--- title: "The Gold in the Crack" date: 2026-09-27 description: "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 kep" author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Science and civilization" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/science-innovation-and-civilization.md" --- # The Gold in the Crack **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. --- ## The Ten Just Men Are Not Heroes In 1978 Václav Havel, a Czech playwright, wrote an essay that would circulate secretly throughout Eastern Europe: *The Power of the Powerless*. At its centre stands an ordinary man, a greengrocer. In his shop window, among the onions and carrots, he has put up a poster received from headquarters: "Workers of the world, unite!" Havel asks: does the greengrocer believe what the poster says? Almost certainly not. He has never thought about it. He puts the poster up because that is what is done, because everyone puts it up, because not putting it up would mean trouble. The poster does not in fact say "workers, unite". It says: "I am obedient and I want to be left in peace." Havel then imagines a day when the greengrocer no longer puts up the poster. He does not organise a revolt, does not write manifestos. He merely stops taking part in the lie. And that small gesture, Havel says, is dangerous to the entire system, because it shows that it is possible to live otherwise. Havel calls it "living in truth". It is not a new ideology set in place of the old one. It is simply the refusal to go on playing a role you do not believe in. And when one greengrocer refuses, his neighbour sees that it can be done. Then another one. Four years earlier, in February 1974, on the day of his arrest, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published a short text: "Live Not by Lies". He did not ask people to be heroes, to take to the square, to confront tanks. He asked something smaller and harder: not to say, not to write, not to sign anything they know to be false. Lies may rule the world, he said — but let them not pass through me. It seems to me that here lies the secret of the ten just men from the first article. They are not heroes. They are people who do not put up the poster. Today's poster no longer stands in the shop window. It stands in the share button. The post you pass on without reading it to the end, the screenshot without a source, the rumour about the school circulating on the class group: all of these are posters. Most of them we do not truly believe. We pass them on because that is what is done. Not putting up the poster means, today, not pressing share. To you, the young, the poster comes in another form as well: the assignment that is not yours. You submit it under your name, though a predictive model wrote it. No one is forcing you, just as no one forced the greengrocer. It is merely more convenient. But it is the same gesture: you sign something that is not true. Its opposite is not never to use the tool. It is to say what you did with it: "I used an assistant to check my grammar", "I started from a generated draft and rewrote it". One honest sentence about the tool is already a poster taken down. And the web economy is built so that posters circulate. A false text that stirs fury earns more than a true and boring one. Predictive models can produce, in seconds, a thousand different posters, each fitted to a different reader. The remnant, here, is those who refuse: the local journalist who checks once more before publishing, the researcher who says "no" to a convenient conclusion, the writer who declares his tools. Since August 2026, European law has required that generated images, clips and sounds which imitate real people or events be labelled as such. It is a law that tries to take the posters down. But no law can stop the hand that presses "share". Open source has a technical form of the refusal to live in lies. Open code can be read by anyone. What cannot be read cannot be verified, and what cannot be verified must be taken on trust. A closed program asks you to believe it does what it says. An open one shows you. And you, parents, have your own poster, perhaps the hardest to take down: the small lie told to the child "to protect him". "Nothing happened." "It's nothing serious." "The phone isn't listening to what we say." Children learn the truth earlier than we think, and then they learn a lesson we never meant to give them: that adults put up posters too. And there is one more poster, ours, the ones at the meetings. Sometimes a rumour appears on the class group about a teacher, about a child, about a school decision. No one knows where it came from. A few pass it on, the others stay silent. A single parent who writes "I asked directly and it's not so" — or at least "let's find out first" — does, on a group of thirty people, exactly what Havel's greengrocer did. To a ten-year-old, the greengrocer's story can be told like this: there was once a man who had a vegetable shop, and who put in his window a card with some words he did not believe in, just because all the neighbours put up the same. One day he decided not to put it up any more. He did not quarrel with anyone. He simply stopped saying what he did not believe. Ask him whether he has ever passed on something he did not believe: a message, a joke about a classmate, a picture. > **Stop.** The ten just men are not heroes. They are people who no longer put the poster in the shop window. --- ## Suicide or Repair The English historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, in the middle of the last century, twelve volumes on the rise and fall of civilisations. One of his best-known ideas is that **civilisations live for as long as a creative minority knows how to answer challenges**. When that minority ceases to create and begins merely to dominate, the civilisation stops. One formula attributed to him is often quoted: **"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder"** — one of the British historian's most famous theses, set out in his monumental work *A Study of History*, published in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961. An American archaeologist, Joseph Tainter, proposed a colder explanation in 1988. Societies solve problems by adding complexity: more rules, more officials, more systems. At first, each new layer brings large benefits. In time, the benefits shrink and the costs grow. When complexity becomes too expensive to maintain, the society collapses. Collapse, Tainter says, is forced simplification. You lose, all at once, everything you can no longer sustain. The Western Roman Empire, among other things, came to spend more and more on army, administration and taxes merely to stand still. When the burden grew too great, many of its subjects no longer had any reason to defend it. In the series on the obsolete state I described the same mechanism in today's administration: form upon form, applications that do not talk to each other, procedures added after every problem and never removed. The complexity of a civilisation and the complexity of its technology are described in the same words: layers, dependencies, maintenance costs. **The question that interests me is simple: can we choose simplification before it is imposed on us?** Anyone who works with websites recognises Tainter's description at once. A modern site may depend on hundreds of pieces of code written by others, each with its own dependencies. A page that could be a simple text loads dozens of scripts, advertising trackers, fonts from other servers. Each layer solved a problem, but each can also fail and drag everything down with it. I have seen institutional websites fall because a single component, no longer maintained by anyone, became a security hole. Programmers also remember a day in 2016, when a single man removed from the internet a small module of eleven lines, which aligns text to the left. Thousands of projects around the world stopped that same morning, because they depended on it without knowing. Voluntary simplification, in my trade, has concrete forms: clean HTML, which can still be read in twenty years' time; open standards, which no company can withdraw; fewer dependencies, chosen with care. It is not nostalgia. It is maintenance. A simple site is easier to repair, and what is easy to repair lives longer. The web economy pushes in the opposite direction. Complexity sells well: the platform with a thousand functions, the subscription with one more module, the ever-larger predictive model demanding ever more data centres. Each year adds a layer. No one is paid to remove one. And a child's phone is, on a small scale, one of Tainter's empires: dozens of applications, each with its account, its notifications, its data sent elsewhere. Each one solved a problem. Together they became a problem. Open source has here a silent advantage: open standards. A text file, an HTML page, a free image format do not depend on a company's survival. They can be read by any program, today and a generation from now. They are the simple stone on which one can rebuild after a collapse. A document saved in an open, internationally standardised format will still open when the program it was written in no longer exists. A closed document depends on the goodwill of a single company. And you, parents, can practise voluntary simplification at the scale of a family. Count the applications on your child's phone, and on your own. Choose together which ones stay. Fewer applications, chosen together, means fewer accounts, less data given away, fewer things that can break. It is not a punishment. It is a spring cleaning. To you, the young, simplification may look like a step backwards. But think of it as a rucksack for a long road: you do not take everything you own; you take what you can carry. The civilisations that survived knew, at some point, what to leave behind. So do people: a deleted application, a closed account, an abandoned platform are sometimes the first step towards something more solid. > **Stop.** Collapse is simplification you did not choose. Repair is simplification you choose in time. --- ## Waiting for Another Benedict ### Not a Godot, but a Benedict In 1981, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre ended his book *After Virtue* with a paragraph that became famous. We are living, he said, through something like the end of the Roman Empire, when people of good faith ceased to sustain the empire and began to build local forms of community, in which moral and intellectual life could survive the dark age that was coming. We are waiting, he wrote, not for a Godot, but for another St Benedict — "undoubtedly very different". Benedict of Nursia founded, in the sixth century, communities of monks who lived by a simple rule: prayer and work. In the centuries of chaos after the fall of Rome, the monasteries that followed his rule became the places where books were copied. Many of the ancient authors we read today reached us because a monk, in a cold cell, copied them out by hand, letter by letter, not always knowing what he was copying. An American novel of 1959, *A Canticle for Leibowitz*, took the image to its end. After a nuclear war, people burn the books and kill the learned. An order of monks in the desert preserves what remains: fragments, technical sketches, even a shopping list. A young monk spends years copying and illuminating with gold an electrical circuit he does not understand. He does not know what he is preserving. He knows only that it must be preserved. In 2017, the American journalist Rod Dreher proposed, in *The Benedict Option*, that people who hold to the old values withdraw into separate communities. The book ignited a fierce debate. Many replied that withdrawal is itself a form of abandonment, and that Benedict's monasteries were not fortresses but open houses, with guests, schools and hospitals. I side with the critics. I do not believe we need walls. I believe we need places. ### The Monasteries of Our Age Where, then, are the monasteries of our age? I believe we already frequent them, without giving them that name. The parents' meeting, in a classroom, on chairs too small. The projects committee, at a long table, with dossiers. The residents' association, in the block hallway or the basement. These are unspectacular places, sometimes boring, often tiring. But they are among the few places left where ordinary people, who did not choose one another, decide together something that concerns them all. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, studied for decades the communities that administer their common goods themselves: pastures, forests, irrigation systems. She found that those which endure have certain things in common. They know clearly who belongs to the community. They make their own rules, adapted to the place. Those who respect the rules have a say in changing them. Someone monitors what happens, and sanctions escalate gradually, not all at once. There is a place where disputes are settled. Read the list once more and think of the residents' association. The known members, the voted rules, the meeting where they change, the censor who checks, the penalties that escalate, the assembly where people quarrel and then make up. Your block is, without knowing it, an Ostrom community. When it works, it is a small Benedictine monastery of the common good. The most beautiful example I know is one I have read happens, in different forms, in several countries. The parents of a class agree, at a meeting, to postpone together their children's first smartphone. Not because the phone is the absolute evil, but so that no child is the only one without one. In Britain, in 2024, a WhatsApp group of parents started an entire movement this way, called *Smartphone Free Childhood*. It is not a law. It is an agreement between neighbours. That is a Benedictine rule for our century. I know it is not simple. At a parents' meeting, someone has to propose, someone has to not laugh, someone has to write to the class group what was decided, and a few months later someone has to remember. Exactly the same roles Ostrom found in the villages that kept their forest. And this agreement needs no application. It only needs people to see each other, now and then, in the same room. To you, the young, your monasteries look different, but they exist. The choir, the debating club, the bicycle-repair workshop, the reading group, even a well-moderated Discord server, with clear rules and people who know each other by name. The criterion is simple: is it a place where someone would notice if you were missing? The web has its monasteries too. The Internet Archive has preserved, since 1996, hundreds of billions of web pages that would otherwise have vanished. Software Heritage, begun in France in 2016, archives the source code of open programmes from all over the world, like a library of humankind. In 2020, a copy of millions of open-source projects was deposited on special film in an abandoned mine in Svalbard, beneath the Arctic ice, to last a thousand years. The medieval copyist and the digital archivist make the same gesture: they preserve without knowing who will read. Wikipedia is perhaps our greatest monastery: hundreds of thousands of volunteers who write, correct and verify, under rules they gave themselves, a library anyone can read without paying. And for predictive models, these archives have become something new: the seed bank. If the web fills with generated texts, the texts written by humans — verified and dated — will be the only clean soil from which anything can still be grown. The digital monasteries preserve, without having planned it, the seed of tomorrow's models. The economy does not love them. The Internet Archive has lost costly lawsuits against the big publishers and lives on donations. Software Heritage depends on the support of public institutions. Monasteries have always lived on the gift of those outside. To a ten-year-old, the story can be told beside the bookshelf at home. Tell him that, long ago, after a great empire collapsed, some monks sat for hundreds of years in cold cells and copied books by hand, letter by letter, so they would not be lost. Many of the stories we read today reached us because of them. Show him an old book from the house, if you have one. Then ask him what he would preserve, so it would not be lost: a photograph, grandmother's recipe, a game, a word. > **Stop.** We do not need walls. We need places where someone would notice we are missing. --- ## The Tools in Their Place Ivan Illich, a priest and thinker who lived in Mexico, wrote in 1973 about "convivial" tools. A convivial tool is on the scale of the human being: you can use it without depending on a vast system, you can understand it, repair it, set it aside. The bicycle is convivial. The motorway, less so. Illich feared tools that grow so large that the human ends up serving them. His favourite example was the car: invented to save us time, it had come to hold us in traffic for hours. Today the example would perhaps be the phone. Richard Sennett, an American sociologist, wrote a book in 2008 about the craftsman. The hand that works, he says, thinks. The craftsman who repeats a gesture thousands of times does not become an automaton. He becomes someone who understands the material from within. Sennett defines craftsmanship as the desire to do a thing well for its own sake. Not for a mark, not for money, not because someone is counting. When I read these books, I ask myself: what would my father repair today? I am not sure. But I believe he would begin with the tools that will not let themselves be opened. An engine could be taken apart. A phone glued shut, no. A closed program, no. A predictive model you do not know what it was trained on, no. I imagine him laying a hand on the bonnet and asking: "Where does it open?" And if it opened nowhere, I believe he would have said that it is not a tool, but a box. European law has begun, slowly, to prove him right. From 2025, phones sold in the Union must have spare parts available for years, and from 2027 phone batteries must be replaceable by the user. Small steps. But they mean the tool is once more being asked to have a bonnet. The answer to his question has a simple form: what you can open, understand and repair is yours. What you cannot, belongs to someone else, even if you paid for it. Richard Stallman, who started the free software movement forty years ago, put the same idea into four freedoms. The freedom to use the program as you wish. The freedom to study how it works, that is, to see its code. The freedom to pass it on. The freedom to improve it and pass on the improvement. It is, in fact, the definition of the tool kept in its place: beneath the human hand, not above it. In "The Mechanical Bird" I ended with the Spân from *Harap-Alb*: the servant who, through a trick, becomes the master. The predictive model can be a very good servant. It becomes a Spân when we no longer know how it works, can no longer live without it, and can no longer walk away from it. There are already roads back towards convivial tools. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, is working on a project called Solid, in which your data stays with you, in a place you control, and the applications ask your permission to use it — not the other way round. The European Union speaks more and more often of digital sovereignty, meaning not depending entirely on a few companies on other continents. And there are open predictive models, which you can download, run on your own computer and study. They are not as powerful as the largest ones. But they are yours. Here, though, an honest caveat is needed. Many of the so-called "open" models publish only the result of the training, not the data or the method. You can use them and modify them, but you cannot rebuild them from zero. They are closer to an engine you can take apart than to the factory that made it. That is a lot. It is not everything. The economy moves, for now, in the opposite direction. The subscription replaces ownership. You no longer buy a program; you rent it. You no longer own the music, the films, the books, but access to them — until the terms change. The boxes multiply. In America, farmers have taken to repairing their tractors with pirated software, because the manufacturer had locked it and would not let them change a part themselves. The right-to-repair movement was born, in large part, in their workshops. I think my father would have understood them at once. And you, parents, have in the house the most delicate of today's tools: the predictive homework assistant. It can be convivial, or it can be a Spân. The difference lies not in the tool but in how we use it. As a teacher who asks ("what do you think comes next?"), it is a good tool. As a solver that hands over the answer, it becomes master of the homework. Agree with your child, as a rule of the workshop, on how you use it. To you, the young, I say what I would have wanted to hear at your age. Learn at least one tool to the very end. A programming language, a musical instrument, a sewing machine, a bicycle. Know what is inside it and how it is repaired. However many tools you use afterwards, you will know how to ask: "Where does it open?" And for the smaller ones, the workshop can begin early: a robotics kit they assemble themselves, a Scratch project they take apart to see how it works, a bicycle whose inner tube they change themselves. The first tools a child opens are also the first he will never let become a Spân. > **Stop.** What you can open, understand and repair is yours. What you cannot, belongs to someone else, even if you paid for it. --- ## Birth as a Second Chance Hannah Arendt, whom I met in the previous article speaking of promise, also wrote about something simpler and more astonishing: birth. Every human being who is born, she says, is a beginning. Not a continuation, not a copy, but something genuinely new that no one could have foreseen. The world, which would otherwise run towards ruin by its own laws, is saved again and again by the fact that new people are born, who can begin something. She also said that forgiveness undoes the past, and promise binds the future. Birth makes both possible. Without new people, there would be no one to forgive and no one to promise to. It seems to me the most beautiful idea of a second chance I have met. Nineveh was not saved only by the repentance of the great. It was saved, says the end of the book of Jonah, also by the more than a hundred and twenty thousand "who do not know their right hand from their left": the children. They were the city's future. They were its second chance. To you, the young, I say something you may not hear often: you are not the heirs of a ruin. Yes, you are receiving a world with many cracks: the climate, the internet broken by its own economy, a country emptying of people. But you are not the end of the story. You are the beginning of the next one. What you will do cannot be predicted from what we did. That, in Arendt's sense, is your power. In the series "Body, Family, Country" I wrote about Romania's birth-rate crisis: fewer and fewer children are born, and many of those born leave. I do not repeat the figures here. I say only that every child born here is, literally, a second chance for a place that feared it no longer had one. And you, parents, already have your second chance at home: the child you have. Not the one you might have wanted, nor the one the algorithm compares with other children, but the real one, ten years old, who resembles no one. Arendt's question, asked at the table, is simple: what promise do you make him? Not a great one. One you can keep. That you will not read his messages in secret. That you will be home for dinner a few times a week. That you will not put his photographs on social networks without asking him. Small promises are what bind a future we cannot see. Predictive models are, by their construction, the opposite of birth. They produce the most probable answer — that is, the one most resembling everything already said. They are astonishingly good at continuing. They cannot begin anything. A child, by contrast, is precisely the most improbable answer. The applications on his phone try, day after day, to make him predictable: to guess the next clip he will watch, the next thing he will buy, the next friend he will add. The better they guess, the more they earn. To raise him as a beginning means, sometimes, to let him be unpredictable. To be bored, to invent, to choose something other than what the feed recommends. The same is true, on a smaller scale, of every original text written by a human being. The web economy treats it as "content" among others, and the models treat it as a training datum. But a text written by someone out of their own life is a small birth in the common corpus: a beginning that no prediction contained. The birth of a child and the birth of a true text are beginnings of the same kind. No one could have guessed them in advance. Your child's first composition, written by hand, with mistakes, is such a beginning. So is your own first text written alone — you, the young — after years of short messages and generated answers. Open source, too, has a form of birth: the fork. When a project reaches a dead end, someone takes the code and starts a new project, with another name, other ideas, another road. The old code does not disappear. It becomes the parent of the new one. Many of the programmes we use today were born this way, from a project that seemed finished. And the largest open project in the world began as a pure birth. In 1991, a twenty-one-year-old Finnish student announced on a forum that he was working on an operating system, "just a hobby, won't be big and professional". His name was Linus Torvalds. Today that system, Linux, sits in most of the world's servers and in billions of phones. No one could have predicted it. To a ten-year-old, this story is the easiest to tell, because it is his own story. Tell him the day he was born: the weather outside, what you felt, the first thing you noticed about him. Tell him that on that day no one in the world could know who he would become — not you, not the doctors, nor any computer. Then ask him what he would like to begin, something no one in the family has done before. > **Stop.** The predictive model is very good at continuing. It cannot begin anything. A child is precisely the most improbable answer. --- ## Epilogue: What I Can Leave to You ### Three Refused Inheritances I have reached the end of the series, and I owe you an answer to the question anyone asks at a certain age: what do I leave behind? I cannot leave you the land. My grandfather asked that it not be sold, and I understood from his dying words that it was not ours to give away. I cannot leave you my father's workshop. His tools were for his hands, and those hands are gone. And I cannot leave you my archive of texts. There are many, on several websites, but they are mine. You will have to write your own. What I can leave you is a single thing, received from all three: the knowledge that things can be repaired. My grandfather entrusted the land to us instead of selling it. My father repaired engines others had given up for lost. I repair websites no one sees. It is the same knowledge, passed through three pairs of hands. In "The Mechanical Bird" I ended in 1997, at the Chamber of Commerce in Botoșani, where I spent six months in front of two computers I did not have at home. I learned then what I did not know: that a machine can be understood if you stay beside it long enough. That is the other half of the inheritance: the patience to stay beside a thing until you understand it. ### For Each End of the Table To you, the young, friends of my son: you are not my children, but you are my child's friends. That makes us, in a way, part of the same remnant. I have seen you pass through the house, earphones on, talking about a game or an exam. Perhaps I never told you at the table the things in these three articles. You have them here, written, to take or leave. I do not ask you to be just men, or heroes. I ask you only not to put up the poster, and not to let break what can still be repaired. To you, parents of ten-year-olds, I would say what I wish I had known when my son was your children's age. Postpone, as far as possible, the children's contact with technology. And one more thing, which I know for certain: these years pass more quickly than they seem to, at the meetings. And to you, the young, I say this as well: it will not be long before you sit at the other end of the table. You will have ten-year-olds, you will sit through meetings on chairs too small, and you will ask yourselves at what age to give them their first phone. Then perhaps you will remember this table. The table with two ends is in fact the same table; only the people move, over the years, from one end to the other. To you, neighbours and committee colleagues: the inheritance is not only what I leave. It is also what we repair together, in the places where we already meet. The block's roof, the dossier of a project that got past its first objection, the class fund spent wisely. They are small. But they are ours, all of ours. I thank you for the evenings lost in halls too cold and on chairs too small. It is there, in fact, that the city was held up. ### Four Threads, One Weave If I had to gather the digital thread of this series into a few sentences, I would write them like this. The internet's economy has learned to profit from what breaks, from what is thrown away, and from our attention. It can also learn to pay for what is repaired, if we demand it. Predictive models live on what we wrote, and empty out without us. They need relevant human beings in order to stay relevant themselves. A child's phone is the place where all of this enters the house. We cannot close it for ever, but we can open it together, with rules set at the table. And open source, with its three principles — open collaboration, transparency, and knowledge passed on — shows what a second chance looks like for tools: you can only repair what you can open. ### The Gold in My Own Crack At the end of every article in this series I have written a note: the text was drafted with the help of a predictive model, and the decisions are mine. Some readers skip it. Others may wonder why I keep writing it. I write it because it is the gold in my own crack. This series speaks of people who do not put the poster in the shop window, of code that can be read, of repairs left in plain sight. I could not hide — I, of all people — how it was made. The transparency note is the version history of these texts. It is the errata published in advance. It shows where the human worked and where the tool worked. Perhaps one day all texts will carry such a note. Perhaps not. But if the web has a second chance, it looks like a bowl mended with gold: not new, not without fault, but repaired in plain sight, with the traces left where they can be seen. So it is with us. Nor is this series without fault. Where you find one, tell me, and I will correct it in plain sight, with the date of the correction beside it. I cannot leave you certainties either. I do not know whether the web will be repaired, whether the platforms will come back, whether the models will remain tools or become Spâni. I do not know what your children's world will look like. I know only what the worm in the parable knew: that it is worth digging one more year. And that I do not dig alone. Our cracks need not be hidden. Through them, the light comes in. --- ## Conclusion: What Can I Repair, and for Whom? "The Mechanical Bird" ended with a question: "Could I do this alone? And do I still want to be able to?" It was the question of a person losing his relevance, who wants to know whether he still has hands. This series ends with a symmetrical question: what can I repair? And for whom? You, the young, can answer it for a friend, a colleague, a place. You can repair a thing someone else would throw away, a text someone else would leave generated, a connection someone else would let die. For whom? For those who come after you, just as others repaired for you without knowing you: those who wrote the open code you use, those who corrected the articles you read, those who kept the block standing before you moved into it. You, the parents, can answer it for the ten-year-old standing between you and the world. You can repair the time spent together, the trust, the rules of the house, one piece of the web he will inherit. For whom? For him — but not only. For the children in his class, who will need the parents to decide together. **For you, the young:** choose one thing to repair for someone else. Not for yourselves. A neighbour's bicycle, a Wikipedia page about your town, an open project you use, a friendship. **For you, the parents:** choose together with your child one thing to repair for someone else in the block, the class or the family. Do it with your hands, then tell him the story of the bowl with the gold. Three articles, three gestures. Repair one thing. Practise one virtue. Repair something for someone else. It is not much. But Gomorrah did not burn because it had sinned. It burned because ten just men could not be found. Nineveh was given another forty days. We, perhaps, are given one more year. And if someone asks you, one day, why you wasted time on a repair when something new could have been bought, tell him what my father used to say: "It can still be repaired." --- ### Author's Note This text was drafted with the assistance of an advanced predictive model, used for research, structuring and revision. The axis, the starting material, the personal scenes and the editorial decisions are mine. The epilogue explains why this note is part of the text. **This article's lizard.** The remnant that preserves the books while the "empire" collapses can also be read against the institutions that are losing their digital memory: websites deleted at every change of management, lost archives, expired domains, public documents that can no longer be found. Benedict's monks copied what others threw away. I have named no institution. Neither did Benedict name the empire. ### Sources **Kintsugi** - [Kintsugi: The Poetic Mend (Dr Bonnie Kemske, DAJF)](https://dajf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Dr-Bonnie-Kemske-Kintsugi-The-Poetic-Mend.pdf) **Moral resistance** - Václav Havel, *The Power of the Powerless* (1978) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Live Not by Lies" (12 February 1974) **Civilisations, collapse, continuity** - Arnold J. Toynbee, *A Study of History*, 12 vols. (1934–1961) — [academia.edu](https://www.academia.edu/24811789/A_Study_of_History) - Joseph A. Tainter, *The Collapse of Complex Societies* (Cambridge University Press, 1988) - Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue* (1981), the end of chapter 18 - Rod Dreher, *The Benedict Option* (2017), and its critics - Walter M. Miller Jr., *A Canticle for Leibowitz* (1959) **Forgiveness, promise, beginning** - Hannah Arendt, *The Human Condition* (1958), on natality and §§33–34 - The Book of Jonah, 4:11 **Tool and craft** - Ivan Illich, *Tools for Conviviality* (1973) - Richard Sennett, *The Craftsman* (2008) - Richard Stallman, *Free Software, Free Society* (2002); the four freedoms of free software **Common goods, archives, data** - Elinor Ostrom, *Governing the Commons* (1990) - Internet Archive — archive.org - Software Heritage — softwareheritage.org - GitHub Archive Program, Arctic World Archive, Svalbard (2020) - Tim Berners-Lee, *This Is for Everyone* (2025); the Solid project — solidproject.org - The "left-pad" incident (npm, March 2016) - Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the AI Act), Art. 50 (transparency of generated content); Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 (ecodesign of phones); Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 (batteries), applicable from February 2027 **Children and screens** - The *Smartphone Free Childhood* movement (United Kingdom, 2024) - Jonathan Haidt, *The Anxious Generation* (2024); Candice Odgers, critical review, *Nature* (2024) — [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation) **Companion series** - "The Mechanical Bird", Part III, "The Spân and the Keys" — petrucojocaru.ro — [link](https://petrucojocaru.ro/teme-transversale/spanul-si-cheile-delegarea) - "Body, Family, Country", Pillar III (the birth rate), cojocarupetru.info — [link](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=536:cifrele-unui-dezastru-anuntat&catid=13:stiinta-si-civilizatie&lang=ro-RO&Itemid=115) - "Ten Just Men" and "Seven Repairs", Parts I and II of this series, cojocarupetru.info