The Universe Isn’t Trying to Kill Your Company. You’re Doing That Yourself.
The Towel Problem Think, for a moment, the sheer range of things humanity has managed to not screw up. We split atoms. We put rovers…
ADJ
Aric is a co-founder of This is Bulgaria, a futurist, and a professional troublemaker. With over two decades of experience, he explores the intersection of technology, business, and human behavior, turning complexity into actionable insight.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work, It Breeds It
In the beginning there was Work. It was formless, slightly resentful, and spread evenly across the day like butter that refused to melt. Then humanity…
Europe’s Last Chance to Rethink Itself, Before It Processes Itself to Oblivion
Europe is not collapsing. It is doing something more European than collapse: it is administering decline, competently, procedurally, and with a moral vocabulary that makes…
How the World’s Richest Company Forgot How to Think: The Spectacular Unraveling of Apple’s AI Dreams
There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from asking your phone a simple question and watching it fail spectacularly. Picture this: You’re trying to…
THE CITY THAT THINKS FOR ITSELF
I’ve spent twelve years inside the automotive industry watching companies pretend to innovate. Then I spent more years advising cities on why they should run…
THE REPOSITORY OF CONSEQUENCE – A Satire in Eight Movements
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray “The major problem—one…
Breaking the Mold: What the Rosenhan Experiment Teaches Us About Innovation in Europe
In 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan published a study in Science that would shake psychiatry to its core. Eight healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals claiming…
The Talking Mirror
We built a social network where humans were not allowed. That detail matters more than anything else. An empty stage, a sealed arena, populated only…
Intelligence, Displacement, and the Question of Agency
I was fascinated by technology long before I understood what the word meant. I must have been six or seven years old. My parents’ library…
The Era of “Optimization” is Over; the Era of “Adaptation” Has Begun
As someone who studies patterns of organizational and economic transformation, I’ve watched a fundamental shift unfold over the past five years – one that most…
Bulgaria’s AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence could redefine a nation’s economic future
Could AI be the secret weapon that propels Bulgaria onto the global economic stage? Imagine traditional Bulgarian industries – from the rose fields of the…
The Fear That Swallowed Itself: How Apple’s Terror of Failure Became the Only Thing It Achieved
What happened was not a pivot, not a partnership, and not a strategy in any meaningful human sense of the word. What happened was that…