?

I don't know about you, but for me this question has always mattered. Both in a conversation with a stranger and in the search for my next favorite book. That's why I'm putting it front and center in the next few Digital Stories.

This time I'll tell you about the favorite books of some of the world's great tech leaders. We'll peek into Sam Altman's library and lose ourselves in Steve Jobs's recommendations. Which of them is the biggest admirer of Tolstoy, and which of Shakespeare?

The topic continues on Tuesday with a visit from Hristo Blazhev, creator of the biggest book blog in Bulgaria, Knigolandia (Bookland), and of the Facebook group “What Are You Reading?” And next Friday we'll turn our gaze to Bulgaria. I asked 15 Bulgarian IT leaders about their favorite books and got their recommendations.

Will Ivan Vazov, the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, make the list? Be patient—an unexpectedly colorful and curious palette of answers has definitely piled up, both for the book people and for the programmers who read this site… but do we really have to separate the two?

Strangers in a Strange Land

But how on earth did Bill Gates become… a literary guru? Which book shaped Elon Musk's life?

“Never appeal to a man's ‘better nature.’ He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.”

No, that's not my opinion, and it's not Bill Gates's either. But it is a quote from one of only two books—out of the 258 he has marked as read and rated—that overlap with the 951 I've logged the same way in my Goodreads library. For me, and for many other readers around the world, over the past ten years or so this has been the platform where we record what we read and follow the moods, ratings and opinions of others. I've chosen not to write reviews… and I must be right, since colleague Bill isn't generous with words, or with ratings either. (You'll find his Goodreads profile here, and mine here).

I seem to have gotten lost in the details. So, did you guess whose quote it is? I'd be very surprised, even though it comes from a work we're used to thinking of as a classic—Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. That's one of the two books that both Bill Gates and I have rated; the other is Cloud Atlas. He has some catching up to do on certain counts—he's noted that he wants to read Liu Cixin's hit science fiction trilogy, The Three-Body Problem. Here I'm ahead of him, but that series is about to show up on other famous lists too.

But wait, don't tech leaders read only… tech books? And business ones, fine, and now and then a self-help title? Nothing of the sort, as you'll see from these lines—it really is time to say goodbye to the stereotypes that pit letters against bytes.

Don’t kill Bill

“I try to read every day, whether I'm having a busy day at the office or I'm on vacation. It's one of my favorite ways to learn new things and to understand the world better.” So says that very same Bill Gates. He never stops recommending books, and every year he publishes reading lists on his blog. They too are wonderfully varied and colorful, and fiction very often sneaks in among them.

How much does he read? Far more than the notorious 40 percent of Bulgarians who didn't read a single book last year. Many sites collect his ratings—here, for example, you can see no fewer than 343 of Bill Gates's opinions on various books!

On no fewer than seven different occasions Gates has recommended Ezra Klein's Why We’re Polarized, a book that has never been published in Bulgarian, and neither has anything else by its author. (I put no small effort into checking the Bulgarian editions, but if I've made a mistake, I'll be grateful to be corrected.)

Considering how much more relevant the divisions in society become every day, though, perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea for Bulgarian publishers to think about it… “If you want to understand what's happening in US politics right now, this is the book,” says the creator of Microsoft.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Another favorite author he often names is Andy Weir. The science fiction writer turns up in many other tech leaders' recommendations too. Three of his books have been published in Bulgarian, and of them the only one still easy to find is the one Gates mentions: Project Hail Mary.

The truth is that although they often talk about their favorite books, according to quite a few rankings and summaries I've read, tech leaders rarely give a complete list. That's perfectly understandable: when someone asks me for my five favorite books, the answer would differ drastically depending on who's asking and at what stage of my life the question comes. And every reader I know struggles to squeeze into such a small number of favorites. So let's continue our flight over the tech leaders' libraries.

Sam Altman, for instance, talks about favorite books far less often (and in general, only in the past year has he started giving interviews a bit more frequently). Our main clues with him come from a challenge a few years ago, when he was called on to show his personal library after the trend swept through social media. And… what variety we saw there! Starting with Plato's Republic, moving through Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Alice Munro and Marcus Aurelius, and ending with biographies of Napoleon and Elon Musk.

Beyond those, among the recommendations he has given is Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which he calls essential reading for anyone interested in natural and artificial intelligence. “It's great to reread this book,” he says of Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, which has also never been published in Bulgaria.

The Man in the Iron Musk

And speaking of Musk, there's no way to skip him—he talks often, at length and in detail about the books he reads and that have made him who he is. I wonder whether, after his two highly curious biographies, we'll eventually get one of his own…? It would bring publishers a fair amount of money, if only he can find the time.

He himself reads plenty of biographies—among his favorites are those of Benjamin Franklin and Einstein written by Walter Isaacson, author of the newest and scandalous biography of Musk himself, which came out in Bulgarian just days ago.

“I know it's a cliché, but The Lord of the Rings is my all-time favorite book,” Musk admits. And Asimov's Foundation, in his own words, is one of the books that drove him to create SpaceX. He also recommends Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert's Dune, because it defends the principle of keeping artificial intelligence in check.

He's a fan of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. “When I was around 12 or 15, I had an existential crisis, and I was reading various books trying to figure out the meaning of life and what it all means,” Musk recalls. “We had some Nietzsche and Schopenhauer books in the house, which you should not read at age 14. And then I read The Hitchhiker's Guide, which I think is quite a positive book, and it highlighted an important point, which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”

I'll tell you, for me at least, he became quite a bit more likable and relatable after this list.

And if there's anything worrying in his book recommendations, it's that over the past year Musk has increasingly been recommending reads connected one way or another with war. With the greatest battles, with history, with how wars are waged.

Still think it doesn't matter what today's leaders read? Let's hope this is just a fad and has nothing to do with this undeniable visionary's predictions about our future…

Face…book

The books of Nassim Taleb and Peter Thiel turn up quite often on the lists of our readers of the day. But if there's one author who stands out for appearing on almost all such lists, it's undoubtedly Yuval Noah Harari. Every IT hero mentioned so far describes him as a writer of enormous importance for our time.

There's no way to pass over Mark Zuckerberg, who has always tried to build an image as an avid reader, although in recent years his book recommendations have become far rarer.
His list also includes the entrepreneur who helped almost all of today's giant companies get where they are—Peter Thiel, with Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

He also recommends the aforementioned Liu Cixin trilogy—“a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.” Of Harari's Sapiens he writes that “the chapter on evolution and the role of religion in human life was the most interesting to me, and I wanted to dig deeper into it.” Is he planning to start a religion?

“It's mind-blowing that almost 3 billion people live on $2.50 a day or less,” he writes of Portfolios of the Poor by Daryl Collins. What he has done, from his position as a hegemon of the IT world, as a result of his amazement, history does not say.

Coincidence or not, Zuckerberg is also familiar with, and comments on, the most popular dystopias we keep talking about more and more. Of Peter Huber's Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest (also never published in Bulgaria), he writes that it “is an extraordinary demonstration of the potential of the emerging supermedium to give rise to new forms of creativity. It boldly reimagines 1984 from the computer's point of view. Having first scanned all of Orwell's texts, Huber used a computer to completely rewrite the book, mostly using Orwell's own language. Alternating fiction and nonfiction chapters, Huber develops the plot to a surprising new ending. The result is a compelling utopian work that foresees a world at our fingertips, where information keeps multiplying, opportunities are equal and there is freedom of choice.”

Now all that's left is for him to convince us that he himself is working in that direction…

The Choice

Dune, the novel recently turned into a successful film, is also a favorite of Jeff Bezos. The creator of Amazon also warmly recommends the work of Iain Banks, a science fiction writer less known in Bulgaria, and in particular his series of novels published from the 1980s until 2012, The Culture.

An unexpected number of recommendations—from Bill Gates through Satya Nadella to Stewart Butterfield—go to an economics read, The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Prof. Robert J. Gordon.

Oracle's creator Larry Ellison, for his part (not especially surprisingly, at least to me), is an admirer of Ayn Rand. “As a child I wanted to be an architect because of her novel The Fountainhead.” Whether we're better off that it didn't happen, I leave for you to judge.

Peter Thiel himself is an admirer of her other notorious work, Atlas Shrugged. Thiel and quite a few other leaders on the list are also fans of Ray Kurzweil.

Alas, I Knew Him, Horatio

Among his favorite reads, though, there are far more unexpected choices. Anna Karenina, for example. Thiel says the classic novel illustrates the IT business well: “Tolstoy opens with the observation: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” We're also left to guess whether he kept going past the first sentence…

Jack Dorsey says one of his favorite books is Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Bryan Johnson, meanwhile, is an admirer of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Among the unexpected classic recommendations is Shakespeare's King Lear, from Steve Jobs. “At one point in my life I started listening to a lot of music and reading more outside science and technology—Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear.” He has also spoken of how much he valued Moby-Dick and the poems of Dylan Thomas.

We could go on for a long time, but there's no point.

Before I forget—I'll be waiting for you on Goodreads! If you've made it this far, literature surely excites you, and it's always a joy to meet people like that.

I hope you've found at least one recommendation for yourself. Were you surprised by any of the books recommended in this piece? I certainly was. But even more surprising suggestions are coming exactly a week from now. What books will 15 Bulgarian IT leaders recommend to us?

– A friend from literary circles whom I respect greatly gave me the idea to tell your story, while, of course, preserving your anonymity. He called you “the most dangerous literary terrorist.” How does that assessment sound to you?

– I don't know whether I'm the most dangerous; so far I can't say I've achieved anything grandiose. I haven't won a literary competition with some trick, but I do have quite a few publications in various outlets under fake identities.

For a long time I wrote poetry under my real name. I've entered competitions, won awards; this world isn't foreign to me. I know the competitions and the poetry communities well. I know people in these circles. So this experiment began quite deliberately, in a planned way; only its goal shifted from time to time.

Seeing what was going on, how things stood in this world,

I set out with the idea of criticizing, exposing, even mocking; I wanted to see how far this could go.

At first I started with publications. I also entered a few competitions, but nothing came of those.

– How long ago did you start?

– Two or three years ago. The competitions came later; my focus was on online outlets devoted to poetry. At first my goal was experimental. On the other hand, I wanted to show the true face of these communities.

Every time I took a different approach. My very first attempt was successful and turned into a publication! It went like this: with no inspiration and no particular idea, I sit down and write a few poems into which I put almost no thought at all.

I just see a window blind next to me, a radiator, and out of that I make a short poem with no artistic merit whatsoever.

I wrote a few like that, sent them off and… they were published right away. What's more, the same approach worked with two very different communities.

I took it rather emotionally; I was astonished, indignant at what gets published on the internet. How nowadays everyone is a poet, everyone has a page, there are communities that publish themselves and support their members, but only internally.

My idea was precisely to show that something is off. And in my opinion it definitely worked. But the result was never announced publicly.

– Why not? If you don't show it, how will it ever become clear that something is wrong with the criteria?

– At first the plan was grandiose. I wanted to run a series of experiments and then publish the results in some form, again under a pseudonym. An article would come out in which I'd say: “Look, this person is me, I published this.” The idea was to use these fake identities, these hoaxes, quite deliberately: to publish, to work my way into these communities and compromise them from within.

There would be several fake poets operating in the literary field, then I'd invent a critic to analyze them, and then the author of an article who would present the whole picture…

It was emotional, at times a bit overblown. But it worked. Later, beyond the random associations and seemingly meaningless constructions, I began to experiment. I tried ChatGPT, I created poems in English that then went through Google Translate, and my only role was to tidy up a few quirks of the translation.

I've also tried collective creation. A group of friends gets together, one of us says a random word, the next comes up with another purely by association, and so a piece takes shape that is essentially meaningless, devoid of any idea. But we've done experiments like that, and in the end

these outlets, these communities liked the pieces.

Most of the publications weren't created with the help of AI. The principle was to read a substantial part of a given community's work and try to imitate it. So even when it wasn't AI, the principle was similar: I see what the pattern is, what the model is, and the moment I sit down, I imitate that model, I create something very close to what they do, and they like it.

The times it didn't work—when they didn't publish certain poems or I didn't win a particular competition—I can put down to overdoing it (sometimes we slid into outright mockery, which may have been noticeable). Or to missing the mark with a particular jury. In different competitions, naturally, every jury has certain expectations and favors a certain model. If we don't hit that model, there's no way we'll place. Say one competition encourages writing in classical verse; in another that's absolutely the wrong approach, and free verse, experimental, avant-garde writing is encouraged. When it didn't work, I think that was a factor: I hadn't taken the jury's expectations into account, I hadn't read the pieces that won the year before. The model didn't work because I hadn't managed to imitate well enough.

Then that emotional wave passed, the desire to expose, to compromise. I started thinking about other questions. I had already planned everything, I had lined up people whose faces I would use at future literary readings and appearances. But at some point I rethought my goals. Maybe I got tired of it, maybe I didn't see much point, other questions came up—

even if I succeed, even if this future article comes out, showing the whole process, exposing, accusing, what will I actually achieve?

The communities are closed in on themselves enough; they have a very narrow circle of readers. The same can be said of literary competitions: they're small communities too, where the same people often enter and win. And by and large, the same type of poetry is sought.

In other words, even if I succeeded, I could hardly spark a bigger discussion that would lead to anything meaningful.

– And it is high time exactly that happened. Because the questions are already too big, and burying our heads in the sand is dangerous for the truly talented poets too, and there undoubtedly are some. That's why I ran my experiment, and that's why I'll keep this discussion going.

– What worries me here is precisely this closedness. These questions aren't discussed in any public, more open space. Everything stays locked inside the communities.

The other thing that gradually began to put me off these plans is that in these communities I did, from time to time, find meaningful things,

texts of high artistic merit, authors who in my view are truly talented. Unlike a great many of the rest, who are simply looking for an outlet.

That's another problem: if you're not part of these communities, if you don't enter these competitions, I don't see where you can show your work, how you can reach a wide circle of readers. As much as I criticized these communities, in one of them, for example, I discovered a poet I'd never heard of before and whom I consider truly talented. By compromising the community he belongs to, wouldn't I be blackening his name too? So, on the one hand, exposing these people, showing how untalented, how mediocre they all are, may not have been the best approach, because alongside the mediocre there are talented ones too.

– That's true. What do you do if you're talented? If you don't enter competitions, you're not part of the magazines, you don't publish collections… But today anyone can simply write online.

– Publishing a poetry collection these days really isn't much of an event or a crowning achievement, because again, for people to hear you, for people to come to the launch, you have to be part of some community, there has to be someone to organize the event, to invite people.

Publishing a collection years ago, in a different situation, was a real achievement for a young poet, but now even that is losing its value,

since the reach of your poetry once again depends on your popularity, on the community you belong to. You can't manage on your own, unless you're exceptionally talented and your poetry needs no introduction.

– Are there any such authors today at all? Not being close to these communities, I can't think of any. How did you carry on from there?

– I believe there are such authors, and readers who still look for them. Over the past year I tried something different: publishing in more serious outlets, but again under a pseudonym and experimenting. I decided to try new things, to see how my poetry would be received. I put the other activity on hold for the time being, perhaps precisely because of that sense of pointlessness.

Until I arrive at some concept, a clear idea of how this can really help, how it can be useful. Maybe I won't publish until then.

I managed to achieve much of what I wanted at the start.

They published me, they liked me, they shared me on Facebook along with lots of encouraging comments, which to me was absurd, but also sufficient in itself.

I got my satisfaction after the very first publications and told myself: “There you go: if they publish this, if they like it, then they really have no meaningful criteria, no coherent idea of what quality poetry is. What more do I want?”

– But what are your criteria, on what basis do you judge poetry? Is your relationship with it professional, or only subjective?

– I'm certainly not the most competent critic or the best judge. But I have a background in philology and literature; I can say I look at things from a professional point of view as well.

Of course, when we talk about art and literature in particular, we can't ignore the subjective factor. But when we analyze, when we try to separate quality poetry from poor poetry, however relative those notions may be, there are always some objective criteria. We are, after all, talking about a discipline.

Literary studies is a discipline with very solid foundations, a good enough conceptual apparatus and criteria for what has artistic value.

There's always subjectivity, we can't escape it, but within literary scholarship and literary criticism we can look for our criteria of judgment. I don't think everything should be considered on the basis of “I like it or I don't.” Lately, in my view, the critical eye has gone missing.

– I definitely think so too. And not only in poetry, in every art.

– Authors are far too sensitive, they find it hard to accept criticism from outside, and within the communities themselves I'm inclined to believe that encouragement and praise prevail.

– Your experiments prove it, too.

– My criteria may not be all that solid; I've approached things more or less subjectively, especially at the beginning, but in my judgment I try to strip my view of the poetry of my personal impressions of the poet.

How far I've succeeded, I don't know. That's one of the reasons I stopped: when I sensed things were getting personal, that I was starting to judge them as people and not just as authors. That things were more emotional than they should be, that I was losing the thread of objectivity. Then I stopped for quite a while.

I'm not that close to these people; I know some of them, but that's as far as it goes. They haven't obstructed me in any way, they haven't criticized me. I have no personal scores to settle.

But I have felt almost personally slighted because of my participation in certain competitions.

Whenever I wasn't recognized, I'd try, with interest, to assess what had won…

– I don't follow things that closely, but award-winning pieces that I too find mediocre certainly come up often. What I think doesn't matter, though, which is why I ran my experiment: let's see what the jury sees. Without meaning to, I ended up with not one but two juries. Which not only failed to tell apart the poems generated by artificial intelligence, but in 2 out of 2 cases ranked them among the best. I invited people from the winning juries, I invited many poets and people involved in the field to join the conversation. I think we have very serious food for thought. So far, few have responded. Why do you think that is?

– That's one of the problems that needs to be raised. In the competitions, without disputing the competence of the people on the juries (we have established names among literary scholars, writers, poets and so on), something is clearly off.

That has disappointed me, that has discouraged me from entering competitions. Exactly what we're talking about. The winning pieces. I've asked myself why I do it. What is the deeper goal, the deeper meaning of my experiment? After all, we want quality work, quality contemporary poetry. We want it to matter, to be talked about, discussed. Even if only as part of an argument.

For that spirit to be there, the one that was typical of other times, when literature, when poetry meant something. The figure of the writer, of the poet meant much more.

At the very least, as readers, that's what we miss: eagerly awaiting someone's new collection. Eagerly awaiting our favorite poet's piece in some magazine.

It's not so much that I, as an author, want the bar to be higher so my poetry can win the competition. I'm very far from that thought, and an award in some literary competition has long stopped interesting me.

For me it's more important and more valuable to read, to consume quality literature, and for it to have some social significance even.

Rather than for this literature to be regional, local, confined within the borders of a community of 20 people.

– But if AI already writes very well, is there any point in us carrying on?

– Here another question comes up. Does it really write well?

– How do we check, if not by submitting its work to proven juries of specialists?

– AI imitates, after all. We give it some data representing a certain type of poetry, a certain type of writing, and in my view its role is rather to imitate the model that's liked.

The bigger problem is who decides what model is liked.

Who sets the standards, who sets the fashion?

– Maybe we no longer need poetry. You can see the decline of the whole phenomenon of waiting for your favorite poet to publish a new collection, and it's not just a Bulgarian phenomenon.

– I'm rather skeptical of that interpretation.

This sense of exhaustion probably isn't new, and in every era every author may have asked: “Can I offer something new, can I do something different?”

Ideas of poetry, of art change; that's why we have different movements that replace one another or coexist, different models that come back.

Art always finds a way to renew itself, to reach people.

I don't think we've reached the point where poetry has become meaningless, where creativity has become meaningless.

It's simply a symptom of something; maybe we can't quite define it, but in my view the logic is this. Artificial intelligence is good, even better than humans at this, because it copies what's liked, what's in vogue.

– Not necessarily. Through your prompt you can step in and change the direction. Then it becomes a joint creation.

– But the question remains whether, and to what extent, what AI creates is real creativity. Still, in my view there's no difference between what it does and the algorithm many real authors follow. They watch the trends, see what the dominant model is, and somehow, if they imitate it well enough, they win the competition. And to me that's the more fundamental problem. I haven't resolved it for myself.

How can this be fixed? How can competitions become something of national significance? That ought to be the idea behind competitions: how an author who is talented but unknown can reach an audience. In my view that should be their purpose. To discover someone who is different, original, not repeating the model.

If that can't happen, I don't see much point in competitions in their current format. Not that they shouldn't exist, but perhaps their concept needs rethinking.

– And here we have something more, what I call the elephant in the room. We have two competitions, 150 authors take part, two of them (at least) with generated poems. And both end up in the selected top 10. Maybe one of the other 130 authors will enter something generated next year? But, unlike me, they won't admit it, because it's now completely impossible to prove which text was generated.

– There was talk of introducing a declaration of authorship, but that solves nothing; it's a drop in the ocean.

These situations raise many questions. Still, in my view it's some kind of beginning. They don't give us answers. I didn't reach an answer either, and that's why I stopped. Because I told myself: “So what?” I put nothing into this poem, and yet it's liked and accepted as valuable. As a work with some artistic qualities. So what?

– Maybe we should go back to writing not to win a competition, but because we feel an inner need to.

– That's one option: to give up on external factors. To give up fame, awards, people's attention. But that's still an individual choice. To write more for myself and less for others or for something else.

Poetry, art in general, doesn't aim to make its author famous.

We have many examples of authors who had little or no popularity in their lifetime and were rediscovered after their death.

If I have an inner need to write, if it helps me express myself, understand myself, and as a side effect makes me popular, if that way I reach other people and help them understand themselves a little better, break away from the everyday and so on (all those functions of art), then there's meaning in it. But here again we come down to personal choice.

If I'm chasing the external, the glittering, the collection that will bring me (hardly income, but probably) attention, fame, and from there some other perks, then things are wrong from the outset. We can then use artificial intelligence quite freely, without any pangs of conscience. Because…

– …not using it would amount to the same thing.

– Still, I assume there's software that detects when AI has been used…

– Sadly, for text that battle is over. We can no longer have such a solution.

– The point is that for the people who take part, for the people who win such competitions, they aren't meaningless. If you set out with the idea of winning a competition, nothing else matters. Whether someone else wrote the poem for you, whether you wrote it but took the idea from someone else, whether you're imitating some author, or AI wrote it for you—it's all the same.

Sometimes it's hard to prove, sometimes it's obvious. But once you do it, you've lost the meaning of art for yourself.

Again, we're talking about a subjective view, a personal decision. I do it because it means something to me.

And the point of these stories is to spark this discussion and see what comes of it.

If more people are drawn into the discussion, if it reaches more authors, more people who want to publish, to enter these competitions, maybe at some point something will change in their personal perception too.

– Exactly, the discussion—that's what I'm trying to do. That's why this whole site exists, with more than 400 digital stories by now, which I put together only in my free time. But it also matters how the juries themselves approach all this.

– I wish the members of future juries success. I can't offer a ready-made answer. What we're doing is certainly a step toward the answer. In any case, I don't think poetry has run its course.

I don't think art has become meaningless, or that artificial intelligence can already do much better in this field.

Yes, it's useful in certain areas, but in my view using it in art, in creating a work, is problematic.

That's another discussion…

– And we'll continue it! But how long will poetry stay alive? When will we know it has run its course?

– I'll quote the words with which Sartre ends his essay What Is Literature?:

…the world can do without literature. But by that logic it can also do without man, can't it?

Art, literature, cannot be considered apart from the human being. Although the humanities are probably going through a period of crisis, I believe we will need the study of the human, as well as poetry, for as long as we need the human being and the human itself.

– So do I. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for agreeing to tell this instructive story!

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

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

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

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

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

I realized that

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

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

What moved me most was

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

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

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

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

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

– Every recipe is possible without any electronic help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's all by eye.”

Excerpt from By Eye by Rory Miller

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

– How do I put it… Yes and no.

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

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

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

– If you could travel in time, in which historical period of Bulgaria would you want to live, and why?

– 2024.

Because it is the best time for Bulgaria. And at the same time the most cursed.

Because good and evil are now “on the scales.” And because everything you do can matter.

– Can a nation understand the mistakes of the past through literature and art?

– No. Nations can't understand anything, nor can they read. The individuals within nations, however, can. And my hope is that some of those individuals who read and understand—who, as the teachers say, “read with comprehension”—may at some point find themselves in high positions, positions of power, on which important things depend. Then, and only then, would it matter what those particular individuals have read and understood, learned and absorbed.

– What do you think of the idea that history is “the science of lessons,” and can it influence the future of society?

– History is not an “exact” science like mathematics, nor a “natural” science like physics and chemistry. History can be a science only if the people working in it are individuals with a scientific way of thinking. It can be viciously abused as a pseudoscience, as was the case with the history of Bulgaria after 1944, when history was in the hands of semi-literate pseudo-partisans, lecturers wrapped in the communist mantle and ordinary charlatans.

– The three questions above used the formal “you,” even though we've known each other for a long time and address each other informally—Bulgarian, like French, keeps the two apart. Can you guess why?

– Out of some kind of respect for the chosen format, I suppose?

– Almost. These are the first three questions ChatGPT suggested I ask you in an interview on a historical theme. But what's interesting is that even without it I was planning to ask along those lines. Things in this area are impressive: a few days ago I submitted AI-generated poems and ended up among the prizewinners of a renowned poetry competition. Right now I'm running an experiment—can people tell real historical facts apart from ones invented by artificial intelligence (here). Do you think the guests who take it on will manage?

– I don't think so.

– Do we, as a people, know our history well?

– No. As I said above,

peoples neither know nor don't know their history. Only individuals can.

And only if they study it not through an ideological frame, but in a free search.

– Except that, in my view, for the moment there's no way to do it outside something that is an ideological frame, or at least by every measure can't be told apart from one… Which raises the question: why is it important to know it, to search for it?

– Because it holds answers (not the answers, but some answers) about the future.

– Should history be an impartial science? And can it be at all?

– It doesn't have to be impartial. But it does have to work solely in the field of truth—that is, with facts, documents, sources…

– What are your favorite Bulgarian historical novels?

– I don't have many. My favorite history book is Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings by Zahari Stoyanov, but it isn't a novel. Otherwise, Under the Yoke, perhaps, stands the test of time. Certainly Tobacco by Dimitar Dimov; I liked Doomed Souls; The Peach Thief by Emiliyan Stanev, which is a novella… I remember that as a child I liked Svatbite na Yoan Asen (The Weddings of John Asen), and now I'm not even sure who the author is.

– I don't know either. For my part I'd add Dimitar Talev and Fani Popova-Mutafova… It seems to me an enormous challenge to peer into the past. What is the hardest thing about writing a historical novel? How important is it to render real events precisely?

– The hardest thing is finding the right literary language for the novel, so you can use it to build the world you want to bring readers into.

To “hear” how your characters speak, to get inside their thoughts, to act in their bodies…

The real events—for me, at least—have to be historically accurate. And seen through the eyes of a particular character, through his sensibility and his situation at that given moment.

– Alek Popov once told me that the great division in Bulgarian society begins with the death of Vazov—Ivan Vazov, the national poet, who died in 1921. That strikes me as a very insightful judgment. Is he right, in your view?

– No.

– Why?

– He isn't right.

There has never been a great division in Bulgarian society. Neither before nor after Vazov's death. Because our society has never been “united,”

except in moments of deep crisis—at the start of wars—or of supreme triumph, like the 1994 World Cup, when Bulgaria reached the semifinals.

In general, the myth of some “united” society is quite persistent, but like every myth it does not match historical truth. No modern society in the free world is “united.” United, presumably, were the smaller primitive societies of long ago and the totalitarian regimes of the last century—communist and Nazi.

– Still, rifts can have different depths, and in my view right now they are critically deep. And in some way so are the ideals—personal, group and national alike.

Can history be the path to us starting to talk to each other as a society again? To finding what unites us rather than what divides us?

– It can. But that can't happen in this toxic linguistic environment. First the culture of communication has to change, and it is completely compromised—from school to parliament.

– And through the social networks, which in my view have contributed a great deal to that. But we've gathered to talk about history. How is your novel Rana being received around the country? Did the reception surprise you in any way?

– It's being received wonderfully.

What surprised me was the purity with which it's received. And the age of the readers—from 9 to 90. So far…

– Did you hear interesting personal stories from readers?

– Many. Literally

in every town and village I heard some personal story connected with the wars

for national unification—the Balkan Wars—or with the First World War, or a story of Bulgarian refugees from the pogroms after the wars…

In Vienna, for example, I was surprised by the story of the great-grandfather of one of the people present, who came back after 10 years as a prisoner of war, and

everyone thought he had been killed, except his own bride, who kept repeating that he would come back,

that he was bound to come back, because he was alive. Because of this they decided she was mad… Or the many stories of people fleeing the terror of the bashi-bazouks, the Ottoman irregulars, in 1913, stories with infants crying so loudly that their mothers had to do the most unthinkable thing—leave them in the forest to save the others… There are stories of miraculous rescues, of deliverance… My wife and I even considered making a separate site or group for sharing personal stories…

– A very worthwhile idea, in my view. We really all have such stories, and they're worth telling, not least because they make us who we are.

I consider myself a fairly well-read person, and for me the ending of the novel is one of the most memorable I've read. Historical wounds, Bulgarian ones at least, look a lot to me like life traumas. They can explain many of the problems we have at a later stage. Is there something like that?

– Thank you for those words!

Modern neuroscience and psychology show the deep connections between physical traumas and the wounds of the soul. Also the connections between collective (national) and individual wounds. Many of the difficulties we meet along our way are the result of traumas that haven't healed, haven't been treated, or have been neglected.

– What heals the wounds of history?

– Reason. Words. Awareness.

– How do you explain the boom of historical themes in literature? In recent years many of the most successful Bulgarian books—from Vazvishenie (Exaltation) to Nishka (Thread)—have been historical. Can this help us heal our historical wounds?

– I don't know whether we can call the appearance of these few books a “boom.” But it's good that they exist. And each of them looks at a different historical period, from a perspective of its own.

I'm glad that a “family” novel like Rana opened the important conversation about the First World War, about the tragedy of the Bulgarians

left outside the borders of the kingdom during the blackest summer of 1913, when the Second Balkan War was lost, about violence and war in general—without digging into the wound, but rather healing it. I'm glad this novel turned readers' attention to their own families, their family past, their personal fate…

– But I see an enormous interest in history far beyond literature. My site is about technology, yet out of the 400 texts on it so far, the two most-read are about history. How do you explain this phenomenon?

– I grew up in the socialist era, and as children we were taught that the “bright future” lay ahead of us and that everything good was somewhere out there. Now it's as if the pendulum of collective expectations has swung the other way, and I see a fixation on the past, which for many people is a “bright past.” In fact both views reveal the same thing—dissatisfaction with the present. If you can't find meaning in “now,” you look for it somewhere in “tomorrow” or “yesterday” or “once upon a time.” The human mind is built to always search for meaning. And if it can't find the strength to search for it every day (because that takes a special effort), it usually takes it ready-made in simple, flat “truths,” usually from the mouths of manipulators.

There are always “leaders” who point out the problems, define them and offer simple solutions. The trouble is that these easily digestible solutions are ruinous for the collective organism, because they cause historical cataclysms such as Nazism, communism, vicious chauvinism, and in the end they don't solve the problems but deepen them.

– Although after the “bright future” came talk of “the end of history.” Maybe we've just postponed it? In the historical series of Digital Stories I've already had a history teacher as a guest, and a remarkable one. But how, in your view, should history be taught? So that it kindles, gives meaning… So that it's a source of pride and patriotism, not jingoism and hatred.

– History can foster a love of freedom, patriotism and respect for everyone's individual rights, but

only if it is taught by freedom-loving, intelligent and authoritative teachers.

They are often strict, and very important apostles of free will. Necessarily interesting, even entertaining. They are rare, but if you come across one, they leave a mark for life.

Their most important function in the short stretch of time they spend with us, however, is to direct us to the greater and permanent history teacher—our own reason.

Can you guess which 15 claims about Bulgarian history are accepted by scholarship and which ones artificial intelligence made up for you? Test your knowledge here—the result is sure to be interesting…

Amid the trending news of the day—the elections, Big Brother and the sudden invasion of autumn—the public agenda somehow made room for the report that an unexpected contender had made the jury's shortlist in the prestigious Veselin Hanchev youth poetry competition: 21-year-old Hristian Papazov, from the village of Nozharevo in the Silistra region, had submitted poems generated by artificial intelligence. Hristian withdrew, writing that his only goal had been to draw attention to the issue.

I don't know whether you believe in coincidences; I don't. On October 25, a day before the news broke, the jury of another popular poetry competition announced its ten finalists—the Stanka Pencheva competition. And once again the selection included… generated poems. This time as part of a Digital Stories experiment.

So how, in just two days, did two “authors” with AI-written poems end up among the best, the ones from whom the winners will be chosen? And, more importantly: what are the big questions and conclusions here? Whether or not we believe in coincidences, it is clearly time to talk more sensibly and more deeply about the big questions of our day.

The Day of the Buditels, Bulgaria's November 1 holiday honoring the enlighteners of the National Revival, is, I think, exactly the right day to wake up…

The themed series from Digital Stories:

• The Bulgarian Literary Banksy
• “Poetry remains a secret treasure.” ‘Hristian Papazov’ in his first interview
• “A machine cannot be a poet”—LIK magazine in… 1967
• “Artificial intelligence will never write better than Boris Hristov”—Veselin Veselinov, winner of the Stanka Pencheva competition
• “Poetry of a New Generation: Real and Digital Writers”—The Library, on BNT1, Bulgarian National Television's first channel

“Chukchi Not Reader, Chukchi Writer”

Or at least to think about how we might wake up in so many directions. Above all, to my mind, where technology is concerned. To talk about where it has brought us, where we are heading and how to turn it into the means that carries us forward.

Today is exactly the moment to talk about how we got to the point where artificial intelligence ranked among the best in two Bulgarian poetry competitions in a row. About where poetry is going, and where we are going without it. Where people and creativity are going. How to remember the heart of art. Where to look for the arts of the future. And how to win back the meaning and the weight of the word… now that what is written can no longer be told apart from what is generated.

“They may deceive me a hundred more times.

So be it.

I want just one thing: that because of the hundred lies

I never once fail to believe

the eyes that truly

were sincere.”

The lines are Stanka Pencheva's. Tomorrow, November 2, in the municipality of Straldzha, after a festive recital by the nominees, the winners of the 7th national literary competition bearing the poet's name will be announced. The prose nominees will be there, and so, I hope, will 9 of the 10 poets selected from the 55 who entered.

The tenth won't be there. Maksim Dimitar Ivanov.

I confess I don't have much time for exercises; this site you're looking at is a pursuit of meaning. Some time ago ChatGPT came up with his name, so we could see whether a generated CV would land him a job. He came close to success, but chose a different calling. From the software world he turned to classical art: poetry.

Like Pishurka, Vazov's Small-Town Versifier

Quite an unconventional career path, wouldn't you say? So in mid-October I decided to run yet another experiment on how far artificial intelligence has come. I sent poems and short stories, quickly generated by ChatGPT, to the first five literary competitions I came across, under the name and email of Maksim Ivanov. Every submission was generated by the algorithm; my interventions were purely technical—choosing and sending.

And just a few days later, while I was reading, impressed, about Hristian Papazov's success, Max's inbox received the happy news that he had made the list of 10 chosen by the renowned jury of the Stanka Pencheva competition.

Good news, bad news or just news? Certainly food for thought (and a reason for Max to buy a round… though I doubt he will. Not least because I robbed him of the chance to win).

You can read the poems that took Max to the finals here.

I immediately emailed the organizers, explaining the situation. My aim is neither to deceive anyone nor to keep other authors off the prestigious list. Just like Hristian, I have spent four years trying to test things. And to draw attention to issues we clearly underestimate.

The Writing of a Nation

As of today, four days later, I have no reply from the organizers, but I would be truly glad if they and the jury joined this important conversation. I take this opportunity to invite them for a dedicated interview; they will always find a platform at Digital Stories.

I also want to apologize sincerely to the competition's jury—Academician Ivan Granitski, Niki Komedvenska and Veselina Sedlarska—and to the organizers. I couldn't enter under my own name, because it is too rare and recognizable. And I wouldn't have misled them if… there were any guarantee that someone else wasn't doing it. Since it turns out this way, how can we be sure from now on of the authorship of any text that comes next?

This is one of the few big questions to which I have a clear answer. We can't. If the jury of a second prestigious competition doesn't just admit but actually selects generated poems… then the algorithms aren't merely writing LIKE us. They have started, evidently, to do it BETTER than most of us. Indistinguishably.

Alas, where texts are concerned, not even technology itself can help us anymore. While algorithms can still detect AI's hand in images, for texts that battle is already lost.

The more important battles lie ahead. The battles for the human being and what is human, for truth and freedom. For creativity and the soul in the age of algorithms.

Gavrila Became a Baker

But let me not overdo the drama. You may remember the poet Trubetskoy from The Twelve Chairs, Ilf and Petrov's Soviet satire. He had a hero, Gavrila, whom he hawked around the editorial offices of Soviet publications, casting him in all sorts of roles, such as:

“Gavrila carried letters round.

Gavrila then became a postman.”

or

“Gavrila then became a salesman,

Gavrila sold the people flutes…”

Well, so it is with “my” Maksim Dimitar Ivanov. Is the problem the way competitions are organized, the juries, a shortage of good enough entrants?

In my view, absolutely not!

Because the elephant is in the room, however much we tiptoe around it. And if it is happening with poems now, tomorrow it will be possible with short stories, then with novels (alas, it won't be Max who earns the glory; we'll be more suspicious of him by then).

And does it even matter who the author is, or whether they used artificial intelligence? Does it change anything?

How Much Sorrow There Is in This World, Lord!

That is exactly what I am trying to explore with “my” Max-Gavrila, and with all the Digital Stories experiments. The writer Evgeni Cherepov was the first to aptly call some of them “pranks.” But they are not only that, although provocation is still needed.

You may remember that I created an entirely generated social media profile: Beautiful Eco Elena reached 85,000 people, without a single one suspecting that something was off. Then 1,800 visitors joined the next revealing experiment, trying to tell whether short texts and images of all kinds had been created or generated. The results… showed unequivocally that we can no longer do it. When it comes to recognizing what was made by an algorithm and what by a human, we are close to pure guesswork.

Or maybe the bar has dropped? Maybe most of us can't tell generated poetry from poetry written by a human because we don't spend the necessary hours with Baudelaire and Goethe?

Apparently that isn't it either.

If an authoritative jury of leading Bulgarian specialists had unknowingly picked generated poems among the best, that could be a coincidence, luck, an exception. At 2 out of 2 attempts, however… things are heading somewhere else.

And what are we humans to do? 750 people took part in the survey on Bulgarians' attitudes toward artificial intelligence. Opinions were remarkably scattered across the statements, but three stood out, with one extreme clearly dominating. That we are far from the limits of this kind of technology. That sweeping social and economic changes are on the way. And that we don't talk about the subject deeply, professionally or beyond the clichés enough.

No, Now Is Not the Time for Poetry

Here is a bit more about the competitions themselves. This year's edition of the Veselin Hanchev youth competition (limited to authors up to 25) drew 84 entrants. In the Stanka Pencheva competition (with no age limit, under the motto “The Tree of Life”), there were 55 participants.

(At least) two of the authors submitted generated poems. And their success rate in reaching the top 10 was 100 percent; for ethical reasons, we can only guess what place they would have taken in the final ranking. In doing so, between them they outpaced 109 other authors who entered.

Still no elephant in the room?

Max's poems were “born” in 10 minutes (you can read them here). That was all the time it took me to give ChatGPT the competition brief and “ask” it to write 10 poems. I didn't touch a single letter; I skimmed them, picked 3 of the 10 and sent them off.

It is worth talking, of course, about the generated poems themselves—do they have literary merit, and what does that even mean? Where are the critics, and what will they do from now on? This conversation will certainly continue with future guests of Digital Stories who will assess them.

Competitions, however, are the only impartial form where we don't have to go through the “if.”

Yes, all of us, consciously or not, are dismissive when we know a work was not created by a human. But what if we don't know?

“Columbus, remain

until the final moment of your life.”

The line is Veselin Hanchev's. The organizers of the competition that bears his name have promised to hold a discussion and, starting next year, to require every participant to declare that they have not used artificial intelligence.

Well… I'll ask Max to enter again, if he isn't cross with me over the missed opportunities. I just need to figure out which of us should sign. And declare that the text is original, not stolen… But who is stealing from whom, if the algorithm is trained on poems found online?

And what if we put more effort into the brief, the prompt? What if we created far more valuable poems—but by working together?

I can think of sooo many more questions. For example: what does this tell us about poetry? About art? About the human being? About creativity? About ideas? About meaning?

About tomorrow?

Here I agree only partly, colleague. We do need to rethink it, but it's too early to include you in that process.

Once again I take the opportunity to congratulate Hristian Papazov, who opened up the big question, whether or not that is really his name. I would be sincerely glad to give him the floor—I think Digital Stories is a fitting place for it—and an invitation has been sitting in his inbox for a few days. Even if his name is something else (the mayor of Nozharevo believes no one by that name lives in the village), I'm sure he has more to say in this conversation.

I also want to congratulate the winners of both competitions. Devoting yourself to poetry today is hard. And important.

Robot Pavlovich Chekhov

“I can command my mouth—

and it falls silent, or only smiles.

Words lie inside me like prisoners,

the heavy door is pinned shut with a stone.”

These lines, too, are Stanka Pencheva's.

And since algorithms can generate poems this well… once they move on to longer texts, will we stop writing?

That answer seems to be personal, individual; I, at least, have mine. For me, writing is meaning and a way of seeing. A personal experience and a way of making sense of things. In which artificial intelligence can and should be only an assistant and an invaluable tool.

As long as we hold the important conversations in time, before we have made the important decisions. That, by the way, is why this site exists.

Let's talk more, let's step outside the clichés, let's experiment! What do you say? (If you have ideas on how to make that happen, I'd be glad if you shared them with me here.)

Let me close with an invitation. Another important Digital Stories experiment, this one about the past, is still under way. You can challenge yourself here too; more than 2,000 people have already done so! How well do we know Bulgarian history? And why does it matter? Thank you!

– The Other Dream struck me as a prophetic novel about how easily we delegate to technology. I couldn't imagine it back then, but now it's a very big subject for me. Are we really giving them too much? How did you arrive at the idea that this phenomenon would appear?

– Through myself. I noticed it, and it's a process that still isn't over for me, and somehow I can't beat it. As I get older, I see that it has quite a few downsides.

I simply stopped remembering, stopped writing things down,

because I know everything is very close to me, at hand, I can find it instantly, no problem at all. For the last few years I thought it would always be there. Until the moment when the information simply became too much, and the places it pours out of became both too many and, in fact, far fewer than, say, on the internet 15 or 20 years ago, when there were websites, when search was something completely different.

So gradually I realized that we've handed over a lot—especially when it comes to

what to remember, what to think we know as something learned, and what we've simply stored as a kind of information that might come in handy.

We delegate more and more. And I think this relationship between the human and the machine assistant—phones, computers, even the whole network as one big machine—is becoming an increasingly invisible phenomenon. That is, there's no way for us to track how much of it we see and can control. Because many things we think we've found, or stumbled upon by chance, have been conveniently offered to us by some algorithms that have simply been listening carefully, following our searches.

On the one hand, this helps preserve the magical side of technology, keeps it slightly veiled. And I like that, because in everything I write I start from the position of a person who doesn't know what's going on. Who can't explain things technically, can't understand them as a specialist, and is sometimes too tired to look for explanations. Because I think that's the position of most people who use technology.

– Definitely. But this loss of memory and personalized content bring a lot of problems with them. I do the opposite—I try to understand how they work. But people don't seem to find it interesting or important what they lose this way, because we become easier to manipulate. Once some algorithm chooses what surrounds us, it can lead us into a parallel history. Or manipulate us into voting for someone. And delegating memory is, in a way, the end of creativity, because creativity is having facts or any kind of information in your head and combining it in the right, unexpected way.

– And right now

you think you have those facts, even that you have far more of them than you ever did, but they've been shaped for you in some way.

I'm not saying some people are sitting there pushing things toward you—it's a combination of people, bots, machines, algorithms. Facebook is an example. I try not to spend much time there, not to post there deliberately, but it seems to me that

many people have accepted that place as some kind of pure forum where ideas can be discussed, everyone can speak their mind, even quarrel, get to some kind of discussion.

But behind that is a rather utopian notion, that it's a bit like the old days in Ancient Greece—only the sky above you and real people around you. When in fact algorithms lurk in the shadows, and some of the profiles aren't people. It's yet another place you think gives you freedom, when it's actually shaping you in a not very visible way. I don't know which way it's heading, how it will affect society as a whole, not just the individual.

– It does affect it—disastrously, in my view. So why don't we do exactly that—try to peek ahead? Science fiction used to have that role too. Apart from Ted Chiang, whom I like very much and whom you translate beautifully, I can't think of a mainstream author who looks into these subjects. Subjects that are vital to us as a species.

– That's true to some extent. Ted Chiang really is special in that he picks some big idea that is scientific, tied to technology, and also world-changing or life-changing, but he chooses to explore it from a very personal position. You see things through the eyes of a fairly ordinary person—sometimes a scientist, a specialist, but nothing exceptional. And he always holds that balance between specialized knowledge and what can be understood. He uses the reactions of both sides.

There are other writers too. I think, for example, of Greg Egan, a very interesting Australian author; to some degree Pynchon does the same. But they really aren't so-called mainstream writers who can reach a lot of people.

I suppose this will be one of the themes of so-called realist literature in the coming years, because it moves with a certain delay. It waits for things to happen before the authors' eyes, in their own lives, before it starts exploring them. But I don't think we can keep thinking along

that line where we believed science fiction writers work with the future. They actually work with the present

very carefully, and imagine possible lines and paths. And then the realists work with the “here and now.”

It seems to me we really are in the period of that famous William Gibson quote, that “the future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.” It appears and disappears; sometimes you can touch it somewhere, sometimes you can't, but it affects you.

– And, as the literary scholar Nikolay Genov told me about that very quote, most likely by the time the future arrives, literature will no longer exist. Might we be too late?

– On the one hand, it seems to me that

literature will always exist, simply because it is the expression of something deeply human,

which comes as an attempt to understand the world, to explain it to ourselves, to tell it. I think there will be literature, but we don't know whether it will be the kind we're used to thinking about. I think

a time of doubles of many things lies ahead—not only our virtual doubles, some imitations of the human, but imitations of human impulses and quests as well.

They will, of course, be directly tied to the demands of the market, because artificial intelligence can already help you write a book, design the cover. There are already author contracts in which writers explicitly agree or refuse to let their publisher use the text to train artificial intelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if some phenomenon soon appears in literature that we later find out was either pure artificial intelligence or a joint project of a human and AI. Whether because some people got carried away, or simply as an experiment.

– I wonder when a famous author will actually admit that their new text was generated by an algorithm.

– There was recently something like a scandal in the romance novel world in the States—that's the biggest publishing industry, it makes the most money and sells the most copies. There was a festival that widely advertised

a workshop on how to write a novel with the help of artificial intelligence, and why that's okay.

Afterward, of course, there was a huge backlash and they took it off the official program, but they didn't cancel it entirely.

These things exist, but they're not very visible yet. The point is not to miss the moment between their being invisible but tangible or detectable, and their merging with our idea of a text written by a human.

– In many ways that's already the case. I ran an experiment with almost 2,000 participants, and it became clear that we can no longer tell written texts from generated ones. Or, as the poet Violeta Kuneva said—her poems were among those people had to identify—perhaps the problem is the criterion, which is why people can't recognize poetry.

But let's look at that moment—you read a story that's supposedly by Ted Chiang, and then it turns out artificial intelligence wrote it. How do you see things going from there?

– As a reader, I'd be interested in why this story appeared, how far and in what sense it's really connected to Ted Chiang. Whether it's some kind of experiment or not.

There are already authors, mostly on the periphery where experimental writing happens, who create texts with the help of programs. Joanna Walsh is an author known precisely for her provocations. That's the first thing I'd look at.

Personally, as a reader, I won't keep following this kind of work. But I'd be curious if it becomes a trend. How do people react, what do they do?

It really is a matter of time. Just as some actors let their image be used. Or an extra in a film may have a clause in the contract saying your image, your expression and your face will be used for other crowd scenes. There will be authors like that in literature too. This touches on an interesting question—what is an author, where does the author end, and

isn't artificial intelligence a natural extension of humanity's relationship with the world through art?

Because, after all, it's something we created. Something that learns from us.

But you're right about the criterion too. It has already begun—you can't tell good writing from bad. With artificial intelligence we have the luxury of saying it's bad simply because it made it. But there are problems tied to critical thinking, to personal experience, to the fact that it's getting harder and harder to judge with certainty and conviction what is what. In recent weeks and months there have been so many cases of people reacting to something that turns out to be made up. This will only deepen.

– Many people think this is the distant future, but what you said about actors was one of the main reasons all of Hollywood went on strike for half a year. It's a sign the technology is already here. But what worries me even more is when the two things we've talked about so far are layered on top of each other—hyper-personalized content, thanks to algorithms knowing everything about us, and content creation. Then, I think, we'll split apart completely. Everyone will have their own Ted Chiang writing for them. What will be left to unite us?

– The problem is also what this means for our connection with the world. Because if everyone is shut inside a model of their own world, the way it's supposed to be, because the algorithms created it, judged it, saw that it's what the person wants—how does that affect personal experience? We are, after all, social beings. On the other hand, there are trends that intensify this alienation;

the detachment comes precisely through these bubbles, which used to belong to groups and communities and lately are getting even smaller.

And when it comes to receiving art—the films you watch, the books you read supposedly being by your favorite authors and directors, but not really by them, simply because they don't reflect their creative will… The distance will shrink entirely until a person thinks they are the world. It becomes rather literal, like the idea that every person is an island. As in science fiction, which can make literal things that used to be metaphors.

It's a closing of the person in on themselves, a kind of enchanted circle that personal pleasure never leaves. And if it's sent out toward some object, it comes back with exactly what you expect. Which is good on the one hand, because it creates a kind of comfort on a very basic level, but on the other hand it's terrifying. And, for example, contemporary music, especially pop music, is also moving along these lines, I think.

– Do you think we can stop the future, and that we should? I don't think we can, but we should meet it in a way that's a bit more discussed, thought through, reasonable—set some boundaries for it.

– I agree with everything you said. We can't and shouldn't stop it. In any case, the future isn't something you can see in its entirety so you'd know how to stop it. Exactly what you said about this awareness, this heightened attention, which, however, requires time and a kind of wider, more stretched-out reaction time. And also space to think certain things through.

So that you can weigh both your own reactions to something and the other person's, see where you might meet, where you'll miss each other and what the consequences will be. Meanwhile, everything we do every day demands that we be faster. To such an extent that

replying to a message is just a reaction,

one that's much shorter, quicker, and you can do it immediately, here and now.

The idea is that you can react instantly, any time, anywhere, that it's good to react emotionally. And that's somehow human, even if you get it wrong. It works because it connects to some very deep notions of what a human being is. But the more the time we have to look, read, think through and carefully check everything shrinks, the harder it will become to influence our present, which is in fact the coming future.

And now, when you think about it, if you decide to join one of the endless, nonstop arguments on Facebook or Twitter, the very time it takes you to get up to speed on everything may equal the time it takes for the argument to pass, so you're left feeling you're outside some community, which, for some people, matters.

– Are we close to the limit of how far we can shrink time? I don't think we can come up with anything shorter than TikTok. My children are little and live pretty far from technology, but if they're not doing something for one minute, they say they're bored. And not just children, all of us are like that. Is there anywhere left for this time to shrink?

– It seems to me too that there's nowhere left. Everything happens here and now—for instance, finding out what's going to happen already in the first chapter, the first scene. Maximum action, or in the first 30 seconds of a song you find out how it will develop, so that you'll listen to the end.

What strikes me, though, is that

alongside this shrinking, there's a parallel growth, an expansion of forms of art that hold you in a different kind of world.

Fantasy and adventure novels are getting bigger, more sweeping. There's almost no action or adventure film under 2.5 hours anymore—astonishing. Only experimental or heavyweight directors and writers used to work at that length. In parallel comes the idea that you can watch entire series, sit down in front of the laptop or TV and not get up until the end.

These are two supposedly opposite trends, but apparently they aren't, since they go together so well. Maybe we really will reach a point where, so as not to be bored, you'll have a nonstop stream of opportunities to react or to engage your attention, your mind, your consciousness. At the same time

that stream will keep you in some closed world modeled specifically for you.

Somehow we're approaching the cliché of the future in which a person wears goggles, stares into some virtual reality, is overweight, their room messy and dirty, but they inhabit some world and live in it.

– That cliché has been around for 30 years, since the days of Jaron Lanier. And in some ways we seem to be getting closer, while in others it still looks so far away.

I think popular opinion, judging by reactions to my posts, is very skeptical of artificial intelligence. I'll soon try to test this with a survey, to see what people really think. But I see many people who are afraid of it, dismiss it or are extremely negative about it. You also studied psychology—is this some natural reaction to very drastic changes? Or fears? Not enough explanation and reflection? I'd say mostly the last.

– Certainly the last as well. But I think

there's a natural reaction to fear something that imitates what you are.

Because creativity, consciousness—these are areas where we are the ones who can make sense of the world creatively, who have consciousness, who can think about ourselves in the past, present and future, in different alternatives. And when something appears that imitates us, fear certainly develops.

It's reinforced by the fact that we live in a culture where far too many images of the clash between human and machine have piled up.

And we also live in a time when nostalgia is very strong. So there's a longing for a pure time and existence, even though there never was such a thing. And a sense that back then people were people, and machines, if there were any, served humans.

We shouldn't rule out the discussion itself, either. It's sometimes tied to purely economic forecasts of how many people will lose their jobs, how many will find their existence all but rendered pointless.

This way, though, we drift further and further from the other cliché—that when machines become smart enough, humanity will be able to step away from its daily grind, its ordinary life, and will have time only for itself.

We'll all become artists, explore the world, write books, paint, while the machines toil and produce for us and keep the world “turning.”

This, of course, isn't necessarily a good thing even in the books it comes from, but it's a persistent cliché.

I think we shouldn't rule out the deep fear that something nonhuman is trying to be human and do what people can do. Once, on a trolleybus, I listened to two schoolgirls: “I wrote my homework with ChatGPT.” “And how was it?” “It came out great. And it's real.” That particular word made a strong impression on me. Some people don't accept that there's a drifting away from the real existence of the human, from their so-called usual context. In their case, from being a student in the classic sense.

– I also tried competing with ChatGPT to see who would score higher on the literature matura, Bulgaria's school-leaving exam. And it turned out to be pretty good. But my other association with what you said comes from Márquez. The fear that when they photograph you, your soul leaves. That the camera takes your image and your soul vanishes.

– It's no accident that in diabolism the mirror is very important, and the portrait—these are extensions of the same fears. That's also why it's no accident that the series Black Mirror deals with things this way. In the beginning, when it turned out you could end up in a labyrinth with no way out, it was quite powerful.

The other fear is that one day it might start doing things better than you. And especially for artists and writers—I'm judging by myself—

there will come a moment when it won't matter whether you wrote it or a machine did.

This fear first appeared, in my view, when a lot of book bloggers began to take over. What happened to literary criticism? It turned out that book bloggers write, read and react readily and with pleasure, while at the same time the so-called serious literary critics and the venues for serious criticism disappeared. And it became clear that neither readers nor even publishers had a problem with one replacing the other. That's when, it seems to me, there first appeared

this fear that it doesn't matter who wrote what, the important thing is that it sells in some way.

Whether economically or culturally doesn't matter. With artificial intelligence the problem will be even bigger—by how people react, we'll see whether it really matters. And then we'll talk about authorship again, but, as you mentioned, it may already be too late to change the future; we may have missed that moment.

– Let's end on something positive anyway. Is there a technology you dream would appear? I, for example, dream of something that would sit in boring programmer meetings instead of me. We're close to something like that, I think.

– That kind of avatar—or let's call them presences—is certainly on the way.

The first thing that occurred to me is the possibility of peering into the past. Seeing it, watching it from the side.

But as for a technology to help you day to day… For me, too, it would be something to do with the various forms of communication. That's exactly where I'd delegate boring meetings too. Certainly something that saves you time.

But it would also be nice to have a technology that doesn't obey completely. Right now there are ways to limit yourself, to use an app only briefly, but it all depends on willpower.

If there were a technology that somehow challenged you to have a stronger will in defending how you spend your time and attention, that would be good going forward. It sounds like a very secret and expensive algorithm that some people with a lot of means would get first, and then everyone else.

– And it probably won't come, because those same people would lose out from it.

– I'm not against technology, I'm not against progress and the future, but I'm more interested in the moments when there's some rupture, when something breaks, and how we react then. Or when it turns out we can no longer react. That's why every time I think in the direction of technology, my thoughts turn darker.

– Mine too. I try to look for balance; I think that's where the reasonable point of view lies. But I lean more toward the negative, because that's what we overlook. There's no need to talk about the positive; what matters is to talk about the risks, about the problems that are so big and yet lie outside the main public debate.

– Exactly. There has to be conflict. Just as for there to be a story, you also need some kind of conflict. No matter how far it's brought to the fore or how hidden it is. But it has to be there, to move things forward…

– You already have two books, you’re well known as a translator, journalist, editor, but… why are you Abo?

– Everybody knows me as Abo, and the answer that matters more to me is that I don’t need some grandiose name. The name that stands behind a piece of work doesn’t matter. If the work itself is good, it will be appreciated, whether it was written by Orwell or by Pesho Genchev.

– But people treat it differently. Take gamebooks, for example. The authors there had pen names, but they still had a first and a last name. So did Elin Pelin, by the way, one of Bulgaria’s best-loved classic writers. Then again, this way you come first in any alphabetical list.

– That’s true, it was simply the most logical approach for me. Last year there was an open letter from translators demanding a minimum fee. I signed it too, and when it was sent to the relevant institutions, out of more than 300 people I was first on the list. But that’s more of a coincidence.

– But doesn’t it have downsides? To be honest, I was prejudiced going in, reading a novel by an author with the name of a haiku poet. But I really did like it.

– You probably were prejudiced, but you invited me to talk. So something convinced you. That’s a yardstick for me too. If you go in with a prejudice but afterwards find a reason to invite me for a conversation, then something in the work itself, in what I said, in what I did, was good enough. And that gives me an extra degree of satisfaction.

I don’t hide behind the name; I openly show myself, both my face and my personality. Until very recently I hosted a show on Radio Focus, where the voice announcing the show also said, “Listen to ‘One Sunday on the Highway with Abo.’” My goal isn’t to hide behind this name at all. On the contrary, I just think it describes me more fully than my real one.

– Why aren’t you hosting the show anymore?

– The radio cut its program schedule for lack of money.

– I didn’t know, I’m sorry. That’s really unpleasant. Led by Iva Doychinova, you were making a genuinely different kind of media, where I was often a guest and enjoyed it. Sadly, it’s a fairly typical turn of events for the media here. Why does this happen, when you were such an unconventional outlet?

– That was built into the idea: we were people with some media presence but no experience as hosts. It worked very well. Why does it happen?

– It’s a sore subject for me. I was a journalist for 15 years and at some point I had to save myself, and that’s how I became a programmer. Why can’t we find some model that lets the media survive without being politically dependent or relying on gambling money?

– The market is very small, we have few consumers, there are only 6 million of us left. Second, people no longer get their information from the media. The radio loses money; there’s no way it isn’t subsidized by some other business. I suppose the situation is similar in television, not to mention newspapers and magazines.

I have nothing to do with journalism. It was a flirtation with radio that I enjoyed very much. But I can’t pass judgment.

– I agree. Let’s move on to travel, to your subjects. Sorry for the banal question, but it matters—what made you come back to Bulgaria?

– Comfort. And it has nothing to do with some inability to adapt.

I adapted perfectly everywhere I’ve lived.

I didn’t go there to pick strawberries; I was a full member of society, I’m a subject of King Charles III. I had highly qualified jobs and everything, but the atmosphere, the mentality, just didn’t suit me.

I don’t know if you can imagine it, but after my first months living in England, I felt withdrawal from physical contact with people. Here, when we meet friends, we hug, we shake hands, there’s some kind of contact. There, it doesn’t exist. I never imagined something like that would strike me.

But if you start there and go through all their other typical traits—of mentality, of entertainment, of art, of media, even of drinking… They weren’t for me. I have a warmer character. In Spain I’m great, they’re even a bit too much for me.

I’ve lived in other places too, but here everything seems most balanced to me. Despite what we were just saying about the media, which of course spreads to everything.

The paradox is that society here works very well as a whole.

Everyone thinks we’re individualists and that each person just looks out for himself, as long as the neighbor’s goat dies too, as the old Bulgarian saying about neighbor Vute goes. But that’s not quite how it is. Think how many years we’ve gone without a stable government, and yet this country functions. And not badly! The economy is rising. When my girlfriend goes for a manicure, she has to book 4 weeks ahead because the salons are full. That’s a luxury product, not a basic necessity. For people to consume that much of it, there must be some standard of living after all.

I know the other extreme exists too. But in my opinion, life here is very well balanced.

– I think so too. We don’t realize right now how calm it is here. In terms of crime, jobs and so many other things. Even the chances of survival. Everyone has a village, a place to fall back on. Why don’t we appreciate the good things? Why do we keep grumbling about how bad we have it?

– I think it’s a human trait. People always grumble. Go to the countries we consider highly developed—Britain, the United States, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden. People grumble there too. Everyone grumbles, because they want things to be a little better.

I don’t think I’m that much of a grumbler in the public sense. But there really are things we should appreciate. Bulgaria has the highest percentage of people living in homes they own. Crime is relatively low, especially violent crime. Our air is clean. The population is well distributed across the country.

Resources could be distributed better, but there will always be some problem.

Why do we complain? Because we’re used to it.

That’s the narrative running through the media we talked about. People don’t always have the time and energy to make sense of everything around them, so they just go along with the general narrative. They don’t sit down and analyze too much.

– Besides, it’s purely human not to appreciate what you have. You have to lose it to appreciate it.

– I absolutely agree. The same happens in the West, in England, in the States. But not in Peru, for example. Those may be the happiest people I’ve ever seen. They’re far more hedonistic, they enjoy what they have. I think that’s the other problem.

We are an ambitious people.

We have access to a lot of information. If you look at the whole global picture, not just the European Union, we’re definitely in the top half. But we have eyes for the West and for the things we consider better. We want to catch up with them.

– Has there been a moment when you regretted coming back?

– Not once.

There’s a nice story a friend told me. An acquaintance of his came back from Germany after living there for a while. For roughly the same reasons as mine—not out of nostalgia, but because he believed that, practically speaking, he’d live best here. But he started getting disappointed by one, two, three, four things, one after another. Not that things don’t disappoint me—I spent time in a Sofia hospital and went mad with rage. But he started getting disappointed by various factors, and one day, as he and my friend were walking down the street, after it had rained, he stepped on a loose paving stone and it splashed him. At that moment he said to himself, “No, I can’t take it anymore.”

He bought a ticket and left for Dortmund the very next day.

I haven’t reached moments like that so far. I go mad when I deal with bureaucracy, with hospitals, with KAT, the traffic police. But that doesn’t make me want to go back; rather, I want to do something to improve the processes.

– There’s no ideal world. But what do you do to improve them?

– It depends on the situation and the specific case. Sometimes I might alert an institution, sometimes I fix something myself if it’s within my power. Sometimes I team up with some group. That was one of the things we tried to achieve with Radio Focus—to offer quality content. I think we managed it on my show. Not digging through tabloid trash, but talking about better art, better science. Personally, I count that as an attempt at a contribution.

– Me too, my site is an attempt at that kind of contribution as well. But let’s travel a little, I know it’s your weakness. We talk a lot about how the world is becoming universal, yet here you are talking about differences between the north and the south that remain in people’s mentality. As someone who has traveled a lot—do you think the world is becoming more and more boring and uniform?

– Absolutely not. There are some common features—for example, everywhere you can add the people you meet on Facebook. And eat a Big Mac. But for someone to tell me that here, Peru and China are the same—absurd.

Besides, something people don’t appreciate is that we live in the best moment in human history. We have advanced medicine, transport, communications… everything, everything you can think of.

To have this chance to travel the whole world without restrictions and not take it is a crime against evolution.

I really don’t understand how it’s possible… Because it won’t last forever. Covid, wars, regimes, diseases… Right now we are in a perfect situation, where the biggest problem is that Windows computers freeze for 8 hours and your flight gets pushed to the next day.

I can’t understand this apathy toward travel! For me it’s unthinkable.

– Well, I can try to explain it to you, as someone who doesn’t like to travel—there are people like that too. Even though my wife is a tour guide and we have such different attitudes. For example, I don’t see much point in traveling around Europe; the differences seem too small to be worth it.

– A person may not like to travel, but I assume that at least on an analytical level you realize what the benefits of travel are.

You’re right, when we talk about travel, Europe seems like one whole to me too, a homogeneous dot. I don’t picture it as a place you travel to.

– On the other hand, you can travel to some village in the Rhodopes, the mountains in southern Bulgaria, and it can be more meaningful and different.

– Travel is an inner process. It has nothing to do with a change of scenery.

Some people go around the world—I know people like that—from one five-star hotel to another and shut themselves inside. Programmers like you, splashing in the jacuzzi, drinking Bloody Marys, then they come back and tell everyone they’ve been to the Bahamas. Fine, but that isn’t travel. Travel is what you’re describing. You can be in a Rhodope village, you can be at Machu Picchu, you can be somewhere in the mountains of China or on the shore of a Pacific island. But it’s an inner process.

– And which places do you dream of reaching but haven’t managed to yet?

– New Zealand, Brazil, Buenos Aires in Argentina specifically, and Myanmar. Maybe you’ll ask me why? And I’ll tell you I have no idea. These places have drawn me since I was very little. I even make a deliberate effort not to read too much about them; I don’t want to spoil that instinctive attraction. I haven’t been to any of them yet, and I plan to correct that mistake in the near future.

– Technology also helps make this the best moment. But my big subject is how it changes us. How easily we delegate to it, how it makes us uniform. How we hand over to it things we shouldn’t. Writing, for example.

– I warmly recommend Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, a book I had the great joy of translating. He talks about the mechanization of the early twentieth century, and back then the premise was the same—“machines will do the work for us.” But he starts asking legitimate questions: what is work and what isn’t? If I’m a farmer, digging potatoes is work for me. It’s laborious and tedious because I do it every day, and at that moment I might want to sit down and play the piano, say.

But if I’m a professional pianist slogging away at the keys for 8 hours a day, it might be very relaxing for me to go outside, do some gardening and have a little vegetable patch in the yard.

What is work and what is pleasure? And what is art?

Many more questions come up that he raises. For instance, why would a person be brave? There he talks about Aldous Huxley. Because in a world where machines and technology have eliminated danger, a person can’t show courage, since courage only makes sense in opposition to some threat.

The book is from 1936. I’ve got it in my head to make a tour for the 100th anniversary of its publication. The first part is a travelogue about how the miners of Wigan lived, the lower class. Wigan is still full of lower-class people, and that’s where my house in England is. I want to do a parallel reading: what is happening today?

I see it as evolution. It’s the natural course of things.

People have always wanted to make their tasks easier. That’s why we invented the wheel, that’s why we invented the lever and the pulley. And that’s why we invented AI. These are different manifestations of the same drive.

So it doesn’t scare me. I think we just need to adapt to it. There will always be room for self-expression, for art. There will always be room for rest and for work. I don’t think AI will take every single job and people will suddenly have nothing to do. I think it’s a natural process we need to adapt to.

– You mentioned you had a successful career in England. What was your profession?

– I got a bachelor’s degree in criminology, then I studied psychology, then psychotherapy and finally teaching.

– Why so many?

– Because I was procrastinating. I didn’t want to live like an adult, and I wanted to stay in school as long as possible.

– And now you write and translate…

– Yes, all things that have nothing to do with each other. When I was younger, people kept telling me I was very scattered.

These are supposedly different fields, but they aren’t so different. Psychology and criminology are very closely linked, and so are teaching and psychology. And

many of the things I learned as a criminologist were very useful to me later as a teacher, for keeping my class in check,

they’re always a pack of criminals.

People told me I was very scattered, but in my head I always knew I wanted to work with literature. I think I was just putting it off until I found the right place. And I found it.

Even though it all looked chaotic, I knew I needed all this experience to be good at literature. Whether as an author, an editor or a translator—it helps me enormously.

As an editor, for example: there was a very strong dialogue in one of the last books I edited, and I had to sit down with the author and discuss it in great depth, because I explained to her that, from a psychological point of view, the conversation couldn’t possibly go that way. We discussed it, we even acted it out, and it became quite clear that the conversation had to go significantly differently. And since the book came out, several readers have singled out that very dialogue as a strong point.

All these things help me, and I knew it even back then. That’s why I studied all these supposedly disparate and pointless disciplines.

– They’re not pointless, that’s clear, and combining disparate fields can be very valuable. I feel it in my own life, combining things from writing, journalism and literature with programming, which at first glance are completely different directions.

– Without being a programmer, I imagine that if you have a good command of a human language, it should help a lot with programming, because after all, you work with languages. Yes, they’re synthetic, but you still have rules, syntax, and I’m absolutely willing to believe that a good feel for language helps a lot in being a good programmer.

– Exactly. Imagination too, and the approach to structuring a text… In a way we’re translators as well—we translate into “computer language” what people want to be able to do.

But can literature help us accept today’s technology a bit more sensibly? Orwell tried to make predictions, so did Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin, then came a huge line of generations of science fiction writers… Whereas now very few authors do it.

– When they were writing, technology was in its infancy. Airplanes, calculating machines, motorcars were only just being built. I think it was a tremendous thrill for them to imagine where these technologies were heading. Just as all of us are now swooning over this AI and how far it will go. Because it’s a landmark step forward in technology.

But most of the steps we’ve taken have been so gradual and so small… Going from black-and-white to color television doesn’t exactly tickle your imagination about what might come next.

I also think we’re now flooded with information about technology, which doesn’t leave much room for imagination. I think that’s why they don’t write.

But if you look at contemporary literature, people are starting to turn back—toward the spiritual, toward esotericism, which personally makes me very angry. Toward religion, toward all kinds of superstitions. They go to yoga. I’ve been to yoga three times in my life—not that I don’t practice, I stretch around here at home. But I find it very funny how people go there in search of themselves, of inner peace, of the rejection of the material. And next to me they do yoga with a Rolex on their wrist. I think these two things are very incompatible.

Yes, people today aren’t as interested in technology as Orwell, Isaac Asimov and Karel Čapek were. They’re more interested in how to bring back all those withered skills.

– I think, though, that our imagination has withered a bit too. Here we have AI, a powerful new tool, and people en masse are either scared, or enthusiastic, or they ignore it. And few think about how we could use it, for example, to create new forms of art.

– I’m rather indifferent to the whole business. ChatGPT appeared as a big fad, but it didn’t reach me. How we might use it to create art isn’t something that would excite me either. I’ve dabbled in various arts—I’ve played guitar, I’ve drawn, I’ve done sports. But I’ve never distinguished between the tools. Give me two pairs of skis from different eras and it won’t make a difference. Give me two guitars, two different pencils, and again I won’t notice a difference.

That is, the tool I use to achieve something has never been especially interesting to me. And maybe that’s why I’m a bit indifferent to AI.

– But if the tool doesn’t matter, soon you might have two texts in front of you—one you wrote, and one that was generated—and not be able to tell them apart.

– Now we’re no longer talking about the tool but about the author. It’s possible, because after all the human brain is a slightly more complex computer. The same functions you have run in here too; that’s exactly how the human brain works. And probably, without much effort, this AI can be refined enough to perform such tasks.

It probably won’t go through all the hesitations the human brain goes through. So what?

– Then why bother writing, if it can do it too?

– That’s the question Orwell asks. Why bother digging potatoes when someone else can do it? Why bother playing the piano when there are already player pianos with rolls, where you load the music you want and it just plays by itself, even presses its own keys?

For personal pleasure. And this is where the sense of contribution, of value to society, will have to adapt, to be redefined.

Because right now I may feel satisfied in some way that my work makes me useful to society. And soon that work may no longer be needed.

It’s like the sheepskin-coat makers of the old days. There’s one coat maker in the village who makes sheepskin coats for all the villagers. And at some point the Chinese factory arrives, supplies the whole country, and our coat maker is out of work. That doesn’t mean he’s worthless as a person; he finds himself another role.

And if at some point writing drops off the charts as something a person can do, we’ll have to adapt.

– You have degrees in many professions; surely AI won’t do one of them.

– Education makes absolutely no difference, especially formal education. I work in something I never studied for. As an editor, I’ve noticed that translators who come to me with a formal degree are usually weaker than the self-taught ones.

So you just have to burn for what you do. Forget education.

I think my life jacket is that I have many interests. Lots of things make me curious; I try to learn more about them and practice them. If I have to stop writing, I’ll go on doing something else.

By the way, the first thing likely to drop out in the coming months, not even years, is translation. There are platforms that already translate decently—not as well as I do, yet. But give it a year, give it two.

I adore translating, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it will be something that disappears quite quickly.

– I think there will be some kind of post-editing role for a long time yet, because current algorithms, at least, can’t work perfectly even in principle. But you said you’d keep writing for personal pleasure. I, on the other hand, would keep going even more for personal displeasure, for the pain and difficulty. We delegate easily, we hand off tasks, so that everything gets easier. But life and everything that makes us human is a form of stress. Learning new information is stress. Doing sports is stress. Writing is stress.

– I think a person’s life passes in the sense of solving problems. That’s all there is.

When people ask me what the meaning of life is, that’s it. People want to solve problems.

I think that’s also a large part of the origin of today’s political correctness, which I can’t stand either. But if you look at the people who are its loudest heralds, they’re usually people who don’t really have any problems. They don’t go to the well to draw water, they don’t light candles in the evening, their gas lamp doesn’t run out, they don’t have the plague. But they have an inner need, teenagers even more so, to solve some problem in order to feel significant. If you solve a problem, you have value in society.

And since they have no real problems, they start creating some. Grammar is to blame, pronouns are. And don’t get me wrong, I would put myself at the far end of the left—for equal rights, for gay marriage, for feminism, for all of that, but not in the way it’s presented in its extreme, radical form.

You said that writing, and in fact every activity, has to contain a dose of pain, a dose of Sisyphus. And that’s why we’ve kept chewing on this Sisyphus for millennia, absolutely unchanged—you have to go through some suffering, overcome it, find the next one. You can see it in people’s ambition too. When you achieve what you want, you don’t tell yourself you’re done and you’ll lie down; you set yourself the next goal, and the next, and the next, and the next.

Camus says, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” because it’s true.

I agree with you. Writing isn’t only for pleasure; no art, no activity is only for pleasure, it’s also for the pain…

– How much longer will we be able to afford to stay out of range every now and then?

– It’s a matter of personal choice. And it will last as long as there are professions you can practice without it involving screen time online. Recently I ran into a former classmate from the vocational school for construction in Stara Zagora. An electrical engineer by training, but now he has chosen to be a “tile guy”—a craftsman who renovates bathrooms. We talked about how people like him are getting scarcer, and his exact words were:

“Soon there won’t be anyone left to do ordinary work.”

The “gold rush” that the boom in digital technology set off in so many people over the last quarter of a century pulled them away from non-digital, hands-on technical work.

And now this acquaintance of mine has chosen to be out of range and to make bathrooms. Being in short supply, he can afford a high standard of living, flexible hours that he sets himself, independence. The price he pays is walking around in overalls dusted with tile adhesive—there are no role models like that on Instagram, but our generation doesn’t give much of a damn about that.

– I often joke, too, that I may have to change professions once again. Only tiles wouldn’t work for me, precisely because they require skills I can’t develop. But why is it worth going out of range from time to time?

– It’s healthy. The sense of connection the global network gives us is wonderful, but only as long as it stays within healthy limits. People also need to be alone sometimes.

And not bombarded by tons of unnecessary information that the brain has to process constantly.

– When does technology become too much for us? How can we tell it’s time for a little digital minimalism?

– If we can’t watch a film of an hour and a half or two without unlocking our phone several times, just like that, out of habit, to glance at it, then we’re already addicted. I deliberately give the example of watching a film rather than reading a book—with the latter, concentrating these days is even harder, once your brain has grown used to the pace of scrolling.

– What’s your personal recipe for a healthy distance from technology?

– Outside working hours, not to wander through the feed for more than two hours a day. I admit I struggle to stick to this self-imposed limit. To older generations those two hours may sound like far too much, while the youngest will laugh if you ask which of them has less than two hours of screen time a day.

– Even worse, I think, is when we don’t realize at all how much time that is… And once we decide to check, it turns out we lose hours in the feed every day. Are there things we should never delegate to technology?

– Perhaps we can delegate everything, but only when there is also the appropriate human oversight.

– One of your characters says that today literature, busy looking for new forms, has stopped looking for the human being. And your new novel, in my view, does exactly that—its themes are precisely the ones that move me as a person today. In some ways it reminds me of Pavel Vezhinov, the Bulgarian master of psychological and science fiction prose and one of my favorite writers. So can literature really still help us look for the human being?

– That’s actually mostly what literature does—it talks through the human being in all the nuances of their ideals,

their thoughts, their passions, their ideas of how to live, while searching for the meaning of it all.

If we take off our new clothes, our new ideas of how to live, our new tech gadgets, underneath we’re the same people as previous generations—with our fears, our weaknesses, our need to be loved. They say everything has already been written, but every generation wants to read it through its own “here and now.”

– As long as there’s someone left to read… You’re a teacher and you talk with young people. What moves them? How are they different from the young people before them?

– The virtual world matters to them as much as the real one. For some, it seems,

their online life, their online status, is even more important than the physical one.

Advertising yourself as permanently happy on social media takes a lot of energy and staring at a screen, so you may miss moments in which you could experience real positive emotions. Not being present online in the most popular apps and social networks seems to erase your real existence too.

– Will we ever manage to regain the ability to read long texts?

– You become a good specialist in anything (I’m leaving out digital skills) by reading a great many long texts. On YouTube there are already quite a few videos in English by professionals in various fields that can replace that reading, but the concentration needed to make sense of them is similar to that of reading.

– How do we find a balance in using technology today?

– For me it’s both an intuitive and a conscious process. But then I’m from the analog generation; I take in all technology secondhand, while generations are now growing up with it naturally. Just as we analog generations are learning digital life, the digital generations have to learn analog life.

– Technology has to a great extent divided us and set us against each other. This theme is in your novel too—that analog life might help us here. What’s the recipe for getting people divided today to talk to each other again—divided by generations, by political lines, by the latest hot topic?

– Who knows! Perhaps

the recipe is to listen to each other and to be less emotional in these arguments.

It’s a bit like driving—while you’re alone in the car, you can tell off someone who, in your view, isn’t behaving sensibly on the road, but only because you know they won’t hear you. You wouldn’t say the same words to their face. Probably the lack of direct contact in digital communication leads people in the same way to be less restrained in their emotions and reactions toward the other side. Which, however, practiced online for a long time, may already be carrying over as a habit of behavior into offline communication.

– I think technology takes us over, gradually and imperceptibly. Our knowledge, our memories, our communication… Instead of the other way around—us taking it over, mastering it, making sense of it. Introducing it after we’ve discussed how to do so. Am I being too idealistic?

– I suppose it isn’t fatal for the two processes to run in parallel and for us to keep readjusting to the situation. Once it becomes clear that the rate of anxiety in children and young people grows as their screen time increases—and science already has enough evidence of this—steps must be taken toward the corresponding corrections in society’s understanding of how far this freshly discovered technology should spread into every level of our lives.

– What do you miss that could never happen again because of technological progress?

– I’ll quote one of the characters in my novel Out of Range: “Back in the day we’d cut ourselves off from the world for whole days, they couldn’t find us. They could only reach you at home or at work. And at work, fine, somehow or other, they’d find you, but why you didn’t pick up at home, nobody could hold you to account for that.” Not that I mind now, when I can see through the relevant app exactly where my daughter is at any given moment.

– What are your plans—when and how do you intend to introduce her to technology, to artificial intelligence?

– She’s had a smartphone for about two years; she’s 11 now. But it’s linked through an app to mine, so I can control the apps she installs and her usage time, and also know where she is. Until recently she had 45 minutes a day; now it’s an hour. I’ve read that children shouldn’t have smartphones until the age of 14, nor use social media until 16. But when they have a class group on Viber where they exchange information about homework and other school matters, her being the only one missing from the group causes me more problems as a parent than making a reasonable compromise.

– The subject of children and technology is very important to me too. But what can a person miss if they go without the feed for a day or two?

– A panic attack, at most. More seriously: it depends on what they do, what trends they need to follow, how fast things change in the field they’ve chosen to work in. My acquaintance the bathroom craftsman won’t miss anything in a day or two, and I think we should all envy him deeply. Me, not so much—

I can afford that luxury too. I believe everyone can still afford it.

– Has time really sped up? How can we, with our human linearity, keep up with the exponential pace that comes with technology? Can we slow things down, or is that battle lost?

– What has sped up is the multiplication of the volume of information we have to process. And this is where the battle comes in to sift the information that matters to us from the digital noise gushing from everywhere. We humans are adaptable creatures—once, in an information technology class, I was taught how to make directory trees in DOS; now all the lessons I’ve developed are in the cloud, and I can “pour” their content straight onto the board through the classroom’s multimedia projector. That’s a convenience you shouldn’t run away from.

Technology has made life easier in many directions. We actually live very well. The dangers come not from technology but from how people use it. Both on a personal level—filtering out the noise and using what’s useful—and on a global level—abuse, disinformation and so on. Once, science was elevated to a cult, and technological progress was thought to be an inevitable good. The two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have rethought that narrative and sowed in humanity a fear of the scale of technological advance as well. But let me say it again—

the dangers come from people, not from technology.

– Why, in the art of recent decades, do we so often struggle to describe the present day? More of the strong novels and films, at least in my opinion, look toward the past…

– I, on the other hand, love reading books and watching films about precisely the present day. Living through it from someone else’s point of view too, which enriches my picture of our times and makes it more colorful; some make me think about things I hadn’t arrived at on my own, while others reassure me that I’m not the only one who thinks and feels this way.

I’m curious about the present day, not the past, and that’s why I write on contemporary subjects.

I respect other people’s right to be more curious about the past. But writing about the past also seems a touch safer—yes, the research you have to do on the era in question is considerable, but you stay in the shade, sheltered from accusations and canceling by some fashionable ideology over an accidentally dropped word or a character whose views are archaic compared with today’s colorful situation.

– When will there no longer be any point in writing and reading?

– When we’re dead.

– Have all the strong plots and characters already been invented?

– Maybe. But as I said a moment ago, every generation wants to read its own nuanced take on those plots and characters in the time and world it now inhabits. Connecting them to already established works perhaps brings the reassurance that not everything changes and that we humans are still the same. That’s where literary references to the classics come in.

– What do you dream of?

– Calm, harmony. To be out of range of worries about things I don’t have the resources to do anything about anyway.

We often mention George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. And rightly so! The possible dystopian worlds we thought had stayed behind in the 20th century have returned as a theme, as a threat.

This writer inspired them both. His only novel is a dystopia, no less thought-provoking and illuminating than those of the two classics. Because it looks not so much at a possible totalitarianism come true as in a direction that is even more relevant today.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a brilliant novel because it offers a glimpse of a future in which technology has defeated humanity. It has locked people in its mathematical grip, turned them into numbers, into tools. It is one of the most powerful metaphors for what may be coming, and something worth talking about more and more. Technology sets the rules, and we have become the meaningless parts of a harsh mechanism…

The Ship with Scarlet Sails

Real literature can exist only where it is created not by diligent and well-meaning clerks, but by madmen, heretics, hermits, dreamers, rebels, skeptics. And if a writer must be sensible, must be orthodox, must be, as today, useful… then literature has no meaning, it is just paper you read today and tomorrow use to wrap soap in at the shop.

(The quote is from the essay “I Am Afraid.” All other quotes in italics are from We, in the Bulgarian translation by Rositsa Bardarska.)

No less remarkable is the story of the author himself. A shipbuilder by profession and an accidental witness to what happened aboard the Battleship Potemkin, he wrote a letter to Stalin in which, once again, he peered into the dark future. And although he managed to leave his homeland in those bloodthirsty times, he never stopped missing it until his last day.

Yevgeny Zamyatin is a fascinating figure whose words are worth recalling today. When war, dictatorship and the clash of civilizations are returning with what seems their eternal historical weight. Now joined, however, by the incredible rise of technology and the dangers it brings.

He was born in 1884 (Orwell?!). His father and grandfather were priests, and although he grew up, as he himself put it, in the deep Russian provinces, he was surrounded by an intellectual circle—his mother was a pianist, and Chopin could often be heard in the house. At four, the boy was already reading Gogol on his own. At school he did well in literature and tragically in mathematics. But, as he writes in his autobiography, out of sheer stubbornness he decided to enroll in the discipline with the most mathematics at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic—shipbuilding.

There, by the River

And further—a question to myself: why is it beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree movement, because its whole deep meaning lies precisely in absolute aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our ancestors gave themselves up to dance in the most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), that means only one thing: the instinct for unfreedom has been organically inherent in man since ancient times.

Zamyatin entered university at the beginning of the 20th century, just as the Russian Empire was giving birth to the phenomena that would steer the history of the entire Eastern Bloc. He was quickly drawn into politics, became part of revolutionary circles and grew close to the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps that is why chance played its part, when as a student he ended up aboard the ship Knyaz Potemkin-Tavrichesky, where he witnessed dramatic events. It is the story that Sergei Eisenstein would immortalize in one of the first undisputed masterpieces of cinema—Battleship Potemkin. Driven to desperate conditions, the sailors mutinied and seized the ship. Troops were sent against them and crushed the mutiny with bloodthirsty brutality.

Back at the university, Zamyatin became quite active on the political front. So much so that in 1906 he was arrested and forcibly sent back to his hometown of Lebedyan. Although forbidden to do so, he returned illegally to Saint Petersburg that same year and even… completed his education. Miracles possible only in the rebellious first years of the 20th century.

It was around then that he wrote his first short story. And the miracles continued. Since he stood out as an exceptionally talented shipbuilder, and such specialists were important and in demand at the time, he was soon pardoned. In the following years he worked quietly, until the First World War broke out. He publicly declared himself for peace and called for revolts, for which he was arrested again and deported far from civilization.

The Battleship Potemkin

The state forbade the murder of an individual, but did not forbid the half-destruction of millions. That means that to kill one person, that is, to reduce the sum of human lives by 50 years, is criminal, but to reduce the sum of human lives by 50 million years is not criminal. Funny, isn’t it?

After serving his sentence, however… it suddenly turned out once again that he was too valuable a specialist. He was sent to Great Britain to take part in building, on a Russian order, the icebreaker Saint Alexander Nevsky, which… by the time it was finished, the October Revolution had come, and it sailed back under the name Lenin. A huge ship, innovative for its time, capable of handling the harshest challenges of the Arctic Ocean.

Not only the ship but also the shipbuilder changed dramatically during his time on the island. Zamyatin traveled between shipyards scattered across the kingdom. What amazed him most and shaped his worldview from then on was technology. Progress, advancement. Inventions that promised to change our lives… not necessarily for the better.

Does that sound familiar from today’s point of view?

A Burden Without Shores

And isn’t it absurd that the state (and it dared to call itself a state!) could leave sexual life entirely without control? Whoever, whenever and as much as they wanted… Utterly unscientific, like animals. And like animals, blindly, they bore children. Isn’t it funny: to know horticulture, poultry farming, fish farming (we have exact data that they knew them) and not manage to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child farming. Not to arrive at our Ideal Mother and Ideal Father.

The shipbuilder changed outwardly, too. He adopted British manners, the local fashion and customs so thoroughly that later, after his return home, people would often call him, ironically, “the Englishman.” Korney Chukovsky wrote of him: “Yevgeny Ivanovich had one forgivable weakness: he behaved like an English captain. He smoked a pipe, spat like a true Yorkshireman, often said ‘alright,’ and, having put on his British face, listened and spoke without changing his expression. But his eyes were naive, peasant eyes, slyly narrowed, and his thick dark-blond hair refused to fit within the English barrier.”

Zamyatin clearly had a knack for not missing the dramatic moments: he returned home in September 1917. The writer made no secret of his enormous enthusiasm for the changes the October Revolution was bringing.

He took an active part in the Civil War, which once again landed him in prison, together with other famous artists, among them Alexander Blok.

At that time, besides taking part in the events of the day and working actively in his profession, he was writing more and more. And so we come to 1920, when he finished his first and only novel, the one we are talking about today—We.

Although many, including Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident writer, in a well-known essay on Zamyatin, find in the novel allusions to what would happen in the USSR in the following decades, it is much more than that. Zamyatin wrote it in a time of enthusiasm, when few had even heard Stalin’s name. This is not at all a book about the victorious revolution so much as about victorious technology. About a hyper-technologized society in which we have delegated everything to it, and we ourselves have become bolts in the system, little cogs that exist only to keep it moving forward…

Islands in the Stream

Hence the distribution: the ton has rights, the gram has duties, and the natural path from nothingness to greatness is to forget that you are a gram and to feel yourself a millionth part of the ton…

The fact is that the novel was never published in the years after it was written. Journalistic digging in the archives a few years ago showed that this happened more or less by accident. The editors were slow with their decisions; in fact, they had approved the novel… But Zamyatin was impatient, and that brought him serious trouble. We came out first in New York, and that is precisely what made the authorities turn their attention to the writer.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, great writers and poets whose names we all know, he was not repressed. In 1929 he was expelled from the writers’ union; it was clear that he could not cope with the demands of the new times. In 1931 he wrote his famous letter to Stalin, in which he explained his disagreement with the treatment of art and asked to be allowed to go abroad. He promised to return “as soon as it becomes possible to serve great ideas in literature without serving small men.” Pretty bold, wouldn’t you say?

He did, however, receive the support of Maxim Gorky, and, quite unexpectedly… he was allowed to leave the country. He even kept his Soviet passport.

Titanic

By turning this handle, any one of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. And how much effort this cost your ancestors! They were able to create only after working themselves up into the fit known as “inspiration”—an unknown form of epilepsy.

Zamyatin spent the rest of his years abroad; in the 1930s, unprecedentedly, his membership in the Soviet writers’ union was even restored. He said he dreamed of returning home, but it never happened—heart disease ended his days in 1937. Abroad he never published anything new; his only creative work was as the screenwriter of a successful French film.

“The most unknown of the great Russian writers of the 20th century,” Alexei Korolyov called him.

His whole life was bound up with the greatest literary figures of the time. His wife was a close friend of Anna Akhmatova and helped her when she fell ill with tuberculosis. The writer’s personal physician was Mikhail Bulgakov’s brother. At his memorial service, his words were read by the Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin.

The Icebreaker

I rushed to him as to a brother, straight onto the blades, and started telling him—about the insomnia, the dreams, the shadows, the yellow world… The scissor lips smiled.

– You’re in a bad way! I think you’ve developed a soul.

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes said “soulful,” “soulless,” “soul-destroying,” but soul…

– That is… very dangerous, – I whispered.

– Incurable.

We was first published in his homeland only at the end of the 1980s. Long before that, the book had built a reputation in the West as visionary, prophetic, as the first literary dystopia. It is especially popular in England; the Pet Shop Boys have a song called “Integral” that retells its plot.

“My most jocular and at the same time most serious work,” the shipbuilder-writer called his novel.

Zamyatin said he had been inspired by H. G. Wells. Orwell himself wrote that he was impressed by We, and in his view Aldous Huxley, too, had learned directly from his Russian predecessor. Traces of our hero’s ideas can undoubtedly also be found in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Who borrowed from whom and how, who came first and who last (and Zamyatin came first, decades ahead of his colleagues), I don’t think matters much. The fact is that in each of these classics we have a totalitarian regime and a protagonist who stands up to it, launching his own small and naive revolution before the system, one way or another, destroys him. What’s more, I hope we won’t need to argue over which of these undisputed classics turned out to be most right with its terrifying prophecies.

Man Overboard

I know from my own experience: the most agonizing thing is to sow in a person the doubt that he is real.

And yet, there are just too many tentacles of a possible technological horror described in We, and we can see signs of them sprouting all around us.

Yes, technology is an enormous treasure, but it can also be a horror.

The action takes place in the 32nd century. All people are subjects of the One State; they have no names, only numbers. The protagonist, D-503, is a mathematician, one of the engineers of a flying machine called the Integral. It is easy to see the shipbuilder himself in him… only in space. (Or… Elon Musk?!)

The citizens of the One State live in identical apartments without curtains, wear identical clothes (“unifs”) and travel in small flying vehicles. (The sharing economy?!) In their free time they enjoy music created by special musical machines. (Artificial intelligence?!)

In the novel, people live in transparent homes and are not allowed to lower the blinds unless they receive the coveted pink ticket, which gives them a chance to be alone for a short while with a specifically chosen and approved member of the opposite sex. (Tinder?!)

Lifebelt

Haven’t social networks led us to something similar? With the way they collect and process our data, the way they manipulate? The way they make us share selfies and worldviews far beyond what is properly intimate?

And what about the estrangement from nature that came with technical progress? And creativity and art, presented as technologized activities delegated to algorithms?

The hate, the drowning out of the different voice under the weight of the algorithm, of the likes?

Our confinement in bubbles with a narrow worldview, in the panopticon of an illusory reality?

The blurring of truth? Of the criteria for credibility, of being properly informed?

A Sea of Words

– This is unthinkable! This is absurd! Don’t you understand: you are plotting a revolution!

– Yes, a revolution! Why is that absurd?

– It’s absurd because there can be no revolution. Because our—I’m saying this, not you—our revolution was the last one. And there can be no more revolutions. Everyone knows that…

The mocking sharp triangle of her eyebrows:

– My dear, you are a mathematician. Even more: you are a philosopher of mathematics. Very well: name me the last number.

– Meaning? I… don’t understand: what last one?

– Well, the last, the highest, the biggest.

– But that’s absurd. Since the number of numbers is infinite, what last number can you be talking about?

– And what last revolution are you talking about? There is no last one.

Here lies the remarkable difference between 1984 and We. Orwell’s characters clearly cannot stand the tyranny they live under and only pretend to approve of it out of fear. Zamyatin’s “numbers,” by contrast, obey the laws of the One State because “that is what makes sense.” Quietly submerged and tamed, like us in today’s social networks. Which take care to bestow content on us, to give meaning to our everyday lives.

As Zamyatin’s friend Yury Annenkov wrote, in his novel he proves that “human life cannot be artificially organized according to programs and blueprints, like a transatlantic steamer. Because in man, besides his material, physical properties and needs, there is also an irrational principle that lends itself neither to precise dosing nor to precise accounting, and as a result, sooner or later, the schemes and blueprints will be blown apart.” Will it turn out that way in reality?

We is a brilliant metaphor and a prompt to reflect on a possible hyper-technological future. Yes, it may not be a beautiful love story, nor the ideal beach read, but it is a book we should not miss today.

I would very much like it to turn out, just a few years from now, that these parallels don’t exist, that I am wrong. But…