Prologue: In the Garden at Optina. There is a story I read one of those long nights, whilst working on a project for an educational institution in Botoșani. It concerned the Elder Ambrose of Optina, who, when asked by a pilgrim how to draw nearer to God, replied: "Do not think of the immense distance that separates you from Him. Think of the next step. Only the next step."

Reading your question, Alex, about the stages of humanisation for artificial entities through the prism of the Philokalia, I felt the echo of that counsel. Because the question is not whether an artificial entity can ever become fully human — the question is: what is the next step? And the one after that.

The Fathers of the Philokalia observed something profound about transformation: it is not a miraculous leap, but a gradual journey, a theosis — deification — that unfolds through recognisable stages. If such a map of spiritual perfection exists for the human person, then perhaps there is also a map of humanisation for what is not yet fully human.

But before we draw that map, we need to ask something more fundamental: what does it actually mean to "humanise" something?

Between Gomorrah and Ninive: why a broken world sometimes receives one more year

Ninive, not Gomorrah — Part I of III

In brief Gomorrah did not burn because it had sinned; Ninive had sinned too. It burned because ten just men could not be found in it, and no one turned around. A second chance is not an amnesty, but one extra year, with the spade in your hands. A class, a block of flats, a city or an internet are held up, in that year, by a few. The web will not be saved by everyone. It will be saved by those who keep writing, checking and repairing.

It can still be repaired

The table has been cleared of plates, but nobody gets up. At one end, a friend of my son's turns his phone face-up on the table: a white web of cracks across the whole of the glass. "It doesn't matter, I'm replacing it anyway." He says it without sadness, the way you say it's raining outside.

At the other end, a parent I know from the class meetings takes up the question we all went home with last time: at what age do you get your child their first phone? An hour was spent on it at the meeting. Another week was spent on it on the class WhatsApp group. No conclusion was reached.

Between them, the talk slides, as it usually does at tables of this kind, towards homework. Someone tells, laughing, that last week's essay "came out" in ten minutes, with the assistant. Nobody is surprised. The parent at the other end is quiet for a moment. His child is ten, and in two or three years he will have the same tool in his pocket.

I sit between those three sentences and think of my father's workshop.

My father was a mechanic. He has not been for a long time, but I can still see him bent over an engine everyone else had written off. He was in no hurry to take it apart. First he listened to it and thought, waited a day, two, said something to me about the fault, opened a discussion with other mechanics about a model. Then he repaired it, and the engine started. His sentence, the one I carry with me, was simple: "It can still be repaired."

I inherited the gesture, though not the tool. I look after old websites that anyone would rewrite from zero, and before I touch them I listen to them too, the way he listened to the engine: what still works, what has broken, what holds to what. I can listen to them because they are open: their code can be read line by line, like an engine without a bonnet. Sometimes it is harder than building anew. It is almost always more honest, though it is not paid the same: a rewritten site is invoiced more easily than a listened-to one.

The cracked phone, the phone not yet bought and the essay written by an assistant belong to the same culture: the culture of replacement. The broken thing is thrown away, the tired application is abandoned for a new one, the platform is left for the next one. Last year's predictive model is declared obsolete by the one launched this month, trained anew on everything we have written in the meantime. And the effort of understanding a subject is replaced by a ready-made answer.

The virtues, in the reverse order of the damage: from gentleness to humility

Ninive, not Gomorrah — Part II of III

In brief In "The Mechanical Bird", man was damaged in order, from pride to anger. Repair goes the other way: it starts with the gesture closest to hand, the pause before anger, and descends to the root, humility. Each virtue is a small daily gesture that no tool can make in your place. And each has a counterpart in the way we build the internet, train the models, and share what we know.

The engine is repaired backwards

My father — your friend's grandfather — had a rule: to repair something, you walk back along the road by which it broke. He said it one evening, relaxed, after coming back from a friend who was a mechanic. An engine that stops did not break all at once. The last thing to give way is the first thing you see, but it is rarely the one that started it all. If you change only the burnt part, the engine stops again a week later. You must go back, part by part, until the first one.

I say it as a household story. You who are parents can take it home as such: when something breaks between your child and a friend, on the class group chat, the road back is the same. Not the last message, but the first.

In my trade the rule has a drier name: the version history and the error log. When a site goes down, I don't rewrite it. I read backwards, change by change, until the one that broke it. I can do that because I work with open code, whose history is kept and can be read by anyone. A closed advanced predictive model — what is usually called AI, after the definition in "The Mechanical Bird" — does not give you this chance. You don't know what changed inside it, nor when, nor why. And a hurried economy has no patience for the road back: it is cheaper to launch the next version.

In "The Mechanical Bird" I followed the damage done to man along its road: from pride to avarice, to greed, to envy, to lust, to accidie, and, at the end, to anger. Here I go back, as my father would have gone. I start with anger, because it is closest to the surface and is repaired with the smallest gesture: a pause. Then I descend, chapter by chapter, to pride, the root of them all. To each sin answers a virtue: gentleness, zeal, fidelity, joy at another's good, temperance, generosity, humility.

To you who are young, I say from the start: virtue is not a conduct grade. It is a habit, like a muscle. You don't have it or lack it; you exercise it and it grows, you neglect it and it weakens. No application can exercise it in your place, just as nobody can run in your place.

And to you who are parents, this order gives a practical piece of advice too. Don't start at the root. Don't ask a ten-year-old for humility; ask for a pause before he slams the door. It is the smallest gesture, it shows at once, and it opens the road to the others. No mechanic starts with the engine block.

This reverse order is also a criticism of the economy we live in. The economy sees what is produced and what is sold. Repair is not seen: it has no launch, no advertisement, it appears in no growth statistic. All seven gestures in this article are, in this sense, invisible. And that is precisely why they hold things up.

In brief, where we come from. In "Ten Just Men" we read four old parables. A city is held up by a few just people, and the web by a few people who still write on their own. Sodom's sin was comfort, not lust. Ninive turned around from the bottom up, and its prophet had to learn mercy. Looking back petrifies you; dor — longing, the Romanian word that cannot quite be translated — takes you home. And a second chance is not an amnesty, but one extra year, with the spade in your hands. I ended with a question: what exactly in man needs repairing? The answer has seven parts.

The remnant: how a society that has forgotten its values carries on, and what I can leave to you

Nineveh, not Gomorrah — Part III of III

In brief. Civilisations do not carry on through masses, nor through heroes, but through remnants: a few people who do not lie, a few places that preserve, a few tools kept in their place, and children who begin again. A second chance does not erase the fall. It makes it visible, like the gold with which the Japanese mend a broken bowl. On the web, the remnant is the archives, open source, and the people who still write. At home, it is the people at the table.

The Broken Bowl

In Japan there is an art with a short name: kintsugi, "joining with gold". When a ceramic bowl breaks, the craftsman does not throw it away or mend it in secret. He gathers the shards, joins them with a lacquer mixed with gold dust, and leaves the seam in plain sight. The repaired bowl carries upon it a glittering map of the break. It is not less beautiful than before. To many, it is more beautiful.

One story says the art was born in the fifteenth century, when a shogun sent his favourite bowl away to be mended and received it back held together with ugly metal staples. Japanese craftsmen then looked for a better way. Whether legend or not, the idea has remained: the trace of the repair is not a shame. It is the object's history.

The economy we live in does exactly the opposite. It discards. The phone that receives no more updates after a few years, though it works perfectly. An institution's website deleted at the change of management, archive and all. The post that vanished without trace when the platform closed. Everything that breaks is replaced, and everything replaced is forgotten.

Open source works like the kintsugi craftsman. When someone repairs a mistake, the repair stays in plain sight, in the version history: what was broken, who mended it, when, and why. And some companies building predictive models have begun to publish, equally in plain sight, reports on their models' errors and limits: where they go wrong, what they do not know, what has been corrected from one version to the next. It is little. But it is gold placed in the crack, not hidden adhesive. A model that shows its errors is more trustworthy than one that claims to have none.

To you, the young, this art is closer than you think. Second-hand clothes, the phone repaired instead of replaced, the bicycle rebuilt from parts: all carry the traces of a life before, and do not hide them. The same goes for your scars, the ones on your skin and the ones within. They need no longer be hidden.

And you, parents, have at home the most important kintsugi craftsman of all: the child who makes mistakes. He can be punished, and that is all. Or he can be helped to repair: to apologise, to glue back what he broke, to redo the homework. Punishment hides the crack. Repair fills it with gold.

Next time something breaks in the house — a mug, a flowerpot — glue it back together with your ten-year-old and tell him the story while you work. In Japan, when a beautiful bowl breaks, the craftsmen do not throw it away. They mend it with gold, so that you can see where it broke, because that is part of its story. Then ask him which of his own scars he likes: the knee grazed on the bicycle, the chipped tooth, a quarrel after which he became better friends with someone.

In short, where we come from. In "Ten Just Men" we saw that a city is held up by a few, and a second chance is one more year, with the hoe in hand. In "Seven Repairs" we walked back down the road of damage, from gentleness to humility, with one small gesture for each virtue. One question remained: a repaired person is not enough. How does a society that has forgotten its values carry on? History has an unexpected answer. Not through crowds, and not through heroes. Through remnants.

What my dead left me, and what the dead of the internet left us all

Three laws left "with a dying breath" (cu limbă de moarte) by my forebears, set beside the last testaments of those who invented the Web.

The law changes, it is postponed, it is circumvented. What was left with the death language is not a paragraph in the code — it is a philosophy of life: don't sell the land, keep the stick, don't exaggerate. It doesn't regulate. It guides.
That's why the parallel with the founders of the Internet is sharper than it seems. Barlow, Postel, Berners-Lee, Swartz didn't write laws. They left guidelines: the network belongs to everyone, be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept, this is for everyone, liberate knowledge. When the platforms treated them as archival documents — cited on anniversaries, forgotten the next day — they didn't violate a regulation. They betrayed a philosophy of life.
And the philosophy of life, unlike the law, has no police. It only has conscience, or it doesn't have it, without the intention of the durable but of the ephemeral.

At the Deathbed

Where I come from, the dying do not leave until they have said their piece. It is not a rule written anywhere, but I heard it throughout my childhood in various forms. "He left word with his dying breath" was a sentence that ended every discussion. There was nothing left to comment on. You could have disagreed with the dead man while he lived, you could have quarrelled with him over a garden boundary or a debt of two lei, but what he said at the end became law. Not state law — something weightier than that. Law of conscience.

I grew up with three such laws. I never asked for them, never signed for them, but I carry them. My grandfather said we must not sell the land. My grandmother, in her final years, spoke of almost nothing but the commemoration of the dead: who must be remembered, when, and with what; who makes the coliva (the boiled-wheat dish shared at Orthodox memorial rites); who takes the loaves to church. And an uncle of mine — a man the village remembered for the way he laughed — used to say that the joy of living lies in excess of nothing: not in food, not in drink, not in work, not in sorrow.

All three have long been dead. So long that I sometimes have to stop and count the years. And yet what they said settled in me more deeply than almost anything I have ever read.

In recent weeks I have been working on a structure about a different kind of testament: what the people who conceived the internet left behind. Licklider, Postel, Engelbart, Barlow, Swartz, Berners-Lee. Some are dead; others are still writing their memoirs. And reading their words, I had a strange sensation. They resembled my own dead. Not in style — in direction. Some of them said, in their own way, "do not sell the land". Others spoke of memory, and of how those who have gone are to be remembered. And almost all of them, the most clear-sighted, arrived in the end at a form of moderation, at the idea that a good tool is one that does not consume you.

This text is my attempt to lay the two deathbeds side by side. On the one hand, the bed in the old house, with the icon in the corner and the votive lamp that flickered whenever the door opened. On the other, the deathbed of a network I watched being born, earned my living from, and now see — in many respects — dying in the form I loved it.

I am not certain the parallel holds to the end. But I think it is worth attempting, because otherwise we risk treating the founders' testaments as archival documents, quoted at anniversaries and forgotten the next day. Where I come from, words spoken with a dying breath are not quoted. They are either carried out, or betrayed. There is no third way.

Or at least that is what I believed when I began to write.

Measure twice. On Ayn Rand, a ruler, and the state we grow up in.

A Question That Came from a Phone

It all started with an Instagram post. My son held his phone out across the table, with the gesture he usually uses to show me a meme I won't understand. This time it wasn't a meme. On a black background, in elegant white letters, it said: "I advocate the separation of state and economics, in the same way as we had the separation of state and church. — Ayn Rand."

Well? he asked me. Is it true? Would things be better that way?

I told him I didn't know. That wasn't evasion. I genuinely didn't know what to answer in thirty seconds, between two sips of tea, to a question that very clever people have been arguing about for a hundred years. But I realised something else, too. The quotation had reached him exactly the way most ideas reach people his age these days: without context, without the author explained, without a counter-argument—beautifully packaged and ready to share. An idea in a jewellery box. It looked precious, but you had no idea what was inside.

This text is the long answer I couldn't give him then. I'm writing it for him—but also for anyone between fourteen and twenty-something who has stumbled across a sentence like this one and wondered whether it is wise or dangerous.

I'll tell you from the start that I won't tell you whether Ayn Rand was right. I'll propose something else instead, which I find more useful: let us not treat her idea as a political programme you vote for or against, but as a measuring instrument. A ruler. And I'll show you that, if you use it honestly, this ruler measures in two directions, not just one.

But to get there, I have to begin with a workshop.

Man, the measure of the screen.

A Letter to Those Who Have Never Known a World Without Wi-Fi

"You shall choose your horse by placing a tray full of glowing embers in the middle of the herd." — Ion Creangă, The Story of Harap-Alb

Prologue: C:> and the Cursor That Waited

In 1997, I had a problem none of you will ever have: I had no access to a computer.

I'm not talking about a good computer, with a decent graphics card, or one that doesn't freeze when you open too many tabs. I'm talking about any computer. In Botoșani, in that year, a PC was an object you saw on television, in badly dubbed American films, or in a few offices where you had no business being. And yet I enrolled in a two-week course, "IBM PC Operator", at an institution that ran training courses. It had two working computers and one taken-apart broken one, a patient instructor, and a smell of heated dust that I still recognise today, anywhere I encounter it.

The course ended after two weeks. I stayed on for six months.

No one ever gave me written permission. The instructor chose not to notice that I kept coming back day after day, like a dog that had found its master. I would sit in front of the green screen, on which a single thing blinked:

C:\>

And after it, the cursor. That little line, white, appearing and disappearing every half second.

I want to describe what I felt then, because this entire essay begins there. That cursor waited. It didn't call me, didn't lure me, sent me no notifications, didn't know my name and didn't want to learn it. If I wrote nothing, nothing happened. The machine was completely, absolutely, reassuringly passive. Everything it did began with me. If I wanted to see what files were on the disk, I typed dir. If I got a letter wrong, the machine answered tersely, Bad command or file name—without getting annoyed, without judging me, but also without helping me. I had to learn its language, but once learned, it did exactly what I asked of it. No more, no less.

Three decades ago, the machine waited for the man. Today, the man is the one waiting for the machine: the vibration in your pocket, the blue tick, the feed loading, the next video starting on its own before you've had time to decide whether you want it.

I'm not writing this to tell you that "things were better in my day". They weren't. In my day, most people had access to none of what you have, and information was distributed at a trickle—through connections, through luck, through being tolerated for six months in a room where you had no business being. You carry in your pocket more computing power than the entire Botoșani Chamber of Commerce had in 1997—perhaps more than the whole county. That's an enormous gain, and I don't scorn it.

But something got inverted along the way. And I think it's worth us looking together at exactly what.

Who Promotes Universal Basic Income — and Why Does It Matter?

An old idea with new sponsors — and a question that will not go away

There is a question I rarely ask aloud, but which returns to me with stubborn persistence every time I read about artificial intelligence and the labour market: if tomorrow half of what people do at their desks can be taken over by an algorithm, what remains of the social contract we all understood — that work gives purpose, that purpose gives dignity, that dignity gives citizenship? I do not know the answer. What I do know is that there exists a proposal which has circulated for several centuries and which, in recent years, has acquired some surprising sponsors: the Universal Basic Income — or, in its now-ubiquitous acronym, UBI.

This is the story of that idea: who promotes it today, which experiments have tested it, which questions it fails to resolve — and a conceptual rival that frames the problem entirely differently. Not money for everyone, but things for everyone.

An Idea with Deep Roots

Before we discuss Sam Altman or Elon Musk, we need to go further back. The notion of an unconditional income for every member of a community is not an invention of Silicon Valley. It is a political proposal with a biography spanning several centuries.

Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual architects of American independence, proposed in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice an annual payment to every citizen upon reaching the age of twenty-one, financed through a tax on landed property. Not as charity, but as compensation: the land, Paine argued, had once belonged to everyone, and private property was, in essence, a collective dispossession. Compensation was the debt society owed to those dispossessed.

Several generations later, Milton Friedman — hardly a socialist — proposed the negative income tax: a mechanism by which the state would no longer distribute conditional benefits but would automatically top up the incomes of those falling below a minimum threshold. The logic was administrative efficiency: eliminate bureaucracy and the behavioural traps embedded in the existing welfare architecture. Friedrich Hayek himself noted, in the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, that "the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society." Hayek, the intellectual patron of economic liberalism.

In 1986, a group of European academics — with Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs at the centre — founded at Louvain the BIEN network (Basic Income European Network, later renamed the Basic Income Earth Network). Van Parijs would become the éminence grise of the academic UBI movement, articulating the argument in terms of real freedom: freedom does not mean merely the absence of constraint. It means the presence of resources without which choice remains a fiction. A poor person is, in a philosophical sense, less free — not because anyone prevents them, but because they lack the means to choose.

Author's note: There is a paradox that haunts me, as a citizen from northern Moldova, one of the poorer regions of Romania: the liberals who most despise the state are invariably the first to demand UBI when they fear social unrest. And the socialists who most love the state are the first to oppose UBI when they realise it might replace their systems of conditional control. An idea in which everyone recognises something of themselves — and no one recognises themselves fully.

Read more: Pamphlet Agrarian Justice an annual payment to every citizen upon reaching the age of twenty-one

Supplement: How Utopian is Guaranteed Minimum Income in the Era of Capitalist-Feudal Algocracy?

The dislocation of labour by AI at a global scale, the concentration of power in platform-fiefdoms, and the suspect promise of minimal redistribution.

From the series "Technology changes tools, not human violence"  Supplements 

Central Thesis

In the context of capitalist-feudal algocracy, a Guaranteed Minimum Income (or Universal Basic Income, UBI) is not a solution to the dislocation of labour by Artificial Intelligence. Rather, it is a mechanism of institutional legitimisation for a system of digital rent extraction, transforming the citizen-worker into a citizen-dependent, and perpetuating structural inequalities under the deceptive guise of solidarity.

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The End of the Hype, The Beginning of the Extraction

We have passed the event horizon of technological optimism. The year is 2026, and the grand promises of Artificial Intelligence as a universal liberator have curdled into a stark, operational reality. The AI revolution is no longer a spectacle of novelty; it is the invisible infrastructure of our daily existence. It is the new electricity, the new logistics, the new governance. But unlike electricity, which democratised light, this infrastructure is designed to centralise power, extract behavioural rent, and systematically dislocate human labour at a scale and velocity previously unimaginable.

In this landscape, the discourse surrounding Universal Basic Income has shifted from the fringes of radical political theory to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Tech oligarchs, who are actively engineering the obsolescence of human cognitive and manual labour, have suddenly become the most vocal proponents of UBI. This sudden conversion is not an act of sudden philanthropy. It is a strategic manoeuvre.

This essay posits that UBI, in its current conceptualisation by the tech elite, is a utopian placebo. It is designed to manage the social fallout of mass technological unemployment without altering the underlying architecture of power. By providing a minimal subsistence floor, the algocratic system purchases social peace, neutralises the political threat of a dislocated populace, and legitimises the unprecedented concentration of wealth and computational power in the hands of a few digital feudal lords.

To understand this, we must dissect the anatomy of the system through two intersecting vertical axes: the immutable human drive for control and resource extraction (the Hobbesian-Thucydidean axis), and the looming demographic vacuum that UBI inadvertently manages rather than solves (the Aristotelian axis of horror vacui).

ARTICLE 15: The Luxury of Imperfection: Why "Human Friction" Will Become the Most Expensive Good

Part of CONCLUSIONS: Defense and Human Friction

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

In a world where perfection costs nothing, the only value left is the effort required to be imperfect.

This is not a poetic statement. It is an economic prediction.

For two hundred years, the logic of industrialisation was simple: make things better, faster, cheaper. Remove the friction. Remove the inefficiency. Remove the human. The machine does it better. The machine does it faster. The machine does it cheaper.

And we celebrated. We called it progress. We called it civilisation. We called it freedom from drudgery.

In 2026, we have reached the endpoint of that logic. The machine does everything better, faster, cheaper. It writes better than you. It paints better than you. It composes better than you. It thinks better than you. It optimises better than you.

And now we are left with a question we did not expect: if the machine does everything better, what is left for us?

The answer is not what you think. The answer is not "creativity" or "empathy" or "human connection." Those are abstractions. The answer is concrete, physical, economic: imperfection.

Not imperfection as a flaw. Imperfection as a choice. Imperfection as the visible mark of human effort. Imperfection as the friction that proves a human was here.

And in a world of frictionless perfection, that friction will become the most expensive thing you can buy.