Science, innovation and civilization

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

Ninive, not Gomorrah — Part II of III

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

The engine is repaired backwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nineveh, not Gomorrah — Part III of III

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

The Broken Bowl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Deathbed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Question That Came from a Phone

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

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

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

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

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

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