Not long ago, the internet was built in a simple and almost honest way: people wrote for people. Someone shared experience, someone argued, someone sold, someone explained, someone made mistakes, someone searched for truth, and someone simply wanted to be heard. The web was noisy, imperfect and overloaded, but at its core there was still a human logic: pages, authors, sources, opinions, personal experience, forums, blogs, company websites, media, comments, a search bar and a long journey from question to answer. Now that model is quickly becoming part of the past.

Nikolai Nosov novel Dunno on the Moon written in 1964 is a mirror of modern reality. It is a story about a world ruled by the hunger for money, profit, and entertainment — a world that turns people into sheep.

It was one of those scientific stories that seems almost impossible. A Soviet researcher who had never set foot in Mexico managed to do what the world’s leading Mayanists had failed to achieve for decades: he proved the phonetic character of Maya writing and opened the way to reading it. Not through a jungle expedition, not through a sensational archaeological discovery, not through a new bilingual inscription like the Rosetta Stone, but through work at a desk, with books, tables, manuscripts and iron logic. Later, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov would say, almost defiantly: “I am an armchair scholar. To work with texts, there is no need to climb pyramids.” In that sentence there was defence, irony and the pain of a man who for too long was not allowed to visit the cultural world of his greatest discovery.