Bulgaria: with kuker dances we will chase the spirit of the machine | News and analysis from Bulgaria | DW
Professor Ivaylo Dichev’s comment:
Much has been written about the drama surrounding the Electoral Code. It is clear to everyone that GERB destroyed the state to split the reformist coalition, and Ninova killed her party to justify the bad results. Even the compromise proposal of the DPS to spend another 60 million on other machines that check the paper ballot like scanners does not answer the question – can we be sure that some irresponsible politician will not question them as well. And will we not finally get to the fingerprints.
The problem is that all this primitivism is catching on among few citizens. That our “technical nation” (as Zhivkov called it) is probably not far from the New Zealand Maori, who think that by photographing them, you steal their soul.
Take this. Recently, a reputable university had me mail them a statement signed with son pen. No electronic signature, no scan, no black. Older people will probably remember that back in the day they did not accept official documents written with a pen, because it probably looked suspiciously western to them. At school, our students had to write with quills, thick and thin, and our bags invariably had stains from a broken inkwell. To this day, the administration worships the stamp, for which you line up at a certain counter. But what does print mean today? A rubber mold that anyone can order for a few leva. It’s good that they didn’t think of challenging it at the cost of political forces.
Institutions work with paper
There are no real Luddites in our country, because we do not see the introduction of artificial intelligence to take away jobs (it is not found very naturally, but still). To the unfortunate election enumerators, a lot of work, the new Electoral Code triples, just offers more money and that’s it. The resistance to any step forward is enormous, and legislative changes are a good opportunity for the “conservatives” to trip up whatever they can. Paper continues to be the main document in most institutions, which means that the notorious electronic management does not ease the work, but doubles it – once you write on paper, once on the computer. Soon there was a conflict over e-prescriptions: doctors protested because you wouldn’t be able to write a prescription when visiting a sick person at their home. I wondered why this would be a problem – don’t they have light computers suitable for visiting and equipped with mobile data?
I don’t know if we Bulgarians are more primitive than other nations. I remember years ago French friends praying that the computer would somehow get out of the blue screen, which meant something terrible, but not sure what. When the telephone appeared, the Swedish peasants cut the wires because they believed that demons were passing through them. The mobile phone was also accompanied by a global fear that it caused brain cancer – it was recommended to use it with a headset so that it was not too close to your head. The 5G network was also blamed for the Covid epidemic: two Bulgarian municipalities decided to ban the placement of the new antennas on their territory, and in Sofia there are still blocks that are deprived of the income that this could bring them. Just in case.
The world is changing faster and faster, the things we have to live with are becoming more complicated and incomprehensible. Back in the day, many Bulgarian men could lie under the Muscovite and fix him. The modern car is equipped with a computer, which for most of them remains a secret – they just throw it away and buy a new one. And what about even more obscure things like cryptocurrencies, facial tracking, or genetic editing? The citizen understands anything less and feels helpless in the face of the threats with which he is bombarded every day by the media. And it happens that what is achieved by progress turns into some idols, which some people bow down to, others get angry at.
Technology is moving away from us, and we are moving away from technology
The improvement in the field of communications, privatized today by social networks, seems particularly dangerous. What is the algorithm that governs our tastes, interests, friendships? Company secret. Mark Zuckerberg himself speaks out because he did not foresee the negative consequences of his discovery and promises to take measures against radicalization and lies in his network. But is this possible in a planetary problem?
Prof. Ivaylo Dichev
Recently, a large group of Bulgarian citizens sent a petition to the European Parliament protesting the way in which Facebook (now the main digital media in our country) is moderated by your company Telus. I myself am subject to frequent inexplicable lockouts that I cannot dispute or demand an account for. But isn’t FB a private company that makes its own rules? If we imagine that moderation changes and begins to sanction people who support Russian aggression and anti-social positions on the other side – won’t the extreme right then start writing petitions? That’s what happened to Twitter when it blocked Trump’s account. Now the work there is about to be seen in a right-libertarian direction.
After all, Bulgaria is part of the fashion world
I’m not trying to reason about how to moderate social media. I’m just drawing your attention to the fact that here we are dealing with an algorithm invented ten thousand kilometers away, implemented by people we don’t know and whom we haven’t completed for anything. In the same way, we will become beasts one day when we get driverless cars flying by and Elon Musk succeeds in implanting chips in our brains. Not because we are weak old men, as we think in the BSP, but because technology is moving away from us, it is becoming more and more difficult to decipher. The Bulgarian specificity is that, instead of bringing reason, the elites allow themselves to go crazy, already disturbed by the speed of change of the people.
The problem of accelerating progress is serious, but the time when it was opposed by the patriarchal rural idyll is long gone. Bulgaria is part of the modern world, for better or for worse. And it is extremely irresponsible for Bulgarian politics not to turn into a tribe that will chase away the spirit of the machine with kukerian dances.
* This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author. It may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and Deutsche Welle as a whole.