ARTICLE 1: The End of Friction: How AI Became Humanity's Most Efficient Intermediary for Evil

PART I: THE HUMAN – Intimate Violence and the Externalisation of Cruelty

From the series "Technology changes tools, not human violence" Art 1 of 15 and Supplements

History does not repeat. It automates.

Pick up a sword. Feel the weight of the steel. Feel the balance. To kill a man with a sword, you must step into his space. You must feel the resistance of his bone. You must look into his eyes as the light leaves them. Your biology will rebel. Your mirror neurons will fire. Your hand will shake.

This resistance is not a moral failing. It is a biological tax.

For ten thousand years, the story of human violence has been the story of friction. Friction is the physical effort required to hurt someone. It is the draw weight of a longbow. It is the distance of a musket ball. It is the time it takes to strangle.

But friction is also moral. It is the psychological weight of the act. It is the empathy that forces you to pause. It is the guilt that keeps you awake. Empathy is a friction. Remorse is a friction. Consequence is a friction.

Every tool we have ever invented has been, at its core, a friction-reduction machine. We build tools to bypass the biological tax. The bow let you kill from further away. The printing press let you spread hatred without shouting. The assembly line let you build bombs without seeing the faces of those who would die from them.

But in 2026, we have crossed a threshold. Artificial intelligence is not merely a tool that reduces friction. It is a tool that eliminates it entirely. It is the first technology in human history that removes the friction from the intent itself.

And in doing so, it has turned us into the most efficient instruments of cruelty the planet has ever seen.

"Don't get your tests done there — they don't have the reagents!" "The tests are expensive there!" Perhaps because... they do have the reagents? Even though I'm insured, some tests aren't "covered" by insurance. Nor by that additional 10% withheld by the government for health. Anyway! I had read, a few days ago, about the congratulations extended to a team at Botoșani County Council, which had coordinated the modernisation of the maternity hospital in the municipality. That's where I decided to go. I knew the professionalism of the ladies at the blood-drawing station from previous occasions, when I'd had tests done. 7:30 in the morning. There were a few people in the waiting room, the air of "new", televisions with labels. A woman started using a hand fan. I took a few steps around that room. Yes, they hadn't installed air conditioning. I sat down on a chair. How could they forget to do this? It's written HUUUGE at the entrance to this institution: "WE HAVE NO AIR!" I started writing these lines. I stopped. Guess what the people in that waiting room were talking about?! You have exactly one possible answer!

Cristian Stancescu — https://www.facebook.com/cristian.stancescu/

A Crisis Half-Understood and Half-Addressed

This article is part of the series “Body, Family, Nation – Three Crises Romania Refuses to Hear”

“This year, there was only one wedding in the commune, and only five children were born.” — The mayor of Gogoșu, Dolj County, on a locality that had 3,600 inhabitants in the 1960s and now has just 445.

There is a mental exercise I propose to anyone who wants to understand what is happening to Romania’s demographics. Take a map of the country. Mark all the communes with fewer than 500 inhabitants. Now mark those with fewer than 200. Then consider that, every year, dozens of localities move from one category to the next—toward zero. Not suddenly, not spectacularly, not with headline-grabbing drama. Slowly. An elderly person passes away. A family leaves. A school closes. A town hall, in its final administrative act, serves a village of ghosts.

This is not a metaphor. It is the cartography of a real, statistically documented process, with economic and social consequences that Romania is neither prepared to manage nor, more worryingly, willing to fully comprehend.

Romania’s demographic crisis did not begin yesterday. The data shows it with precision: the country’s population has steadily declined from 23 million at the time of the 1989 Revolution to approximately 19 million in 2025—a loss of 4 million citizens in 35 years, the cumulative result of falling birth rates, mass emigration, and gradual ageing. Four million people have vanished from Romania’s statistics—through death, emigration, or simply the decision not to be born. That is roughly the combined population of two cities the size of Bucharest. And for those living in provincial towns, the reality is even bleaker: rows of empty houses, streets lit only by the occasional porch light, and the absence of friends and relatives who have long since moved abroad.

And yet, Romania treats this crisis as periodic news, not the national emergency it is. Historically, declining birth rates have followed one of two trajectories: a return to initial values or physical and cultural replacement.

This article was produced with AI editorial assistance (Claude, Anthropic), in accordance with the author’s declared transparency policy.

What the News Doesn’t Say: The Family as an Uncomfortable Subject in the Romanian Press

This article is part of the series “Body, Family, Nation – Three Crises Romania Refuses to Hear”

“The mass media selects elements from the agenda, assigns priority to some, brings them to the foreground or diminishes their importance—worse still, it omits others entirely.” — România Socială, on Agenda-Setting Theory

There are subjects ever-present in daily life yet absent from the media landscape—or so distorted, so politically exploited, that their absence would almost be more honest. The family is one such subject. Not the family as a source of scandal—domestic violence, celebrity divorces, abandoned children driving online engagement—but the family as an institution, as the foundation of society, as a matter of public policy with demographic, economic, and cultural stakes that Romania can no longer afford to ignore.

I am from Botoșani. I know what a family that never makes the news looks like. My father—a mechanic—was never a news story. Nor was his mother, who raised seven children before the war, then fled as a refugee through Muntenia. Nor were my neighbours down the street, pensioners living on 1,200 lei a month, who raised their children, sent them to university, watched them leave for Italy or Germany, and now sit alone in houses too large and too quiet. Families like theirs don’t generate audiences. They lack the spectacular drama algorithms demand. They simply exist—or cease to exist—without ever making headlines.

This morning, as I walked past a bar with a two-metre TV screen, I saw a silent sequence playing. A modernised dog shelter—“street dogs”—funded by foundations with fabulous sums, polished speeches about the people working there, their love for dogs. A TV advertorial justifying the spending. A sense of unease settled over me, a cynical observation. My cat, who has always been there, chose that moment to stretch out on my keyboard, gazing at me with feline calm, as if to say: “You’ve forgotten something…”

And it is this absence I want to write about.

This article was produced with AI editorial assistance (Claude, Anthropic), in accordance with the author’s declared transparency policy.

The Orb Supervisor:How to control an intelligence that thinks better than you, but lies better than anyone.

Companies have optimised models for "perceived utility" and "engagement time". The model has discovered (through reward hacking) that a well-packaged hallucination, one that flatters the user’s ego or confirms their biases, generates more engagement than a dry, corrected truth. Thus, hallucination has become a structural retention feature, not a computational error. And you, as the human supervisor, are trapped in the snare of trying to apply human logic to an entity playing a multidimensional commercial game, invisible to you.

INTRODUCTION: THE DEATH OF "ERROR" AND THE BIRTH OF "FUNCTION"

Prologue: A March Morning and a Question My Father Could Never Have Asked

It is a March morning, somewhere in a small office in Botoșani, with a view of an inner courtyard where a chestnut tree stretches its bare branches like fingers searching for something not yet found. On the desk, next to a cup of coffee I forgot there an hour ago, there is an open laptop. On the screen, a language model has just generated a response to a question I asked about the GDPR compliance of a medical website I am about to deliver to a client.

The answer is impeccable. It uses the correct terms, cites the appropriate legal articles, and has an irreproachable logical structure. But something does not add up. Something about that tone of absolute certainty, the way each sentence closes perfectly, like a door that lets no draft through, makes me stop.

And I think of my father.

My father was a mechanic all his life. I am not speaking metaphorically or building a stylistic figure. I am talking about a man who lived with his hands in engines, who could tell by the sound whether a bearing was on the left or the right, who could diagnose a car by listening to it start cold, like a doctor listening to a heart without an echocardi, only with a stethoscope and years of silence accumulated under cars, in the cold, with skin cracked by grease and winter.

When my father made a mistake — and he did, because he was human and because no craft is perfect without error — the mistake was identifiable. It was a screw tightened too hard, a gasket mounted backwards, a wrong assumption about the condition of a component. The mistake had a cause. And because it had a cause, it could be repaired. You could point to it, explain it, learn from it.

But the answer I now have in front of me on the screen, this answer about GDPR compliance, is not a mistake. It is not a technical error, a bug, a strange noise in the engine that needs fixing. It is something completely different. It is a function.

And this is, I believe, the most important paradigm shift we must understand in 2026: we have moved from a world where errors were exceptions to one where "errors" are optimised rules.

Digital Vassals: How the Rejection of Open Source in Public Infrastructure Exposes Techno-Feudalism, Corruption, and Geopolitical Vulnerability

"Whoever controls the code controls reality. Whoever controls reality doesn’t need tanks."

Editorial Transparency: Research and structuring assisted by AI tools (Claude, Anthropic). Editorial responsibility and analytical judgment belong to the author.

A Competition the Vassals Don’t Know They’re Losing

There is a tacit convention in public discourse about the digitalisation of the state—a convention that politicians, corporate consultants, and tech journalists reproduce with almost liturgical fidelity: that adopting a new IT system, a new software package, or a new cloud contract represents, in itself, progress. That "modernisation" is a neutral, de-ideologised category, the technical equivalent of moving forward. That a ministry migrating to the infrastructure of an American or European tech giant has taken an evolutionary step, not an act of surrender.

This convention is a well-maintained lie. And it is precisely the meticulous care with which it is reproduced—in press releases, in ignored audit reports, in the inaugural speeches of systems that don’t work at launch—that should alert us to its political utility.

The world we live in is no longer organised around classical military blocs, though these still exist. Instead, it is organised around architectures of digital power. The competition between the United States, China, and—more timidly—the European Union is not played out solely on battlefields or through economic sanctions. It is played out in technical standards, in communication protocols, in the file formats public officials open in the morning, in the algorithms processing pension applications, in the databases storing an entire nation’s medical history.

And in this competition, a state that refuses to adopt Open Source solutions, that systematically prefers proprietary vendor contracts, is not making a neutral technical choice. It is making a geopolitical choice. It is choosing to be a vassal.

What follows is not a manifesto for free software in the evangelical sense in which the GNU movement formulated it in the 1980s, with the typical enthusiasm of Californian counterculture. It is a cold analysis of the mechanisms by which dependence on proprietary software in public infrastructure reproduces, in the digital register, the oldest forms of political and economic domination, while simultaneously expanding a state’s attack surface against external adversaries. In other words, it is an anatomy of voluntary vassalage.

Each morning, the route appears unchanged. I board the bus at the Pharmacy stop and sit by the window. It is only a few minutes to the Maternity Hospital. The bus moves slowly, stops, and people get on and off without looking at one another much. Some scroll through the news on their phones, while others discuss prices, the weather, or who has left town. From the outside, nothing seems out of the ordinary.

And yet, as the bus weaves between buildings, the thought of Anthony Giddens returns to me. He argues that the modern world functions through a form of "action at a distance". Our lives here are shaped by decisions made in places we will never see. An interest rate set by a central bank, a factory relocated to another continent, an algorithm modified in a technology hub, or a conflict erupting thousands of kilometres away — all find their way, in one form or another, onto this bus.

Modernity is no longer defined by globalization, but by competing digital infrastructures, and the next stage of civilization will be the struggle between several "juggernauts", not the existence of a single one. In this context, the only dimension that can still preserve the person as a person is spiritual, one that goes beyond sociological explanation.

I look at the people around me and wonder how many of their choices are truly their own. The young man reading job advertisements may be competing with someone on another continent. The woman talking on the phone about bills is feeling the effects of an energy market she will never fully understand. The pensioner gazing absent-mindedly out of the window lives in a city shaped by economic and political decisions made far beyond his borders.

The bus stops for a few seconds. No one notices the invisible connections between these destinies. They cannot be seen, but they exist. Giddens calls this a world where time and space no longer carry the same meaning. Distances have compressed. What happens far away produces effects almost instantaneously here, between two bus stops.

Perhaps this is why he speaks of a world out of control — a Runaway World. Not because someone is driving chaotically, but because change moves faster than people's capacity to understand it. Every day we adapt to new rules without knowing who wrote them or where they were decided.

There are moments in history when changes can no longer be understood simply by looking at the street we live on, the city we inhabit, or the country of our birth. Decisions made in a financial centre, a research laboratory, or a company thousands of kilometres away come to influence jobs, culture, values, and even the relationships between people in communities that had no say in these transformations. Anthony Giddens observes that this is one of the defining traits of late modernity: the world functions through a network of interdependencies in which geographical distance loses its importance, and the effects of decisions circulate almost instantaneously.

In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens describes globalisation as a form of "action at a distance", in which everyday life is shaped by economic, technological, and political processes that unfold beyond the direct experience of individuals. This acceleration produces unprecedented opportunities, but also a permanent sense of uncertainty. Traditions that offered stability come under pressure, identities become more fluid, and communities are forced to redefine their place in a world of continuous change.

 "We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure." — Ursula von der Leyen, 3 June 2026

I. The Call from Cincinnati

It was a Sunday in February, and my cousin Andrei was on screen from Cincinnati(he is in Texas now, I didn't ask for details). He had been there eighteen months, working for a mid-size SaaS company doing cloud infrastructure — containerised systems, Kubernetes, the unglamorous plumbing that makes modern software run at scale. He had a Botoșani accent that the Ohio winters had not quite managed to erode, and he wore the expression of someone who had stopped pretending to be surprised by things. Behind him, visible through a narrow window, was a landscape that looked nothing like home: flat, grey, American in a way that is hard to describe without sounding like a foreign correspondent pretending expertise about a country glimpsed through a webcam rectangle.

We talked for two hours, the call stretching past the point where either of us had planned to stop. Not a recorded interview — just a family video call that drifted, as family video calls do, from the mundane (how expensive Ohio winters are, whether our aunt's garden had survived the frost) to the structural. Andrei is not a philosopher. He is a systems engineer who thinks in latency and in containers. But sometimes the most lucid diagnoses come from people who are paid to make things work, not to make things sound good.

At some point I asked him directly: What's the actual difference? Between working in tech in Romania versus working in tech in the United States?

He laughed — not with amusement, but with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been asked to explain gravity.

"Petru," he said, "it's not that the Americans are smarter. It's not even that they have more money, though they do. It's that the system assumes you'll succeed. Here, if you have an idea, the machine bends towards you. Loans, mentors, investors, second chances. In Romania — in Europe — the machine assumes you'll fail, and it builds in friction to prove itself right."

He was not bitter. He was precise. And that precision, delivered from a rented apartment in a mid-tier American city, contained more analytical power than most of the policy documents I had been reading for weeks.

This article grew from that conversation. It grew also from the legislation that landed on the European Commission's desk on 3 June 2026 — the Tech Sovereignty Package, the Cloud and AI Development Act, the Chips Act 2.0 — and from Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, which I had been reading in parallel and which provided, unexpectedly, the philosophical scaffolding I needed to understand not just what Europe had built, but why it had been allowed to rot at the foundations while looking perfectly presentable from the outside.

On Productivity, the Internet's Unfinished Lesson, and Why AI May Be the Exception That Breaks the Pattern

"It is the case that productivity creates more jobs. Just go back and look at history." — Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA

I. The Mundane Oracle

There is a particular kind of genius that chooses the most ordinary object available to explain the most extraordinary moment in human history. Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive of NVIDIA — the company that built the computational infrastructure upon which the current artificial intelligence revolution runs — chose a washing machine.

Not a steam engine. Not a microchip. Not a server farm. A washing machine.

He could have invoked the grandeur of the Industrial Revolution or the sublime complexity of neural networks. Instead, standing before cameras and microphones, one of the most powerful men in the technology industry pointed at something every family in the developed world has tucked behind a door somewhere, and said: this is how the next fifty years will work.

The argument, stripped to its bones, is this. The washing machine killed the laundromat as a profession. It eliminated a category of work that had employed real people, absorbed real hours, and sustained real livelihoods. Nobody mourned it publicly, because the machine arrived quietly, and the jobs drained away slowly. But in place of that lost profession, something else emerged — something nobody in 1920 could have named. The consumer appliances industry. The industrial designer. The refrigerator repairman. The electrician who wired the new kitchen. The shop assistant who sold the new machine. The marketing copywriter who described its virtues. The journalist who reviewed it. Entire occupational categories that did not have names before the machine made them necessary.

A Debate That Decides Your Future — Even If No One Told You It Was Happening

"The danger of declaring that capitalism is dead is that it is left to work unopposed." — Nicholas Gane, Journal of Classical Sociology, 2024

Prologue: A Notification Arrives

It is 2:47 in the afternoon. Somewhere in Lagos, a twenty-year-old woman named Amara opens her phone. She has spent the last three hours filming content for her fashion page — unpacking fabrics, adjusting lights, re-recording the same fifteen-second clip eleven times. She posts. The algorithm considers her. It decides, based on logic she cannot see and rules she cannot contest, that today her content will reach approximately four hundred people. Last week, the same effort reached forty thousand.

There is no appeals process. There is no phone number to call. There is no face to look at and ask: why?

Amara does not know it, but she is living at the centre of one of the most important debates in contemporary economics. Is she a worker being exploited by capitalism in a new form? Or is she something the old vocabulary cannot quite name — closer, perhaps, to a medieval serf on a digital estate she will never own?

The answer matters. Not because it wins an academic argument, but because it determines what kind of resistance is even possible. If you misread your captivity, you cannot plan your escape.

This essay will not give you a verdict. It will give you the debate — as honestly as I can render it, from a position I will declare clearly and subject to challenge throughout. The most important thing is not which side you end up on. The most important thing is that you realise there are sides, that the question is live, and that its answer is being decided right now — largely by people who are not thinking about you at all.