The Corporate Machine of Bulgarian Television

After "The Face of the System" by Toma Tomov („Лицето на системата" от Тома Томов), foreword to the Bulgarian edition of the book Network by Paddy Chayefsky and Sam Hedrin, 1981r "The Face of the System" by Toma Tomov, foreword to the book Network by Paddy Chayefsky and Sam Hedrin, 1981)

> *"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."* > — Woody Allen They say that time is money. If you wanted to understand contemporary Bulgarian television in a single sentence, it would be this: a short, precisely measured amount of screen time—every second of a viewer's attention is worth thousands of leva. Every Bulgarian citizen possesses the absolute and sovereign right to ask television for that time, and television will gladly sell it, provided that the citizen can afford to pay for it. The law of television is to make money. The airwaves, the broadcasting frequencies, belong to the people, and the Bulgarian government, acting on behalf of the people, grants licences to two large international corporations to produce and broadcast Bulgarian television. There is also a public broadcaster, but compared to the two corporate giants it resembles a little mouse, forever chased and forever trembling lest it be devoured by two well-fed tomcats. The names of these corporations are known to every Bulgarian, because every Bulgarian watches television for several hours each day—even if that television now comes through the Internet. Web television is still television; only the screens have become smaller and flatter. Online people watch programmes in foreign languages, but there are Bulgarian stars as well. Their ambition is to reach the broadcast schedules of the two major television networks. That is where the real money is and where genuine fame still resides. The rebellion of the Internet has failed, and television will reign forever like a vast cemetery built upon the ruins of cinema. The smart device is merely a new kind of television remote control through which viewers vote for their favourite programmes. Today's mobile phones are no longer communication devices; they have become instruments for measuring ratings. Smart devices are no more intelligent than the viewers of this new form of online television. Their purpose is to generate traffic, and they acquire meaning only when they exist in enormous numbers. Even people who insist they never watch television somehow always know what happened on television. After work and sleep, television occupies more of the average Bulgarian's life than anything else. This begins in early childhood, when a child still slowly learns to distinguish colours and movement, while its attention and hearing are unconsciously drawn toward that strange object attached to the wall—something colourful, constantly moving, endlessly booming. Television shapes the earliest images of childhood consciousness. Some even claim that it provides the first spoken word for hundreds of thousands of Bulgarian children. Long before the child systematically learns anything about the surrounding world, it has already become a warehouse filled with millions of images and billions of endlessly ticking pixels. The Bulgarian household usually contains one or two televisions and two or three smart devices. The large screen normally occupies the living room; a smaller one sits in the kitchen; tablets and mobile phones lie scattered across the furniture. There are screens in family cars as well. Mothers feel less lonely and much safer while their children disappear into the endless scrolling of video clips. Every evening, when the ordinary Bulgarian returns home from work, the assault begins. Images and sounds of the news launch an audiovisual battle for attention. Filmed as though live, equipped with authentic sound from the scene, sliced into fragments lasting only seconds, interrupted by captions and dramatic close-ups of presenters, they crash directly onto the kitchen floor. Bloodied heads of murdered people from every corner of the globe fall into the bedroom. Children starve as part of the daily routine. Soldiers fire their weapons every evening. Horrific crimes occur continuously. Human consciousness slowly develops scabs while consuming its daily ration of news. These blurred and indistinct images are absorbed by tired pupils before sinking somewhere deep inside the mind. Thus television humanity becomes engulfed every single day by an endless sequence of catastrophes. There are words, of course—constant chatter serving merely as background to the images. Television is action, and people desire action rather than analysis. The image is a wild horse. Words rarely restrain it. Instead they seem to disappear into a separate drawer somewhere in the brain, while the images overflow consciousness, numb it, overcrowd it. The noisy, colourful stream flowing across countless channels resembles a butcher's shop filled with freshly cut images: dismembered human and animal limbs stitched together against fragments of post-urban landscapes. Above all, there are severed talking heads. That is why every television studio employs several cameras. Directors seek fragmented humanity—broken into pieces, cut apart, magnified as though under a microscope. Closer. Even closer. More predatory. More conflict. Human misery exposed to its deepest foundations. Television today appears to follow the primal forces of nature. It is no longer merely a business transaction but an audiovisual ontology. The end of ideology is visual. Television entropy. Tidal gravity. Ecological equilibrium. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Americans or Russians. Nor are there Bulgarians. These are imaginary communities. There is no Third World. There is no West. Only imagined territories. There exists only a single holistic system composed of countless interconnected systems—a vast, monstrous, intertwined, interacting, multinational empire governed by virtual money. Petrodollars. Gas roubles. Electric euros. Crypto-cartel coins. Yuan. Rupees. Shekels. This international monetary system determines the entire life of the planet. It is the only natural order of things today. It is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of reality itself. Nothing can change it. There is no alternative, and the future has been cancelled. Hope for social progress has disappeared. What remains is non-majoritarian democracy, linear programming diagrams, statistical decision theories, probabilities, cost-benefit calculations, transaction models and investment forecasts. The world has become a collage of corporations relentlessly determined by the immutable laws of global business. If the two gigantic Bulgarian television corporations exist to generate profit, then they must completely occupy Bulgarian consciousness. And they do. They are not merely competitors in the highest league of business. Their mission is to educate and guard the nation's new conscience. They have become trustees of morality and spiritual guardians of the entire state. Television corporations participate in the almost mystical business of selling time in packages measured by the minute. Their objective is ratings, market share and audience percentage. To achieve this, they analyse the Bulgarian television family—not as sociologists interested in its cultural or spiritual life, but as marketers studying consumer behaviour. Serious programming devoted to classical art, theatre, music, literature, cinema or painting has almost disappeared. Even when such programmes occasionally survive, they are interrupted by screaming advertisements for dog food and shampoo. What television truly seeks is the complete absence of spiritual values, because spiritual values cannot be sold. Instead, it manufactures emojis that provoke powerful yet fleeting emotions: admiration, envy, malice, ridicule, indignation, anger and finally apathy—in precisely that order. This television behaviourism excludes spirit and thought in favour of instinct and reflex. A spiritually empty television inevitably creates psychologically damaged people. It is perhaps no accident that television is called "the tube," while the world's largest online television platform is called "YouTube." A tube. A barrel. A pipeline. A television set touched by a fingertip. The viewer resembles a patient kept alive through artificial feeding with images and sounds—a simultaneously Bulgarian and global pathological system devoted to manufacturing anger and madness. The fundamental principle behind this audiovisual bacchanalia is simple: **"Angry people click more."** Bulgarian television today is the diagnosis of that system. “I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!...”- Howard Beale (Network, 1976)