The TVÍK manifesto
Our world is shrinking. Digital spaces blending into reality, people moving anywhere, working from anywhere, cheap flights to anywhere, all mixing together like watercolors in a puddle. Increased connection is beautiful, crucial even. Offering openness and welcoming friendliness gets easier as we get better at understanding others from formerly faraway places. But in the process of blending, we are losing sight of little packets of cultural code, inside jokes whispered in native tongues, ways of seeing that have lasted for generations and survived countless updates.
This isn’t just nostalgia talking from a mindless fear or nationalistic pride. The global merging has a hidden cost. Like how an ancient forest full of interdependent species can withstand what would devastate a uniform single-species plantation, a world with fewer ways of thinking is just as fragile. Different minds, different hearts, different values carried by different words are needed for a healthy cultural immune system to weather whatever storms are coming. These native expressions and ancestral perspectives are the encrypted backups of humanity's memory. And maybe if we put aside more space for everyone's uniqueness, we won't grip our identities so tightly, won't fear losing who we are.
Languages are important magic portals into cultural souls, as vital and varied as the ecosystems of the world. When you learn a new language, you’re not just assigning new symbols to the same old things. Once you’ve learned the symbols, you notice the new ways of making sense of the world that are hidden between the lines and the grammar rules. You find symbolic places where people live differently, think differently, and laugh at different jokes. You unlock corners of the Internet we never knew existed and find new homes in places you once couldn't even see.
But oh, acquiring a new language is hard! It's not just the vocabulary – that is the easy part. It's finding the courage to open your mouth and speak these strange new sounds for another human to decode. It is the willingness to make mistakes, to be misunderstood, to feel like a child again for long enough to make progress in a world where seeming smart is rewarded. Learning a language is emotional. It's messy. It's kernel panic. It's falling down and getting up again. The process of finding your identity in a new system of symbols is full of fears, memory leaks and emotional tangles.
Teaching language while preserving its cultural soul is delicate work. Language carries purpose beyond mere utility. It needs humans – wonderfully complicated, sometimes glitchy, joke-telling, imperfect humans. It is by its nature ever-changing, human, messy and imperfect, and therefore not a job we can wait for AI can automate.
But leaving it all to people is too slow, too expensive. Not everyone can afford language classes or tutors that will remain expensive as long as we assign price tags to other people's time and attention. The people who need language the most – immigrants, outcasts, creators, dreamers – are often the ones who can least afford to learn. And while English spreads like wildfire across the globe, we use our own languages less and less, making it harder to pick up new ones through everyday life.
We need technology's help, but we can't let machines automate away our complexity. There are no simple answers here, but we can use tech to make the impossible at least hackable. We can find a balance between efficiency and beauty.
This work of preserving cultural source code and building tutorials for new places to belong can't be driven by profit or funded by venture capital. Money always wants to simplify, to cut corners as well as costs, to smooth out the very diversity we want 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 sad robot3 searching for meaning beyond its programmed directives, an art collective4, and a dance party5. It is about using technological advancements to assist inclusion. 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 belonging accessible. TVÍK is humans and robots working together to help us stay human.
Gamithra and friends
April 2025
1The bulk of the TVÍK software is the learning app, but that's not all! We've also got a web application for tutors, a license management dashboard for institutions, a lesson editor, and an analytics management system. And this cool website, of course. And there's so much more to make.
2 We've got a vibrant learning community on Discord with community events and people helping each other out, both with grammar and with the practical matters of living in Iceland. And we do private tutoring, too!
3 The course follows a single storyline. There are other characters, too, of course. And even TVÍK is not always depressed. But the story is about a teacher robot that grapples with an identity crisis and secretly hopes to become human. It's a bit of a metaphor for the whole thing, really.
4 All the amazing images are drawn by Johann Marga. We've got a soundtrack composed by Klaus Jancis. We've got a podcast called Human Icelandic, and we've got some fun video content coming up. And we're always looking for more artists to collaborate with! If you're interested, please reach out!
5 To celebrate the launch of TVÍK, we threw a rave in a former potato storage unit in Reykjavík in March 2025. We had German techno, northern lights, and a smoke machine. There will be more.