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

At the PC, at home, with an idea that refuses to come out. The cursor blinks. Blinks again. I've been staring at it for about ten minutes without having written anything — or rather, I've written and deleted the same first sentence three times, each time sounding either too grave, or too breezy, or simply false — that particular kind of false you sense immediately when you're writing not because you're thinking, but because you want to appear to be thinking.

Outside it's morning in Botoșani, which means cars can be heard on the street out front, the neighbour from the second floor has already switched on the television, and Gri is sitting on the windowsill watching a bird he will never catch, with a concentration I cannot replicate at the keyboard. I've had one coffee. I opened a second tab with Google News and closed it immediately, irritated by what was there — AI news, again, constantly, as though AI were the only thing that had happened in the world since 2022. I opened the file again. The cursor blinks.

The idea I'm trying to write does exist — I'm certain of that. I can feel it somewhere in the region of my stomach, or perhaps higher up, in that imprecise place in the chest where things collect when you know them but haven't yet put them into words. It's connected to something I've been noticing over the past few months without being able to articulate clearly: the major platforms have each launched their own AI, and all of these AIs resemble walls more than doors. Google has launched Gemini integrated into Search, Gmail and Drive; Microsoft has embedded Copilot into Windows and Office; Meta has AI in Instagram and WhatsApp; Apple has announced Apple Intelligence across every native application. And when I look at all of this together, I don't see a revolution — I see large companies that have grown frightened and built defences.

For the more pragmatic reader, the correct title would be "From Toxic Expectations to Rational Estimates" — I should warn you that the topic of my online reading is secondary and creates a frustration of utility. Read the text without expecting perfection, but instead estimating what can usefully be extracted from it. If the estimate is confirmed, good; if not, recalibrate for next time.

The hospital corridor, the yellow chair, and the theory of estimates. I was waiting on a yellow plastic chair in the radiology corridor of the County Hospital in Botoșani, and I don't know why I noticed it then — more acutely than usual — the colour of that yellow: a bleached yellow that had long ceased to be yellow, that had become a memory of yellow, a yellow that had given up on itself without being replaced by anything, remaining in that state of nowhere that clings to the retina and follows you after you leave. I had a dull ache in my right shoulder for about two weeks — the kind of pain that doesn't kill you but doesn't let you forget that you exist, the kind our grandparents — practical people, people who had no patience for vague ailments — called rheumatism and treated with spirits rubbed on the spot and a philosophical shrug of the shoulders, nothing to be done about it, it'll pass, while I was treating it with ibuprofen and postponement, which is the oldest Romanian therapy and probably the most ineffective in the long run, though in the short run it is admirable for its convenience. This article is not an advertorial and contains no sponsored content.

My son was next to me on the adjacent chair — not that he wanted to be there, because at fourteen hospitals are places where old people and sick people go who are not you, not yours, and his presence there was more of an errand on Saturday's timetable than a voluntary act of filial solidarity. He had come with me on foot because I don't drive short distances when my right shoulder is compromised, because his mother couldn't, and because, in the end, I asked him to come and he didn't say no — which, at fourteen, is already a form of love, even if nobody says so out loud. He sat with his head slightly tilted towards his own screen, headphones on, with music from which deep bass tones leaked into the air between us like an invisible glass wall — I could see him, I could feel the warmth of his shoulder ten centimetres from mine, but we were, at the same time, in completely separate worlds, each in our own screen, though each of us would occasionally look up when I shifted in my seat and said hello or exchanged a few words with acquaintances, neighbours, childhood friends — you know how it is, the world is very small, and yet these people had no real business being there but would appear exhaustingly from nowhere... no, in fact it was a hospital.

Optimisation. That, in essence, is the crisis of modern marketing. Not a shortage of tools. Not a shortage of data. But the illusion — as old as the world, as new as a SaaS product with a fourteen-day free trial — that tools and data are marketing. That if you hold a good axe, the forest fells itself.

"MarTech is a good idea — but until it manifests at the front line, what does it matter? You just have a pile of numbers." — Jay Baer, marketing consultant and author

I once had a conversation with a man who ran the marketing department of a mid-sized company. He was as proud as a peacock. On his desk — metaphorically speaking, since everything was on screen — dashboards were lined up alongside automation platforms, a CRM, e-mail marketing tools, predictive analytics, heatmaps, A/B testing, and at least three subscriptions to services whose names sounded like freshly coined spells: sophisticated, promising, expensive. The total budget allocated to these tools exceeded the combined salaries of five members of his own team.

I asked him: "And how are sales going?"

He hesitated for a second — that second in which a person knows the truth but is searching for a formulation that won't sting. Then he said: "We're working on optimisation."

The Diagnosis: What Has Gone Wrong, and Why?  Before we discuss remedies, we must be honest about the illness. And the illness is not a pretty one.

Marketing has a credibility problem — not with the public, but with itself. There is a saying for this: "A lie has short legs." In a world where we have access to the most sophisticated platforms in the history of commercial communication, global conversion rates are stagnating at around 1%. Just one per cent. Mark Hurd, the former CEO of Oracle, said it plainly in front of over a hundred marketing directors: "Perhaps something is fundamentally broken in the way we think about marketing."

That is not an accusation. It is a diagnosis. And as with any illness, if you do not know what you have, the treatment does more harm than good.

The symptoms are visible to anyone willing to see them — and many are not:

Brand promises that do not match the product delivered. Domo — a business intelligence platform — spent years selling the image of a revolutionary product, with the fervour of a salesman promising the moon. Their campaigns: impeccable. Their targeting: surgical. Their messaging: coherent and dazzling. Customers bought. And then they left — like guests at a wedding where the food ran out before the cake. Why? Because marketing had sold a thoroughbred, and the product delivered a plough horse. No marketing technology can repair a false promise. It merely shouts it more loudly, to more people, more often.

I remember exactly what my father's desk looked like. Not that he had a proper desk — it was a corner of the sitting room, a wooden table with a drawer that never closed completely, where he kept bills, a biro without its cap, and a notebook filled with phone numbers written in a hand I now recognise in my own handwriting when I am in a hurry. There was nothing digital there. Everything was paper, ink, physical trace. If someone wanted to take something, they had to enter the house, open the drawer, touch the paper. Objects had a material resistance.

Now I sit at my own desk — which is a laptop on a table, beside a cup of coffee I left there the previous evening — and I try to come to terms with the fact that everything I have written over the past eight years exists in a format that a machine can hoover up in a matter of seconds, without opening any drawer, without touching anything, without leaving any trace that it passed through.

And the first question that comes to me is not a technical one. It is an older question, a more personal one: what does it mean to defend your work when your work no longer has any physical weight?

Before Any Strategy, an Acknowledgement

I am not a technical person by training. I am someone who came to understand technology through necessity — through years of managing websites for town halls, hospitals, and schools in Botoșani, through configuration errors discovered at midnight, through documentation read with a coffee in hand and a low-grade frustration that things were not working as they should.

And it is precisely for that reason that I believe I can speak about how AI robots read your site from a vantage point that many technical analysts miss: the place where technology meets the question of why it matters to me, as someone who writes.

Because yes, there is a technical dimension to everything that follows. But beneath all of it there is a simpler and, at the same time, harder question: you, as a creator — what relationship do you want to have with the machines that read your content without asking permission?

I arrived at two possible answers. They are not opposites. They are complementary, like two ways of being, simultaneously, both resistant and shrewd.

Advertorial interview with Cristi Teslaru

The showroom on Strada Iașului, on the edge of Botoșani, bears no resemblance to the sleek tool displays you find in German trade catalogues. There are no chrome stands bathed in LED light, no video presentations about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Instead, on solid metal shelving arranged with an almost military precision, rows of hot-air welding guns stand in careful formation — instruments that look as though they have stepped out of some forgotten industrial era, when craft meant heavy metal in your hand and absolute faith in mechanical simplicity.

It is Monday morning, 17 February 2025. Cristi Teslaru lifts a Leister Triac ST hot-air welding gun towards the light. It costs 3,200 lei — roughly a month's average wage in Botoșani. In his hand, the thing looks almost unremarkable: an elongated metal body, something vaguely resembling an oversized soldering iron, with a sharp brass tip. But inside that studied plainness lives a Swiss precision refined across decades of industrial use: an electronic thermostat calibrated to a tenth of a degree, a ceramic heating element rated for over 5,000 hours, a tip made from a proprietary alloy that distributes heat evenly and withstands extreme mechanical wear. There are also fully automated alternatives — the TECHON range from Bak — for those with different needs.

"People compare prices and can't understand why a Leister gun costs ten times more than a Chinese one they've found online," he says, setting the instrument carefully back on the shelf. "They think they're paying for the same thing. But the difference only becomes visible after the first hundred hours of intensive use. The cheap one dies, or loses its calibration. Leister keeps welding at the same precise temperature, with the same reliability, year after year."

On the demonstration table, beside samples of waterproofing membranes — black HDPE polyethylene, blue PVC for pool linings, TPO sheets for flat roofs — lie thick technical catalogues: Leister from Switzerland, Herz from Germany, Forsthoff, Dohle also from Germany. Names that mean nothing to the ordinary consumer, but which for the specialist tradesman represent the line between professional workmanship and amateur improvisation.

This article is a confession, not a manifesto. I make no claim to represent a school of thought. I make a more modest and more dangerous claim: to say what I have seen.

The solitude of the one who does not applaud. There is a specific moment — and anyone who has lived through it will know exactly which moment I mean — when you feel that the entire room is clapping and you sit there with your hands in your lap, not from laziness, not from ill will, but because you have seen nothing that merited applause.

That moment is uncomfortable. Not because you are certain you are right. But because you are not certain you are wrong, either. And it is precisely this suspension, this lucid indecision, that makes you invisible in public discourse, where either enthusiasm or fear is required — both at high volume, both selling well on social media, both convenient for the industry that produces hype.

I arrived at my scepticism towards generative artificial intelligence by a route that passes through no laboratory. I arrived at it through day-to-day work with Romanian public institutions — town halls, schools, county councils — that were buying or wanted to buy "AI solutions" without really knowing what they were purchasing and, more importantly, without knowing what they were losing through the mere act of purchasing. I arrived at it through reading: the Philokalia, Jung, Noica, Petre Țuțea. Through conversations with ordinary people who told me, with that direct intuition that poverty and a hard life cultivate, that "many words, little wisdom" — and that a machine producing thousands of words per second ought to be regarded with the same suspicion you reserve for the person talking loudest at a party.

But for a time — to be honest, for more than a time — I felt alone in this position. Not persecuted. Not marginalised. Simply alone. Like the man in the village who says the cloud in the west is bringing rain and everyone else looks at the weather app on their phone.

Then I found them.

Not by systematic searching. I did not compile a thematic bibliography of AI sceptics. I found them one by one, in different periods, each appearing in my field of vision through a reference, an article, a debate that reached me through the oblique channels of the internet. And each time I felt the same thing: recognition. Not mechanical agreement — that we think in exactly the same way — but the deeper recognition: someone had placed their hand on the same wall and felt the same cold.

Their names are Gary Marcus, Ted Chiang, and Karl Friston. None of them is Romanian. None of them reads the Philokalia, in all likelihood. And yet.

This morning I reread an e-mail I had sent three weeks ago to a school headteacher in Dorohoi. It was a Tuesday, I think, or perhaps a Wednesday — I can't be certain any more; days blur into one another during periods when I work a great deal and sleep badly. I was sitting at my desk with a coffee beside the keyboard, Gri (the cat) was asleep in a ball on the chair in the corner, and outside it was raining with that fine, insistent October drizzle — the sort of rain that doesn't bother you, but won't let you forget it's there either.

The e-mail was good. It genuinely was good. I had written it with care, revised it twice, added a reference to a specific school project I had found on the council's website, framed the proposal clearly, and placed the call to action exactly where it ought to be. Every rule observed. Everything I knew to work, applied correctly.

I received no reply.

And that morning, rather than moving on as I usually do — because you normally do move on, because if you don't you seize up and stop doing anything — I paused and asked myself a question that, I realised on the spot, I had never truly asked myself before.

Not "Why" didn't he reply.

But "What did I actually know" about him when I wrote it, and "What is the context" — the local market — in which it was received?

The answer came quickly, and it was uncomfortable in that particular way uncomfortable answers have of being clear and final, with no room for negotiation: I knew almost nothing. I knew his title — headteacher. I knew the institution — a school in a town in the north of Moldavia that I had never visited. I knew the school had run a European project two years earlier, from the public information I had found online. I didn't know whether the man read his e-mails himself or had someone filter them for him. I didn't know whether the local authority had blocked or released budgets that quarter. I didn't know whether he was weary of suppliers writing to him, whether he had just had an inspection, whether he was on sick leave, whether his secretary deleted e-mails from unknown suppliers before they ever reached him.

Why does your sales e-mail convince nobody? And what should you do instead?

There is a strange moment I experience every morning — a moment that, if I described it to someone who doesn't work in the digital world, would seem entirely banal, almost ridiculous as a subject for reflection: I open my inbox and work through, with a patience they don't deserve, a pile of unsolicited messages written by people I don't know, about services I'm not sure I need, phrased in a language that tells me everything about the sender and nothing about me. And I think, as I delete them one by one, that somewhere out there is a person who wrote these messages in the genuine belief that they would persuade. That behind every hastily worded subject line there is a sincere hope — behind every "Good Morning, How Are You?" dropped into the void like a stone thrown into a dark lake, without knowing whether there is still water there or whether it has frozen over. The Romanian popular expression "like a walnut in the wall"

And it is precisely this sincere, unfounded hope that troubles me most. Not stupidity, nor bad faith — but ignorance. The fact that there are people who work honestly, who offer real and valuable services, and who still reach nobody, because they don't know that persuasion has a logic, an order, a set of principles that neither you nor I invented, but which were described by a man named Robert Cialdini four decades ago, after years of research — and which the ordinary Romanian knows intuitively through proverbs and grandparents' stories, without ever having read them set down in academic form.

The idea that takes shape beyond the story and beyond personal intuitions is a cold and economic one: it is not the quantity of work that makes the difference, but the way in which it is distributed.

I think about my father's hands. I don't know why I start there, but that is where I go every time I want to understand something about real work — about what it actually means to know how to do something. His hands had a texture I have never been able to forget, though I have tried. Not because they were ugly — on the contrary — but because they held something I do not have, something that still intimidates me now, at my age, when I ought to have moved past this kind of comparison. They were a mechanic's hands. Cracked at the knuckles, with nails that no amount of soap could restore to the white of an office worker's hands. The black of engine oil had settled there as a second skin, older and more truthful than the first.

My father knew how to do everything.

He repaired cars, of course — that was his trade, the workshop in Botoșani where the air smelt of burnt oil and the warm metal of an engine cooling after a long journey. But he also repaired the roof when the rain came in, and the electrics when there was a short circuit, and the neighbour's rubber boots, and the black-and-white television, and my three-speed bicycle, which I broke every summer with the same systematic enthusiasm. He never refused. That was his pride — that there was nothing in the world he could not do, fix, or restore to the state it ought to be in.

And I admired him for it. Sincerely, without reservation, with that uncracked admiration of a child who has not yet seen enough of the world.

I am forty now and I understand something different. I understand that my father was exhausted. No one asked me that at the time and I didn't ask myself — children don't see their parents' tiredness, or they see it and choose not to name it, because naming it would make it real. But the tiredness was there, in the way he rose from the table and went straight to the workshop after supper, in the way his day of rest was never truly rest, because someone always turned up with something to repair, and he could not refuse, because to refuse would have meant saying he didn't know how — and that was unthinkable.

He knew how to do everything. That was precisely why he could never stop.

A comfortable illusion. There is a lie we tell ourselves collectively, every day, each time we open a chatbot and receive a response that sounds like wisdom. The lie is not spoken aloud. It doesn't appear in terms and conditions. It cannot be proved in any court. It is subtler than that: it is the feeling that we have understood something. That we have thought. That we have arrived, through our own intellectual effort combined with the power of the machine, at a valid conclusion. 'As stated above.' It is an introduction that refuses to be merely an introduction.

It is not true.

It is not true, and it is not harmless. And precisely because it is so comfortable, so fluid, so nearly inevitable — it deserves to be examined with the very instruments we are, paradoxically, allowing ourselves to lose in its presence: critical thinking, patience, the capacity to bear uncertainty without pressing a button.

Sit with that for a moment. Don't continue. Don't scroll.

There is a moment in any genuine act of reading when the resistance of the text makes you stop. When the sentence doesn't yield immediately and you have to work. That moment of friction — that small cognitive discomfort — is precisely where understanding happens. Not before. Not after. There, in that uncomfortable interstitial space.

Now imagine that moment disappearing. That there is always a voice to complete the sentence, summarise the argument, serve you the conclusion on a digital silver tray. Imagine that disappearing systematically, across millions of minds, day after day, over the course of a few years.

That is not a working hypothesis. It is a description of the present.