--- title: "Seven Repairs" date: 2026-09-27 description: "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" author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Science and civilization" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/science-innovation-and-civilization.md" --- # Seven Repairs **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. --- ## Gentleness, against anger: *The Snow Queen* In Andersen, the story begins with a mirror. A wicked troll makes a mirror in which everything beautiful shrinks until it almost disappears, and everything ugly grows and comes forward. The mirror shatters into millions of splinters that fly about the world. One enters a boy's eye — Kai — and one into his heart. From then on, Kai sees only what is crooked and ugly everywhere, and his heart becomes a lump of ice. He leaves with the Snow Queen. In her palace of ice he sits trying to compose, from pieces of ice, the word "Eternity". He cannot. It is a mind that calculates without warmth, and which, however it combines the pieces, never reaches meaning. His friend Gerda sets out to find him. She travels far, barefoot, through all the seasons. When she finds him, she does not scold him and explains nothing. She weeps. Her warm tears melt the ice in his heart, and Kai begins to weep too, until the splinter comes out of his eye. It is a detail we forget: on her way, Gerda is helped by many — a crow, a robber girl, a reindeer, two old women of the north. One of them says she cannot give Gerda a greater power than the one she already has. Her power stands in her heart. Gentleness is not a technique you learn from a manual. It is received, it is exercised and it leans on others, but it is yours. In "Mirror, Mirror, on the Algorithm" we read the mirrors of fairy tales as the ancestors of the recommendation feed. The troll's mirror is the most precise of them. It does not lie: it merely chooses. It enlarges what is ugly and shrinks what is good. It does exactly what a system does when it has learned that rage keeps people in front of the screen longer. This is not an exaggerated metaphor. A 2017 study in *PNAS*, led by William Brady, showed that each word with a moral and emotional charge in a political message increased, on average, its chances of being reshared by roughly 20%. The predictive models that choose what we see learned the lesson faster than we did. And the platform economy pays for it: rage means attention, and attention means money. You who are parents know this mirror from the class group chat. A message sent at eleven at night, a complaint about homework or a school trip. Then a second message, more insistent. Then a third, in capitals. Within minutes, the splinter has entered the hearts of thirty people. And almost every time, a parent writes something simple: "Let's talk about it tomorrow, at the meeting." They contradict no one. They just lower the temperature. That is Gerda. To you who are young, the splinters come more often through the comment sections: a clip made on purpose to annoy you, a wave of people piling onto someone who made a mistake. Gentleness there is not weakness. It is the courage not to enter the wave. Sometimes it is a single comment saying "maybe we don't know the whole story". Other times it is closing the application. The world of open source has also learned, on its own skin, what a community's anger does. Many projects now have a code of conduct, and one unwritten rule circulates at code review: criticise the code, not the person. You can tell someone they got it wrong without humiliating them. That way the person stays in the project after the mistake as well. European law now requires very large platforms to assess the risks they produce, including the way their feeds amplify hatred and division. It also requires them to offer at least one feed variant that is not based on your profile. It is a law trying to change the mirror. But a splinter that has already entered is still removed with tears, not with regulations. The story can be told to a ten-year-old almost from beginning to end. Tell them a magic mirror broke, and a tiny splinter got into a boy's eye and heart. From then on he saw everything as ugly and no longer knew how to be glad. His friend travelled very far to find him, and when she found him, she wept, and her tears melted the ice. Then tell them that sometimes these splinters come in through the screen: a nasty message, a clip that enrages you. Ask them whether such a splinter has ever entered them, and what melted it. **For you who are young:** a pause of ten seconds before any comment written in anger. Count them. Most of the time, after ten seconds you write nothing at all. **For you who are parents:** a family rule — "we write nothing when angry" — valid for adults too. Especially for adults, on the class group chat. > **Stop***The troll's mirror does not lie. It only chooses what to enlarge.* --- ## Zeal, against accidie: *The Prodigal Son* The parable is in Luke, chapter 15, and it is perhaps the best-known story about a second chance. The younger son asks for his share of the inheritance, leaves for a far country and squanders it. Famine comes. He ends up keeping pigs and coveting their carob pods. And then, the text says, "coming to himself", he decides to go back. It is worth seeing what he prepares himself to say. He does not ask forgiveness with nothing. He says: "Make me as one of your hired servants." His return begins with the readiness to work. The father does not let him finish the sentence: he sees him from afar, runs and embraces him. But the son had set out ready to take up the spade. But the parable also has a second son, whom we forget. The elder brother worked all his life beside his father and never left. When he hears the music of the feast for the one who returned, he is furious and refuses to come in. "Look, all these years I have served you," he tells his father. He worked, but without joy, like a hired hand in his own house. The father comes out to him and says: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours." **Zeal without love is another way of being far from home.** In "The Mechanical Bird", accidie was the soul's laziness that no longer wants to care for anything, like Urashima Tarō, who forgets the world in the palace under the sea. Zeal is its opposite. It is not agitation, not productivity, not "hustle". It is the desire to do the thing yourself, with your own hands, even if someone or something could do it faster. My father knew this without ever naming it. An engine could not be repaired by someone who had never listened to it. His knowledge stood in his hands, not in a manual. Matthew Crawford, a philosopher who left his desk for a motorcycle repair workshop, wrote a whole book about this way of knowing. He says that the hand that works thinks, and that work truly done by you binds you to the world in a way nothing else replaces. As the web fills with generated text, work done by humans becomes, paradoxically, more valuable. Technical standards already exist, such as C2PA, that try to attach to every image or text an "identity card": who made it, with what tools, what was changed. Some publications have begun to use a "made by a human" label. My father needed no label. You could see it in the engine that started. To you who are young, today's economy offers a trap wearing zeal's face: work measured by a platform. Deliveries counted by an application, freelance projects rated with stars, hours clocked by a program. Zeal is not exhaustion, and it is not a rhythm imposed by an algorithm. It is the work you do well because it is yours, not because someone is counting it. And you who are parents have this scene every evening, at homework. The ten-year-old has in his pocket or on his tablet an assistant that can solve the maths problem in three seconds. The prodigal son who offers to work, and the child who tries first on his own, before asking the assistant, are doing the same thing. Both choose the longer road, because it is theirs. In open source there is a lovely label for beginners: "good first issue". It is a small task, left on purpose for someone who has never contributed before. Nobody solves it for you. You are only shown where it is, and your questions get answers. A first contribution made on your own to an open project is, for many programmers, the moment they passed from using to building. You can tell the child the story like this: a boy left home with all the money and spent it on trifles, until he was left hungry, keeping other people's pigs. Then he said to himself: I'll go home and tell my father I want to work, even as a servant. And his father saw him from afar and ran to meet him. Ask him what he would do first, if he wanted to repair a mistake. Then let him answer without helping him. It is his first piece of homework done on his own. And praise his effort, not only the result: a child praised only for the good mark quickly learns the shortest road to it, and that road today runs through the assistant. **For you who are young:** one thing carried through to the end without help, every week. A text, a repair, a piece of code, a recipe. No assistant, no step-by-step tutorial. **For you who are parents:** homework first on their own. The predictive assistant comes only afterwards — as a teacher who asks, not a servant who solves. --- ## Fidelity, against lust: *The Woman and the Ostrich Egg* The San are one of the oldest peoples of southern Africa, hunters and gatherers of the Kalahari desert. Among their stories is one about a man, a woman who came out of an ostrich egg, and a promise. The woman becomes his wife on a single condition, which he promises to keep. For years they live well. Then one day, in anger, the man says the very word he had promised never to say. The woman becomes an egg again and disappears. She never comes back. It is worth noticing that the promise is not broken from ill will, but in anger. The first chapter and the third touch here: the man who cannot make the pause before rage ends up breaking, in a moment, what he had kept for years. In "The Mechanical Bird", lust was not only a matter of the body. It was the squandering of bonds: to belong to everyone and to no one, to promise easily and leave just as easily. Fidelity is its opposite. It means staying bound to a given word even when no one sees you any more. Hannah Arendt wrote about promising as one of the two powers that make life together possible. The other is forgiveness. The future is uncertain by its nature, she says, and promises are "islands of certainty" in an ocean of uncertainty. It seems a useful distinction today. The predictive model guesses the future. The person who promises binds it. I have seen this power in project committees. At the end of a meeting minutes are written: who does what, by when. At the next meeting they are read aloud. It is a small, almost embarrassing moment, but in it you see everything: who said they would do it and did it, who forgot, who found an excuse. No sanctions are needed. The minutes are a written promise, and the fact that they are read aloud is sometimes enough. To you who are young, the opposite form is familiar: ghosting. You vanish from a conversation without a word, because it costs you nothing. The dating applications have turned the promise into something you can swipe left. Their economy lives on your not staying: if you stay, you no longer need the application. The same ease appears in group projects, at university or on Discord: someone promises their part and disappears the day before the deadline. Nobody can force them. But everyone remembers. The web has its promises too. The `robots.txt` file, standardised only in 2022 but used for thirty years, is a site's polite request: "do not come in here". It is not a lock. It is respected only by those who keep their word — and some robots of the companies that train models have been caught ignoring it. More recently, the `llms.txt` proposal tries to tell the models what matters on a site and how to read it. I have written, for the sites I maintain, a small module that publishes such a file. It is the site's promise to whoever reads it, human or model. European law is trying to turn this politeness into obligation. European copyright lets authors say, in a form a machine can read, that they do not want their texts used for training. The European regulation on predictive models requires the companies building large ones to respect this reservation and to publish a summary of the data they were trained on. Consent is slowly becoming a promise that can be checked. Open source invented a strange and beautiful form of promise: the licence that binds those who come after you as well. The GPL licence says you may take the code, change it and pass it on, but only with the same freedom you received it with. It is a promise made to people you do not know and who cannot control you. You can tell the child the fairy tale like this: a man found a wonderful wife, come out of an egg, and he promised her one thing. They lived happily for a long time. But one day the man grew angry and forgot the promise, and his wife disappeared and never came back. It is not a cheerful story, but it is one children understand immediately. Ask them what small promise they could keep for a whole week. Then give yours too. If, for instance, you have agreed together not to read their messages without telling them, keep your word. A child learns fidelity above all from the promises you keep to them. **For you who are young:** one small promise, kept to the end. A message you said you would send, a meeting you said you would come to. **For you who are parents:** small promises kept by a parent towards a child. "After dinner, no phone — me first." > **Stop***The predictive model guesses the future. The person who promises binds it.* --- ## Joy at another's good, against envy: *Joseph and his brothers* Joseph is Jacob's favourite son and receives from his father a coat the others do not have. He dreams that his brothers' sheaves bow to his own, and — without much wisdom — he tells them the dream. His brothers hate him. They throw him into a well and then sell him to merchants travelling to Egypt. To their father they say a wild beast tore him apart. The story fills thirteen chapters of Genesis. Joseph becomes a slave, then a prisoner, then Pharaoh's right hand. Famine comes, and the brothers go down to Egypt to buy grain, not knowing they will be asking it of him. Joseph recognises them. He tests them, then can hold back no longer: he weeps and tells them who he is. At the end, after their father's death, the brothers fear revenge. Joseph answers them: "You meant evil against me, but God turned the evil to good." The story does not make Joseph innocent from the start. The young man who told his dreams of greatness to his brothers was a bit of a stonecutter himself. And the father who preferred him was, without wanting it, growing the envy. In this story, the second chance is received by everyone: the brothers, the father, and even Joseph, who learns in prison what he had not learned at home. The brothers' second chance comes from the one they sold. And Joseph does not only forgive them. He is glad they are alive. In "The Mechanical Bird", envy was the queen's mirror in *Snow White*: the question "who is the fairest of them all?", asked without end. Our mirrors today answer with numbers: followers, likes, views. The platform economy lives on comparison, because the person who compares always comes back to see whether they have risen or fallen. It is no accident that in 2021 Instagram introduced the option to hide like counts. The mirror knew what it was doing. To you who are young, envy usually arrives on the phone: the classmate who won the scholarship, the friend who "made it" online, with a photo from a beach or a job offer. Joy at another's good does not mean pretending it does not hurt. It means being glad anyway. The professional networks have turned every success of someone else into an announcement you read between two of your own failures. The announcement is true. It just doesn't show you the years before it either, which the person who wrote it lived — perhaps, like Joseph, in the well. The web has a gesture that resembles Joseph's joy: the link. When you send someone to another person's work, you give that person readers, trust, sometimes bread. A predictive model that cites the source and sends the reader to it does what Joseph did: it recognises, instead of taking the other's place. A model that answers from other people's work without naming them does what the brothers did: it sells the one who did the work. When a search engine writes its own answer, the link to the source ends up low, small, beneath the text, and sometimes no longer arrives at all. That is the difference between a gift and a receipt. Open source has its own rituals of joy at another's good. Every project keeps a list of contributors, sometimes thousands of names. When someone fixes something, their name stays in the version history. And when two people work on the same change, both can be written in as authors, one beside the other. Even an honest fork, when a project takes another road, keeps the names of those it started from. And you who are parents, you see envy at school meetings, though we never speak of it. When it is announced that a child has won a competition, the room applauds. But on the class group chat, later, questions appear about who helped them and how much the training cost. Children feel the difference between our applause and what we say at home. And the oldest form of envy we feed ourselves, in the family: the comparison between siblings — "look how beautifully your sister writes". It is Joseph's coat, cut again, in another sitting room. The story can be told to a ten-year-old in a few sentences. A boy had brothers who were jealous of him, and they sold him to strangers. Many years later, the boy had become a very important man, and his brothers came to him hungry, not knowing who he was. And instead of taking revenge, he fed them and wept with joy at seeing them. Ask them who they were glad for today. **For you who are young:** praise someone publicly, without comparison. No "better than", no "unlike others". Just their name and what they did well. **For you who are parents:** at dinner, everyone names one good thing someone else did that day. Not something they did — something someone else did. --- ## Temperance, against greed: *The Manna in the Desert* In the book of Exodus, the people flee Egypt and reach the desert, where they have nothing to eat. Every morning, manna appears on the ground: something like white grains, tasting of honeycake. The command is simple: each gathers as much as they need for one day. The text says a strange thing: whoever gathered much had no surplus, and whoever gathered little lacked nothing. Some did not listen and kept manna until the next day. By morning it was full of worms and stank. The only exception was the day before the Sabbath: then they gathered for two days, and the manna did not spoil. The reserve was allowed for rest, not for accumulation. There is one more detail, in the very name of the manna. When they first saw it, people asked one another: "What is it?" Its name comes, by tradition, from that question. Manna begins as wonder, not as property. Greed appears only when wonder turns into the care of having more than you need. In "The Mechanical Bird", greed was *Starveling and Thirsty* — the belly that never fills. Temperance is not deprivation. It is the knowledge of "enough". My uncle used to speak of the joy of living without excess. **"Always rise from the table a little hungry, if you want to live long."** He was quoting a famous maxim often attributed to the Persian physician and philosopher **Avicenna**, taken over from Romanian popular wisdom. The word I bind to him is "enough". Not "little", not "nothing", but enough: as much as you need to be well, and no more. I saw "enough" taught, without words, in shared budgets. The class fund, collected at the start of the year. The block's repair fund. There, every leu spent belongs to everyone, and the question "do we really need this?" is asked out loud. It is a school of temperance, perhaps the best we have. In an apartment block, someone proposes an expensive, beautiful repair, someone else a cheap, provisional one, and in between there is usually found the version that lasts: not the biggest, not the smallest, but the fitting one. To you who are young, "enough" may sound like a word for the old. But count the subscriptions that pull money from you monthly, the clothes bought for a single photo, the applications you haven't opened in weeks. Today's economy is built so that you never reach "enough". The web of today has forgotten the command of the manna. The data economy gathers everything, from everyone, for every eventuality: every click, every location, every second spent on a page. Most data is never used. It spoils, like manna kept overnight, but it is not thrown away. It sits on servers, consumes energy and, from time to time, is stolen. The European data protection law has a principle the people of the desert would have understood: data minimisation. Gather only as much as you need. The same "enough" applies to the predictive models. The race for the largest model has become a race of data centres, of water and of electricity. Meanwhile, much smaller models can run on a laptop or even a phone, without sending anything anywhere. Ivan Illich spoke, fifty years ago, of "convivial" tools: made to the measure of the person, which you can use without depending on an enormous system. Not the largest model, but the fitting one. Programmers have an old form of temperance, called the Unix philosophy: a program should do one thing and do it well. Small programs, that can be combined, that you can read and repair. It is my uncle's "enough", written in code. And you who are parents perhaps know the temptation of solving "enough" with an application: parental controls, time limits, notifications. They can help. But a child does not learn temperance from a timer. They learn it by seeing you put the phone down. And "enough" shows even in the games on their phone: many are made never to end, without a final level, with daily rewards calling them back. Their manna never spoils — and that is exactly the problem. You can say it to the child like this: a whole people was in the desert, with nothing to eat, and every morning they found on the ground bread come from the sky, exactly as much as they needed for one day. Those who tried to keep more found it spoiled the next day. Ask them what "enough" means to them. Perhaps they answer with a number of minutes. Perhaps a number of sweets. Any answer is a beginning. **For you who are young:** one evening a week without the feed. One item of clothing bought second-hand, instead of new. **For you who are parents:** "enough", taught by your example, not by parental-control applications. > **Stop***Manna kept overnight spoils. So does data gathered for no reason.* --- ## Generosity, against avarice: *My grandfather's dying breath* My grandfather left, with a dying breath, the command that the land must not be sold. I understood late what he meant. I don't think he feared poverty. I think he meant that the land was not ours to sell. It had been entrusted to us. The inheritance was not a property, but a care passed on. In "The Mechanical Bird", avarice was *The Fisherman and His Wife*: the woman who asks the enchanted fish for more and more, until she is back in the hovel where she began. Generosity is its opposite. It does not mean giving from your surplus. It means knowing that what you have was given to you so that it may pass through you. The Gospels tell a small scene at the Temple. Rich people throw large sums into the offering box. A poor widow comes and puts in two small coins, the smallest coin of all. Jesus tells his disciples she gave more than all of them: the others gave from their surplus, she gave everything she had. But read the verse before it too. Just before he sees the widow, Jesus warns the people about the scribes who "devour widows' houses". So the scene has two faces. The widow's generosity is great. And the institution that receives her gift, without having cared for her, is judged on the same page. Generosity does not excuse the system that takes from those who have the least. I have seen the widow with her two coins many times, in the places where I meet you. The parent who stays after the meeting to stack the chairs and turn off the lights. The neighbour who keeps, for years, the accounts of the residents' association, unpaid and rarely thanked. They give no money. They give time — the one thing that cannot be bought back. The web has its own unsold land: the commons. Wikipedia, written and corrected by volunteers, without advertisements. Millions of open source programs, passed on under licences that say explicitly: "take, use, change, pass it on". The Creative Commons licences, under which photographers, teachers and researchers leave their work free. All of it is "do not sell the land" said in the language of our century. To you who are young, this generosity is closer than you think. A tutorial written for those who come after you, an answer left on a forum, a first contribution to an open project, an hour spent showing a younger colleague what you have learned. It is knowledge given, not sold. The platform economy is built on the opposite principle: everything is for sale, including what is not yours. The free applications on a child's phone live, many of them, on their data. And we parents sometimes put the children's photographs on social networks ourselves, with the school's name in the background and their date of birth. In English a word was even coined for this: *sharenting*. My grandfather's dying breath extends naturally, for us, into another command: do not sell the child's data. It is not yours. It was entrusted to you. And the predictive models were built out of the common land: out of Wikipedia, open code, forums, books. Generosity, in their case, would mean giving back: supporting the commons they learned from and leaving open at least a part of what they built. Some companies do. Many do not. And we ourselves already leave a digital inheritance: archives of photographs, accounts, texts, websites. Someone will have to care for them after us, or decide what is kept. My grandfather's dying breath can be written for them too: do not sell them; keep them open for whoever comes after you. You can tell the ten-year-old the widow's story like this: at a box for offerings, rich people came and put in a lot of money. Then a very poor woman came and put in two small coins. And someone wise said she gave the most, because she gave everything she had. Ask them what they could give that costs no money. Perhaps a drawing, perhaps an hour of play with a smaller child, perhaps a toy they no longer use. **For you who are young:** give time. One hour a week, to someone or to something shared: a correction on Wikipedia, a translation, an old person in your block. Time cannot be converted into money, and that is precisely why it counts. **For you who are parents:** the child chooses one of their things to give away, not to sell. You choose one photograph of them to delete from the social networks. > **Stop***The land was not ours to sell. Neither is the child's data.* --- ## Humility, against pride, the root: *Prince Charming Born of a Tear* and Steinhardt We have reached the root. In "The Mechanical Bird", pride was *The Stonecutter*: the man who wants to be, in turn, the sun, the cloud, the mountain — anything stronger than himself — until he is a stonecutter again. Pride is the desire to be everything. Humility is the knowledge of one's own measure. Eminescu — Romania's national poet — wrote a fairy tale with an unusual hero. An empress who could have no children prays at length before an icon of the Mother of God, and from the icon a tear falls. From that tear a son is born: Prince Charming Born of a Tear. He grows quickly and becomes strong, but he does not use his strength to rule over others. He sets out towards the neighbouring emperor — his father's enemy — but instead of continuing the feud, the two become sworn brothers. A man born of a tear is a bridge between earth and heaven: strong, but knowing where he comes from. The second testimony is from our own century. Nicolae Steinhardt, a Jewish Romanian intellectual, was arrested in 1959 for refusing to give evidence against his friends. In Jilava prison, in 1960, he was baptised a Christian, in a cell, with water from a kettle. The book in which he tells his prison years is called *The Diary of Happiness*. At the lowest point of his life he found the second chance. To you who are young, the lowest point comes in other forms: the failed exam, the job you didn't get, the relationship that ended. I do not tell you it is good that it happens to you. I only say that it can be the place you start from, not the place you stop at. Humility begins with the sentence we find hardest to say: "I don't know." And there is something more. The stonecutter in the tale ends exactly where he started. But he is no longer the same man: now he knows the true weight of each of the things he wanted to be. Humility is not being small. It is knowing your measure and being at peace with it. On the social networks, where everyone builds an image larger than themselves, this measure is lost most easily. The great platforms were built on the stonecutter's pride: each wants to be everything, to swallow everything, to leave nothing outside itself. The European law of digital markets requires the largest of them to open up, to be able to talk with others, not to favour their own services. It is a lesson in humility imposed by law: you are not the whole web, you are only a part of it. The predictive models have a form of pride too: the answer certain of itself that is, in fact, wrong. The people who build them call it a "hallucination". An honest model should be able to say what we too find hardest to say: "I don't know". Some are beginning to learn. But the economic pull is in the opposite direction, because a confident answer sells better than a sincere doubt. Open source has, here as well, a custom that resembles humility. When you don't know something, you open a public ticket: "I don't understand why this doesn't work — can anyone help?" Anyone can answer, from anywhere. And when someone, even a stranger, shows you a mistake in the code, the correction is accepted. What matters is whether it is true, not who said it. And there is one more gesture, perhaps the hardest: the maintainer who, after years of work, admits they can no longer carry on and hands the project over to someone else. They don't run away and don't let it die. They entrust it. And you who are parents perhaps know the opposite temptation: never admitting to the child that you don't know. It is easier now, because the answer is one click away. But the child who hears you say "I don't know — let's find out together" learns something no assistant can teach: that it is all right not to know, and that finding out is a road walked with someone. And when you are wrong towards them, tell them. A parent who asks a child for forgiveness loses no authority. They show them what humility looks like in a grown person. You can tell the child Eminescu's fairy tale like this: an empress prayed to have a child, and a boy was born from a tear. The boy grew very strong, but he did not boast of his strength. When he fought a giant, he did not defeat him to humiliate him — he made a brother of him. Ask them whether they can be friends with someone they quarrelled with. And if they don't know, tell them you don't always know either. **For you who are young:** say "I don't know" out loud, at least once this week. In a lecture, at a meeting, at a table with friends. **For you who are parents:** "I don't know — let's find out together", without asking the model first. --- ## The table of repairs | Virtue | The sin from "The Mechanical Bird" | The gesture for the young | The gesture for the family | The digital thread | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Gentleness | Anger | Ten seconds of pause | "We write nothing when angry" | Feed without rage; code of conduct | | Zeal | Accidie | One thing done alone | Homework first alone | "Made by a human"; first contribution | | Fidelity | Lust | One promise kept | "Me first, no phone" | `robots.txt` respected; the GPL licence | | Joy at another's good | Envy | Praise without comparison | Someone else's good deed, at dinner | The link and the cited source | | Temperance | Greed | An evening without the feed | "Enough", by example | Data minimisation; small models | | Generosity | Avarice | One hour given | A gift made by the child | The commons; the child's data | | Humility | Pride | "I don't know", out loud | "Let's find out together" | The model that says "I don't know"; the public ticket | --- ## Closing: one single virtue Seven repairs are too many for one week. Nor did my father's rule ask you to fix the whole engine at once. It asked you to find the part where the damage began, and start there. **For you who are young:** choose a single virtue of the seven and practise it for a week. Only one. **For you who are parents:** tell the child one of the seven stories and ask them the question from its chapter. Listen to the answer to the end. The table above can be printed and stuck on the fridge. It is less elegant than an application, but it sends no notifications and gathers no data. But one repaired person is not enough. The web, the block, the city are not held up by good people taken one by one, but by what they build together. How, then, does a society that has forgotten its values carry on? That is the subject of the final article: *The Gold in the Crack*. --- ### Author's note This text was drafted with the assistance of an advanced predictive model, used for research, structure and revision. The axis, the starting material, the personal scenes and the editorial decisions are mine. I say it here for the same reason open source keeps its version history: so that it can be seen how the thing was made. **This article's lizard.** The grandfather who would not sell the land can be read against an economy in which everything is for sale: land, data, attention, childhood. And "it is not ours to sell" can be said of other entrusted things too: public goods, forests, institutions. I have named none of them. My grandfather named none either. ### Sources **Parables and fairy tales** - H.C. Andersen, *The Snow Queen* (1844) - Luke 15:11–32 (the prodigal son) - *The Woman and the Ostrich Egg*, San tradition [https://vdoc.pub/documents/myth-and-meaning-san-bushman-folklore-in-global-context-7gec3ivl0cd0](https://vdoc.pub/documents/myth-and-meaning-san-bushman-folklore-in-global-context-7gec3ivl0cd0) - Genesis 37–50 (Joseph; Genesis 50:20) - Exodus 16 (manna; 16:18, 16:20, 16:22–26) - Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4 (the widow's coins) - Mihai Eminescu, *Prince Charming Born of a Tear* (*Convorbiri literare*, 1870) - The Orthodox Bible used for quotations **Romanian testimonies** - Nicolae Steinhardt, *The Diary of Happiness* (Dacia, 1991) **Philosophy and craft** - Hannah Arendt, *The Human Condition* (1958), ch. V, §33–34 - Matthew B. Crawford, *Shop Class as Soulcraft* (2009) - Ivan Illich, *Tools for Conviviality* (1973) **Internet, predictive models, open source** - William J. Brady et al., "Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks", *PNAS* 114(28) (2017) - Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (DSA), art. 34–35 and 38; Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (DMA); Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), art. 5(1)(c) - C2PA, specifications for content provenance — c2pa.org - RFC 9309, *Robots Exclusion Protocol* (IETF, 2022); the `llms.txt` proposal (2024) — llmstxt.org - GNU General Public License; Creative Commons - Contributor Covenant (the code of conduct used by many open source projects) - Doug McIlroy, the principles of the Unix philosophy (1978) **Companion series** - "The Mechanical Bird", Part II, "Mirror, Mirror, on the Algorithm" - "Ten Just Men", Part I of this series