I got hooked on Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher Universe back in school, and I can’t write enough lines here to sum up the wildly emotional experiences tied to these games. Their very first one was atmospheric. Some no-name Polish studio entered the game dev scene with two things—an intriguing title and a gripping storyline.

I have the fondest early memories of The Witcher. When we scraped together cash for a new PC that could barely run The Witcher 3, or how we jammed to bard tunes inspired by the game’s world and hit up LARP sessions to play out the roles of the book’s heroes. In recent years, we pinned our hopes on the Netflix series, then cursed the writers for butchering the lore.

The last time I replayed the third game was after the next-gen patch dropped. Even on the nth playthrough, I discovered fresh experiences, like the quirks of courting the fun, romantic Triss instead of the loyal but slightly dull Yen :)

So, I didn’t wait for a translation when Crossroads of Ravens hit Polish shelves. I grabbed the digital edition right away. Luckily, we’ve got plenty of decent machine translation tools in 2024, so with some trial and error, I got a version pretty damn close to the original in just one day.

The new installment is about Geralt’s adventures. Not exactly a shocker, but this time we see the Witcher from a new angle. It kicks off with a village elder interrogating an 18-year-old Caer Morhen grad who had the “nerve” to kill a soldier who tried raping a local girl.

The elder couldn’t care less about motives. He was just stoked to flex his authority over a “mutant.” Like any educated figure, he had read Monstrum or A Portrayal of Witchers. The latter being a lovely piece claims that all sorts of plagues—diseases, livestock dying, miscarriages, stillbirths, pest infestations—are the fault of the damned Witchers!

In this book, Geralt isn’t the world-weary, scarred, philosophical dude we all know and love. He’s 18 with naive views about life, and it’s a miracle he’s still breathing. He tries to reason with the elder by quoting the law, only to be told he can roll up that law and shove it into his ass. The local authorities and elders hold all the power here, so if Geralt wants to go “by the book,” he’d get 20 lashes for strolling into the village armed. Never mind that he was dragged in—not waltzing in—but, who cares about details?

Right in the middle of this charming convo, the killed soldier’s boss rolls onto the scene, and Geralt’s odds of survival immediately nosedive. The military guy isn’t settling for a whipping; he wants Geralt hung. Just when it seems like this might be the end, a Witcher who had been tracking Geralt shows up just in time to save him from a quick execution. This dude became Geralt’s second mentor after Vesemir—Preston Holt from the School of the Snake.

That was the end of chapter one, and I’ll stop spoiling now to keep the fun alive. Let me just say, Preston Holt is a pretty rad character and it’s partly thanks to these early lessons that Geralt became the fearless and resilient Geralt we know from the other books and games.

From there on out, we get a classic Witcher tale—tough calls, good and evil, nature’s balance, scumbags, and selfless heroes. Expect flashbacks and nods to the games. For example, the story of peasants attacking Kaer Morhen in 1194 unfolds across the book, giving it new layers until the end. And of course, no Witcher story would be complete without some romantic escapades!

The nods to the games are extra sweet given the rocky history between Sapkowski and CD Projekt Red. Once upon a time, Andrzej turned down a royalty deal with the then-unknown studio because he wanted cash upfront. After Witcher 3 blew up, he kicked himself, bashed the studio, and even threatened to sue. Eventually, they settled. I’m guessing the studio slid him a check big enough to soothe his wounded pride.

In his trademark style, Sapkowski weaves Geralt’s adventures together with vivid details of Kaedwen, where it all goes down. Each chapter is a fresh escapade, but near the end, they all click together like whimsical puzzle pieces.

As we go, we dig into new lore, like what’s up with the School of the Snake? The games introduced it but the previous books never mentioned it. Likewise, another small but juicy detail was revealed: why Geralt named his first horse “Roach”! Also, the book pumps up the Witcher bestiary quite a bit. Most monsters were brand new and debuted here, except for a striga and some water demons. Unfortunately, old faces from earlier novels barely show up. Just a couple of Vesemir mentions in passing; that’s it.

It was cool learning fresh details about how Witchers came to be. What experiments were done, who ran them, why did Geralt end up as one of the last monster slayers, and why did the trials fizzle out? I was also stoked to meet a namesake of mine—Timur Voronoff, Preston Holt’s agent. Early on, he hands Geralt instructions and some cash to get by, promising to help him score contracts for 10% of Geralt’s earnings in return.

Sapkowski wouldn’t be Sapkowski if the book was flawless. My editorial colleague, Pavlo, calls the Witcher series a “meh” example of Polish dark fantasy, insisting there are far better works. I disagree for the most part, but I do wish we got more insights into the world. A bunch of stuff you have to piece together from the games or fan digs, and the character letters that should ideally flesh out the setting, felt like a snooze sometimes.

The root of these issues is length. The book’s too short, which kills some narrative depth. Under 300 pages and just a few hours of reading feels like an adventure yarn than a full-blown novel.

Just as you’re getting into it, the show ends, the band bows and the stage lights go dark. After finishing, you’re left feeling a bit unsatisfied. It makes you want to reread the earlier stuff or jump back into Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the umpteenth time (how many is too many?!).

On the flip side, thanks to the maestro for putting it out at all and promising another in two years (I have the urge to insert a George R.R. Martin joke here, but will hold back). This book leaves a mark. It’s not like those million faceless “modern culture” products you forget the second you finish. Andrzej throws us back to the good old times when “Books” were spelled with a capital ‘B’! Not random pulp clogging up Amazon’s shelves.

In my eyes, we’re running low on worthy stuff these days—games, books, bands, flicks. Junk culture marketplaces rule the day, and hitting the audience’s emotional buttons means millions of views in the bank. More so if your content is aimed at teens who don’t yet understand how big corps toy with their feelings for fat profits.

After 15 years in tech journalism, I’m beyond sick of companies bragging that their phone, laptop, TV, or whatever gadget is the year’s ultimate and offers a mind-blowing, more “productive” experience. I’m done with soulless games and cardboard-cut-out characters without a scrap of truth. I’m over movies with jokes so flat that no one laughs, but hey, at least no one’s offended. I’m tired of social networks where there are no friends; only toxic followers.

That’s why I appreciate real creations that come from the heart. Flaws and all, I devoured Crossroads of Crows and can’t wait for what’s next.

A week ago, I poured myself a glass of wine late at night, took a deep breath, and nuked my Facebook account. That was the lackluster grand finale of nearly two decades on the platform. I had about 5,000 friends and a few thousand followers at the time, out of which I knew 200 people in real life at best.

A day before I pulled the plug, I dropped a post asking friends to stay in touch with me on other channels. Unexpectedly, it blew up with a record number of likes. That same day, my LinkedIn network jumped by about a hundred people, a couple dozen hit me up on Telegram, and a few even called to check in because they’d seen the post.

Those two days were seriously nostalgic, and it made me reminisce on how it all began. Social networks were originally meant to connect friends—mostly classmates and college buddies. It seemed like magic back in the mid-2000s, where you’d type in your school or college, and boom, there was a list of people you once knew but had since lost contact with. Remember back when you actually recognized everyone on your friend list? Or those goofy groups with ridiculous names like “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow-Walking People in the Back of the Head”?

A lot’s changed since then. In Ukraine, the Russian network VKontakte tanked in 2014 after Russia grabbed Crimea and kicked off the war in Donbas. In the U.S., Facebook went from a friends’ hangout to a platform full of low-grade content with an algorithm that stalks your every click and craves your complete attention. X has been flooded non-stop by Musk’s political agenda, Trump’s risky tweets, and Republican Party supremacist posts, even if you never followed them or showed interest in the topic.

A few years back, my buddy Alexey Mas “predicted” the meltdown of social media networks and the jacked-up state of the internet as we know it. He was the OG visionary of the Ukrainian internet, and for the last few years of his life, he had been building a project called “Craft Social Networks” to steer the “off-track web” back onto a better path. He was also a fan of my books and wrote glowing reviews, way more generous than they sometimes deserved. We didn’t talk much IRL, and I kept telling myself, “Next time I’m in Kyiv, I’ll drop him a line and we’ll meet up.”

In 2020, not long before his tragic death, he wrote a series of articles about how the internet and social networks had taken a wrong turn. At the same time, he quit his top-management job at a big telecom company and launched the “Craft Social Networks” project. The idea never went viral, and soon Alexey was gone. His thoughts seem super relevant in 2024, so I want to quote a few of his ideas.

Why the Internet Needs a Rethink and How We Can Fix It

Originally, the Internet was conceived as a distributed network. Its job was to move info around even where monopolies tried to block it. Such a network helps boost diverse opinions and free idea exchange.

Early websites were simple: just HTML pages and links to jump around. A repost on social media is basically a link too. It was all easy and clear.

But links alone aren’t perfect. They lack attributes like who made them and whether people trust ’em or not. Today, corporations and their black-box algorithms – Google, Facebook, etc. – make those calls for us. That system is centralized and driven by profit, not user needs.

So, if we want the internet to become truly distributed again someday, we’ve gotta create our own decentralized trust system where everyone decides who to believe. That’ll help crush fake news and dodgy info.

For “Links 2.0,” you’d want to add author info and context. That helps you figure out who shared/created it and why. But how do we know we can trust this author or their context?

At the heart of a decentralized trust system are “Centers of Power.” These are nodes in the network that can spin up a distributed registry and trust system without a central authority. Each node can issue “digital passports” to users, building a web of trust. This brings back the internet’s original distributed, democratic nature, letting every user shape the network and own their data. Nodes themselves earn trust levels based on ratings from other nodes and users.

Once you have such a trust system, imagine websites becoming interactive. You pop onto a page and instantly see which of your friends, famous folks, or reputable users commented on a snippet, bookmarked it, rated the info quality, and so on.

I call these interactive add-ons “objects.” A user’s “weight” in these objects depends on their trust rating, which comes from other users. Objects aren’t stored on the site itself; they’re kept in personal storage lockers only their owners can access.

With that in place, page rankings, news feeds, and content streams would get sorted by transparent algorithms based on user decisions, not corporate agendas.

This switch to a new system should happen gradually. Sites could serve both old-school and new-format versions. We might need to build a new kind of browser and tweak their trust settings to let users interact with content in fresh ways.

What Will the New Social Networks Look Like?

Social Networks 1.0: They use algorithms to decide what to show you. That leads to manipulation and warped reality, as the “The Social Dilemma” document pointed out.

Social Networks 2.0: Think platforms for building communities. Each one is unique, but connected through common standards. It’s like a Lego kit for whipping up a community in a few clicks. Just set who owns it, what data it stores, and what data it swaps with other communities. Every community is private property. Otherwise, people will want to shut them down, limit them, and block data sharing in a futile bid to keep some sort of single control center intact.

The internet should be a tool for the free flow of ideas, not a weapon of manipulation. By going back to distributed principles and openness, we can make the web more democratic and useful for everyone.

Above, I squeezed my friend’s main ideas into a super-condensed form. He wrote them before Bluesky was even a thing; before people started mass-quitting X; and back when Facebook still had folks writing meaningful posts, not doomscrolling mindless clickbait content made for degenerates and getting sucked into endless flame wars.

I’ve seen most of his foresight concepts come to life in Bluesky, where 20 million people already hang out. That’s one reason I’m writing this. If you don’t know, Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol). It supports independent communities that can swap data. Down the line, it’s supposed to turn into an open network of infinite independent communities.

Of course, Bluesky’s creator, Jack Dorsey, has probably never read Alexey’s stuff, and Alexey also had no clue what would happen a few years after he passed.

How did two people cook up similar groundbreaking ideas, at different times and places? I have a theory. Remember how Facebook popped up back in the day? It wasn’t the only or the first of its kind. The concept of social networks was obvious and inevitable at a certain point—it was just part of digitizing society. Zuckerberg just did it better than the rest, even though there were predecessors like Friendster and MySpace.

Today, a progressive minority—the people who often shape history—want freedom and decentralization. The success of platforms like Bluesky, though local, proves that. If a dev builds an app on a similar protocol, Bluesky’s users could jump ship and take their nicknames, comments, followers, and engagement with them. Sooner or later, one of these ideas could flip the whole game for the web, just like social networks did back in the day.

I recall being impressed by a billboard near the Facebook office, ten years ago in the Valley. You could faintly see the Sun Microsystems logo on its back, and the shiny Facebook emblem beamed on its front. I wonder if we’ll see another paradigm shift, and if so, who’ll step into the shoes of today’s Big Five tech corps?

So here’s my question: how would you lay down the principles for a new internet?

I’ve jotted down a few ideas off the top of my head, but I’d love to flesh them out more later:

• Our data should belong solely to us.

• Censorship, hidden limits, down-ranking, and clickbait feeds need to fade away, so we’re not trapped in manipulation and distortion. Page rankings and news feeds should be formed by transparent algorithms and user choices, not corporate dictates.

• Corps should not hide algorithms that affect user experience; we need transparency in content sorting.

• We need a distributed trust system where everyone picks who to believe, instead of relying on centralized gatekeepers.

• Social networks should be distributed and user-owned, not run by a handful of suits who think they’re invincible just because they got in first.

Can you add to this list? And is any of it even realistic?

It's almost midnight and I'm kicking back with some instant coffee – no sugar – in a B&B on the outskirts of Copenhagen, where I'm literally the only guest. This month, I hit the big 40. I spent 15 of those years hustling as an IT journalist. Tomorrow, I'll head back home to my usual grind, so I've muted all my messengers and sworn not to crash until I finish writing this piece.

Just a day ago, I got back from Greenland. I spent a week in the stunning country with virtually zero internet; cut off from work, endless pings from colleagues, and the nonstop juggling of micro-tasks.

I wasn't in Greenland for the touristy stuff. I hate tourism – it's like a plague that kills the souls of cities and countries, reducing everything to some bland, cookie-cutter experience. I used to be all about seeing the world, but after hitting 40+ countries, places started to blur together. There's the “central square with a church that some great author immortalized 400 years ago” – no different from a thousand other churches. And there's the "best pizza in town" spot where you won't find a single local, and the prices are jacked up compared to the café next door serving equally decent grub. You get the drift; no need to push it.

In Greenland, I was prepping for a marathon amidst the snow and ice, at a crisp -15°C. Over the past year, I'd knocked out a few half-marathons and the daily runs were getting stale. I craved a new challenge. Enters ‘training for a 42km race in one of the coldest spots on the planet’.

I wasn't expecting much from Greenland – I figured it's all snow and ice, and probably full of Danes. And Inuits? I thought they were just storybook characters and maybe 20 of them were left living in igloos in the middle of nowhere. I flew in to run and hadn't read up on the country, aside from some semi-adventurous tales by Danish explorer, Peter Freuchen. He’s the guy from those viral stories – the one who supposedly got trapped in an ice cave, crafted a knife out of his own poop, and dug his way out (spoiler: cool story, but not exactly true).

Harsh climates breed tough people. At the airport, this guy, around 30, was pushing two meters tall, rocking a beard, short hair, a light winter jacket, windproof pants, and a rapper-style cap with the sticker still on. His red, weather-beaten hands with half-healed scratches gave away his Greenlandic heritage, as did his awkward urge to light up right in the airport lounge. He was sneaking sips from a duty-free beer and occasionally dashed out to the freezing, windswept platform to smoke.

Then there was our pilot on the internal Greenland flight. A two-meter-tall jokester who, after saying "We're a free country with free people", invited a passenger to chill in the cockpit during the half-hour flight. Our group's coordinator, Bjorn, is a Dane. He's 80 and has spent 50 of those years connected to Greenland. "Why?" I asked him. "Look out the window," Bjorn replied. "There's nothing more beautiful in the world." And there's the marathon winner – a member of the local running club – who finished half an hour before everyone else, hugged his wife and kids, and didn't even look winded. No biggie – just 42 km over snow and ice at -15°C. His ancestors ran way more.

Life up north is all about simplicity. Seals and whales aren't exotic delicacies for tourists – they're just food for locals and their dogs. For centuries, Inuits didn't know about keto diets or veggies; they got all their vitamins and nutrients from meat. Take whale blubber or mattak, chew it with the skin for ages, and then swallow it whole. Whatever they caught is what they lived on, and they were glad to be alive. That's why exporting most local products to the mainland is banned. Hunting, still the main pastime for locals in winter, isn't mindless slaughter for souvenirs – it's a means to survive on an island 90% covered in ice.

Modern Greenland, however, isn't stuck in the past. Even a fishing village of 44 people has a cell tower, a government services center, and a telemedicine point. Traditional skin clothing exists, but most folks are decked out in Gore-Tex and warm, windproof jackets. Every boat has a Garmin GPS, and air travel covers pretty much the whole country. The local store isn't your typical supermarket. It's a general store with life's essentials, from apples and toothpaste to rifles. In remote settlements, these stores are subsidized by the government. Not by Europe or some foreign taxpayers, but by Greenland itself – a Danish autonomy with its own language, flag, culture, and traditions. Ask a Greenlander if they consider themselves Danish, and they'll laugh in your face.

Does this way of life make the locals unhappy? If anything, they're puzzled by the isolated life in Europe. One guy I chatted with – a Dane born in Greenland who later moved to the mainland – complained that on his birthday, he can only invite a small group of friends. Back in his hometown, people would post a visible notice in a public spot saying that Christian is celebrating his birthday on such-and-such date. That was enough for every villager to drop by with a gift and grab a drink or eat, depending on how generous the host was.

So why am I going on about Greenland? It's about a simple life filled with vivid colors and emotions – the kind of life endless streams of memes and dumb videos on social media are trying to replace. Maybe I should focus on telling stories about the positive impact of technology on our everyday lives in the near future.

Stay tuned for the next post.