The question “how do I stay relevant?” is honest.

Romanian legislation has established precise standards for structuring and organising information on the websites of public institutions. The stated aim is accessibility and transparency in the relationship between citizens and the administration — with particular emphasis on the sites of local councils and educational establishments.

This article does not set out to be an investigation in the journalistic sense of the word: all the reference documents are publicly available to anyone on legislatie.just.ro. What it offers instead is a systematic reading of those documents — one that will prove useful to anyone who builds, audits, or maintains a public institution's website.

In the context of the digitalisation of public administration and growing demands for transparency, Romanian legislation (Government Decision 830/2022) has established standards for the structuring and organisation of information on public institution websites. This detailed regulation is aimed at ensuring a high degree of accessibility and transparency in the relationship between citizens and public administration — with particular relevance to the creation of school websites and local council websites.

Listen to the audio summary in Romanian and English

What follows is a mapping of the system by which Romania has transformed the relationship between citizens and public institutions through the regulation of how authorities present their information online. The documents examined reveal a profound shift in the very concept of administrative transparency.

The Behavioural Context of the Contemporary Digital Consumer — Too Long; Here's the Summary

On an ordinary Tuesday morning, Maria — a fifteen-year-old from Bucharest — wakes up and, within the first five minutes, checks three different apps. She scrolls, remembers she has history homework, opens an article, reads two sentences and closes the tab. Too long, she thinks. Then a notification appears: the same article, but rendered as a five-minute conversation between two people discussing the subject in an easy, unhurried way. She listens on the way to school. By the time she arrives, she knows the whole lesson.

"TL;DR — too long, didn't read — has become not just an internet joke, but a philosophy of life," observes a teacher who once sent his pupils a ten-page reading. Nobody read it. When he converted it into a short dialogue podcast, everyone listened.

This is where the story of a fundamental shift begins — a change in the way we consume information. It is not about laziness or superficiality. It is about how the very way our minds seek and process knowledge has been rewired in a world saturated with stimuli.

The Fragmented Attention Paradigm

"To be or not to be" — Shakespeare might ask today — "attentive to a single thing for more than eight seconds?" The contemporary answer appears to be an overwhelming no.

When our grandparents read the morning paper, their attention moved lineally, calmly, along columns of newsprint. Today, a teenager receives on average 237 notifications a day. Every ping, every vibration of the phone, every banner that appears from nowhere shatters attention into ever-smaller fragments. It is like trying to drink water from a cracked glass — theoretically possible, practically exhausting.

The phenomenon experts call scroll fatigue — the weariness of endless scrolling — has become the daily reality of millions of young people. The swipe left, swipe right gesture, once the exclusive property of dating apps, now defines our entire relationship with information. We see something, we assess in a fraction of a second whether it merits our time, and we either stop or move on. Most of the time, we move on.

It was a short message. The kind written by someone who knows they have one chance — a single read before deletion — and so compresses everything into a tight, salutation-free opening, with a small, precise blow in the first line. "Most Romanian brands DO NOT appear at all in AI responses." The DO NOT in capitals. Deliberate.

I read it twice. Not because it had convinced me, but because it had stopped me — and that is a rare thing, amid the daily stream of messages I scroll through with the half-awake eyes of a man who has seen enough pitches in eight years of building websites for public institutions. Something in the phrasing had caught on something. Perhaps it was "do not exist" — not "appears less often", not "has reduced visibility", but simply: does not exist. As though absence from a chatbot's generated response is equivalent to metaphysical non-being.

I stood up from my desk. I reached for the cup of coffee that had already gone cold, because I'd stood up half an hour earlier to answer something my son had asked and had forgotten all about it — which is perfectly normal in this house, where cold coffee has somehow become a symbol of how I live, with my attention perpetually fragmented between work and family and thoughts that can never quite find their peace. I drank it cold. And I began to think.

What Fear Looks Like When It's Professionally Packaged

There is a kind of fear you don't feel suddenly, like an alarm — you absorb it slowly, through repetition. The message from Marius — or from whoever signed it as Marius, because I have no way of knowing if that is a person or a campaign alias — operates on precisely this logic. It doesn't tell you "you are in danger now". It tells you "you may already be falling behind, and you don't even know it." It is a more insidious fear, because it has no precise moment of arrival. It enters through the door of uncertainty that anyone building something — a business, a blog, an online presence — carries with them wherever they go.

In recent months, the internet has filled up with advice. Not ordinary advice — advice delivered in a particular tone, one I have come to recognise after years in this field: the tone of manufactured certainty.

"Structure your content as a FAQ and AI will cite you."

"Build topical authority and you'll appear in model responses."

"Optimise for AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — and stay visible in the age of artificial intelligence."

I read these and find myself thinking the same thought I had ten years ago, when Romanian SEO was overrun with "experts" who guaranteed you the first page of Google within thirty days. The same tone. The same certainty. The same fundamental dishonesty about the real complexity of the subject.

Only this time, the object of all these promises is harder to verify, harder to contest, and far more tempting to believe.

Where This Anxiety Comes From

I need to say something about the context in which these pieces of advice take root — because without that context, my critique might seem like cynicism, or the snobbery of a specialist.

There is a genuine fear behind the question "how do I appear in AI responses." A fear I understand, because I live it too, in my own way.

If you are a writer, a journalist, a specialist, a consultant, or simply someone who has built something online over the past few years, you are probably watching the same spectacle unfold: people are starting to ask questions of a chatbot instead of searching on Google. And the chatbot answers. It does not send them to you. It does not cite your article. It tells the user what to do, directly, without intermediaries.

The visibility you spent years building — through articles, through SEO, through a constant presence — seems to be evaporating behind a white screen with a blinking cursor.

The anxiety, then, is legitimate. The question "how do I stay relevant?" is sincere.

The problem is that the industry — the one that sells courses, consultancy, and "proven strategies" — has rushed to fill the void with comfortable answers. Answers that sound like solutions, but which usually conceal a fundamental ignorance of, or dishonesty about, how things actually work.

I am sitting in the cinema and thinking that there are places which have no need of publicity. Places that breathe within their own silence, indifferent to the fact that no one comes to photograph them or transform them into weekend destinations. Tudor Giurgiu has just finished the film. The Spruce Forest — that simple, almost banal title, which conceals something you do not know how to name: a particular density, a humidity of the air that enters the lungs and stays there, like a thought you return to without meaning to. The director is now in dialogue with the audience. He answers with that apparent ease of people who have thought deeply before speaking — and I listen to him and think about the way some people seem already to have digested what others are only just beginning to feel.

…the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air.

The Holy Fathers would have said that there is a work of the heart that precedes the word. That before one can speak rightly about something, one must have passed through it with the heart, not merely with the mind. Saint Isaac the Syrian, in his Words on the Ascetic Life, writes that one who has not wept does not know what joy is — that these are not opposites, but steps, one after the other, one through the other. Giurgiu's film has brought me, without my knowing it, to one such step.

And so I say, without thinking too hard about it, that our county too has a spruce forest. At Oroftiana. I say this and immediately feel how something shifts in the auditorium — a silence that is not indifference, but rather a pause, a brief stillness in people who hear a word they are not sure whether they have heard before or only dreamt. Oroftiana. A name with a particular weight, with those long syllables that sound of another era, another world — a world in which places had owners with names, in which the nobility left their mark on toponymy, in which the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air.

It is not a spectacular passage. It has no martyrs, no barricades, no smouldering ruins. What it leaves behind, instead, are flats occupied by tenants who will never become owners, bank accounts without physical cash, music without records, films without cassettes, work without long-term contracts — an existence in which almost nothing truly belongs to the person living it.

The most enduring chains are not those a man feels at his wrists, but those he comes to call ”safe”.

When man ceased to be necessary — the slow birth of a world in which survival becomes a granted privilege

There are historical transformations that contemporaries only recognise after they have already occurred. The Industrial Revolution did not arrive one morning to the beat of drums and notices posted on walls. It came in through the back door — in the workshop of a blacksmith in Birmingham who noticed he was receiving fewer orders, in the hands of a weaver in Lancashire who had lost his clientele without anyone ever telling him why. The truly decisive changes do not arrive announced; they arrive disguised as convenience.

The West today looks, on the surface, like a victory. The shops are full. Deliveries arrive in twenty minutes. Screens pulse in every flat, every pocket, every waiting room. A man from 1950, had he been able to peer through a window at this world, would have believed he was witnessing the prosperity Marx had written about, without the conflicts Marx had predicted. And yet, beneath this illuminated, connected surface, there unfolds — quietly and methodically — one of the most profound transformations of the human condition in the past several centuries: the passage from man as producer to man as recipient.

The portrait of the urban man, "why comfort is dangerous, similar to the Lotus Island in Homer's Odyssey" — and what we can do on Monday morning — on a Friday in May as an argument.

'He throws his rubbish out of the window in the hope that nobody sees him.'

It is half past seven in the morning, a Friday in May, and I step out the door with a simple intention: the market. Not a delivery app, not a supermarket with white lights and ambient music calibrated for mild anxiety. The market. The one with faded awnings, with the smell of pickles and warm bread mingling in the air like an old promise, with people who know your name and with conversations that have no hashtag and end with no call to action.

I take the same road I have taken for years. Botoșani on a Friday morning has a particular rhythm — it is not the rush of a large city, nor the drowsiness of a town that sleeps in. It is something in between: a community that wakes, recognises itself, exchanges a few words, and moves on. A human rhythm, pre-digital, resistant to optimisation.

I am not sure I realise in that moment that this day will become, in my mind, an argument. A counter-argument, more precisely. Against a portrait I have watched grow around me like a sophisticated weed: the modern urban man, comfortable to the point of disalignment, at ease to the point of emptiness.

I. The WhatsApp Group, Tuesday Evening, 22:47

It all began the way important things usually begin in our lives — with a throwaway message in a WhatsApp group.

Mihai — a full-stack programmer with fourteen years of experience, the kind of man who can write working code in any language given an hour and a black coffee — sent a link accompanied by three words: 'read this, lads.' The link led to an article about the implicit misalignment of artificial intelligence: the idea that neither humans nor machines come by default calibrated towards the common good. That alignment — whether human or artificial — is always a construct, never a natural state.

Andrei, a systems engineer at a public institution in the county, replied within ten minutes: 'nothing new there — that's bureaucracy every single day.' Ciprian, the other programmer in the group — a backend specialist, the type who speaks rarely but precisely, like a compiler with no errors — sent a grinning skull emoji. Bogdan, the IT man in equipment sales, someone who knows more psychology than tech but would never admit it aloud, wrote: 'let's talk on Friday.' And Relu — the third programmer, the youngest among them, twenty-nine years old, who had caught the React and cloud wave and who uses ChatGPT with a casualness that makes the others feel suddenly old — added: 'Friday works for me, but I reckon AI is better aligned than people. Fight me.'

'As the saying goes: the dog barks, the caravan moves on,' replied Bogdan. 'We'll sort it out on Friday.'

II. Preparing for the Meeting — Thursday Evening, Each at Home

Andrei sits at his desk in the living room, laptop open, a slice of bread and brined cheese beside the keyboard, reading. Not for the first time is he reading about misalignment — he has worked for nine years in a state institution and experiences misalignment daily: in procedures that fail to align, in objectives that contradict other objectives, in forms that request data nobody processes and nobody uses. But now he reads with different eyes. Not as a frustrated employee, but as a man trying to understand why things are the way they are.

The broader context — why being small makes you vulnerable. A small business does not mean a small risk.

I remember that my father, who spent his whole life repairing cars in a neighbourhood garage, always used to say that a thief doesn't break into houses with big dogs — he breaks into the ones with a low fence and the lights off. He was not a man given to elaborate metaphors; he was a man of mechanics, of tangible things, of direct cause and effect. If something wasn't working, you found the cause, you fixed it, you moved on. He knew nothing about cybersecurity, had never heard of Business Email Compromise, had never read any FTC report about the scams battering SMEs across America and Europe alike. But he had understood something fundamental about the nature of vulnerability: that nobody attacks you where you are strong and prepared — they attack you where you are distracted, rushed, tired, and above all, where you believe you are too small to matter.

I run a small firm. Based in Botoșani, in north-eastern Romania, a region that Bucharest systematically ignores and that investment maps pass through without stopping. I build websites for town halls, hospitals, schools, and private companies that have come to understand that existing on the internet is no longer a luxury — it is a condition of survival. I have clients who ask for quotes on European-funded projects and clients who negotiate the price of an SSL certificate with me as if they were haggling over tomatoes at a market. And within this entire spectrum of daily reality — invoices, contracts, emails, deadlines, deliverables, DNSC [National Directorate of Cyber Security] vulnerability reports, GDPR compliance, NIS2, Law 232 — I have discovered, particularly over the last two years, that I am not merely a provider of digital services. I am also a target.

Not a large, spectacular target of the kind that makes the news. Not a company with hundreds of employees, not a bank, not an operator of critical infrastructure. I am precisely the type of target that digital fraudsters prefer precisely because it is small, precisely because it has no IT department with twenty people and a well-paid CISO, precisely because behind the firm there is a single person who, at ten o'clock in the evening, is answering emails whilst his teenage son asks him to watch something together on YouTube, and the cat — Gri, a grey cat with the temperament of a Stoic philosopher — sleeps on the laptop keyboard with an indifference that is almost insulting towards the problems of the digital world.

Charting a Battlefield in Transformation. In the autumn of 2025, as I write these lines, I find myself in the paradoxical position of the historian who tries to document the present. It is rather like attempting to draw a map of a battlefield whilst the bombardment still echoes in the distance, whilst the front line shifts with every hour that passes. 

I set out to write about the artificial intelligence tools I use daily, only to discover quickly that this apparent simplicity conceals a vertiginous complexity. Every week brings a new model, a new capability, a new promise. Claude Sonnet 4.5 was released at the end of September, transforming the industry's standards in the field of programming. A mere fortnight later, Claude Haiku 4.5 was demonstrating that near-peak performance can come in a faster and more economical package. In August, GPT-5 had arrived with great fanfare, promising a new era of artificial reasoning.

I am overwhelmed. I admit this without embarrassment, the way an honest general acknowledges that his map is becoming obsolete before it is even finished. But this sense of being overwhelmed is not resignation — it is that paradoxical state in which the awareness of one's own limits becomes the starting point for the search for pragmatic solutions.

What follows is not an academic treatise on artificial intelligence, nor a comprehensive technical review. It is a letter to you, the reader, written from the trenches of an ordinary user attempting to navigate this landscape of constant change. It is the confession of someone who seeks simple solutions for complex problems, who accepts that he cannot know everything, yet still hopes to understand enough to be of use.

Just as Beevor reconstructed the battles of Normandy by intersecting the perspective of the soldier in the trenches with that of the general at headquarters, so too shall I attempt to blend technical detail with human experience, the particular with the universal, enthusiasm with scepticism.