"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes." — Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
A Letter Before We Begin
My son,
You will not read this today. You are probably scrolling. I know, because I can hear it — that particular silence you produce when the phone has you, the silence that is not rest but something more like suspension. The cat, Gri, hears it too. She curls up on the chair beside you and pretends not to notice, which is perhaps wiser than what I am about to attempt.
I am not angry. I am trying to understand something, and I think you might actually enjoy it if you give it half a chance.
Last week, I sat in front of my screen — as I do every day, because this is where my work lives — and I read something that made me laugh out loud. Cory Doctorow, an author and digital rights activist, described sitting on a panel in Toronto where the moderator called jailbreaking a smartphone "rampant theft of IP." Doctorow's jaw dropped. Mine very nearly did too, though I was alone in the room and there was only Gri to witness it.
I want to explain to you why that moment matters. Not because it is complicated, but because it is actually quite simple — and the simple things are the ones they prefer you never to figure out.
The Locked Door and the Key You Already Own
A Short Funny Story to Get Us Started
Imagine you buy a house. You move in, hang your pictures, put your grandmother's rug on the floor. Then the estate agent knocks on the door and says: "Lovely home. Just to let you know — you are only allowed to buy furniture from us. And if you put a sofa from another shop in your living room, that is theft." You would tell them to leave. You might use colourful language. You would be right to do so.
Now: why do we accept exactly this situation with our phones?
"We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented." — Christof, The Truman Show (1998)
What Jailbreaking Actually Is
Jailbreaking means removing the software restrictions that a manufacturer installs on a device — a phone, a tablet, a games console — so that the owner can choose which software to run on it. That is all. You are not stealing the device. You are not copying someone else's work without paying. You are simply deciding, as the owner of the object in your hands, what it does.
The algorithms on your platforms right now are doing something analogous to jailbreaking, but in reverse: they are quietly installing their own restrictions on your attention, your mood, your sense of what is normal. The difference is that nobody asked your permission, and there is no moderator on a panel to call it "rampant theft of your time."
The Father's Perspective: What I See When I Watch You
Your mother notices it first, the way mothers always do. She says you look through people now, not at them. Your grandfather, who spent forty years fixing engines with his hands, says he does not understand a word of what you are doing on that screen, but he can tell when someone is not present. He told me this last Sunday after dinner, quietly, so you would not hear. Your grandmother said nothing. She just refilled your plate, which is her language for love and also for concern.
The mechanic who came last month to fix the boiler — a man who has never owned a smartphone and is inexplicably cheerful about this — said something I keep thinking about. He said: "A machine that does not let you open it is not your machine. It is the manufacturer's machine, rented to you." He meant the boiler. He was also right about everything else.
"Fă bine și nu te uita la cine," says Greuceanu, the hero who fights the giants alone, before anyone thanks him. Do the right thing, and do not look to see who notices.
The Legislation They Do Not Tell You About
Governments around the world have passed laws — some quietly, some with great fanfare — that criminalise the act of circumventing the technical locks manufacturers place on devices. In Canada, this is called the Copyright Modernization Act (2012). Similar provisions exist across the EU and the United Kingdom under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. The stated purpose is to protect intellectual property. The actual effect is to protect the business models of the companies that lobbied for the laws. A genuinely transparent, predictable, and citizen-facing digital legislation would distinguish between copying someone's creative work — which is indeed a form of theft — and deciding what runs on the device you purchased. Currently, most laws do not make this distinction clearly. And the companies that benefit from this vagueness spend considerable sums ensuring it remains vague.
"Prostia nu e o scuză, e o alegere," as they say in certain corners of the internet. Ignorance is not an excuse; it is a choice. Legislators who cannot distinguish a locked phone from a copied film are choosing not to learn, because learning might cost them something.
Apple Was Born in a Dorm Room Selling Stolen Phone Calls
The Irony That Should Make You Snort
In the early 1970s, two young men in California were selling small electronic boxes that let you make free long-distance phone calls by fooling the telephone network. They sold them door to door in university dormitories. Their names were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The legal term for what their boxes did is "toll theft." The company they went on to found is Apple.
I want you to read that again, slowly.
The company now worth approximately three trillion dollars — the company whose lawyers fight to make sure you cannot install software on your iPhone without their permission — was seeded with money made from a device that committed literal telephone fraud.
"Ignorance is the parent of fear," wrote Herman Melville, not about tech companies, but the application is elegant. Apple's executives are not ignorant. They are afraid — afraid of the world in which you, the owner of your phone, are also the one who decides what it does.
What Baudrillard Would Say (If He Used TikTok)
Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who wrote Simulacra and Simulation — the book Morpheus hides his discs inside at the beginning of The Matrix — argued that in the modern world, copies of things become more real than the things themselves. The image of a product becomes more important than what the product actually does.
Apple sells you an image of freedom — the clean lines, the white earphones, the sense that you are one of the sophisticated ones. The actual product locks you inside a garden where every flower has been pre-approved, and thirty per cent of every purchase goes to the gardeners.
The platforms your friends are on right now are doing something similar. They sell you an image of connection — likes, comments, the warm feeling of being seen — while the actual product is your attention, packaged and sold to advertisers. The algorithm does not care whether you feel good. It cares whether you stay.
Your Teacher, Your Grandfather, and the Platform They Did Not Design
Your history teacher told you last term, your mother mentioned, that he finds it increasingly difficult to hold the class's attention for more than seven minutes. He has taught for twenty-two years. He is not less interesting than he was. The algorithm has simply recalibrated what "interesting" means, and seven minutes is now a generous span. Your grandfather sits with you for an hour and says very little, but everything he says is worth keeping. The algorithm would give him terrible metrics.
"Cel ce nu a gustat amarul nu cunoaște dulcele," says Făt-Frumos, the hero of the old stories, after his long journey through difficulty. Those who have not tasted bitterness cannot know sweetness. Your grandfather has tasted considerable bitterness, and this is precisely why his silences mean something.
The Real Threat: Not AI, but the Off Switch
What Digital Sovereignty Actually Means
I am home all day. I work from this desk, on this screen, using tools — email, cloud storage, document editors — that live on servers I have never seen, in buildings I could not find on a map, controlled by companies incorporated in jurisdictions far from here. If any one of those companies decided tomorrow to terminate my account — for any reason, or no reason at all — I would lose years of work, communication archives, client contacts, and the email address I use to log into virtually everything else.
This is not a theoretical risk. It has happened to people. It will happen to more.
In Canada, where Doctorow's panel took place, the government has begun to discuss "AI sovereignty" — the idea that Canada needs its own artificial intelligence to be truly independent. But as Doctorow points out, if every Canadian chatbot were switched off tomorrow, the country would carry on. If Microsoft switched off Office 365 for every Canadian government ministry, the country would not carry on. That is the actual vulnerability, and it is almost never discussed.
"You think that's air you're breathing now?" — Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
We think we own our digital lives. We are breathing borrowed air.
The Tractor That Could Not Be Repaired
This is not abstract. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian soldiers captured Ukrainian agricultural tractors. The manufacturer, John Deere, remotely disabled them using software locks — which is interesting, perhaps even admirable in that context. But the same mechanism that allowed John Deere to disable stolen tractors also allows John Deere to prevent Ukrainian farmers from repairing their own equipment without authorised technicians. The software lock does not distinguish between a stolen tractor and a broken one. It simply enforces the manufacturer's control.
Your friend's father fixes farm machinery. He told you, I think, that he can no longer repair certain models because the diagnostic software is locked. He is not a thief. He is a mechanic. He is being told, in effect, that the machine in front of him is not the farmer's machine. It belongs, in the ways that matter, to the manufacturer.
The social media platforms work identically. They do not belong to you. Your account, your followers, your years of posted content — none of it is yours. It can be removed, altered, or monetised without your meaningful consent. The terms of service, which nobody reads because they are designed not to be read, say so quite clearly.
Philip K. Dick's Question, Updated
Philip K. Dick, who wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — later filmed as Blade Runner — spent his career asking one question in a hundred different ways: what is real, and who gets to decide?
His answer, which arrived slowly and painfully through his life, was that power decides. Those with the ability to control what you perceive as real will use that ability. The question is whether you know it is happening.
The engagement algorithm on every major platform is a reality-shaping machine. It does not show you the world. It shows you a version of the world calculated to keep you returning. If outrage keeps you returning, it serves you outrage. If anxiety keeps you returning, it serves you anxiety. The version of reality it constructs has no obligation to be true, and considerable commercial incentive not to be.
I am not saying this to frighten you. Plato said it first, about a cave, around 380 BC. You are not the first generation to live in a manufactured shadow-world. You are the first generation for whom the shadows update in real time, are personalised to your psychological profile, and are backed by trillion-dollar infrastructure.
"Omul sfințește locul," goes the old saying. The person makes the place holy. But only if the person is actually present.
The Margins Are the Message
How Much Money Is Being Taken From You (and Everyone Like You)
Here is a number: thirty per cent.
When you buy an app on your phone — any phone, either kind — thirty per cent of what you spend goes not to the person who made the app, but to Apple or Google, for the privilege of using their payment system, which they require you to use, because they have locked the device so that no other payment system can operate on it.
A musician who releases an album through a streaming platform receives approximately 0.003 to 0.005 dollars per stream. The platform keeps the rest. A writer who publishes through certain e-book platforms cannot sell you their book directly, even if they wanted to, without violating the platform's terms.
This is not capitalism. Capitalism involves competition. This is a toll gate, and you pay it every time you engage, whether you know it or not.
"Your margin is my opportunity," Jeff Bezos once told his suppliers. He meant it as a statement of competitive intent. Applied to the jailbreaking debate, it becomes something more interesting: Big Tech's margin — that thirty per cent, that fifty-one per cent of ad revenue — is the opportunity for every country that decides to legalise fair competition.
The Ad Market Nobody Taught You About
The online advertising market, which funds essentially everything you read for free, is controlled by two companies: Google and Meta. According to the US Department of Justice, they operated an illegal, collusive arrangement — given the internal nickname "Jedi Blue" — that rigged the advertising auction to ensure both companies won regardless of what the advertiser wanted or what the publisher needed.
Every news website you visit for free is funded, in part, by this arrangement. Every time the arrangement takes more than its fair share, the news organisation receives less. Newsrooms shrink. Journalists lose their jobs. The information environment degrades.
The algorithm that keeps you on the platform longer has, as a direct consequence, less money reaching the people who do the actual work of finding things out and writing them down. I am one of those people, in a small way. You have seen what my working week looks like.
Sfântul Ioan Scărarul on Attention
"Atenția este mama rugăciunii," wrote Saint John Climacus in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, approximately 600 AD. Attention is the mother of prayer. What he meant was that the quality of your inner life depends entirely on where you choose to direct your awareness. An attention that is bought and sold, sliced and targeted, is not capable of the depth he described.
I am not asking you to pray. I am asking you to consider what it means to have your attention managed by a system whose incentives have nothing to do with your flourishing.
The Platform and Your Sister
Your sister is eleven. She is watching you for signals about what adolescence means, what cool looks like, what to want. She has already begun to notice what you spend time on. The platform knows this about siblings, about younger children, about the way imitation works. The algorithm that shapes your reality is already modelling hers.
I am not blaming you for this. I am telling you that you have more power in this situation than you may realise, and that power works in both directions.
Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral
The Doctorow Principle
Cory Doctorow has a phrase for the process by which revolutionary technologies become oppressive incumbents: "enshittification." It describes the arc of a platform from useful to extractive to hostile, as it moves from attracting users to locking them in to monetising them at the expense of their experience.
He means it descriptively, but it also carries a moral charge. The companies that once disrupted the old order — Apple disrupting IBM, Google disrupting the old web portals, Facebook disrupting loneliness — have become, each in their turn, the old order. And they use exactly the same legal and technical mechanisms they once circumvented.
Steve Jobs sold Blue Boxes in dormitories. The legal term for what those boxes did was toll theft. Forty years later, Apple's lawyers argue that installing a different app store on a phone is theft of intellectual property.
This is what Doctorow means by "every pirate wants to be an admiral."
Morpheus Was Right (About This Particular Thing)
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy."
The system is not a person. Nobody in particular decided to build a world in which thirty per cent of your money goes to two Californian companies every time you buy something on your phone. It emerged from a series of individually logical decisions, each made by rational actors pursuing their own interests, within a legal framework designed by lobbyists who had very clear interests of their own.
The system can be changed. It has been changed before, often by people who were initially called criminals.
The breakup of AT&T — the telephone monopoly that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were ripping off with their Blue Boxes — was ordered by a federal court in 1984, after years of legal battles. Before the breakup, AT&T told anyone who would listen that competition would destroy telecommunications. After the breakup, telecommunications costs fell dramatically and the industry innovated at a speed that would not have been possible under monopoly control. The people who broke AT&T were called radical extremists and enemies of progress. Then they were called right.
Your Girlfriend and the Attention She Deserves
You were on your phone when she called last week. I heard you, through the wall, saying "yes, no, yeah, I know" in the tone that means you are not really listening. She is a thoughtful person and she will notice, if she has not already, that the phone is present in your relationship in a way that you have not invited and perhaps not examined.
I am not lecturing you on romance. I am pointing out that the algorithm wins when you are less present than the device in your hand. The algorithm does not care about your relationships. It cares about your engagement metrics.
"Un prieten la nevoie se cunoaște," says Harap-Alb's faithful horse, carrying him through impossible trials. A friend is known in need. The phone will not carry you through anything. It will simply keep you scrolling.
What Canada Understood, and What We Should
The Disenshittification Nation
Doctorow's proposal for Canada is elegant in its simplicity: legalise jailbreaking. Allow Canadian companies to build businesses selling tools that free devices from their manufactured constraints. Let Canadian news organisations sell subscriptions to Canadian readers without surrendering thirty per cent to Apple or Google. Let Canadian farmers repair their own tractors. Let Canadian ministries export their data to Canadian cloud services without penalty.
He calls this the opportunity to become a "disenshittification nation." It would make billions, not lose them. It would create jobs in Canada, not Silicon Valley. It would make the country genuinely more resilient against the specific threat it actually faces — not the theoretical threat of not having domestic chatbots, but the real threat of having its entire digital infrastructure switched off by a foreign executive order.
The parallel for Romania — for us, here, in Botoșani — is not identical, but it rhymes. Our dependence on platforms and cloud services controlled elsewhere is the same dependence. Our news organisations losing advertising revenue to the same duopoly is the same problem. Our farmers, our mechanics, our small business owners paying thirty per cent premiums for payment processing they did not choose — it is all the same mechanism.
Saint Paisios on Technology (Approximately)
Saint Paisios of Mount Athos, the twentieth-century Orthodox monk, wrote and spoke extensively about the spiritual dangers of distraction and the importance of inner stillness. He did not, obviously, anticipate the smartphone. But he said something that I keep returning to: "Sufletul are nevoie de liniște ca să audă glasul lui Dumnezeu." The soul needs silence to hear the voice of God.
I do not require you to interpret this theologically. You can interpret it psychologically, if you prefer: the self needs silence to hear itself. An attention economy designed to eliminate silence is, by this measure, an economy designed to prevent you from becoming yourself.
The legislation that would protect you from this — that would require platforms to offer genuine chronological feeds, to give you control over your own data, to stop selling your attention to the highest bidder without your meaningful consent — exists in fragments in various jurisdictions. The EU's Digital Services Act moves in this direction. It is incomplete and imperfect. It is more than most countries have managed.
The Teacher Who Stayed for Twenty-Two Years
Your teacher, who cannot hold the class for more than seven minutes now, chose his profession because he believed that ideas, communicated well, could change people. He has not changed. The attention landscape has. He deserves better. So do you.
"Cine nu știe carte, nu știe nimic," goes the old saying. He who cannot read knows nothing. It is a proverb that made sense when literacy was the dividing line. Today the dividing line is attention — the ability to sustain focus long enough to actually understand something. This is more valuable than it has ever been, precisely because it is rarer.
What You Can Do Tomorrow
I am not asking you to become a digital rights activist. I am asking you to consider five things you could do tomorrow morning, before the phone wakes up:
1. Check who owns your files. Open your email, your document storage, your photo library. Ask yourself: if this company closed tomorrow, what would I lose, and how would I recover it? Back up what matters to somewhere you actually control.
2. Find the receipt. Look at your monthly app spending. Calculate, roughly, how much of it goes to the platform rather than the person who made the thing you bought. This number will surprise you. Surprise is the beginning of attention.
3. Read one thing without the algorithm selecting it. Go to a website directly. Not via a link in your feed. Not via a recommendation. Choose something, deliberately, and read it to the end. Notice what it feels like to be in charge of the sequence.
4. Talk to the mechanic, the craftsman, the person who repairs things. Not about technology. Just talk. Ask them what they know that most people your age have not learned. They will tell you something worth keeping.
5. Ask your grandfather one question you have never asked before. One question. About something he built, or fixed, or decided. The answer will take longer than seven minutes. Stay with it.
What You Should Avoid
- Do not mistake the map for the territory. The version of reality your feed shows you is not the world. It is a product.
- Do not assume that what is legal is ethical, or that what is illegal is wrong. Apple was founded on illegal circumvention. Jailbreaking is currently illegal in many places, and is, by any honest analysis, a property right.
- Do not let the algorithm choose your friends, your interests, or your sense of what is normal. It is optimised for engagement, not for your flourishing.
- Do not believe that complexity is a reason not to understand. The mechanisms described here are simple. They are made to seem complex so that you will not examine them.
- Do not scroll past this. Or — scroll past it, and come back.
Author's Note: How This Article Happened
This piece began somewhere unexpected: a short passage in Cory Doctorow's newsletter, Pluralistic, in which he described a panel moderator's jaw-dropping description of jailbreaking as "rampant theft of IP." That single moment of intellectual confusion — or deliberate misdirection — is a window into something large.
The article moved, through drafting, from a straightforward explainer about digital rights to something more personal and more complicated. The Beevor influence — alternating macro and micro, finding the human scale inside the political — pulled it toward the letter form, which seemed more honest than the essay form for what I actually wanted to say. I am genuinely uncertain whether my son reads my analytical writing. I know he reads messages addressed to him.
The tensions in this article are real. I am simultaneously arguing that the law is wrong (anti-circumvention provisions) and that law matters (the need for clear, transparent digital legislation). These positions coexist, but awkwardly. I have tried not to smooth the awkwardness.
The "șopârlă" (Aesopic embedded argument), if there is one, is the story of Apple's Blue Boxes. It appears to be a historical anecdote. It is also an argument that the moral framework used to criminalise jailbreaking is selectively applied, that the largest company in the world built its foundations on the same behaviour it now prosecutes, and that this is not hypocrisy so much as the predictable logic of every system that achieves dominance. The Blue Box story is the article's spine. Everything else hangs from it.
Rhetorical tools used: anaphora (the repetition of "It is not theft of IP" and its variants); antithesis (pirates becoming admirals, founders becoming gatekeepers); direct address (the letter form throughout); the embedded philosophical quotation as structural anchor rather than decoration; and the deliberate use of the proverb — Romanian, Orthodox, cinematic — as an argument by compression, saying in one sentence what a paragraph would dilute.
Subjective errors to acknowledge: I have been harder on platform algorithms than the evidence strictly requires. The platforms are not entirely hostile; they have genuine utility. I have also perhaps overstated the resilience value of jailbreaking as a policy tool — it is necessary but not sufficient. A country that legalises jailbreaking but does nothing about data portability, cloud sovereignty, or local infrastructure investment has solved one problem and left many others.
What I have not said plainly enough: the person most likely to benefit from the legalisation of jailbreaking is not the sophisticated user who already knows how to circumvent technical locks. It is the small business owner, the small-town journalist, the mechanic, the farmer — the person who pays the toll without knowing there is a gate.
Bibliography and Ten Questions with Answers
Key References
- Doctorow, Cory. Pluralistic: Jailbreaking isn't theft, June 2026. pluralistic.net
- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
- Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Doubleday, 1968.
- Plato. The Republic, Book VII (Allegory of the Cave). c.380 BC.
- Wachowski, Lana and Lilly. The Matrix. Warner Bros., 1999.
- John Climacus (Ioan Scărarul). The Ladder of Divine Ascent. c.600 AD.
- Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Harper & Brothers, 1851.
- Wikipedia: Breakup of the Bell System. en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia: Jedi Blue. en.wikipedia.org
- Bezos, Jeff. Quoted in multiple business sources regarding supplier margins as competitive opportunity.
Q1: What is jailbreaking, in the simplest possible terms?
Jailbreaking is the act of removing the software restrictions that a manufacturer installs on a device you have purchased, so that you can decide for yourself what software to run on it. It does not involve copying anyone else's work without payment. It means using your own property as you choose.
Q2: Why is jailbreaking currently illegal in many countries?
Laws in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and many EU countries include provisions that criminalise circumventing technical protection measures on devices. These laws were passed largely in response to lobbying from technology and entertainment companies, and were often tied to trade agreements. The stated justification is the protection of intellectual property; the actual effect is the protection of manufacturers' control over devices after sale.
Q3: How did Apple begin, and why is this relevant?
Apple's founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, financed their first product by selling Blue Boxes — devices that allowed users to make free long-distance phone calls by circumventing the telephone network's billing systems. The legal term for this is toll theft. Apple is now worth approximately three trillion dollars and argues strenuously that installing unauthorised software on an iPhone constitutes a form of property crime. This is not incidental irony; it is the central historical argument against the moral legitimacy of the current anti-circumvention framework.
Q4: What is the thirty per cent problem?
When a user purchases an application or digital product through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, thirty per cent of the purchase price goes to the platform operator rather than the creator. This is enforced through the requirement that all in-app purchases use the platform's payment system. No competing payment processor can be used, because the device is locked. This thirty per cent levy is applied to every transaction, globally, for every app on every device of both types.
Q5: What is "digital sovereignty" and why does the AI conversation miss the point?
Digital sovereignty is a country's ability to function independently of foreign technology infrastructure. The current conversation in many countries focuses on building domestic artificial intelligence. Cory Doctorow's argument — which is well-supported — is that switching off a country's chatbots would produce no meaningful disruption, while switching off its cloud email, document storage, and enterprise software would paralyse government and business functions. True digital sovereignty requires addressing device ownership, data portability, and cloud dependency, not building chatbots.
Q6: What is "enshittification" and who coined it?
Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the predictable deterioration of digital platforms. A platform first provides genuine value to attract users; then locks users in; then extracts maximum value from users at the expense of their experience in order to satisfy investors. The term is descriptive and has achieved wide circulation precisely because it accurately describes the observable trajectory of major platforms including social media networks, search engines, and e-commerce sites.
Q7: What is Jedi Blue?
Jedi Blue is the internal nickname for an alleged collusive arrangement between Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) regarding online advertising auctions. According to the US Department of Justice, the two companies agreed to rig the advertising market in ways that disadvantaged publishers and guaranteed both companies a disproportionate share of advertising revenue, regardless of the market outcome. The case has proceeded through the US legal system with significant findings against Google.
Q8: How does the engagement algorithm affect young people specifically?
Engagement algorithms are designed to maximise time spent on platforms. Research and platform documentation indicate that emotional arousal — including anxiety, outrage, and social comparison — tends to increase engagement. These mechanisms do not distinguish between adults and adolescents. The developing brain, which has not yet fully matured in its capacity for impulse regulation and long-term perspective, is particularly susceptible to these dynamics. The platforms are aware of this. Leaked internal documents from multiple major platforms have confirmed that adolescent users are studied in detail, and that their patterns of engagement and distress are known to the companies.
Q9: What would legalising jailbreaking actually change in practice?
If jailbreaking were legalised, third-party companies could build and sell alternative app stores, competing payment processors, independent repair tools, and data export services. Publishers could sell subscriptions directly to readers without surrendering thirty per cent to platforms. Farmers and mechanics could repair their own equipment without authorised technician requirements. News organisations would retain a significantly larger share of subscription revenue. The economic modelling suggests this would represent a substantial transfer of value back to content creators, small businesses, and consumers.
Q10: What is the single most important thing to understand from this article?
The device in your hand is, in important legal and technical senses, not yours. The content you create and store on platforms is not yours. The version of reality the algorithm shows you is not neutral. None of this was inevitable; it resulted from specific decisions, made by specific people, for specific financial reasons, within legal frameworks that can be changed. Understanding this is not enough, but it is the beginning.
Published at cojocarupetru.info. Petru Cojocaru is the founder of ABSOLUT WEB EXPERT SRL, a digital agency in Botoșani, Romania. He writes in Romanian and British English on questions of digital culture, technology ethics, and the intersection of Orthodox anthropology with contemporary media.
AI tools were used in the drafting and editorial process of this article. The author maintains editorial responsibility for all positions, errors, and interpretive choices herein.