Interlude. Bishkek

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I flew to Bishkek twice for the digital nomad festival, and both times I remembered the people better than the festival programme. Digital nomads are people who work from a laptop and live wherever they happen to like at the moment, and the festival gathers them in one city for a few days so that they can finally see each other off-screen. At such gatherings there is always a lot of talk about startups that are just about to take off.

At one of these festivals, in a restaurant, I met Ivan Limarev for the third time. We had met earlier, on a mutual friend’s yacht, where I was talking about DAOs, decentralised autonomous organisations, and later we ran into each other by chance in Bali, where he thanked me for the talk about DAOs while I stood in front of him trying to remember where I knew that face from. I am bad at recognising faces myself, while Vanya reads them professionally. He came up with neurotypology, a method that tries to read the structure of a personality from the face, essentially a modern physiognomy grounded in neurophysiology. Academic science is sceptical of it, and I too will not claim that character can reliably be read from the shape of a face. But Vanya travelled to some twenty-five countries, looked at hundreds of thousands of faces and kept at it, and there was something in that stubbornness I always liked.