A weekly digest - part serious, part not - in partnership with The Sofia Globe
The week began early. Unreasonably early.
The sort of early that should come with a government warning label, especially in Bulgaria, where coffee officially kick-starts the bloodstream at around 10:00.
Monday, 06:00. Varna.
From there to Shumen, and finally Ruse.
Days ran from 08:30 to 23:00, back to back, until it slowly dawned on me that in Bulgaria, if you drop a stone anywhere, you will find warmth, beauty, and curiosity waiting patiently underneath it.
This week, however, also began in a far-away land with a somewhat politically disconnected government called Australia—where policy stupidity recently achieved the rare feat of exploding directly into its own face.
You cannot ban self-expression.
If history has taught us anything (and it really has been shouting this for centuries), it’s that locking down self-expression doesn’t suppress pressure—it concentrates it. Dictatorships learned this the hard way: clamp down long enough and eventually everything erupts like a volcano, launching unfit leaders into a mountainous doom of their own making.
Banning social media access for kids is like asking my generation to play outside with LEGO.
Instead of thinking—God forbid—about how to harness social digital interaction as a tool for growth, education, and accountability, policymakers reach for the bluntest instrument available. Digital tools are native to our lives now. We can’t simply ignore them because we don’t understand them.
And as Australian kids cleverly demonstrated, apparently a picture of a labrador is enough to stroll straight through the policy’s intellectual security checkpoint.
From one disconnected government to another—this one closer to home.
The German Chancellor declared that Pax Americana is over and that Europe must let go of nostalgia.
Hello? Nostalgia?
What happened to the German miracle? Where is the magnificent German engineering? Oh—China happened.
And how exactly does Europe imagine functioning without American tech? Don’t get me wrong: my biggest criticism of the EU is that we simply do not have productivity technology of our own. Our strategies orbit American platforms. We have no real answer to Apple, Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.
Yes, there are attempts. I dare you to work with Nextcloud for a week and tell me how fast you run to the nearest bar.
I agree—absolutely agree—that Europe must regain its digital sovereignty. But it won’t happen through regulation-as-punishment and rhetoric-as-substitute-for-vision. It must be driven by innovation-first frameworks, policies designed as catalysts rather than constant deterrents.
And this is precisely where Bulgaria should shine. After all, it is Chinese companies that now drive innovation inside German companies—especially in automotive.
Meanwhile, as Europe is literally covered in shit, Time magazine chose AI as its Person of the Year.
For me, SHIT stands for Simplicity, Honesty, Intellect, and Transparency. And until Brussels starts acting accordingly, we’ll keep watching French farmers—joined by taxi drivers and firefighters—block the arteries of Europe like cholesterol blocks the human heart.
How close is Europe to a heart attack?
And can we still recover?
While France protests, American and Chinese tech companies are quietly launching a new space race—one that puts data centers in orbit, harvests solar energy directly, and creates a new generation of intellectual property. Europe will pay licensing fees and eat synthetic food. But hey, as long as we still have paper straws—wrapped in plastic, for sanitary reasons—we’re good.
Europe has repeatedly failed to understand how the modern economy actually works. We stagnate, barely noticing how China, for example, has rethought GDP itself.
Bulgaria has already demonstrated how to leapfrog generational technology in the past. Not China. Bulgaria. (Best internet in Europe if you don’t know what I’m talking about)
Did Europe learn from it?
I don’t think so.
In less comedic news, rape statistics published this week show the UK and Sweden at the top, with Bulgaria at the bottom—lowest rapes per 100,000. Bulgaria is not alone; much of Eastern Europe shows the same trend. Values still matter more than politics.
Thomas Sowell once said we are approaching a point where nobody is responsible for what they did, but everyone is responsible for what someone else did.
I can’t find better words.
In China, you can now use partial AI health kiosks—booths that operate without human doctors. They scan vital signs, run basic tests, and diagnose common illnesses within minutes.
But the most important news of the week came quietly—and explosively.
China has reportedly built a prototype extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine in Shenzhen. Until now, ASML was the only company that truly cracked EUV—the $250-million machines required to produce advanced chips for Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, Intel, and Samsung.
The monopoly is over.
Yes, Europe is pushing its chip industry, and that is one of the most important initiatives underway. But if we want to get anywhere, we must cut the bureaucratic nonsense and adopt innovation as a governing framework.
Google has also launched a direct attack on Nvidia’s most valuable asset—not its chips, but its software. A leaked project called TorchTPU aims to make PyTorch run seamlessly on Google hardware. If it works, Nvidia’s $4 trillion empire starts wobbling.
China, meanwhile, did what everyone else has talked about for 50 years: They successfully ran a thorium molten salt reactor and converted thorium into uranium-233.
They built an all-optical AI chip—LightGen—that reportedly outperforms Nvidia hardware by more than 100x in speed and energy efficiency.
Tesla employs 100,000 people.
BYD’s R&D alone employs 120,000 engineers.
China now has 3.75 terawatts of power generation capacity—nearly three times that of the US—and 34 nuclear reactors under construction. More than the next nine countries combined.
You see where I’m going with this.
Europe is debating the Digital Euro.
The final text will go to the European Parliament.
But entrepreneurship is not a currency.
I read a lot about China this week.
And I can’t stop wondering: while the EU debates, how long does it take China to install another hundred solar panels?
About a second.
COLLISION ZONES
Reality vs. Bandwidth
This week’s first collision happened somewhere between eight surveillance drones, a street protest, and a collapsing 5G connection. While citizens shouted slogans below and drones hovered above like confused mechanical pigeons, the internet quietly gave up. Not out of protest—out of congestion.
The modern revolution, it turns out, does not fail because of ideology. It fails because everyone is live-streaming it in portrait mode.
The Takeaway: When political expression depends on mobile bandwidth and TikTok servers, freedom no longer belongs to citizens—it belongs to infrastructure.Food Producers vs. Policy Designers
French farmers dumping manure on police cars is not vandalism. It is performance art born from regulatory despair. When the people who grow food feel unheard by the people who regulate food, the result is not dialogue—it’s fertilizer with intent.
No regulation has ever grown a tomato. And no committee has ever understood soil.
The Takeaway: If policy continues to punish production instead of protecting it, Europe won’t starve dramatically—it will starve bureaucratically, one form at a time.
Innovation vs. Offence Detection
Somewhere this week, European governance officially crossed from leadership into comment moderation. When the state deploys AI to scan social media for insults, power has shifted from vision to vigilance.
This is not resilience. This is emotional surveillance.
The Takeaway: A government that fears sarcasm more than stagnation has already lost the plot—and is now desperately searching for it in the comments section.
Humans vs. Risk Models
Europol warning that “putting people first” could trigger extremism is the most unintentionally honest sentence written this year. Humanity itself has now been classified as a risk factor.
Independent thought? Suspicious.
Ownership? Questionable.
Preferring humans over machines? Potentially radical.
The Takeaway: When systems treat human preference as a threat, the problem is no longer extremism—it’s architecture.
Power vs. Accountability
While Europe debates bottle caps and moderates tone, AI companies elsewhere are being elevated above law, above states, and above consequence. A new aristocracy is forming—not of bloodlines, but of server farms.
Feudalism is back. The castles just hum louder.
The Takeaway: When protection flows upward instead of downward, democracy quietly converts into a user agreement no one read.
THE BOTTOM LINE
This week was a masterclass in misaligned intelligence.
Europe is terrified of saying the wrong thing, incapable of building the right thing, and oddly proud of both. We regulate speech, outsource innovation, fine what we don’t own, and protect what we can’t control.
The US demands your digital soul at the border.
China waves you in and quietly builds the future behind you.
Europe debates whether wanting humans involved is extremist.
And Bulgaria? Bulgaria stands in the middle—sunny skies, long walks, collapsing bandwidth—still capable of seeing the absurdity for what it is.
The real conflict is no longer left vs. right or East vs. West.
It is:
Automation vs. agency.
Systems vs. humans.
Control vs. creation.
No algorithm will save us from this.
No regulation will innovate us out of it.
And no committee will ever understand why people are angry if they keep listening only to dashboards.
This week didn’t need a solution.
It needed clarity.
And clarity says this:
If “putting people first” is now considered dangerous, then the most radical act left is simply to remain human—and build accordingly.