The TVÍK manifesto

We're confronting a future of increased globalization. Even if we try to mitigate it with border control and protectionist policies, the culture-blending effects of digital spaces, remote work, wars, and cheap travel will continue to seep into cultures, undermining wonderful worlds of diverse insight, specialist knowledge, and culture, from traditional cultural values to memes and inside jokes. This process escalates cultural tensions between in-groups and out-groups, and damages cultural ecosystems. To protect the future of humanity from crises, self-made and natural, we must protect diversity and complexity from cultural homogeneity.

Teaching languages is important for people to understand each other. Not to understand each other in conversation and practical matters, but for empathy. Learning a language introduces not just new symbols for the same meanings, but opens up an alternative system of thinking about things. Through language, we cross cultural gates. We encounter worlds of different ways of doing things, subtle differences in our approaches, nuance and specialist knowledge, and learn new small pleasures to appreciate. We learn inside jokes and we discover new corners of the Internet previously inaccessible. And we find a different sense of belonging for when new worlds become available to us.

But teaching a language is hard! Teaching vocabulary is simple, but teaching the confidence to present oneself to a situation where one needs to use a new set and unfamiliar set of symbols, building the safety to be able to make mistakes in front of emotional humans, and developing cultural intuition is a complex challenge.

Teaching language while preserving culture is a subtle challenge. It is complex. It is best done by equally complex humans, complete with the ways they make mistakes and differ from their linguistic norms, the jokes, and the nuances. It is not a job AI can automate.

However, leaving the teaching process only to people is too expensive and slow. In-person education, such as tutoring or language classes, is expensive, because people's time and attention is valuable. The language acquisition process remains financially out of reach for many that need and want it the most — the immigrants, the nerds, the outcasts, the creators, and the academics. While English takes over an increasing amount of the world, we can finally find common language, but in doing so we also become less likely to use our own languages for practical matters, making it even less likely to adopt a new language solely through practical exchanges.

We must embrace the promise of technology in helping us bridge this gap, but we can't leave it to AI to slowly automate away our humanity, with our quirks and complexity. We can't apply simple solutions to complex problems, but we can make them easier to solve.

The work of capturing culture is difficult, and it cannot be profit-driven, nor can it be backed by venture capital. Optimizing for financial gain inherently cuts costs as well as corners, reduces complexity, and acts against the very diversity we are trying to protect.

TVÍK is an attempt to capture the language learning process while respecting diversity and complexity. It is software¹, a community-based language school², a story of a depressed robot³, an art collective⁴, and a dance party⁵. It is an attempt to make use of available technology to increase accessibility without compromising on quality and depth. It is an attempt to work with all of the complex feelings of finding one's identity in a new world of symbols instead of measuring engagement. It is an attempt to find ways to make learning accessible while remaining financially sustainable, and diverting the costs of the learning process to institutions instead of placing the financial burden on individuals. It is an amalgamation of human and robot output for the sole purpose of protecting what makes us human.

Gamithra and friends
April 2025