Historical Similarities

The Smell of the Classroom

There is a specific smell in training rooms that never changes, whether the walls are adorned with 1997 calendars, heavy wooden furniture, or 2026 LED screens and plastic chairs. It is the smell of anticipation mixed with the fear of being left behind. For me, the classroom was not just a physical space with tiles and desks—it was the workshop where I learned the first lesson of the digital craft, attending various courses or presentations of new technologies. For nearly three decades, I have watched from the perspective of a student as entire generations of entrepreneurs crossed the threshold of that room, driven not by a passion for technological conquest, but by the primal instinct of economic survival. From the hum of the CRT monitors’ transformers to the sterile silence of data centres, the story is not about machines, but about the person trying to tame a new tool.

Looking back, I notice that every technological leap was met with the same deceptive promise of absolute simplicity. We were repeatedly told that the new interface would make everything easier, that the magic button would replace hours of apprenticeship, that the software would think for us. But the eye of the person who works with raw material—whether it is untreated leather or source code—knows that surface simplicity is often a trap. When you hide complexity behind a user-friendly interface, you do not eliminate the weight of the tool; you only move it from your hand into the shadow of the system, where you can no longer control it. True mastery does not lie in pressing a button, but in understanding what happens behind it.

In that room, people did not come to become engineers or programmers. They came with hands calloused from real businesses, minds burdened with profit and loss calculations, seeking a lever. Whether it was a floppy disk with data in FoxPro in 1997 or a subscription to an AI agent in 2026, their fundamental question remained merciless and pragmatic: How much does this tool cost? Who will operate it? And who will bear the burden when it fails? They understood, perhaps faster than the inventors, that technology is not a saviour, but a capricious employee, and the real cost is not the licence, but the dependency it creates.

Above and beyond business calculations, there is an unwritten law of history: any technological peak, no matter how civil it may seem at first, is inevitably absorbed by structures of power. From the servers that store our data to the colossal energy infrastructures that power algorithms, digital sovereignty has become the new battlefield. Those who believe they are adopting a simple productivity tool often discover, all too late, that they have become nodes in a global network of dependency. Legislation, data location, and human verification are not just bureaucracy; they are the last lines of defence for those who refuse to be mere passive consumers of their own economic destiny.

But before we talk about the cloud, sovereignty, and hallucinating algorithms, we must return to the origin of this relationship. We must remember the moment when the machine was not yet an abstract service, but a physical, heavy object that you could touch and had to learn step by step. The story I tell here is not a nostalgia for a bygone era, but a map for navigating the present. Because, although the screens have changed and commands have been replaced by prompts, the psychology of the person sitting in front of the unknown has remained exactly the same. Everything began with a silence, a cool room, and a cursor blinking on a green or absolutely black background.

Transparency Note: Article written with AI assistance (Qwen). Judgements, polemical positions, and perspectives belong entirely to the author.

Read more: From MS-DOS to the Complex AI Algorithm: The User Experience

A decade of accelerating ruptures. Ten defining characteristics that will enter the history books. And, at every chapter, the Romanian condition alongside its historical parallels — because our trajectory is not an exception to the rule, but a concentrated mirror of it, repeated with uncomfortable fidelity.

A note on perspective. This essay is written from Romania — a country of nineteen million people on the eastern flank of the European Union, bordering Ukraine to the north and east, the Black Sea to the south-east, and five other states in between. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. It has one of the fastest internet networks in Europe and one of the lowest rates of EU structural fund absorption. It has produced global technology companies and exported several hundred thousand doctors, engineers and programmers to Western Europe over the past two decades. It is, in other words, a country of persistent paradoxes — which makes it an unusually instructive lens through which to examine a decade that was itself full of them.

Introduction: The Decade of Multiple Crises

There are decades that pass. And there are decades that break things.

The decade 2016–2026 broke things. Not uniformly, not simultaneously, not with the same instrument everywhere — but it broke. Historians writing about it will likely reach for the term "polycrisis" — coined by the political theorist Johan Galtung in the 1970s and revived by economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan in 2022: not a single crisis with a single cause and a manageable resolution, but multiple structural crises that overlap, amplify each other, and render ineffective the remedies that worked when crises arrived separately.

The pandemic that locked the world. The war that returned to Europe. Artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the nature of work itself. Democracies fragmenting from the inside. Climate that ceased to be a warning and became a weekly weather event. Economies exiting the era of near-zero interest rates and rediscovering inflation. All of this in the same decade, sometimes in the same year.

History books will see 2016–2026 as a period of accelerated transition — the end of a long cycle of relative stability that had held since 1991, and the beginning of something whose name we have not yet found. Perhaps a new multipolar order. Perhaps prolonged disorder. Perhaps, with luck and better choices, a reorganisation towards something more robust.

Romania will be present in these books. Not at the major chapters — there we will appear in parentheses, unless something spectacular occurs. We will be at the bottom of the page, in the footnotes, in the grey-shaded case study boxes. The example that illustrates how a difficult road can be made even harder than it needs to be, when choices are consistently mediocre and reform is perpetually deferred — after the elections, after the crisis, after the next "after".

This essay follows ten major characteristics of the decade 2016–2026 and, at each, deepens the Romanian condition with concrete historical parallels. Romania's history is, among other things, an exceptionally rich archive of repeated crises, missed opportunities and partial adaptations. To ignore it is to fail to understand the present. To understand it does not guarantee change — but it improves the odds.

A necessary methodological note: historical parallels are not determinism. This essay does not argue that Romania is condemned to repeat the same errors indefinitely, that there is some immutable "national character", or that change is impossible. It argues something more precise and more verifiable: that institutional structures tend to reproduce themselves unless deliberately altered; that problems unresolved by one generation return to the next in different forms but with similar mechanisms; and that understanding the mechanisms — not accepting the fatalism — is the necessary condition for change. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes — and the rhymes have a logic that can be anticipated, if you know how to read it.

Article 13 of 10 (the third postscript) — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: 1–12. Articles 10, 11, and 12 outlined nine scenarios for 2050. This article—which the author had declared in the afterword of Article 12 he would not write—proposes three more, anchored in the 1907 Peasants’ Revolt and the Romanian Stalinism of the 1948–1964 decades. Two moments of violent fracture—one on the eve of the First World War, the other in the heart of the 20th century—that radically reshaped, in different ways, Romanians’ relationship with land, state, and their own labour.

I. Flămânzi, Botoșani, 23 February 1907, Noon

The village of Flămânzi lies twenty-five kilometres north of Botoșani, on the gentle hills of the Moldavian Plateau, where the broad interfluves slope gently towards the deep valleys of the streams feeding into the Siret River. In a normal February, these hills should have been white with snow. In the winter of 1907, the snow was absent. The hills were black, muddy, with patches of frost in the shaded valleys where the sun only reached for a few hours a day. The slopes were bare, deforested by generations of forced clearing to expand the arable land—that land which, through the rent they paid on it, kept the people living here on the edge of famine, never quite beyond it, but never comfortably within its bounds.

Gheorghe Todiriță, fifty-two years old, the village’s bell-ringer (the man who rang the tocsin at the church gate on Sundays when the priest decided to gather the people), sat in his cottage at noon, eating cold polenta left over from the morning. Beside him, his wife, Ileana, was opening a sack of spring seeds. It was three-quarters full. It had been fuller in autumn—but November had brought the rent collector for the overdue payments, and some of the grain had gone to him. This was not absolute poverty—Todiriță was not the poorest man in Flămânzi. There were families who had lived that autumn on potato peels and beetroot mixed with bran, and who now, in this dry February, sent their daughters to gather dried chicory roots from the fields, because the boiled weeds with salt could stave off hunger for a few hours. Todiriță was better off than that. But Todiriță knew that if the rent collector came again with demands before spring, the distance between him and those who ate chicory could shrink suddenly.

A half-hour’s walk away, at the Mirceni estate, Moise Weinglass—the chief rent collector for a conglomerate of estates totalling several thousand hectares of arable land in Botoșani County—was signing, at that very moment, a financial report for the absentee owner in Bucharest. The report showed that the rents for 1906 had, despite the partial drought, been paid in full. That the collection of arrears was proceeding. That the livestock inventory was up to date. Moise Weinglass was a man of fifty, with a proper ledger, a clean desk, a good-quality oil lamp on his table, and a small but real collection of books in Yiddish, German, and Romanian arranged on a shelf above his desk. He was not a monster. He was a link in a chain—at the end of which stood the absentee owner, and above the owner stood the financial structures of post-1866 Romanian modernisation, which demanded rent, rent, rent from the land of Moldavia to finance the selective industrialisation of Wallachia.

The connection between Todiriță and Weinglass was the rent—a fixed price per cultivated hectare, negotiated once every few years, non-negotiable in practice because Todiriță had no one else to compare with and nowhere to go if he did not accept. The land was not his. It had not been his before 1864—when serfdom and corvée labour were still in place. It had been his, formally, since 1864, through Cuza’s rural law—but it had been insufficient land, given without animals, without inventory, without affordable credit, and soon suffocated by a rental market in which large owners systematically gained more than the small freeholders.

Four days later, on 27 February 1907, three hundred peasants gathered in front of the town hall in Flămânzi. No one had ordered the gathering. There was no union organisation, no active socialist cell, no agitator sent from Bucharest or Iași—a narrative the conservative powers would later construct because it was more comfortable than the truth. The truth was simpler and more terrifying: the people had gathered because they had nothing left to eat. Hunger has no agitator. Hunger is its own political discourse.

The mayor came out onto the steps. He spoke. He promised to send a report to the county. The people threw stones. The mayor went back inside. The next day, the gathering had grown to six hundred people. They entered Weinglass’s estate. They took what was in the warehouse—wheat, corn, seeds. They did not kill anyone. They did not set anything on fire. They took food and returned home with it. It was a revolt, but for now, it was a disciplined madness.

The revolt spread southward within days, like a field fire, across the Moldavian plain, through the counties of Botoșani, Iași, Roman, Vaslui, Neamț, Bacău. By mid-March, it had crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Muntenia. On 12 March, in Vlașca County, manor houses were burning. On 15 March, in Teleorman County, a sub-prefect was taken hostage by a crowd of several thousand people. On 17 March, in Ilfov, cavalry troops fired into the crowd for the first time. By 28 March—when the last fires died down in Oltenia—the official death toll was 419. The real number, according to later historians’ estimates, was between 11,000 and 14,000. The liberal government of Sturdza had been dismissed during the revolt; the conservative government of Cantacuzino that followed had ordered the army to suppress the uprising. The army suppressed it.

Gheorghe Todiriță did not die in the revolt. He lived until 1921, when pneumonia finally took him at the age of fifty-six. He lived to see the 1921 agrarian reform—which finally gave him land. Five additional hectares, free of rent. He died before he could see that those five hectares were not enough without capital, without machinery, without cooperatives. He died without knowing that his son, Vasile, would be absorbed into the collective in 1953, and that his land would become everyone’s, meaning no one’s, meaning the state’s.

This is the opening scene of this article. Not in a palace, not at a negotiating table, not in a council of ministers. In a cottage in Flămânzi, with cold polenta, a three-quarters-full seed sack, a rent collector twenty minutes’ walk away, and black fields on the horizon. With people who, four days later, would break a fragile equilibrium that had lasted, with all its tensions, for almost forty years since Cuza’s reform.

This article—which its author had declared unnecessary in the afterword of Article 12—proposes three more scenarios for 2050, anchored in two moments that defined Romanians’ relationship with their own labour and their own land: the 1907 Revolt and the Stalinist collectivisation of 1949–1962. These are the moments when the ‘top-down’ transformation—that of Cuza, of Carol I, of the 1921 reform—clashed with the ‘bottom-up’ transformation and shattered against it. Their lessons are different from those of the previous articles. They are harsher.

Article 12 of 10 (the second postscript) — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: 1–11. Articles 10 and 11 outlined six scenarios for 2050. This article proposes three more, anchored in the period of Cuza’s abdication (10–11 February 1866) and the immediate months that followed—a six-month interval that, more than is recognised, defined the structure of the modern Romanian state.

I. The Princely Palace, Bucharest, the Night of 10–11 February 1866, 4 a.m.

Snow had fallen over Bucharest all day on 10 February. It had begun at noon and settled over the tin roofs of Calea Mogoșoaia (the future Calea Victoriei) in a layer of about ten centimetres by midnight. On Strada Doamnei, in front of the princely palace, two sentinels from the Domnitor’s personal guard stamped their feet every fifteen minutes to keep warm in their boots. The snow had stopped. The sky had cleared. Above Bucharest, a few frozen stars glinted.

At 4 a.m. on 11 February 1866, a sound heavier than the sentinels’ stomping echoed from the direction of the main gate. A group of about twelve men in Romanian officers’ uniforms—Colonel Constantin Pilat, Major Anton Costiescu, Captain Dimitrie Lecca, plus ten others of various ranks—approached with steps that made no attempt at discretion. The sentinels, who had received instructions an hour earlier via a civilian courier from Ion C. Brătianu, stood aside. The gate opened without a sound.

The officers climbed to the second floor of the palace. The corridor was lit by a single oil lamp, which, in the memories of some participants, danced nervously in the draft from a slightly ajar window at the far end. They reached the door to the Domnitor’s bedroom. Colonel Pilat knocked once, sharply.

Alexandru Ioan Cuza, forty-five years old, ruler of the United Principalities since 24 January 1859—exactly seven years and seventeen days—was asleep. Or rather, he had woken at the first noise. He had sat up in bed, in his long Dutch nightshirt, his hair dishevelled, one eye more open than the other. Next door, in the adjacent room, Maria Obrenović, the Serbian princess with whom Cuza had been living since 1863 in a public adultery that had, in a way, exhausted the entire political class (his wife, Elena Cuza, had retreated to Iași with their two adopted children), had also awakened. Maria did not leave her room. According to recollections, she stood pressed against the wall, her ear to the door, trembling.

Cuza called out. ‘Who’s there?’

‘The provisional government of Romania, Your Highness. We ask you to open the door.’

‘The provisional government?’ Cuza hesitated for a moment. Then he got up, put on his robe, and opened the door. In front of him stood Colonel Pilat, holding a piece of paper.

‘Mr Cuza, you are requested to sign this act of abdication. No blood will be shed. You will not be harmed. But you must sign.’

Cuza looked at the paper. He turned his head towards Maria’s room. He turned back to Pilat. He looked at the other officers who had filled the corridor. None were unknown to him—he had promoted some himself. Costiescu, two years earlier, he had decorated for his service in the 1864 Administrative Reform.

‘With what ink shall I sign?’ Cuza asked. ‘I have no ink in my room.’

Colonel Pilat took from a pocket of his tunic a small silver inkwell. He had brought it with him. That was how prepared the conspiracy was.

Cuza signed, in three minutes, at the desk in his bedroom, the act by which he abdicated the throne of the United Principalities. He asked permission to take a few clothes from his wardrobe. He dressed. At 6 a.m., in the dawn of 11 February 1866, a conspirator’s cab was waiting for him at a side gate of the palace. By 10 a.m., he was at Cotroceni, under discreet guard. By the end of the day, he was on his way to the Austrian border, via Curtici. On 26 February, he was in Vienna. On 15 March, in Paris. Seven years later, he would die of tuberculosis in Heidelberg at the age of fifty-two. He would never see Romania again.

And in his wake, in Bucharest, the ‘Lieutenancy of the Prince’—a provisional regency of three members (Nicolae Golescu, Lascăr Catargiu, Colonel Nicolae Haralambie)—was installed, tasked with quickly bringing a foreign prince to the now-vacant throne. Eighty-nine days later, on 10 May 1866, a young German named Karl Ludwig Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, aged 27, would step down from his carriage at Băneasa. Sixty-one days after that, on 1 July 1866, he would promulgate a Constitution inspired by Belgium’s 1831 model. Forty-eight years later, in October 1914, he would die at Sinaia, leaving behind the longest and most reformist reign in modern Romanian history.

All of this was decided—more than is recognised—in that February night of 1866, with fresh snow on Bucharest’s rooftops, with Cuza signing at his bedroom desk, with Maria Obrenović trembling in the next room, with the silver inkwell that Colonel Pilat had taken from his pocket.

This is the opening scene of this article. Not a victory. A moment of rupture that produced, in cascade, six months of institutional reshuffling. And these six months are the lesson we now extract, in 2026, for three possible future scenarios.