The show was something else entirely. 
About betrayal without direct lying, about promises that never lie, and about the architecture of premeditated baseness. An informal presentation in relational hygiene. Not self-defence. Not cynicism. Hygiene. The distinction matters, and I repeat it because it is worth repeating: hygiene does not mean refusing to shake anyone's hand. It means knowing when to wash your hands ... if you're wondering what any of this has to do with Cybersecurity — I'll grant you, it's a touch melodramatic ... even if it stays on the level of metaphor.
"You were never told an untruth. You were told the truth in the order in which it could be used." — a thought that visits you at three in the morning, long after everything is over
Introduction — Or What a Play Looks Like When You Don't Know You're an Actor
The morning began early, with the smell of coffee I had made in a hurry and with my mother already in the hallway, already dressed, already holding her bag, a full twenty minutes before there was any need. She is eighty-two years old, and this punctuality of hers in the face of any commitment — the doctor, church, a nephew's wedding, a simple walk — remains unchanged, like a reflex from another era, from a generation that considered being on time the minimum form of respect for another person but in her haste she forgot the apartment door was open (we found out when we got back because her neighbors were visiting for coffee in the morning, and she was away from home). I drank my coffee standing up, watching her sitting on the hallway chair, staring straight ahead at the door with a focus I find difficult to describe as either courage or habit acquired from living with what cannot be changed.
We were going to the ophthalmologist. A check-up, I had called it, using the word check-up with that mildly hypocritical optimism we adopt towards our ageing parents when we do not wish to specify what exactly is being checked. I knew her sight had deteriorated. She knew it too. Neither of us had spoken that word, deterioration, but it was there in the hallway with us, invisible and precise, like a third passenger.
I had not been lied to. That is the first and most important clarification, because without it everything that follows in this article slides into victimhood, and I have not come here for that — neither with regard to my mother, nor with regard to the things I shall write about below. But that morning, walking to the park to wait for our appointment, I felt the two narratives converge with a precision I had not sought and which, for that very reason, struck me directly.
There is a type of betrayal without direct lying that you do not quite know how to name. It is not the classic lie — where someone tells you an untruth and you believe it. It is something more subtle and more lasting: someone constructs a project in which you extend your good faith completely, you follow the steps, you contribute sincerely, and at the end you discover that the real purpose was something else, made clear only at that moment, when you can no longer do anything other than understand. A lie wounds you at the moment of discovery. Instrumentalisation wounds you on the day you comprehend the construction — that the architecture of the whole had been designed from the very beginning with a patience you would not have supposed, because supposing it would have meant believing that someone had invested that much deliberate energy in planning something base.
My mother held her bag in her lap and stared ahead. I drove and thought about these things. The city passed outside the window.
Entering the Project, or What Good Faith Looks Like When Used as Raw Material
A Joke to Begin With, So We Don't Forget We're Human
A mechanic friend — Nelu, who has been repairing cars for twenty years in the yard behind his block and who has a practical wisdom you won't find in any book — once said to me: "Do you know the difference between a good client and a bad one? The good one brings his car and tells you what's wrong. The bad one tells you what to do." I laughed at the time. Now I understand it differently.
When you enter a project in good faith, you are the good client. You know what you have. And that is precisely what makes you useful.
The park was large and open, as the central parks in our towns tend to be — towns that once harboured urban ambitions and have since been left with the space itself, with the wide alleys and the metal benches painted afresh each spring and with the trees that have grown larger than any original plan and now shade half the pathway regardless of the time of day. It was morning and there were few people about — a few elderly folk with dogs, a woman running with headphones in, two men sitting on a bench who were not talking, merely existing side by side with the naturalness of people who have known each other for a long time and no longer need to fill the silence.
We found a bench in the shade. My mother sat down with her characteristic care — first checking the surface with a glance, that discreet gesture of elderly people who have fallen once and do not wish to fall again — and placed her bag in her lap, exactly as she had done in the hallway. I sat down beside her and took out my phone, checked the time, put it away again. We had forty minutes to wait.
"The park is lovely," she said. Not as an observation about the park. As a way of occupying the air between us without speaking about what lay ahead.
"It is," I confirmed.
There is a moment — and if you have lived through it, you will recognise it immediately — when someone tells you they need you and you feel something warm in your chest. It is not vanity, or not only vanity. It is the fundamental human need to matter, to be seen, to participate in something larger than yourself. That moment is real. That warmth is real. And it is precisely why it works so well as an instrument of instrumentalisation — because it exploits something authentic in you, not a weakness, but a strength turned against you.
My father was a mechanic. He repaired things. When something was broken, he would dismantle it carefully, identify the exact point of fracture, and put it back together. I remember the smell of engine oil from his workshop, the sound of the spanner on metal, the patience with which he explained to every client what had happened and why. He never lied about the diagnosis. Perhaps that is why I came to believe, implicitly, that people tell the truth about what they want to repair — and precisely why it profoundly unsettles me when I discover that someone knew about the fracture from the start and chose not to name it.
The stages of the project were real. That must be stated clearly, because otherwise the story becomes simple, and simple is dishonest. No one led you astray about how — every step was in order, every deadline met, every tactical promise honoured. The chronology was perfect. It was perfect precisely because it served a purpose you did not know. The ophthalmologist we were to see in forty minutes would, for his part, be perfect at what he does. He would examine, diagnose, recommend. The stages would be respected. And yet what you are left with at the end depends on what lies at those stages' conclusion, not on their quality.
"Morpheus tells Neo: 'I've been watching you all your life, Neo. You're here because you have a certain... skill.'" — in The Matrix, the selection is not accidental. You are chosen for what you can do, not for who you are. The distinction is subtle and devastating.
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard — whose book Simulacra and Simulation actually appears in the film, hidden as a hollowed-out book Neo uses for storage — argued that we live in a world where the signs of reality have replaced reality itself. The project you entered was a perfect simulacrum: all the signs of an authentic partnership, without its substance.
On social media platforms, the algorithm functions identically: it shows you exactly what you want to see, in the order that keeps you engaged. It does not lie about the content — it delivers real content. But the order, the frequency, the intensity — all are calibrated for a purpose you did not choose. My fifteen-year-old son knows this theoretically. But when a clip appears on his feed that speaks directly to what hurts him today, the theory disappears and all that remains is the feeling that someone, somewhere, understands him. I understand. I have felt that too.
Psychology has a phrase for this moment of entry: "The childhood wound awakens where the adult finally feels seen." It is not weakness. It is the fundamental mechanism of the human being seeking recognition — and it does not go away at fifteen, nor at forty, nor at eighty-two.
My mother looked at the people in the park with that gentle, non-judgemental attention of people who have seen enough and have moved beyond the need to categorise. A small child running along the path fell, got up by himself, and carried on running. She smiled. She said nothing.
My daughter — she is twelve years old, and her seriousness disarms me every time — asked me once: "Dad, why do people behave nicely towards you when they want something?" I replied that not everyone who behaves kindly wants something. That there is genuine pure-hearted goodness in the world. But that the difference between authentic kindness and instrumental kindness is sometimes impossible to see until you are no longer needed. Her grandfather — my father, the mechanic — would have said: "Child, when your neighbour brings you apples from his tree without your asking, that's kindness. When he brings you apples and then asks to borrow your axe — that's an investment." Her grandmother would have added, more gently: "And there's nothing wrong with investment, as long as everyone knows it's investment."
Governments around the world have begun to understand, with their characteristic lag behind reality, that fabricated digital relationships require regulation. The European Union, through the Digital Services Act (DSA), has imposed obligations of transparency on platforms regarding recommendation algorithms. The idea is simple and revolutionary in equal measure: if someone is building a personalised experience for you, you have the right to know on what basis. Clear, predictable, and transparent legislation — not as an ideal, but as a minimum enforceable requirement.
The Choice to Continue, or Dignity as a Considered Wager
An Amusing Anecdote About Stubbornness
My neighbour from the third floor — a retired plumber who fixes taps throughout the whole stairwell for a kind word and a coffee — told me once that he had fitted the same tap three times for the same family because every time "someone in the household broke it just to have a reason to call him." "But I kept going," he said, with a broad smile. "Because the tap really was leaking."
Sometimes we carry on not out of naivety, but because the real problem exists, even if it is not the only problem.
We rose from the bench five minutes before the appointment and walked towards the clinic along the main pathway, I slightly behind her, at that distance you calculate instinctively when walking beside an elderly person — close enough to be there if needed, far enough not to appear to be supervising. She walked slowly and upright, with her walking stick in her right hand, looking ahead with the attentiveness of someone who knows the pavement can be treacherous.
The doctor's waiting room was small, with four yellowish-white plastic chairs and a plastic plant on a shelf and a poster showing the anatomy of the human eye, detailed and somewhat intimidating — iris, cornea, lens, retina, all labelled with a precision that transforms something as intimate as sight into a mechanism to be repaired. We sat side by side and waited. She held her bag in her lap. I checked my phone once and put it away.
There is a particular discomfort you feel when you know something is not quite right, but you cannot put your finger on exactly what. It is not pain — it is a kind of background noise, a small and persistent sound, like a refrigerator running at night that your ear has catalogued as normal, but which, if it suddenly stopped, you would immediately notice its absence. I knew her sight had deteriorated progressively. I knew that deterioration was a word containing others, heavier ones. But knowing this in the abstract had not prepared me for the concrete reality of the waiting room with plastic chairs and the eye anatomy poster.
I knew that things could deteriorate. I had this knowledge — not from books but from experience, from previous situations, from life lived. That knowledge did not prevent me from hoping. And that is important to understand, because if it were a matter of naivety, the remedy would be simple: you learn, you become more cynical, you protect yourself better next time. But it was not naivety. It was a choice. I continued to hope because hope was my moral position, not my assessment of the situation.
Philip K. Dick — who wrote Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel from which Blade Runner was made — always asked the same question in his books: what is real and what do we construct to make real? His characters continued to function in systems they knew to be partly rigged, because the alternative — not functioning at all — was worse. They continued not out of blindness but out of a pragmatic and painful choice.
Plato's allegory of the cave is famous precisely for its ending: the philosopher who steps out into the light and returns to the cave is not mad. He knows those who remained will not believe him. He returns anyway, because acting in good faith as a moral position means acting according to your values in systems that do not share them.
On Instagram and TikTok, the engagement algorithm knows when you are insecure. Content offering validation appears more frequently precisely when you are vulnerable — not out of malice, but from cold calibration, from optimisation for time spent on-screen. My son, when he has a difficult day, spends longer on his phone. I understand him completely, because his mechanism is my mechanism, only with a different screen in front of him.
Saint John Climacus wrote in The Ladder of Divine Ascent: "One who has truly tasted humility can no longer be deceived by empty praise, for he knows its price." Knowing the price of attention does not make you immune to attention. It simply makes you more aware of the transaction — and, at best, more capable of choosing with clarity.
The Final Revelation, or the Chasm Between What You Assumed and What Had Been Prepared
Before the Revelation, a Joke You Won't Forget
Ion from the Romanian folk tale — not the eldest, but Ion the youngest, the third son, whom nobody took seriously at first — always arrived last at the sharing out, but was always first to leave with the prize. Why? Because all the others knew what they wanted. Ion discovered it on the way. Revelation does not come as a blow. It comes as a translation.
The doctor was a man of about fifty, with slim-framed spectacles and that manner of good doctors who have seen enough to be surprised by nothing, but who have not entirely lost the habit of explaining. He examined her at length — instruments, lights, letter charts to which my mother responded with intense concentration, as though at an examination she wished to pass. I sat in the corner chair and watched.
The diagnosis came gradually, in layers, as heavy things come when the person delivering them is gentle but not dishonest. He never said directly that the chances were slim. He said that the situation was advanced, that there was a window, that an operation was possible, that results vary. Every sentence was technical and true. None contained a lie. But their ordering, the intonation with which they fell, the pauses between them — all of this told my mother and me that results vary meant in all likelihood, no.
My mother listened. She asked a practical question about the recovery period. She noted something in a small notebook she kept in her bag. And at one point, when the doctor mentioned again the limited chances of functional recovery, she said, suddenly and serenely: "It has rained a great deal this summer, hasn't it?"
The doctor stopped. He blinked. He said: "Yes, more than usual."
I looked at the floor.
She had not denied the diagnosis. She had not wept, not protested, not asked for a second opinion in the same breath. She had changed the subject. She had chosen, with a dignity I can describe only as a form of courage I had not known she possessed or that was possible, not to dwell in that moment any longer than was strictly necessary. And in that change of subject there was more wisdom than in anything I could have said.
Revelation, in its heaviest form, does not come as a lie discovered. It comes as an architecture becoming visible. It is the difference between discovering that a wall is hollow and understanding that the wall was built specifically to appear solid. You do not understand that you were deceived — you understand that you were constructed, that the importance accorded to you, the stages respected, the moments when your opinion was sought, had been simultaneously real and functional. They were not gestures of partnership concealing a hidden agenda. They were components of a mechanism you had not seen whole.
The essential moral difference — and this is the heart of this article — is this: I knew how bad things could get. I did not know how premeditated it had been from the start. The first knowledge is about possibility. The second is about intention. Possibility is impersonal. Intention is personal. And it is precisely that which wounds.
"Welcome to the real world," Morpheus tells Neo after he emerges from the Matrix. The real world is desolate, difficult, incomparably harder than the comfort of the simulacrum. But it is real. And the real, however painful, is better than fabricated comfort.
Baudrillard would say that revelation is the moment when the map has ceased to cover the territory — when the simulacrum has detached from reality and you are left holding both pieces, baffled that they no longer fit back together.
My sister — four years my senior and a decade more pragmatic — listened when I told her about other revelations in my life and said one single thing: "It took you longer than usual to understand because this time it was built better." It was not a reproach. It was a diagnosis.
On social media platforms, revelation also has its algorithm. The moment when you understand that the influencer who is "talking to you like a friend" is reading from a script approved by a paying brand is a small, everyday revelation that teenagers experience several times a week. The problem is that small, repeated revelations do not build immunity. They build cynicism. And cynicism is more dangerous than naivety because it feels like wisdom.
Saint Basil the Great wrote: "Do not be deceived by appearances. The man who smiles at you is not always your friend, but neither is your enemy always the one who speaks the truth." The paradox is complete: the friend who instrumentalises you and the enemy who warns you may, in the long run, be the same person.
Instrumentalisation Without Lying — The Anatomy of a Mechanism
The Joke That Is No Joke
A teacher of my son's — a young man with genuine enthusiasm and chronic exhaustion in equal measure — said to the class: "The most dangerous thing I can do to you is praise you for things you don't deserve. Because you'll believe you deserve them and stop working." The class laughed. The teacher was not laughing.
We left the doctor's consulting room along a narrow corridor with beige linoleum and fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look more tired than they are. My mother walked in front of me, with her stick and her bag, with the straight back of someone who has decided not to be bent by a diagnosis. I walked behind her carrying both things simultaneously — the worry about her eyes, and, strangely overlaid upon it, the persistent thought about how instrumentalisation operates, how a mechanism can be perfect in all its components and base in its totality.
The hardest thing to process in a betrayal without direct lying is not the anger — anger is simple, it has an object, it is consumed. It is the disorientation. You do not know where to place the experience. There is no moment in which you were explicitly deceived, so you cannot point and say: there. You can point to an architecture. But architectures have no visible authors — only functionality.
Robert Glover, in No More Mr Nice Guy, describes the concept of the covert contract — an agreement that one party constructs in their own mind, with unspoken terms, which they consider implicit and universal. But in the case I am describing, the covert contract was not internal — it was external and deliberate. The other party knew exactly what they had contracted and had chosen not to inform you, because informing you would have changed your behaviour and impaired your usefulness.
Kant said that people must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means. The formula is elegant and profound and entirely useless in the face of a system that does not read Kant, or worse, reads him and chooses otherwise.
My daughter asked me once why some people are good and others are not. I told her I do not know whether people are fundamentally good or bad, but I know that systems make them more of one or the other. She thought for a moment and said: "So it's not their fault." I hesitated. "It's their responsibility," I corrected. It is not the same thing.
My grandmother — a woman who could say more with a look than others could with an hour's speech — always said: "Ileana Cosânzeana did not leave with Făt-Frumos because he was handsome. She left because he came for her." The difference between the person who comes for you and the person who summons you because you serve them is enormous. And sometimes, in the hum of a well-constructed project, you confuse the two.
The engagement algorithm does not instrumentalise you with ill intent — the instrumentalisation is structural, built into its architecture. Every like you give, every second you remain on a clip, every conversation you read without commenting — all of it feeds a system that does not know you exist as a person, only as a data source. Baseness without intention may be more disheartening than baseness with intention, because you do not even have someone to blame.
"Ignorance is the root of all evil," Socrates said — not in the sense that uneducated people do harm, but that people who do not know themselves are involuntarily dangerous.
Voltaire, in a letter of 1767, wrote that stupidity was a gift from God, but one should not abuse it. The context was ironic — he was speaking about people who used ignorance as an excuse for calculated actions. There is a category of people who construct elaborate architectures of instrumentalisation and then hide behind "I hadn't thought about that." The excuse of ignorance invoked after the fact may be the most refined type of lie, because it cannot be falsified.
The Catalogue of Promises That Never Lie
Before the Catalogue, a Necessary Observation
Every formula that follows is real in the moment it is uttered. That is the premise and that is the danger. We are not cataloguing lies. We are cataloguing functional truths — correct statements that serve purposes they do not declare.
1. "We're a Family" — Corporate HR
Nelu the mechanic's family never made him redundant by email sent on a Friday evening. A family has no confidentiality clauses. A family does not evaluate you quarterly with a standardised form.
When an organisation tells you that you are family, it is asking for the emotional loyalty of a son and offering the contractual security of a fixed-term employee. The family metaphor is perhaps the most efficient instrument of affective management ever devised, because it activates in you deep emotional responses towards a legal entity.
My son follows TikTok creators who "talk to their community like family." I listened to a few clips. The formulas are identical to those in HR: you are the reason, without you I don't exist, we're in this together. The difference: the influencer has two million members in the family. Family does not scale.
"The good child and the faithful dog you'll find in any house," says an old Romanian proverb. Organisations seek the compliant employee — not because they love them, but because they function.
"You can't wake up from a dream if you don't know you're dreaming," Morpheus says. The corporate family is a comfortable dream. Waking up is brutal, but necessary.
Saint Maximus the Confessor wrote: "True love does not seek its own." The context is theological, but the mirror is precise: a structure that demands your loyalty in exchange for a sense of belonging is not practising love — it is practising management.
Governments have begun to regulate organisational culture through clear directives on employment contracts and overtime. Predictability, clarity, transparency — legislative requirements, not voluntary virtues.
2. "There Are Opportunities for Advancement"
The possibility always exists. It is the most elastic truth in the organisational vocabulary.
A former teacher of mine at secondary school — a man with a refined irony and pedagogical patience I still do not deserve — used to say: "Possibility means it's not impossible. It does not mean it will happen." The class laughed. Some of us probably recalled this later, at the appropriate moments.
The role as a mobile horizon is one of the most elegant retention instruments in existence. Nobody lies to you: the role exists, the criteria exist somewhere, the process exists in theory. But the horizon moves with you, with a precision you could admire if it did not cost you so much.
My son follows TikTok creators who have been "about to launch something big" for several months. The launches come, they are smaller than the promise but real enough to justify the next promise. The horizon moves. You stay.
Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a novel about a product that promises to halt the deterioration of reality. It always exists. It is always one step away. It never arrives. The role in the title is the organisational Ubik.
3. "Your Voice Matters in This Project"
It matters. Exactly as much as needed for you not to leave.
My father — the mechanic — repaired things and did not organise consultations with the car about which method to use. But he knew that if the owner felt they had been listened to, they accepted the diagnosis more readily. It was not manipulation — it was practical wisdom about communication. The problem arises when consultation becomes an end in itself rather than a means towards a decision.
"In the world of the Matrix, every choice is predetermined. Your freedom to choose exists because otherwise the system does not function." — the Oracle to Neo. You have the freedom to choose between options the system has pre-approved.
My grandfather used to say: "You call the eldest or the wisest to counsel. When you call everyone, that's not counsel — that's a performance."
4. "You Are Exactly the Person We Need"
True. Now. For this. When this is over, the need disappears with a surgical precision you had not anticipated.
I was thinking about this as my son showed me a clip in which a creator told his audience: "You are the only ones who truly understand me." Two million unique viewers, each convinced they were among the only ones.
Mass individualisation — a phenomenon of social networks, of organisations, of relationships. You are the person they need. Personal, specific, chosen. That there are other people they need simultaneously is a detail the space does not reveal.
"Know thyself" — Socrates, the inscription at Delphi. The person who knows exactly who you are before you know yourself is better prepared for the relationship than you are.
5. "We Invest in Our People"
The investment is real. The return is calculated. The course they pay for increases your value exactly enough for you to stay, not enough for you to leave with something truly your own.
The repairman who fixed my washing machine explained, while replacing a pump: "I'm telling you exactly what I've changed and why, so that next time you'll know too." He invested in me as an informed customer. He was not afraid that knowing would mean I wouldn't return. He was certain that knowing meant I would return.
The difference between investing in a person and investing in a person-as-instrument is exactly this: the former is willing to lose a customer to a better competitor. The latter calculates precisely how much information to give in order to maintain dependence.
6. "You're Part of the Decision"
You are part of the process that legitimises the decision already taken.
My daughter came home once upset that at the student council "they voted, but the form tutor's decision happened anyway." I listened. I said nothing about how early she had discovered this.
Baudrillard called this the simulacrum of participation — the form of consultation without its substance. The form matters for legitimacy. The substance would matter for a good decision. When you need legitimacy rather than a good decision, form is sufficient.
7. The Voluntary Project with "Internal Visibility"
Additional work, unpaid, with the promise of visibility. The visibility is real. What goes unsaid: that being seen and being rewarded are independent, not causal, processes.
My son understands this better than I would have wished: "Dad, on TikTok you can have a million views and zero income." Exactly. Visibility is a new currency. It does not automatically convert into the old one.
8. "We're Testing Whether You're Ready for More"
A test without publicly stated criteria is not a test — it is continuous evaluation with shifting criteria, adjusted according to what is convenient at the moment of evaluation.
"The choice of the One is not a prophecy being fulfilled — it is the management of expectations on a civilisational scale," a less romantic critic of The Matrix would say. The Chosen One is chosen until he no longer serves the purpose. Then a new prophecy appears.
9. Informal Mentoring That Never Becomes Formal
The warmth is real. The apprentice who understands that they have been building a useful instrument for the mentor does not invalidate the warmth — it complicates it.
My son's teacher — the young, enthusiastic, and exhausted one — informally mentors a few pupils. I hope he does so out of pure intent. I hope he will not discover, years hence, that his enthusiasm served a system that was also consuming him.
10. "We're Waiting for Things to Settle, Then We'll Discuss It"
The settling never comes. The horizon moves. You have been producing in anticipation of a conversation that will never take place in the form you expected.
"Tomorrow, tomorrow, not today — that's what all the lazy ones say," goes a German proverb. But in its organisational form, it is not laziness — it is strategy. Infinite deferral is an active decision disguised as a lack of context.
11. "We Need You at This Event"
Your presence lends weight to a process decided in another room, with other people, a week ago. Not at every event — at this one. You are brought as a credible witness, as an articulate human backdrop, as the legitimiser of a consensus you did not help to form.
My son participated in a school debate "about the future of the school." He prepared arguments. He spoke. At the end, the headmistress announced the decision — taken beforehand, evidently. He came home with a look of bewilderment on his face that I recognised perfectly.
"In The Matrix, the Architect explains to Neo that the previous revolts of the Chosen One were calculated and permitted, because a certain rate of resistance is necessary for the stability of the system." Your presence at the event is the permitted resistance — visible, manageable, functional for legitimacy.
12. "We'll Provide You with All the Resources You Need"
The resources exist. Access passes through an approval process with unclear steps, incomplete forms, and people who do not respond to emails. By the end you are working with what you brought from home — your energy, your time, your patience — and none of this appears on anyone's balance sheet.
My father never promised what he could not deliver. If he did not have a part, he would say: "I'll come back next week, I'll bring it, I'll fit it." He would not say "I have everything I need" and then invent excuses. That was what made him the person the whole neighbourhood came to — not because he was the cheapest, but because he was predictable.
13. "It's a Small Project, But With Great Potential"
The great potential is real. Not for you. You are building the foundations of a house you will never live in and your name will not appear on any of its walls. Nobody lies to you about this — they simply never tell you explicitly that it is someone else's house.
My daughter built a recycling project at school. She worked for weeks. The project won a regional competition. The prize went to the school. She received a certificate. "Does that mean the school won, not me?" I answered honestly that both were simultaneously true. She did not like the answer. But it was honest.
14. "We Trust Your Judgement Completely"
Until the first judgement that contradicts a pre-taken decision. Then it becomes "an interesting perspective, but the context is more complex" — a formula by which you are simultaneously appeased and ignored.
My grandmother used to say: "Complete trust exists only in small children and fools. A mature person knows that trust is earned over time and lost in a moment." She said it about a neighbour who had boasted of golden hands and then broken a pipe. But it applies anywhere.
15–30. The Remaining Formulas in the Catalogue
We're doing this together — you do it, they decide. The division of labour is unequal from the outset and everyone knows it, but nobody names it, because naming it would spoil the atmosphere.
The team WhatsApp group — the illusion of transparency. Decisions are made elsewhere. You learn from the tone in which a task is communicated to you.
We value loyalty and we reward it — enough so you don't leave, not enough for you to feel truly seen. The balance is calculated.
You're one of the few people we're telling this to — there are more of them than you think. Exclusivity is a scalable technique.
We want you to grow with us — exactly as far as you are useful to their growth. When trajectories diverge, yours suddenly becomes a personal matter.
The pilot project that never becomes a real project — a well-organised drawer, the same drawer, year after year.
Your feedback helps us improve — the collection process exists. The conclusions change nothing structural.
We're in the building phase — it takes time. The clear benefits appear when your founding contribution is difficult to distinguish from the contributions of those who came after you.
The grand title without real authority — on the business card. Not in any meeting that matters.
The situation is temporary, we understand it's difficult — understood sincerely, unchanged structurally.
The conference invitation as a symbolic reward — cheaper than one month of the additional work you have put in.
We have big plans for you — in intention, not in the calendar.
The voluntary collaboration that becomes a tacit expectation — without words, through repetition.
You're a role model for the team — a management function, not recognition.
The director's passion project — his, executed by you, abandoned when his enthusiasm wanes.
We will publicly acknowledge your contribution — it comes, it is sincere, it lasts as long as attention lasts on a feed. The work remains in the system, nameless.
All of these formulas share the same mechanism: you were never told an untruth. You were told the truth in the order in which it could be used.
What Remains Afterwards, or What You Learn About Yourself
One Last Joke, This Time About Healing
Nelu the mechanic told me: "Broken cars don't get angry with me for taking them apart. People break something in themselves and then get angry at whoever shows them."
Healing is a dismantling. It is not pleasant. It is necessary.
We left the clinic in the morning light of the city and walked back through the central park, along the same paths, past the same benches. There were more people now — people on their lunch break, a few students on the grass, a woman feeding pigeons with a regularity and seriousness suggesting this was her daily schedule and that her daily schedule was something sacred.
My mother walked alongside me and was silent. Not the oppressive silence of someone ruminating on bad news, but the quieter silence of one who has already set down what needed to be set down and is moving on. We passed the bench where we had sat that morning and she said: "The park was lovely today."
Not "the park is lovely," as she had said in the morning — present tense, attentive to the moment. "The park was lovely" — past tense, already archived, already placed in the category of good things that had happened. An emotional survival technique no book had ever taught me.
Anger comes first, in cases of betrayal without direct lying. It is clean and has a precise object: not the person, not even their intention, but my own inability to have supposed the degree of premeditation. I am angry with myself for not having seen. This is illogical — I had not seen precisely because it was constructed so as not to be seen — but logic does not govern anger. It is governed by the need for retrospective control.
Good faith does not become a mistake. This is perhaps the most important thing to hold on to: acting with integrity in a system that does not share it is not naivety to be condemned. It is the cost of being the person you are. The cost has gone up. It does not mean you must become someone else.
But it becomes more expensive. You are more attentive now to architectures, not to gestures. A single gesture of consideration no longer means anything — you look at its consistency over time, at whether it exists regardless of your usefulness, at whether it survives the moments when you are producing nothing.
My son asked me, one of those evenings when we still really talk: "Dad, how do you know if someone is a real friend?" I told him: "Look at them when you have nothing to offer." He was quiet for a moment. "But I always have something to offer." I smiled. "That's exactly the problem."
There is a difference between being deceived and being used. Being deceived presupposes that you received false information and acted upon it. Being used presupposes that you received correct information and acted in accordance with expectations that the other party knew better than you. The second wounds more deeply and for longer, because you cannot say I believed a lie. You can only say I was predictable in my integrity, and that was their capital.
The End Justifies the Hidden Means, or Premeditated Baseness as a System
The Last Joke — Or Perhaps Not a Joke
A king in a Romanian folk tale — not the good one, the other one — built a golden bridge for a hero from another kingdom to cross. The hero crossed. He arrived. He fought. He won. He left. On the road he realised that the golden bridge was precisely wide enough for one horse, not two. He could not bring back what he had won.
Sometimes the infrastructure of a project is built for one direction only.
The formula we all know — the end justifies the means — describes a type of ethics in which the final aim justifies the process. It is controversial, debatable, but at least honest in intent: you know there is a purpose and that the means are its instruments.
The variant this article describes is more subtle and more perverse: their hidden end justifies your declared means. You act in good faith according to a declared set of rules. They act according to an undeclared set of rules that incorporates your actions as a useful function. There is no point at which you violated the rules you knew — it is simply that the rules you knew were not the only operative set.
The baseness does not lie in the deed — no single deed is in itself condemnable. The baseness lies in the construction: in the fact that someone invested time, energy, and patience in creating the conditions under which you would act predictably and usefully, without knowing you were a calibrated component.
The social media algorithm has no morality. It is structurally base, without intent. Human baseness is base with intent. The difference in texture is enormous: you can forgive a system; you cannot forgive a choice.
Saint Anthony the Great wrote: "The time will come when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying: You are mad, for you are not like us." The context is ascetic, but the reflection is political: the normality of a corrupt system does not make it less corrupt. The fact that everyone does it is not a justification — it is a description of the problem.
"Ignorance displayed as wisdom is perhaps the most dangerous kind of foolishness," wrote Erasmus in In Praise of Folly (1509). The person who constructs architectures of instrumentalisation and considers themselves strategic is not doing something intelligent — they are doing something that any mediocre person with sufficient patience and sufficient lack of scruples could learn.
Governments have begun to require informed consent — the GDPR in Europe, similar legislation elsewhere — precisely because the model of "it was written there, it's your fault for not reading it" is no longer accepted as functional ethics. The same principle ought to apply to organisational relationships: if your real purpose differs from the declared one, that is not strategy — it is structured deception.
Epilogue — Or the Return Home
I drove home through the lunchtime traffic with my mother in the passenger seat. At one point, passing through a junction, she said: "I should pop in and see Măria when we get back — I haven't seen her since last week." Măria is her neighbour on the second floor, a woman of eighty with whom she drinks tea several times a week and whom, as far as I know, she sees just as regularly.
She said no more about the diagnosis. She said no more about the operation. She said she ought to call in on Măria.
At her home — at Grandma's, as my children call it — the flat smells as it always does: of flowers from the balcony and of pastries from a morning some time ago and of something that has no precise name but which I recognise immediately as the smell of my childhood, as physical evidence that some things do not change no matter how many years pass. She placed her bag on the hallway hook with the same precise gesture, took off her coat, and went to the kitchen to put the water on to boil.
"Will you stay for a coffee?" she asked.
I stayed.
We drank our coffee at the kitchen table, with the afternoon light coming in obliquely through the window and the sound of the city in the background, that continuous and neutral sound I hear so rarely consciously. She talked to me about Măria and about a cozonac recipe she wants to try and about how my son has grown so much since she last saw him. She did not speak about her eyes.
I listened and thought about all the things I had written in the preceding pages — about projects with hidden purposes, about good faith as raw material, about the architectures of premeditated baseness — and I thought that my mother, at eighty-two, with deteriorating sight and an unwelcome diagnosis in her bag, was sitting at the table talking about cozonac and Măria, and that this was, at bottom, the wisest possible response to a show that had been something other than the one promised.
She was not denying it. She was not deluding herself. She was simply choosing, with a clarity I do not possess, to inhabit what was real and present and hers — the coffee, the cozonac, Măria, the afternoon light — and not to allow the diagnosis to occupy more space than it needed to.
I left after an hour. At the door, she held my hand a second longer than usual. She said nothing. There was no need.
I return to the coffee from the first morning of this article. The same smell, the same steam, the same cup with the chip in the handle.
This time I know more. I know that real stages do not guarantee honest outcomes. I know that the importance accorded can be calibrated rather than felt. I know that good faith is a capital that some calculate before they appreciate.
And yet I drink the same coffee, from the same cup, with the same ritual.
Not because I have forgotten. Because my rituals do not depend on other people's honesty. Because my integrity is not a reaction to other people's behaviour — it is a choice I remake every morning, independently of what has happened or what will happen.
My son is still asleep. He is fifteen years old and is yet to discover, in his own way, that the world contains architectures he did not build and into which he is being strategically invited. I hope I am preparing him — not through cynicism, not through withdrawal, but through the understanding that you can be a person of good faith and an informed person. That seeing the architecture does not mean never entering any project. It means knowing that you are entering.
My mother, at eighty-two, changed the subject when the diagnosis was too heavy. Not out of fear. Out of choice. She chose to speak about the weather, about Măria, about cozonac — because these are hers, real and present and uncontaminated by anyone else's agenda.
Făt-Frumos's beloved knew the palace was built by someone else. She entered it anyway. But she knew which door to leave by.
The show was something else. That does not mean yours was any less real.
Addendum — Reconstruction, or How You Rebuild After Seeing the Architecture
There is a kind of knowledge that makes you more expensive. Not in the sense that you become more valuable to others — though sometimes that happens too — but in the sense that you become more costly to yourself. It costs you more to enter something, because now you process more, verify more, listen more carefully to the background sounds.
Nelu the mechanic told me that after twenty years in the trade he had come to hear what a car had wrong before he opened the bonnet. "There's a specific sound for every problem. At first you don't hear it. Then you hear it sometimes. Then you hear it always." I asked him whether he didn't find it exhausting to always hear. "I was more exhausted when I didn't hear it and got things wrong."
Reconstruction does not mean becoming someone else. It means remaining who you are, with greater precision in choosing where you place what you have.
My grandfather — that quiet man who said important things rarely and precisely — lived long enough to see entire systems constructed and dismantled. He told me once, near the end of his life, that the only thing he had never regretted was having remained a man of his word even when there was no need to be. That expression stayed with me for years. It means he chose integrity as a position, not as a transaction. Not as a response to other people's behaviour, but as an identity that is not renegotiated according to context.
My son sometimes comes to me with an unease on his face that I recognise — the unease of someone who senses that something is not quite right but cannot articulate what. I listen. I do not give quick answers, because quick answers to complicated unease are, at bottom, a refusal of its complexity. I tell him to wait. That sometimes unease is information before it is evidence. That knowing something is not right, without knowing exactly what, is already something important — and that it need not be immediately translated into certainties in order to be valid.
Saint Isaac the Syrian, in his Ascetic Homilies, wrote: "He who knows himself is greater than he who raises the dead." The context is the ascetic life, but the wisdom is universal: real self-knowledge — not the flattering kind, but the precise kind, the kind that includes the blind spots, the predictabilities, and the places where you are vulnerable to fabricated attention — is rarer and more valuable than any external performance.
On social media platforms, reconstruction after a disappointment is processed publicly, in real time, with an audience. "I've been through a difficult period and here is what I've learnt" — an entire content genre, with millions of views, that transforms private suffering into a spectacle of personal growth. It is not necessarily false. But it is performative. And there is a fundamental difference between processing and performing the processing. The first is internal and painful and slow. The second has a clear narrative arc from problem to lesson and a share button.
I am writing this for a blog, not for a feed. I am not seeking validation in the number of reactions. I write because writing is how I think clearly — and because perhaps someone, reading this, will recognise their own morning with the chipped cup and their own journey to a consulting room and their own revelation that the two narratives in their life are, at bottom, telling the same story.
My daughter asked me once: "Dad, is it good to be kind to people who aren't kind to you?" I told her it depends on what you mean by kind. That being decent is not the same as being naïve. That you can maintain distance and remain a decent person at the same time. That boundaries are not walls — they are clear limits to a space in which you choose to live, defined by you, not imposed by fear of the other.
She thought. She said: "So you can be kind and still have limits." Exactly. Exactly that.
Governments regulate corporate behaviour precisely because you cannot rely on all organisations choosing ethics in the absence of constraint. The GDPR, the DSA, directives on worker protection — all exist because "we chose to be honest" is not sufficient as public policy. Clarity, predictability, transparency — not voluntary virtues, but legislative requirements with real consequences.
Personal relationships have no legislator. They have only people who choose, day by day, whether to build in good faith or with architectures.
My mother, at eighty-two, with an unwelcome diagnosis in her bag and sight that is deteriorating and an operation that might change nothing, chose to talk about Măria and about cozonac. Not from a refusal of reality. From the wisdom of someone who has lived long enough to know that reality is wider than the diagnosis and that allowing the diagnosis to occupy all available space is a choice, not an obligation.
I drove home through the afternoon traffic carrying this understanding, new and old at the same time, like all the understandings that matter.
The show was something else. And yet it was worth being there.
Ten Practical Questions — How to Avoid These Situations in Future?
Author's introductory note: These questions are not a defensive protocol. They are not a checklist to tick before entering a project. They are, rather, the questions I asked myself — sometimes too late, sometimes at the right moment, always with that particular discomfort of the person trying to be honest with themselves about things they would prefer not to know.
1. How Do I Distinguish Genuine Attention from Calibrated Attention?
I sometimes sit and think about this in the most concrete possible way — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a physical memory. There is a type of attention you feel differently in your body from another type of attention, and the difference is not in intensity, but in direction. Genuine attention is curious about you in general — it wants to know how you think, what brings you joy, what causes you pain, things that have no direct connection to your immediate usefulness. Calibrated attention is curious about you specifically — it wants to know exactly what you can do, how available you are, where your limits lie, what motivates you sufficiently to remain engaged. The first is diffuse and generous. The second is precise and economical.
The practical answer: Ask yourself one question after any interaction in which you felt seen and appreciated — what did we talk about that has nothing to do with the project or with what I can do for them? If you find nothing, if the entire conversation, however warm and pleasant, orbited around your capabilities, your availability, your commitment to a shared goal — then that attention was calibrated, not genuine. It does not necessarily mean it was ill-intentioned. It means it was instrumental. And knowing that is already half the protection.
2. How Do I Recognise a Project with Hidden Purposes Before I'm in the Middle of It?
I remember that my father, when someone brought him a car for repair and described the problem vaguely, with too many irrelevant details and too few technical ones, used to say that "the person knows something is wrong, but doesn't want to know what." It was an observation about avoidance, not about ignorance. And I have found that the same mechanism operates in projects with hidden purposes — there is always a strategic vagueness around the finality. What happens after the project ends? Who owns the results? Who decides what is done with them? Questions about finality are uncomfortable precisely where the purpose is dual, because honest answers would reveal the asymmetry.
The practical answer: Ask for clarity about finality before anything else. Not about the stages — the stages will always be clearly defined, because clear stages are the instrument by which you are kept engaged. Ask for clarity about who benefits from the result, in what form, and what happens to your contribution after the project concludes. If the answers are vague, enthusiastic, and undefined — we'll see, it depends on how things develop, opportunities will come naturally — you have an important signal. Vagueness about finality is never accidental.
3. How Do I Maintain Good Faith Without Turning It Into Vulnerability?
This is the question that costs me the most to formulate, because it contains a tension I cannot fully resolve — nor do I wish to, because fully resolving it would mean becoming a type of person I do not want to be. Good faith is a moral choice, not an assessment of the other person. If I condition it on prior proof of the other's honesty, it is no longer good faith — it is a transaction. And yet unprotected good faith becomes an exploitable resource.
I now distinguish between good faith in intention and good faith in information. I can act with pure intention — do my part, contribute sincerely, have no hidden agendas — whilst simultaneously being informed, meaning understanding the structure in which I am operating, knowing who benefits from what, having clarity about the real terms of the relationship.
The practical answer: Good faith does not mean not asking questions. It means asking questions without implying suspicion — out of genuine curiosity about how things work, not from implicit accusation. The truly good-faith person can ask "What does success in this project look like for you personally?" without being cynical. The answer will tell them everything they need to know about the alignment or misalignment of interests.
4. What Do I Do When I Feel the Background Noise — That Weak Signal That Something Is Wrong — But Have No Evidence?
The background noise is described earlier in this article as a refrigerator running at night — present, catalogued as normal, but detectable in its absence. I know now that I systematically ignored these weak signals because I could not articulate them, and because articulating them would have required questioning comfortable things — that I was appreciated, that the project was real, that the relationship was reciprocal.
My son sometimes comes to me with exactly this unease — something's not right, but I don't know what — and the mistake I made for a long time was to help him quickly identify what was wrong. Now I help him to sit with the unease long enough for it to become information.
The practical answer: When you feel the background noise, do not immediately analyse it and do not ignore it — note it down. Literally, if necessary. Today I felt something didn't add up in the conversation about X. You don't need to know what it means. You simply need to document that it existed. Patterns become visible over time — if the noise appears every time you discuss finality, or every time you ask a direct question about resources, or every time you are included in something important, the pattern will tell you more than any point-by-point analysis.
5. How Do I Manage the Moment of Understanding That I Was Used, Without Becoming Cynical About Everyone and Everything?
This is, probably, the most important question and the one for which I have the least complete answer. I know that the answer is not generalisation — deciding that all people are instrumental is a defence mechanism that costs more than the wounds it prevents. Generalised cynicism is a form of emotional laziness disguised as wisdom.
I think of my mother that day, leaving the doctor's consulting room with an unwelcome diagnosis and changing the subject in time. She was not denying it. She was not generalising — she was not saying that all doctors are cold or that the health system is corrupt or that health is an illusion. She was saying it had rained a great deal that summer. She localised the experience. She allowed it to be what it was — a specific experience, with a specific person, in a specific context — without transforming it into a universal theory about human nature.
The practical answer: Localise. When you understand that you were used, resist the impulse to extract a general law. Tell yourself — this person, in this context, with this set of interests, chose to construct a project in which I was an instrument. Not people do this. Not I can no longer trust anyone. This person. This context. Localisation does not minimise the wound. It makes it more precise — and what is precise can be processed. What is generalised remains a diffuse fog that colours everything that follows.
6. How Do I Establish Clear Terms at the Outset of a Project Without Appearing Suspicious or Calculating?
There is a cultural prejudice — particularly in Romanian settings, but not only — that asking for clarity about terms before committing is a sign of a lack of trust or of cold calculation. You don't talk about money at the start, it's not proper to set conditions when you've been invited, it's nice to show generosity before asking for anything in return. All of these norms exist and have a social logic. And all of them can be used against you.
The practical answer: Replace terms with expectations. Not what are my conditions — but I want to make sure we have aligned expectations so there are no disappointments along the way. The phrasing is different; the intention is the same. You can ask what would a successful conclusion to this collaboration look like for you? and what would recognition of my contribution look like in the ideal scenario? without appearing calculating. On the contrary, you appear mature and responsible — and if your partner hesitates or becomes vague at precisely these questions, you already have the information you need.
7. How Do I Tell the Difference Between a Real Promise and a Functional Promise?
A real promise has three components you can verify: a concrete result, a deadline, and a responsible party. A functional promise has all the appearances of a real promise but is missing at least one of the components — usually the deadline or the responsible party, or both.
"There are opportunities for advancement" — functional promise. "We'll discuss a promotion in Q2, with you and the department head" — real promise. "We invest in our people" — functional. "The budget for your specialist course has been approved and must be used by March" — real. The difference is always in the concreteness — and concreteness is precisely what the functional promise avoids with an elegance you could admire if you allowed yourself a moment of detachment.
The practical answer: When you receive an important promise, ask one single question: "When exactly, and how shall we return to this?" Not to force an immediate commitment, but to see how the other person reacts to being made concrete. If the reaction is enthusiastic and specific — "let's schedule a meeting for next month" — the promise is real. If the reaction is vague and warm — "certainly, we'll find the right moment" — the promise is functional. The emotional temperature of the response is not the relevant information. Its specificity is.
8. What Do I Do with the Loyalty I Have Already Built Towards a Project or Person, When I Start Seeing the Signs?
This is the most practical and most painful question in the entire set, because it arises precisely when you are already invested — emotionally, temporally, reputationally. You have contributed, you have built, you have staked something, and just when you have built enough for it to matter, you begin to see the signs. Leaving now costs more than it would have cost at the start, and that is partly the design of the situation.
My daughter once asked me whether it was normal to find it hard to give up a friendship that made her feel bad. I told her it was completely normal and that the difficulty of leaving was not an argument for staying — it was an argument about how much you had already invested, which is information about the past, not an instruction about the future.
The practical answer: Distinguish between the cost of leaving and the cost of continuing. The cost of leaving is visible and immediate — what you lose now if you leave. The cost of continuing is diffuse and future — what you will lose if you carry on investing in a project whose purposes you do not fully know. People systematically overestimate the cost of leaving and underestimate the cost of continuing, because the first is concrete and the second is probabilistic. Try to place them on the same scale before any decision.
9. How Do I Talk About This with Someone Close Without Appearing to Victimise Myself or to Be Seeking Validation?
I avoided for a long time speaking about situations in which I felt I had been used, because any formulation seemed to slide towards victimhood or towards seeking validation — tell me I wasn't wrong, tell me it was the other person's fault. And that was not what I wanted. I wanted to process, not to be consoled.
I found that the difference lies in the question with which you enter the conversation. "What do you think I should have done?" — that invites advice and implies you did something wrong. "I need to think something through aloud" — that invites presence, not solutions. "How would you see this situation?" — that invites perspective, not validation.
The practical answer: Before you begin the conversation, say explicitly what you are looking for — I don't want advice, I just want to hear how it sounds when I say this out loud or I want to know if your perspective sees something I'm missing. People who love you will respond to what you ask, not to what they assume you need. And you will know, after the conversation, whether you received what you were looking for or merely something that resembles it.
10. How Do I Remain Open to New Projects After Living Through This — Without Building a Wall Instead of a Filter?
This is the question with which I close, because it is the only one that looks forward without looking back. And it is, at the same time, the hardest — because the experience of instrumentalisation leaves a defensive reflex that activates too early and too broadly, filtering not only projects with hidden architectures, but also those with honest intentions.
I think of my mother, who at eighty-two, with an unwelcome diagnosis and deteriorating sight, left the consulting room and said we should call in on Măria. She did not build a wall against doctors or diagnoses or reality. She localised the experience, placed it where it belonged — something heavy, from one day, in the office of a man who had done his job honestly even if the news was bad — and moved forward with an openness I can only describe as courage.
The filter, not the wall. The wall blocks everything. The filter lets through what is real and stops what is architected.
The practical answer — and the last: Ask yourself one single question before any new project, before any new relationship in which you sense you are being strategically invited — if tomorrow I can no longer contribute anything, if I become useless to this project, what remains of the relationship? Not as a test, not as a provocation — but as a private, honest thought, made in quiet. If the answer is nothing or I don't know — it does not mean you do not enter. It means you enter knowing. And knowing, even when you choose to continue, is already something different from not knowing.
The show can be something else. You can choose to be present in it with your eyes open.
Red Flag Checklist — Or What to Look for Before It Is Too Late
I once sat with a blank sheet of paper and tried to note down, in retrospect, the signs I had ignored. Not to punish myself — I finished with that long ago — but as a calibration exercise, so I would know next time where to look. The sheet turned out long. I reduced it to what truly mattered.
Each sign below I have either lived personally or witnessed in people in whom I recognised my own past. I write them in the order in which they usually appear — not simultaneously, not suddenly, but progressively, one by one, at intervals long enough for the pattern not to seem like a pattern until you are already inside.
1. Enthusiasm that does not respond to concrete questions
There is a type of enthusiasm that fills every space — meetings, emails, corridor conversations — and which suddenly becomes diffuse when you ask a question that requires a specific answer. When exactly? Who decides? How does it look in writing? The enthusiasm remains, but the answer does not come. Or it comes in the form of slightly displaced enthusiasm. When enthusiasm is greater than the clarity it produces, something does not add up.
2. Your importance suddenly increases without precedent
You were neutral or invisible for a period, and suddenly you are indispensable, essential, exactly the person we need. The change is real and pleasant and disorienting at the same time, if you are honest with yourself. Ask yourself what has changed in their context — not in you, in them. Usually what has changed is that something has arisen for which they need you. It is not you who has grown in their eyes. It is your usefulness for a purpose they have not yet communicated to you.
3. The finality of the project is always in the future and always vague
The stages are clear. The responsibilities are clear. The intermediate deadlines are clear. But the question what happens when everything is finished? produces answers that evaporate — we'll see, it depends on how things develop, opportunities will come naturally. Vagueness about finality is never accidental. It is structural. It is there because a concrete answer would reveal the asymmetry of benefit.
4. Your contribution leaves no trace bearing your name
You work, you produce, you contribute — and the results exist, are real, are used. But somewhere in the process of public attribution, your name disappears or is diluted or is mentioned in parentheses, in footnotes, in that and the team who contributed that covers everything and names nothing. It is not forgetfulness. It is design. Your results without your name are exactly what is needed — the benefit of your contribution without the cost of acknowledging it.
5. You are consulted after the decision has been made
There is a specific sequence: the decision is made, then you are informed, and the informing is presented as consultation. "We wanted to tell you directly, to have your perspective." Your perspective comes after it can no longer change anything, but before you discover that it can no longer change anything. You participate in a conversation about a decision that is no longer a conversation. And because nobody explicitly lies to you, you cannot name what has happened — you can only feel that you spoke a great deal and that nothing you said landed anywhere.
6. Your boundaries are tested incrementally
The first step is small and reasonable. The second is slightly larger, but in continuity with the first. The third is already beyond what you would have accepted if it had been proposed from the start — but it was not proposed from the start; it grew organically, step by step, with a patience that, in retrospect, resembles a plan in a troubling way. Incremental testing of boundaries is the basic technique of social engineering and of instrumental relationships in equal measure. Each individual step seems reasonable. The trajectory is not reasonable.
7. Your loyalty is invoked before your interests
"I know you can do this — you're the backbone of the team." "We counted on you precisely because we know you won't let us down." "Nobody else would understand what needs to be understood." Your loyalty is invoked strategically at precisely the moments when you ought to be asking questions about what is being asked of you. It works because loyalty is a genuine value in you — and that is precisely what makes it exploitable. It is not your value that is the problem. It is the moment in which it is invoked.
8. Important information reaches you late or in fragments
You learn about important changes after they have already taken place. You learn about decisions that affect you through lateral sources, not from the direct source. You learn half the story today and the other half next week, by which point the first half can no longer be put in full context. The flow of information is calibrated — not because you are considered incapable of processing it, but because complete and timely information would allow you to evaluate and act in your own interest. Fragmentation is control.
9. Recognition always takes the form of gestures, never of structures
You receive a thank-you email. A mention in a meeting. An invitation to an event. Real gestures, sincere in their moment, and always individual, always one-off, always lacking in structural consequence — no formalised increase in responsibility, no recognition that produces a lasting change in the relationship. The gestures maintain the balance sufficiently so you do not leave. Structures would transform it. That is precisely why you remain at the level of gestures.
10. When you ask direct questions, the subject changes with warmth
Not with aggression, not with explicit refusal — with warmth. "I like that you ask questions, it shows your character." "Let's discuss this more fully next time, when we have more time." "I understand the concern, and it's legitimate." The response validates the question and neutralises it simultaneously. You leave the conversation feeling heard and with no answer. If this happens more than twice with the same person on the same subject, it is not coincidence. It is technique.
11. Your contribution is easier to request than to refuse
There is a precise social mechanism by which requests become increasingly difficult to refuse the more engaged you are — because each previous yes creates the context in which no would seem like a withdrawal, an inconsistency, a betrayal of implicit commitments. You are never asked for something truly unacceptable — you are asked for something slightly beyond what you gave last time, in continuity with what you have already given. Refusing would require you to explain not just I don't want to do this, but to dismantle an entire history of yeses that have created the expectation. It is easier to continue. And that is precisely the calculation.
12. You don't know precisely who makes the final decisions
You have clear interlocutors, people you work with daily, people who appear to have authority. But when it comes to decisions that affect you directly — promotion, recognition, change of terms — a structure suddenly appears above the structure, an approval needed from somewhere higher up, a we need to check with X as well. Diffusion of authority is never accidental. It is a mechanism that ensures there is never one single person of whom you can demand a definitive answer.
Validation Questions — Or How to Ask for Clarity Without Appearing to Accuse
Before writing this list, I sat with it for a moment, because there is a risk I know well — the risk that a list of questions becomes a protocol of interrogation, a set of traps set for an innocent person who does not deserve the suspicion. That is not the purpose. The purpose is what I said in the cybersecurity section: relational hygiene, not paranoia. Procedures that protect the relationship, not techniques for dismantling it.
All the questions below can be asked in a calm, curious, sincere tone — and all the better if they are asked that way, because the interlocutor's reaction to a curious, non-aggressive question tells you more than the same question asked with declared suspicion. A person with honest intentions responds to curiosity with openness. A person with hidden intentions responds to curiosity with manoeuvring — and that difference in temperature, if you are attentive, is more informative than any verbal response.
Group I — Questions About Finality
These are the most important and the least frequently asked, precisely because they touch on the most sensitive area of any project with dual purposes.
"What does success in this project look like for you personally — not for the team, not for the organisation, for you?"
The question distinguishes between the declared purpose and the personal purpose. A person with honest intentions answers without hesitation, usually with something that overlaps with the collective goal. A person with hidden intentions either produces a generic response that does not address personally, or visibly hesitates before formulating something, or redirects to the collective goal as though you had not used the word personally.
"What happens to my contribution after the project concludes? Who owns it, who can use it, how is it attributed?"
The question about intellectual property and attribution is rarely aggressive in its direct formulation — it is a legitimate question that any collaborator can ask without implying suspicion. A vague or deferred response is the signal. A specific and non-defensive response confirms that the terms are clear to both parties.
"If I can no longer continue tomorrow, what happens to the project?"
An apparently logistical question — risk planning, continuity — that reveals how central you truly are, relative to how central you are told you are. If the project continues without you with minor adjustments, your contribution was instrumental, not indispensable. If the project cannot continue without you — you are genuinely central, which means you also have the corresponding negotiating power, power which perhaps you have not been exercising.
Group II — Questions About Recognition and Reciprocity
"How will my contribution be visible outside our team?"
Not as a demand for praise — but as a question about the infrastructure of recognition. A specific and detailed response — you will be credited in the final report, your name will be on the presentation, I will mention it explicitly — indicates that recognition is envisaged as part of the relationship. A vague and warm response — everyone knows what you do, we appreciate it enormously — indicates that recognition will remain internal, informal, and perishable.
"What do I receive in return — not in the future, within this project, now?"
This question is uncomfortable to ask in our culture, where a direct request for reciprocity is perceived as a lack of generosity. That is precisely why it is worth asking. Not aggressively, not as an ultimatum — but as a request for clarity about the real terms of the collaboration. Any healthy relationship can answer it directly. Any instrumental relationship will avoid it or transform it into a discussion about shared values and collective commitment.
"Are there precedents where someone in a similar role to mine received what I am being promised?"
The question about precedent is perhaps the most effective in the entire set, because it asks for concrete evidence, not declared intentions. If precedents exist and are shown specifically, the promise has substance. If they do not exist or are not shown, you are the first case — and first case is the territory where functional promises live most comfortably.
Group III — Questions About Power and Decision
"Who makes the final decision on X, and how does a recommendation from me reach that decision?"
Real mapping of the decision flow, not the declared version. Anyone can tell you that your voice matters — this question asks them to describe the concrete mechanism by which it matters. If the mechanism is vague or non-existent, your voice matters is a retention formula, not a description of organisational reality.
"If you and I have different views on the direction of the project, what happens?"
Not as a challenge — but as an understanding of the real operating rules. A mature, open response — we discuss it, we argue, we find a solution — is a good sign. A response that evades possible conflict — I don't think we'll get there, we share the same values — is a sign that conflict is not permitted, that your voice matters has an implicit limit that nobody will declare to you but which you will discover yourself at the wrong moment.
"If my results exceed expectations, what changes concretely for me?"
The question about the reward for exceptional performance is revealing because it distinguishes between organisations that have real mechanisms for recognition and those that have only a discourse about recognition. A vague response — it will certainly be taken into consideration — means that your exceptional performance will be used as an argument for what others can demand of you, not as a basis for what you can demand for yourself.
Group IV — Questions About Transparency and Information
"Are there things relevant to my role that I don't know yet but should?"
This is the question I most strongly recommend and ask least frequently, because it requires the person opposite to voluntarily disclose information they may not have intended to disclose. A person with honest intentions responds with what they know and consider relevant — sometimes surprisingly much. A person with hidden intentions says no, I think we have all the necessary information — and in that I think and necessary live precisely the things they do not want you to know, which is to say exactly the things you need.
"How will you know when our relationship is no longer working, and how will you communicate that?"
The question about exit, asked from the outset, is a form of relational hygiene that too few people practise. Not because you are planning to leave — but because the way someone responds to the question about exit tells you an enormous amount about how the relationship will look in the course of it. The person who responds directly and humanely — I will say so directly, we will discuss it, I will not let you find out from other sources — is building a relationship in which you can remain with dignity. The person who becomes vague or surprised by the question is building a relationship from which you will leave discovering you had been leaving for some time without knowing it.
A Final Note on How to Use These Questions
Do not ask them all at once. Do not ask them like a questionnaire. Do not ask them in the tone of someone who already knows the answers and wants to catch someone out.
Ask them one by one, in natural conversations, at the logical moments of the relationship — at the start of a project, at the first sign of vagueness about finality, the first time you feel the background noise. Ask them with genuine curiosity, because genuine curiosity disarms where declared suspicion builds walls.
And listen not only to the response, but also to what happens to the relationship after you ask the question. A person with honest intentions becomes more open after a direct question — they feel they can speak without kid gloves and they appreciate it. A person with hidden intentions becomes more cautious, more strategic, more calibrated — and this shift in temperature, if you are attentive, is more informative than any verbal response.
My mother asked none of these questions of the doctor. Not because she could not have — but because that is not the kind of relationship in which you ask them. There are relationships in which clarity is an act of respect for the other, and relationships in which clarity would be a cruelty towards a person doing their best with what they have. The diagnosis was real. The doctor did his job. The slim chances were not a hidden purpose — they were a reality he had communicated as gently as he could.
Not all situations with unpleasant outcomes are instrumentalisation. Some are simply life, with its natural noise and imprecision, with people doing what they can and with results nobody chose.
The art is in knowing the difference. And that art is learnt slowly, with patience, with mistakes, with cups of coffee drunk at the kitchen table with people who love you and who change the subject when the answer is too heavy to carry.
Author's Note
I wrote this article because I felt it needed to be written — not to persuade anyone of anything, but because some thoughts do not settle until you give them a form. This form, the long essay with narrative threads that interweave and diverge, seemed to me the only honest one in light of the subject's complexity. A short article about instrumentalisation would itself have been an act of instrumentalising the theme — a reduction of something living to a useful schema.
The usefulness of this text, if it has any, lies in recognition. Not in instruction. Not in warning-sign lists or steps to follow. But in that moment, which anyone who has lived through it knows, when you read something and think — yes, exactly that, I didn't know it could be named. Naming a thing does not resolve it, but it makes it less capable of quietly disorientating you.
The second argument for its usefulness is more personal and harder to formulate: I wanted to say, somewhere in writing, that good faith is not a mistake to be corrected. That being predictable in your integrity is a risk worth taking, even knowing that there are people who build upon this predictability architectures you never invited. The alternative — prophylactic cynicism, pre-emptive withdrawal, good faith strategically rationed — is simultaneously safer and more impoverishing.
About The Gallery (2003) by Jos Stelling
I have long wanted to write about The GalleryThe Gallery (2003) by Jos Stelling. It is a twenty-eight-minute short film, without dialogue, without a narrative voice, without a single word spoken from the first frame to the last — and it is precisely this silence that is its principal instrument. A man of around forty-five waits in front of a lingerie shop window in a shopping centre whilst his wife is inside. That is all. The premise is so mundane it almost puts you off. And from this banality Stelling constructs, with Flemish patience and precision, something that stays with you. Filmcommission
The man's attention is caught by a beautiful and sensual woman. Their silent flirtation becomes increasingly bold; the man loses himself in gestures he would not have risked in any other circumstance, and the woman, in her own way, responds — and subsequently takes her revenge. The description sounds like an erotic farce and is, on the surface, exactly that. But Stelling, who completed with this film a trilogy of erotic stories, all narrated visually without dialogue, is not interested in the farce as an end. He is interested in the mechanism by which an ordinary man, with an ordinary life and a wife buying lingerie fifteen metres away, can be led, step by step, through infinitesimally small gestures, towards behaviour he would never have consciously chosen. IMDb
That is the artistic subtlety of the film and that is its connection to everything I have written in the preceding pages.
The woman played by Anouska Wink never lies. She says nothing — literally, not a single word. But every glance, every posture, every response to the man's gesture is calibrated with a precision you only understand retrospectively, when the consequence arrives. She is building a project. The stages are respected. The chronology is in order. The man played by Gene Bervoets participates in good faith — or in what he calls good faith, meaning with the conviction that he is steering the game, that he has chosen, that he is the one who initiated. And only at the end does he understand that the show was something other than the one he believed he was playing.
Stelling does not judge the man. He does not judge the woman. He offers no moral resolution. The camera records, with the cold detachment of the Dutch eye that calls to mind Vermeer observing a woman at a window, how a mechanism unfolds that no character sees in its entirety. The wife, who emerges from the shop with a carrier bag and her usual smile, does not know. The man knows too late. The woman has known from the start.
Twenty-eight minutes without dialogue that demonstrate, more precisely than any theory, that instrumentalisation has no need of words. It needs only an asymmetric understanding of the rules of a game that one party believes to be improvised and the other has long known to be scripted.
I have recommended this film on several occasions. Usually after having spoken with someone about the subjects of this article. Not as an illustration, but as a direct experience — because there are things you cannot explain, you can only show, and Stelling shows them with an elegance that I, in eight thousand words, have only attempted to approximate.
The Gallery and the Architecture of Premeditated Baseness — A Semantic Relationship
Silence as the Language of the Project
The first and most important element of convergence is the absence of dialogue. Stelling constructs twenty-eight minutes of narrative without a single word spoken — and this is his most precise directorial choice from the perspective of this article's theme, because the instrumentalisation described in the preceding pages operates through the same mechanism: not through what is said, but through what is strategically omitted. Gene Bervoets's man is not deceived by a single word — because there are no words. There are only calibrated gestures, measured glances, responses that confirm precisely as much as needed for him to continue. The article says that "you were told the truth in the order in which it could be used" — the film shows that the ordering can be constructed without words too, that silence is sometimes more effective than any sentence, because it cannot be contradicted, verified, or subsequently cited as evidence.
The Asymmetry of Knowledge — Who Knows the Rules of the Game
The man believes he is playing an improvised, spontaneous game, born from the encounter of two people who happened to see each other through a window. The woman knows she is playing a scripted game. That is the fundamental asymmetry, and it is identical to the asymmetry in projects with hidden purposes catalogued in this article: the good-faith participant operates within the declared framework of rules, convinced they understand the terms, whilst the other party operates according to a parallel, undeclared set of rules that incorporates the first person's behaviour as a predictable variable.
The man is not naïve in the common sense of the word — he is an adult with experience, with a life. But his knowledge is asymmetrically incomplete relative to the woman's knowledge, and it is precisely this asymmetry, not stupidity or lack of experience, that makes him vulnerable. The same mechanism appears in every one of the thirty formulas catalogued: "You are exactly the person we need", "Your voice matters", "We're doing this together" — all presuppose that the person who hears them understands the rules of the game in the same way as the person who utters them. They do not. And the distance between the two sets of rules is the space in which instrumentalisation is built.
Real Stages Serving a Hidden Purpose
Stelling does not rush anything. The film unfolds with Flemish patience, frame by frame, gesture by gesture — a glance, a smile, a subtly altered posture, a response that encourages the next gesture. Every stage is real. The flirtation is real. The attention accorded is real. The escalation is real and apparently consensual, because the man chooses at every step to continue. And it is precisely the reality of each individual stage that makes it impossible to identify the moment at which everything deviated — because it did not deviate. It proceeded exactly according to plan, the plan that only one of the parties knew in its entirety.
The article says: "The stages of the project were real. No one misled you about how — every step was in order, every deadline met, every tactical promise honoured. The chronology was perfect. It was perfect precisely because it served a purpose you did not know." Stelling films exactly this — the perfect chronology of a project whose purpose is known in its entirety only to one of the participants.
The Wife — The Character Who Does Not Know a Project Exists
Raymonde de Kuyper plays the wife with a disarming naturalness — she emerges from the shop with her carrier bag, her usual smile, her entirely unknowing presence. She is the third character in the film, but her presence is structurally essential: she is the proof that the man is simultaneously functioning in two realities, one in which he is the husband waiting patiently in front of the shop window and another in which he has just played a game with consequences his wife will never fully know.
This dual existence — sincere participation in a declared relationship, simultaneously with undisclosed engagement in a project with different rules — is exactly the texture of the betrayal without direct lying described in this article. The wife is not lied to with a single word. Nothing is explicitly hidden from her. And yet something now exists in the space between them that she does not know and that he cannot name without revealing, retrospectively, that a parallel project existed. His silence towards her after the incident is itself a form of instrument — a truth omitted in the order in which it can be managed.
The Revenge as Revelation of the Architecture
The film's ending brings the consequence — the woman takes her revenge in her own way, as the synopsis puts it, and in that moment the man understands, suddenly and completely, that he did not steer the game, that he did not choose the rules, that what he believed to be a spontaneous and mutual improvisation was a project with a pre-established purpose that he has just served impeccably.
This is the revelation in the article — not that you were lied to, but that you have understood the architecture. That everything that preceded this moment, every stage respected, every gesture of attention, now has a different meaning from the meaning you assigned it in real time. The facts do not change. What changes is what the facts mean.
Stelling offers no catharsis. The man has no time for a moral reaction — the wife appears, life continues, there is a carrier bag with lingerie and a usual smile and a journey home. The article says that revelation does not bring anger immediately — it brings disorientation, the inability to know where to place the experience, because there is no singular moment in which you were explicitly deceived. The film's ending lives in exactly this disorientation: the man walks alongside his wife and carries within him something that has no clear name and cannot be said and cannot be denied.
The Camera as a Neutral Instance — No Judgement, No Moral Resolution
Stelling films with the detachment of one recording a mechanism, not with the empathy or condemnation of a director who judges characters. The camera takes no side. There is no dramatic music at moments of tension, no camera angle suggesting the man is ridiculous or the woman malevolent. There are only people functioning according to their inner logic, in a shared space, with consequences that not all of them anticipate in equal measure.
The article attempts the same balance — and it is the most difficult to maintain, because the subject invites judgement. To say you were instrumentalised without victimising yourself, to analyse the mechanism without condemning the person in place of the system, to acknowledge that your good faith was the other's capital without concluding that good faith is a mistake — all of this requires the same kind of gaze that Stelling exercises with his camera: present, precise, without verdict.
The Shopping Centre — The Non-Place as the Stage of Instrumentalisation
Marc Augé coined the term non-places for transit spaces — airports, motorways, shopping centres — in which people coexist without knowing one another, without shared history, without mutual obligations. Stelling deliberately chooses the shopping centre as the film's setting, and the choice is semantic, not aesthetic. A non-place is the ideal space for a project without declared consequences — nobody knows anyone, nobody will know, the usual social rules are partially suspended, identities are anonymous.
The projects with hidden purposes in this article function identically within the organisational framework: the formal structure — the meeting, the email, the WhatsApp group, the event with internal visibility — is the shopping centre in which everyone coexists with the appearance of normality, in which stages are respected and chronology is in order and nobody speaks about what is really being built. The formal space of the project is the non-place in which instrumentalisation is possible precisely because the surface rules are respected impeccably.
The Final Convergence
The Gallery demonstrates in twenty-eight minutes, without words, what this article attempts to articulate in eight thousand words with just as many: that the most effective mechanism of instrumentalisation is not the lie — it is the construction. That you can lead someone towards a purpose they do not know through real gestures, authentic stages, calibrated attention, and strategic silence. That revelation does not come at the moment of the lie, because the lie does not exist — it comes at the moment when you understand the architecture, when everything that preceded it suddenly and completely and irrevocably reinterprets itself.
Stelling has no need of dialogue for this. I needed eight thousand words and a morning with my mother at the ophthalmologist and a cup with a chip in the handle. Each conveys the same thing through the means available to them. The film remains, in my view, the more precise version.
Everything You Have Read So Far Is Taught in Information Security Courses
I was sitting last week at the kitchen table — the same table at which I had coffee with my mother after the ophthalmologist, the same chair with the left leg slightly shorter than the others, the same sound of the city coming through the window I always forget to close properly — reading a cybersecurity training document that a client had sent me, a thick and tedious document full of technical terms, and at one point I reached the chapter on social engineering and remained on that page longer than I had intended, because everything it said was, word for word, everything I had written in this article — only from a different perspective, with different terminology, for a different audience, and with the intent to defend, not to understand.
Social engineering, in its technical cybersecurity sense, is defined as the psychological manipulation of people to induce them to disclose confidential information or perform actions that compromise a system's security — and this definition, if you read it attentively, does not describe an IT technique. It describes a relationship. It describes exactly the relationship I have analysed throughout this article: someone who knows more about the rules of the game than you, who constructs real stages serving a hidden purpose, who uses the other party's good faith as a predictable resource.
The difference between the classic cyberattack and social engineering is precisely the difference between direct lying and instrumentalisation without direct lying that I have tried to name in the preceding pages. The classic attack forces a system — it finds a technical vulnerability, exploits it, enters. Social engineering forces nothing. It requests access. And it receives it, because it has built the situation so that access would be granted.
Kevin Mitnick — the best-known social hacker in history, the man who spent years in gaol for having penetrated the systems of large corporations and governments, and who subsequently wrote The Art of Deception, the bible of social engineering — said that throughout his career he never exploited a technical vulnerability that he could not have circumvented with a simple phone call to someone in the company. He did not crack systems. He convinced people. And people opened the doors for him themselves, in good faith, because he had built the context in which opening the door seemed like the right thing to do.
I think about this and I think about how many times I have opened doors in good faith because the context had been constructed to make it appear that this was the right thing to do — and I am not referring to passwords and computer systems, I am referring to projects, to relationships, to moments when someone knew which buttons to press and in what order and with how much pressure, and I operated according to their expectations with a precision I can now admire, retrospectively, with that particular discomfort of the person who recognises that they were usefully predictable to someone else.
Social Engineering Techniques and Their Relational Mirrors
Cybersecurity catalogues social engineering attacks in a few fundamental types, and each of them has an exact mirror in the catalogue of the thirty formulas in this article.
Phishing is communication that appears to come from a trusted source and that requests a specific action — a click on a link, the entering of credentials, the confirmation of an identity. The relational form of phishing is precisely "you are exactly the person we need" or "we have complete confidence in your judgement" — messages that appear to come from a place of genuine recognition and that ask, in return, for a specific action: your commitment, your availability, your unconditional contribution. You do not verify the source because the source seems familiar and warm. You click. You enter your credentials. You confirm your identity as a good-faith person who asks no uncomfortable questions.
Pretexting is the construction of a false scenario — a false identity, a false context, a false need — to extract information or access. But its relational variant, and this is the subtlety that cybersecurity does not fully cover, is not false in its individual components. The relational pretext is constructed from real elements — a real project, real stages, real importance accorded — and it is precisely the reality of the components that makes it harder to detect and harder to contest afterwards. You cannot say you told me a lie because you were not told a lie. You can only say the construction as a whole served a purpose you did not declare — and that is an accusation far harder to prove and far harder to formulate without appearing paranoid.
Baiting is the offering of something attractive in order to induce a desired behaviour. There are opportunities for advancement. We invest in our people. We have big plans for you. The bait is real in its intentionality — the opportunities genuinely exist, the plans genuinely exist, the intention to invest genuinely exists. The bait does not lie about what it offers. It lies, by omission, about the probability and about the conditions and about the time horizon within which the offer becomes concrete. And you, who have taken the bait, function according to the desired behaviour — you remain engaged, you produce, you wait — without ever having received an explicit false promise.
Quid pro quo — the apparently fair exchange in which one party offers something of value in exchange for access or information. Its relational form is the informal mentoring that never becomes formal, the voluntary project with internal visibility, the public acknowledgement of your contribution. You receive something real — visibility, access, knowledge, a sense of belonging to something greater. You give something real in return — time, energy, credibility, loyalty. The exchange seems fair at the moment of the transaction. It becomes unfair in retrospect, when you realise that what you gave has accumulated and produced continuing value for the other, whilst what you received had an expiry date that nobody communicated to you.
Why This Belongs to Social Engineering and Not Something Else
Someone could say that everything I have described in this article belongs to psychology, to sociology, to organisational ethics — and they would be right. But the argument that it belongs also to cybersecurity, to social engineering in its technical sense, has a practical usefulness that the other disciplines do not cover as directly.
Cybersecurity has, unlike psychology or ethics, an explicit defensive orientation. It is not interested in understanding why the attacker does what they do — it is interested in building systems that withstand the attack regardless of the motivation. And it is precisely this perspective that is missing from the way we usually discuss relational instrumentalisation — we talk a great deal about mechanisms, about the psychology of the one who instrumentalises, about the wound that remains, but we talk little, far too little, about the defensive architecture.
When Mitnick describes in The Art of Deception how to build resistance to social engineering, he does not say be more cynical or stop trusting people. He says build clear procedures that function independently of individual good faith. He says verify not because you distrust the person in front of you, but because the verification system protects that person too, not just you. He says clarity about terms is not a lack of trust, it is the hygiene of a relationship.
That is exactly what I have attempted to say in the ten practical questions above — not how to become more suspicious, but how to build, in your relationships and projects, clear procedures that function regardless of the good or bad intentions of the other party. How to ask for clarity about finality not in order to accuse, but as a healthy routine. How to document weak signals not in order to build a dossier, but in order to detect patterns. How to distinguish between a real and a functional promise not out of cynicism, but out of relational hygiene.
The Social Media Algorithm as a Social Engineering System at Scale
There is one final connection I wish to make explicit, because it bears directly on the life of my fifteen-year-old son and of all adolescents living simultaneously in the physical and digital world.
Social media platforms are, structurally, social engineering systems at industrial scale — and this is not a metaphor, it is a technical description. They collect data about your behaviour, build a profile of your emotional vulnerabilities, and deliver content calibrated to activate precisely those points, in the order that maximises time spent on the platform. They do not lie about the content — they deliver real content. They construct the context in which you act according to their expectations, and you believe you are choosing, because your choice is real, even if the space of choice was designed by someone else.
My son knows this theoretically. I have been telling him for several years. And I still see him in the evenings with his phone in his hand, watching clips he did not seek out, recommended by a system that knows what he wants to see better than he knows himself at that moment, because the system has data from millions of previous sessions and he has only the intuition of a fifteen-year-old with a difficult day at school.
Knowing the mechanism does not automatically produce immunity — that is the lesson of cybersecurity applied to real life. Knowing the mechanism is necessary but insufficient. What produces resistance is the procedure — the habit of asking, before any emotional or temporal engagement, who is constructing this context and to what end? Not as paranoia. As hygiene.
The European Union has understood this and included digital social engineering within the scope of regulations governing online platforms — the Digital Services Act (DSA) imposes transparency about recommendation algorithms precisely because it has recognised that algorithmic recommendation is a form of social engineering, that the context constructed by the platform influences user behaviour in ways the user cannot detect without additional information. Clear, predictable, and transparent legislation — not as an ideal, but as a response to a real, identified, and documented attack.
Everything I have written in this article — from the morning with my mother in the hallway holding her bag, to the consulting room of the evasive doctor, to the catalogue of thirty formulas, to Stelling's The Gallery — is, at bottom, an informal course in relational hygiene. Not self-defence. Not cynicism. Hygiene. The distinction matters, and I repeat it because it is worth repeating: hygiene does not mean refusing to shake anyone's hand. It means knowing when to wash them.