Man, the measure of the screen.
A Letter to Those Who Have Never Known a World Without Wi-Fi
"You shall choose your horse by placing a tray full of glowing embers in the middle of the herd." — Ion Creangă, The Story of Harap-Alb
Prologue: C:> and the Cursor That Waited
In 1997, I had a problem none of you will ever have: I had no access to a computer.
I'm not talking about a good computer, with a decent graphics card, or one that doesn't freeze when you open too many tabs. I'm talking about any computer. In Botoșani, in that year, a PC was an object you saw on television, in badly dubbed American films, or in a few offices where you had no business being. And yet I enrolled in a two-week course, "IBM PC Operator", at an institution that ran training courses. It had two working computers and one taken-apart broken one, a patient instructor, and a smell of heated dust that I still recognise today, anywhere I encounter it.
The course ended after two weeks. I stayed on for six months.
No one ever gave me written permission. The instructor chose not to notice that I kept coming back day after day, like a dog that had found its master. I would sit in front of the green screen, on which a single thing blinked:
C:\>
And after it, the cursor. That little line, white, appearing and disappearing every half second.
I want to describe what I felt then, because this entire essay begins there. That cursor waited. It didn't call me, didn't lure me, sent me no notifications, didn't know my name and didn't want to learn it. If I wrote nothing, nothing happened. The machine was completely, absolutely, reassuringly passive. Everything it did began with me. If I wanted to see what files were on the disk, I typed dir. If I got a letter wrong, the machine answered tersely, Bad command or file name—without getting annoyed, without judging me, but also without helping me. I had to learn its language, but once learned, it did exactly what I asked of it. No more, no less.
Three decades ago, the machine waited for the man. Today, the man is the one waiting for the machine: the vibration in your pocket, the blue tick, the feed loading, the next video starting on its own before you've had time to decide whether you want it.
I'm not writing this to tell you that "things were better in my day". They weren't. In my day, most people had access to none of what you have, and information was distributed at a trickle—through connections, through luck, through being tolerated for six months in a room where you had no business being. You carry in your pocket more computing power than the entire Botoșani Chamber of Commerce had in 1997—perhaps more than the whole county. That's an enormous gain, and I don't scorn it.
But something got inverted along the way. And I think it's worth us looking together at exactly what.
Why I'm Writing to You
You, who are now between 20 and 25, were born around the years when I was building the first websites for people who were still asking, "but what do I need the internet for?" You grew up alongside the smartphone. You have no memory of a world without it, just as I have no memory of a world without electricity. For you, the screen isn't a technology—it's the landscape. It's the air.
That's precisely why it's hard to talk about it. The fish, as the old joke goes, is the last to discover water.
I don't want to lecture you about "digital detox". I've seen plenty of articles telling you to throw away your phone, go to the mountains, and read Tolstoy. Most are written by people who built their careers on the internet and who, after publishing the article, checked forty times how many likes it gathered. It's not a position I respect—not even when it's mine.
I want something else. I want to put before you a question that is two and a half thousand years old, and see what happens when we set it in front of the screen. The question comes from a Greek named Protagoras. And as our guide to the screen, we'll have a French philosopher, Stéphane Vial, who wrote one of the most intelligent books about how the digital changes our perception. I'll agree with him on many points. On one alone—but an essential one—I'll part ways with him.
Man, the Measure of All Things
Protagoras of Abdera lived in the fifth century before Christ. He was a Sophist—that is, an itinerant teacher who taught the rich young men of Athens how to speak in public, how to persuade, how to win a lawsuit. Plato couldn't stand him. Almost everything we know about him comes from Plato's dialogues—that is, from his adversary—which is rather like learning about an influencer only from the comments of their haters.
From a lost book of Protagoras, one single sentence has survived, quoted in the dialogue Theaetetus:
Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.
Let's be honest with him: Protagoras didn't mean what I'm going to want him to mean. His idea was one of perceptual relativism. If the wind feels cold to me and warm to you, we're both right, each for himself. There is no "objective" truth above our perceptions. Every person is the judge of their own world.
It's a dangerous idea and a fascinating one at the same time. Dangerous, because if everyone has their own truth, then no one can say anyone else is wrong—and that looks worryingly like the bubbles algorithms lock you into, where each person receives their own version of reality. Fascinating, because it shifts the centre of gravity from things to man.
I want to read Protagoras's sentence differently. Not as a theory of truth, but as a rule of priority. Man as measure doesn't mean everyone has their own truth. It means that the things we make—including machines—must be judged by what they do to people. A tool is good if it makes the person freer, more attentive, more capable, more present. It is bad if it shrinks them, even if it's spectacular, profitable, or "innovative".
It sounds obvious. It isn't. Because over the last twenty years, the measure has shifted imperceptibly. We began measuring people by machines: time spent in the app, retention rate, engagement, how many seconds you watched a video before swiping on. We no longer ask what the app does to the person, but what the app can extract from the person.
The measure has been inverted. That's the whole story; the rest is detail.
A Philosopher Who Looks at the Screen
Stéphane Vial isn't a name you've probably heard at university. He's French, a philosopher and a designer; he taught at the University of Nîmes and later at the School of Design at the University of Québec in Montréal. His most important book is called L'être et l'écran—Being and the Screen—a play on Heidegger's Being and Time and Sartre's Being and Nothingness. It appeared in 2013 with Presses Universitaires de France, and in 2019 it was translated into English by MIT Press.
What does Vial do differently from others who write about technology? He doesn't ask what technology can do, how fast it is, how much money it makes, which jobs it destroys. He asks a deeper, stranger question: how does the world appear to us through technology?
His central idea is that techniques are not merely tools but structures of perception, which shape the way the world shows itself to us. That sounds abstract, so let's take an example.
Think of spectacles. A short-sighted person putting on glasses isn't using a tool the way one uses a hammer. They don't look at the glasses, but through them. And after a while, they forget they're wearing them. The world simply appears clear to them. The glasses haven't added a new object to their life. They've changed the way all other objects appear.
Now think of your phone. You don't look at it, you look through it: at friends, at news, at music, at the places you want to go, at the people you fall in love with. And after a while you forget it's there. The world simply shows itself to you like this: in portrait format, with the possibility of scrolling, with a number under everything telling you its social value.
Vial has a word for this—a difficult word, but worth learning: ontophany. It comes from the Greek ontos, being, and phainein, to show (itself). Ontophany means the way being—that is, reality—shows itself to us. Every technical age has its own ontophany. The person of the printing age saw the world differently from the person of the manuscript age. The person of the age of the train and the telegraph perceived distance and time differently from their grandparents, who travelled by cart. And we, Vial says, live in a numeric ontophany: reality shows itself to us through interfaces, through screens, through programs.
It's not a metaphor. It's a literal description of your daily experience. How many of the things you know about the world did you learn directly, without a screen between you and them? Do the exercise seriously. Count. The number will frighten you.
There Is No "Real Life"
Here Vial says something I deeply agree with, and which I think concerns you directly.
You've probably used the expression "in real life" or "IRL" a thousand times, to distinguish it from what happens online. My generation invented that distinction. In the 2000s, the internet was called "virtual space", "cyberspace"—a kind of parallel world you entered and exited. We logged on and logged off. We had a nickname, another identity, another life. What happened in a chat didn't happen "for real".
Vial says this distinction is false. The supposed difference between real and virtual doesn't exist and never has: we live in a hybrid environment, online and offline at once. He calls the old view a kind of dualism—a legacy of Plato, who divided the world into a true one and one of shadows. On the screen, we'd be in the cave, among shadows, and the true world would be outside.
But think. When someone sends you a message that breaks your heart, does your heart break "virtually"? When you get a job offer by email, is the job "virtual"? When a group of classmates laughs at you in a class chat, is the shame "virtual"? When you fall in love with someone you've spoken to for months on Instagram before meeting, is the love "virtual"?
No. Everything is as real as it can be. The emotions are real, the consequences are real, the money is real, the loves are real, the depressions are real. The virtual isn't another world—it's another texture of the same world.
And now comes the part that interests me, because from here Vial draws a conclusion I want to take further than he did.
If the virtual is real, then the harm in it is real too. Manipulation through an interface is real manipulation. Addiction to a feed is real addiction. An algorithm showing a fifteen-year-old girl, at two in the morning, content about how ugly her body is isn't doing "virtual" harm. Digital surveillance is real surveillance. The excuse "it's just the internet" no longer exists.
For many years, technology companies profited—consciously or not—from this dualism. If it's "just virtual", it doesn't need regulating like the real world. If it's "just a game", it doesn't need treating like a casino. If it's "just a social network", it isn't responsible for what happens in people's homes. Vial's critique of dualism is, without him insisting on this, also an ethical weapon. It obliges us to take seriously everything that happens on a screen, with the same seriousness we'd give something happening on the street.
You already know this in your bones. My generation had to learn it. You never believed that online doesn't count. It's just that you still use our words—"real life"—which slightly lie to you about your own experience.
My Father and the Engine
Here I have to tell you about my father.
My father was a mechanic. Not a philosopher, not an engineer—a mechanic. The man who leaned over the open engine, sleeves rolled up, fingernails that never came clean again no matter how he scrubbed them. For me, even after he died, he remained a kind of benchmark of knowledge: not knowledge from books, but knowledge from the hands. Knowledge that knows without being able to explain.
A good mechanic listens to the engine. He doesn't need a diagnostic machine to know something's wrong. He hears a changed rhythm, an extra noise, a hesitation. His hand knows how tight to turn a bolt without snapping it. There's an intimacy between man and machine that looks like magic to outsiders.
And yet—here's a lesson I never formulated out loud, but learned by watching him—my father knew the engine, but the engine didn't know my father.
The relationship was asymmetric. The man was the one who listened, understood, repaired, decided. The engine wanted nothing from him. It didn't study him, didn't catalogue his habits, didn't know what time he woke up or what made him sad. The engine was, in the noblest sense of the word, a tool. And my father was, without question, the master of the relationship. Not a tyrannical master, but an attentive one, sometimes even tender. But the master.
Why am I telling you this? Because this is where I part ways with Stéphane Vial.
Vial says—and says it beautifully—that technology is no longer separate from us, if it ever was. We are as much part of the machine as the machine is part of us. As a description, that's true. When my father listened to the engine, he genuinely became an extension of the engine, and the engine an extension of his ear. When you move your finger across the screen without thinking, the phone has become a part of your body.
But the phrase "as much" hides a trap. It suggests symmetry. As if the relationship were balanced, as if man and machine were equal partners. And that isn't true—nor should it be.
My father's machine didn't know him. Your machine knows you. It knows what time you go to sleep, what makes you stop scrolling, what kind of face attracts you, which news enrages you, what you buy when you're sad. It knows, in some respects, more about you than you know yourselves. And the asymmetry has inverted. It's no longer the man listening to the engine. It's the engine listening to the man.
My thesis is simple: the relationship between man and technology can be intimate, reciprocal, profound—but the priority must remain man's. It's not a symmetry, it's a hierarchy. A good one, like the hierarchy between gardener and garden, or between musician and violin. The violin transforms the musician—bends his shoulder, calluses his fingers, changes his hearing. But no one would say the violin plays with the musician.
I don't want out of the relationship. I want to remain the man who listens to the engine.
Who Chose the Way the World Appears to You?
Let's return to ontophany—the idea that technology determines how the world shows itself to us.
Vial describes the phenomenon as a philosopher would: as something that happens, a change of epoch, almost a force of nature. The industrial ontophany came with the steam engine; the numeric one came with the computer. No one chose it—it simply fell on our heads.
And here's my second objection. The digital ontophany didn't fall from the sky. Someone designed it.
When you open your favourite app, the way the world appears to you isn't the result of "digital technology" in general. It's the result of concrete decisions, taken by concrete people, in concrete offices, for concrete purposes. Someone decided the feed should be infinite—that there should be no end, no moment where you can say "right, I'm done". Someone decided the next video should start automatically. Someone decided the number of likes should be visible under every post. Someone decided the notifications should be red, not grey. Someone tested dozens of button variants to see which one keeps you two seconds longer.
None of this is natural. All of it is design. And design has a purpose.
In the world I come from—building websites—there's a question we ask at the start of every project: what's the objective? For a town hall website, the objective should be that the citizen quickly finds the form they need and leaves. A good town hall website is one you spend as little time on as possible. For a platform that lives on advertising, the objective is the opposite: keep you there as long as possible, because every extra minute is a minute sold to someone.
Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard professor, called this system surveillance capitalism: an economy whose raw material is human behaviour—extracted, processed, and sold as prediction. Cory Doctorow, a Canadian writer, coined an even more colourful word, enshittification, to describe how platforms are first good to their users to attract them, then good to their advertising clients at the users' expense, and finally turn against everyone to squeeze out profit for shareholders. And the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis goes further still and speaks of technofeudalism: the platforms are no longer markets but digital estates, and we are the serfs who work their land—that is, produce their content and data, for free.
You don't have to agree with all these theories. I don't agree with all of them in every detail. But they have one thing in common, and that thing completes what Vial says: the digital ontophany has owners.
The way your friends, your loves, your news, your own body, your future appear to you has been shaped by people with interests. And their interests don't always coincide with yours.
When I was young, in 1997, the computer in that Chamber of Commerce room didn't spy on me. It couldn't—it didn't even have internet. But I also know, from the stories of older people around me, that ten years earlier, in 1987, there were other ears listening, other files being filled in, other people who wanted to know what time you went to bed and who you spoke to. Surveillance wasn't invented by Silicon Valley. It simply moved from cardboard files to servers, and went from fear to comfort. They used to listen by force. Now you hand it over yourself, smiling, voluntarily, in exchange for a filter that makes your skin look better.
The Anatomy of Wildness
In the title of this essay, in my mind, I used the word "taming". But to speak of taming, we must first speak of wildness. Why would technology be wild?
Three thinkers helped me understand this, each from a different angle.
Technique Runs on Its Own
The first is Jacques Ellul, a French sociologist with an unusual life: he was in the Resistance during the war, a devoted Protestant, and a fierce critic of technique from the 1950s onwards, when everyone else was in love with progress. Ellul noticed something unsettling: technique seems to have a logic of growth all its own. Every invention creates problems that demand further inventions. Every new efficiency becomes the standard below which you cannot drop. We no longer choose technology—it chooses itself, and we run after it.
Think about this in your own life. Did anyone ask if you wanted to be reachable non-stop on messaging? No. It's simply that once it became possible, it became compulsory. If you don't reply within two hours, something is wrong with you. Technique didn't ask permission. It arrived and installed itself, and social norms rearranged themselves around it.
That's the first form of wildness: technique growing by its own logic, not ours.
Remedy and Poison
The second thinker is Bernard Stiegler, also French, with an even more unusual biography: he discovered philosophy in prison—where he'd landed for armed robbery in his youth—and emerged as one of the most original thinkers of technology of his generation.
Stiegler took up a Greek word from Plato: pharmakon. In ancient Greek, the word meant both remedy and poison at once. The same thing that heals you can kill you. The difference lies in the dose, the context, the way you use it.
For Stiegler, every technique is a pharmakon. Writing helps us remember and weakens our memory—Plato was already complaining about that. The internet connects us to people far away and disconnects us from those beside us. The phone gives us access to all the world's knowledge and shatters our attention to the point where we can no longer read ten pages in a row.
That's the second form of wildness: not a bad technology, but an ambivalent one, capable of going either way if it isn't cared for.
The Threshold Beyond Which the Tool Turns Against You
The third thinker is the most important to me: Ivan Illich. A Catholic priest born in Vienna, who lived much of his life in Mexico, an encyclopaedic and impossible-to-classify man. In 1973 he wrote a short book, Tools for Conviviality, which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand what is happening to us today, even though it was written before the personal computer.
Illich observed that many modern institutions and technologies pass through a threshold. Up to a point, they help. Beyond it, they begin to produce the exact opposite of their purpose. His classic example is the car. At first, the automobile makes you faster. But when everyone has a car, congestion appears, cities sprawl, distances grow, and in the end you spend more time getting around than your grandparents spent walking. Illich even made a famous calculation: if you add the time you spend behind the wheel to the time you spend working to pay for the car, the fuel, the insurance, and the repairs, you arrive at an average speed of travel of a few kilometres per hour. Roughly that of a person on foot.
Now apply the idea to social networks. At first, they connect you with friends. Beyond a threshold, they make you feel lonelier than before. At first, they inform you. Beyond the threshold, they misinform you. At first, they give you a voice. Beyond the threshold, they make you speak only to be seen, by the algorithm's rules, not your own.
Illich called this counterproductivity. It's the third form of wildness, perhaps the most insidious: the tool that doesn't suddenly turn bad, but imperceptibly crosses the threshold beyond which it starts working against the very purpose for which you picked it up.
Wildness Bred in Captivity
There is a fourth form of wildness, one none of the three lived to see fully—but one I see daily in my profession.
Some technologies aren't wild by nature. They are bred to be that way.
In the design world there's a term: dark patterns. These are interface tricks built deliberately to deceive you: the "Accept all cookies" button is big and colourful, while "Refuse" is small, grey, and buried under three menus. The subscription takes one click, but cancelling it requires calling a number no one answers. The counter telling you "Only 2 rooms left at this price!" when there are in fact thirty. The streak in an app that makes you feel guilty for breaking a 147-day run.
None of these are accidents. They are tested, optimised, measured. And here I arrive at the most important distinction of this essay.
Taming or Training
There are two ways to gentle a wild animal.
The first is training. You teach it to execute commands through reward and punishment. Pavlov's dog salivated at the sound of a bell, because it had been conditioned to associate the bell with food. The trained animal doesn't understand what it's doing. It reacts. It isn't a partner; it's a mechanism.
The second is taming—domestication. This is a relationship built over time, through care, through presence, through trust. The tame dog isn't merely trained. It is man's companion. There's a reciprocity: the man looks after the dog, the dog looks after the man. But it's clear who decides the direction of the road.
And now, the question that unsettles me: in your relationship with technology, who is being trained?
Because if you look closely, dark patterns, notifications, the variable rewards of the feed ("what will I find at the next refresh?") are precisely the techniques of training. Pavlov's bell is the vibration in your pocket. The piece of meat is the like. And the animal that salivates is not the phone.
I say this not to accuse you, because it happens to me too. I'm in my fifties, I've worked with technology for nearly three decades, I know exactly how these mechanisms are built—some of them I built myself, for clients, in milder versions. And yet, often, my hand takes the phone before my mind has decided. Knowledge doesn't vaccinate you. It only makes you more aware of how trained you are.
That's why I insist on the word taming. I don't want to tell you to flee technology. Nor to let it train you. I want to propose a third way, the hardest one: to tame it. To enter with it into a relationship in which you remain the human.
What a Habitable Technology Means
Here I return to Vial—because although I parted from him on two points, on a third he gives me the most beautiful word in the whole story.
Vial is also a design theorist; he wrote A Short Treatise on Design. In his vision, designers are the ones who make the new digital reality habitable. Engineers invent the technology; designers give it human form. The former build the engine; the latter build the house in which you can live with that engine without being burned.
"Habitable" seems to me a wonderful word. A habitable house isn't merely a building you fit inside. It's a place where you can live: where you know where the light is, where you can close the door, where you can sleep, where you can have guests when you want—not when they want.
And if I place Vial's "habitable" next to Illich's "convivial", I get something that looks like a programme. For Illich, a tool is convivial when it can be used by anyone, as often or as rarely as they want, for purposes they choose, without making them dependent on it or on a master of it. The bicycle is a convivial tool. The public library is a convivial tool. Your grandmother's rotary-dial telephone was quite convivial: it rang, you answered, you talked, you hung up.
A habitable, convivial technology would have several traits. I'll state them as questions you can put to any app, any website, any gadget. It is, if you like, a taming test.
Can I understand what it does? A tamed technology is legible. You don't need to know everything happening inside it, but you need to know roughly what it does and why. When you see a post in your feed, do you know why it appeared? If the answer is "no idea", you are not the master of the relationship.
Can I turn back? A tamed technology is reversible. You can delete, cancel, leave. You can take your data and go. If a platform makes leaving impossible—because all your friends are there, or because it's holding ten years of memories you can't export—it isn't a house, it's a gilded cage.
Does it move at my pace? A tamed technology respects human time. It lets you finish. It has an end. It doesn't interrupt you when you don't want interrupting. It doesn't start the next episode on its own. A human being needs pauses, boredom, dead time, quiet. An algorithm optimised for retention hates all of these.
Does it make me more or less capable? This is Protagoras's question, reformulated. After using a tool, are you more capable or more helpless? GPS takes you anywhere—but if you lose it, can you still find your way? A writing assistant helps you write—but if you turn it off, can you still formulate a thought? It isn't a rhetorical question. The answer can genuinely be "more capable". But you must ask it.
Who gains when I stay longer? If the answer is "me", it's a tool. If the answer is "someone else, at my expense", it's bait.
I'm not asking you to delete every app that fails the test—almost nothing would remain. I'm asking you only to know which ones fail. Because knowing is already the first step of taming. A wild animal you know is less dangerous than one you don't see.
One Evening, a Son, a Question
I have a teenage son. He's younger than you, but not by much, and he is, in a way, also a reader of this essay.
One evening, we were both sitting in the kitchen. He with his phone, me with my laptop. Between us, a plate of something going cold. At one point he looked up and asked me, apropos of nothing:
— What did you used to do when you got bored?
I didn't know what to answer on the spot. I tried to remember. And I realised the honest answer was: I was bored. Simply. I used to sit inside boredom as if it were an empty room. I'd look out of the window. I'd look at the ceiling. I'd think about things. And sometimes something came out of that boredom: an idea, a drawing, a story, a decision. Or the decision to come back day after day, for six months, to a room with two computers, just to see what else could be done with C:\>.
Boredom was a room I lived in. Today it's a room no one enters anymore, because its door has been bricked up with a screen.
I didn't lecture him. I know how parents' lectures sound at that age. I just said: "I got bored. And I think it did me good." He shrugged and went back to his phone. But a few days later, I saw him sitting on the balcony, nothing in his hands, looking at nothing. I don't know whether it had anything to do with our conversation. Probably not. But I liked to believe it did.
I tell you this story because taming doesn't begin with grand principles. It begins with small rooms reconquered: ten minutes on the balcony, a walk without headphones, a journey made without GPS, an evening when the phone stays in another room and you discover the world hasn't collapsed. It isn't a revolution; it's gardening.
Nepsis: An Old Word for a New Problem
I want to bring in here a word you've probably never heard in connection with technology. It comes from a tradition that seems as far from Silicon Valley as can be: that of the Orthodox monks of the first Christian centuries, gathered in a collection of texts called the Philokalia, which Father Dumitru Stăniloae translated into Romanian with Benedictine patience, in years when translating Christian texts was not exactly an encouraged activity.
The word is trezvie—vigilance. In Greek, nepsis.
For these monks, the greatest battle of man wasn't fought outside, but inside—in attention. They had observed, with astonishing psychological subtlety, the way thoughts enter the mind: first a small image, a suggestion; then a conversation with it; then a consent; then a habit; then a slavery. Hesychios of Sinai, one of them, wrote an entire treatise on vigilance—that is, on guarding the mind, on the capacity to observe what enters you before it takes possession of you.
I'm not asking you to become monks. I'm not one either. But it seems extraordinary to me that men living in the desert, over a thousand years ago, without electricity, described with precision exactly the mechanism that the attention economy exploits today. The notification is the suggestion. Opening the app is the conversation. The scroll is the consent. The lost hour is the habit. The feeling of emptiness at the end is the slavery.
Nepsis is, if you like, the interior version of taming. You cannot gentle a technology if you aren't awake in front of it. You cannot be the measure of things if you can no longer measure yourself.
And what's interesting is that nepsis doesn't mean fleeing the world. These monks didn't flee from thoughts—they faced them. They didn't say "stop having thoughts", but "don't let the thoughts have you". Transposed into your world: not "don't have a phone", but "don't let the phone have you".
It's a difference of one letter and a whole life.
What Those Who Build Can Do
So far I've spoken mostly about you as users. But many of you, at 20–25, are or will be builders of technology too: programmers, designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, civil servants who will choose what software their institution buys, teachers who will decide what apps their pupils use.
That means you will hold in your hands a piece of other people's ontophany. You will decide, at least a little, how the world appears to other people.
I tell you from experience: the pressure will always be towards wildness. The client will want more engagement. The boss will want a higher conversion rate. The investor will want growth. And you'll be tempted to add one more pop-up, one more notification, one more colourful button that makes a person tap before thinking. It will be easy. It will work. The numbers will grow.
And yet, there's another way. I worked for years with public institutions—town halls, schools, hospitals—and I learned that a good website for a citizen is a website that respects them. That tells them clearly what they must do. That doesn't force them to accept cookies they don't need. That works for the grandfather with thick glasses, for the person who sees poorly, for the one who has only an old phone and a weak signal at the edge of the village. That protects their data not because a regulation says so, but because that data is a piece of their life.
Cybersecurity, which many see as a technical and bureaucratic chore, is in fact a form of care. To protect someone's data is to protect their privacy. Accessibility isn't a tick-box in a compliance form, but a form of hospitality: the door of the house is wide enough for the wheelchair too.
If you will build technology, put Protagoras's question to every decision: what will this do to the person who uses it? Not just what it will extract from them—what it will make of them.
Sometimes the answer will cost you money. Not always, but sometimes. And then you'll find out how much your principles are worth.
Objections, Because I Can Already Hear Them
I'd be dishonest if I ended without listening to the objections. I hear them in my own head too.
"It's easy to talk like this in your fifties, when you've already made your life. If we're not online, we don't exist. We can't find jobs, friends, or partners."
You're right. And that's precisely why I'm not telling you to leave. Vial's critique of dualism works here too: there's no clean "outside" to flee to. The hybrid world is the only world we have. But living in it doesn't mean accepting it as designed by others. It means building, inside it, a habitable house. Taming isn't emigration. It's furnishing.
"Technology is neutral. It only depends how you use it."
That's the favourite phrase of those who sell technology. And it's half true, half false. It's true that it depends on use. But it's false that it's neutral. A knife can be used both in a kitchen and as a weapon—but a kitchen knife is designed for the kitchen. An app designed to keep you as long as possible isn't neutral. It was made with an intention, and that intention is written into every pixel. That's precisely Vial's lesson: technique isn't a transparent tool but a structure of perception. It is never neutral, because it changes the way you see.
"So what if we're trained? We're happy."
Are you? I'm asking seriously, without irony. Look at how you feel after an hour of scrolling. Not during—after. If the answer is "I feel good, rested, connected, inspired", then perhaps your relationship with that app is already a tamed one and you don't need my advice. But if the answer is "empty", "tired", "slightly ashamed", "I don't know where the time went"—then something in you already knows what I know.
"You use AI to write articles about how technology trains us. Isn't that hypocritical?"
That's the best objection, so I answer it in the note at the end, with all the honesty I'm capable of.
Epilogue: Harap-Alb's Horse
I'll end with a story you know, because you read it at school, probably without much enthusiasm: Ion Creangă's The Story of Harap-Alb.*
Do you remember the beginning? The king's youngest son must set out on a long journey, to the Green Emperor. He needs a horse. And Saint Sunday, disguised as a beggar woman, advises him to place a tray of glowing embers in the middle of the herd. The horse that comes to eat the embers—that is his horse.
And of course, the most wretched of them all comes forward. A scrawny, mangy nag, which the king's son strikes several times with the bridle, because he can't believe this is the treasure. But the horse returns and eats the embers. And after eating, it shakes itself and becomes a wondrous horse: beautiful, strong, that speaks, flies to the moon, and guides the hero through all the trials that follow.
I've thought about this scene for a long time, because it seems to me the most beautiful image of taming I know.
The wondrous horse isn't a trained horse. It's a horse with which the hero has a relationship. The horse advises him, helps him, saves him. In many moments, the horse knows more than its master. And yet, the road belongs to Harap-Alb. The horse doesn't decide where they go; it helps its master reach where he has decided. It's a powerful partner—perhaps more powerful than the man in certain respects—but one that remains in the service of a human purpose.
And one more detail: this horse becomes wondrous only after receiving the embers. That is, after the man gives it something, feeds it, cares for it, commits to it. Taming isn't only mastery; it's also care. Technology doesn't become good on its own. It becomes good when we invest in it attention, understanding, discernment, principles. When we feed it the embers of our own wakefulness.
Today's technology is, in many respects, a wondrous horse. It can fly, it can speak, it can know things we don't know. The question isn't whether to mount it. We've all mounted it already. The question is who holds the reins, and where we're going.
Protagoras would say that man is the measure of all things. I say, more modestly: man must remain the measure of the road.
And somewhere inside me, that cursor from 1997 still blinks, white on black, every half second. It waits. It doesn't call me, doesn't lure me, doesn't know my name. It only waits for me to decide what I write.
That's what I'd like to leave you: a machine that waits for you—not a machine you wait for.
C:\> _
Author's Note
On assistance. As in all my texts, I declare: this essay was structured and drafted with the help of an AI assistant, starting from my ideas, experiences, and reference points. The objection in the chapter "Objections, Because I Can Already Hear Them" is therefore pertinent, and my answer is this: I try to practise what I preach. I used the tool as Harap-Alb's horse, not as Pavlov's bell. The road, the choices, the experiences, and the convictions are mine. The assistant helped with the form. Whether I managed to remain the measure of this text—you be the judge.
On a lizard. True to my habit, I smuggled a lizard into chapter VI: the parallel between the cardboard files of the pre-1989 era and today's servers. It isn't a mere figure of style. It's the thesis that surveillance doesn't disappear—it only changes costume—and that we have moved from enduring it to feeding it voluntarily.
For those who want to read further:
- Stéphane Vial, L'être et l'écran. Comment le numérique change la perception, PUF, 2013 (Quadrige reissue 2017). English edition: Being and the Screen, MIT Press, 2019, together with A Short Treatise on Design.
- Stéphane Vial, Court traité du design, PUF, 2014.
- Plato, Theaetetus (the Protagoras fragment at 152a).
- Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973.
- Jacques Ellul, Le système technicien, 1977.
- Bernard Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d'être vécue. De la pharmacologie, 2010.
- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019.
- Cory Doctorow, Enshittification, 2025.
- Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 2023.
- The Philokalia, vol. IV, trans. Dumitru Stăniloae (Hesychios of Sinai, On Vigilance and Virtue).
- Ion Creangă, The Story of Harap-Alb.
*Cultural note: Harap-Alb ("White Moor") is one of the most beloved Romanian fairy tales, written by Ion Creangă (1837–1889), a classic of Romanian literature. The story follows a young prince's coming of age on a journey full of trials, guided by magical helpers—of which the wondrous horse is the most important. The embers scene, in which the hero must recognise value where others see wretchedness, is the story's central image of trust and partnership.