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Laws Left by Our Ancestors "with a Dying Breath" — On the Web

Science and civilization Hits: 1746 45 minutes read

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

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

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

At the Deathbed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part One: The Grandfather and the Land

The Man Who Counted the Furrows

My grandfather was not a talkative man. I remember him chiefly through gestures: the way he rubbed his palms before taking up the scythe; the way he stopped at the end of the field and looked back — not in admiration, but to check. He had a way of standing with his hands behind his back and his head slightly bowed, which seemed to me, as a child, a form of prayer. Perhaps it was.

His land was never much. It was taken during collectivisation, and after 1989 it was returned in fragments, with survey lines that no longer matched anything the old people remembered. I heard long arguments at the gate about where the boundary had run, about a stake someone had moved, about a walnut tree that "had always been ours". My grandfather never entered those quarrels. He stood aside and waited for them to pass. Then he would walk his allotted strip alone, from one end to the other.

That was when the buyers began to arrive. People from the city, sometimes in cars the village had never seen, with cash in their coat pockets. They stopped at the gates of old people who no longer had the strength to work the land, and counted out banknotes on the table in the hallway. Some neighbours sold. I do not judge them: they were old, ill, with children gone away. But whenever he heard of a sale, my grandfather would shake his head and say only this: money is the devil's eye. Not as moral condemnation — as an observation. Money sees everything, but it sees crookedly. It sees what the land is worth today; it cannot see what it will mean in a hundred years.

When he began to fail, he said it several times, not just once. It was no film scene, with the whole family gathered round and a solemn phrase. It was more a sentence he slipped into ordinary conversations, as if to make sure we all heard it, one after another. Do not sell the land. It does not matter what they give you. It does not matter that you no longer work it. You do not sell it.

Only much later did I understand that he was not speaking of money. He knew perfectly well that the land would never make us rich. He knew his grandchildren would move to the city, that some would leave the country, that the field would go to thistles. He was speaking of something else: that a person who owns a piece of land is never wholly dependent on anyone. That however badly things go, there is a place where you can put a seed in the ground and draw something out of it. That land is the last freedom of the poor.

And I believe he was speaking, too, of something he could not have named: that once sold, the land does not come back. You can buy back a car, a house, a thing. The land you sold belongs to someone else for ever, together with the dead who worked it before you.

A Land Without Boundaries

Once upon a time there was an internet. Not so very long ago — back when fleas were being shod with ninety-nine iron shoes, as our fairy tales say — and 14,400-baud modems were being hurled skyward in celebration. An internet without a master, with forums built by people for people, personal pages on grey backgrounds, addresses that changed from month to month. To those who caught it, it now sounds like a tale. To those who never lived it, it sounds like an invention.

In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote, at Davos, a declaration that opened with an address to the governments of the industrial world. He told them, in essence, that they had no business in the new space; that they held no sovereignty there; that the people gathering online would make their own rules. Barlow was a cowboy from Wyoming, raised on a cattle ranch, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and he saw the internet as a new frontier. New land, empty, without masters, where anyone could take a share and work it as they saw fit.

When I first read the Declaration, in the late nineties, it thrilled me. I was a young man from Botoșani who, a few years earlier, had learned MS-DOS on one of the Chamber of Commerce's two computers, staying there for weeks on end with a trainer's tacit permission after the two-week course had ended. For me, the computer had been exactly that new land. A place where it did not matter that you were from the provinces, that you had no money, no connections. Only whether you knew how to work it.

Only now, nearly thirty years later, do I notice something that escaped me then: Barlow and my grandfather spoke about land in opposite ways. For Barlow, the new land was precious precisely because it had no boundaries, belonged to no one, could belong to everyone. For my grandfather, land was precious precisely because it had boundaries; because it was ours; because we knew where it ended and the neighbour's began. Barlow dreamt of a commune without fences. My grandfather knew, from the experience of collectivisation, what happens to land that "belongs to everyone": it becomes the property of the strongest.

And that is precisely what happened to the internet. Barlow's frontier did not stay free. It was fenced in — not by governments, as he feared, but by a handful of companies that understood before everyone else that land without boundaries is land that can be taken. They came with generous offers: free hosting, free email, free space for photographs, a free place to see your friends. They did not ask for our land. They asked only that we live on theirs.

In the countryside, this kind of generosity has an old, cruel name: the pig's charity (pomana porcului). The pig is fed well all autumn — grain, good slops, everything left over from the table. Nothing is asked of it. Until the morning of St Ignatius' Day, when the pig is slaughtered. The free services of the last two decades have been, in large part, such a charity. They fed us storage space and elegant apps until we were fat enough — that is, dependent enough — for the knife: the advertisements that never end, the compulsory subscriptions, the algorithms that decide how much of what we built ourselves we get to see.

The Domain

The Romanian language has a word that makes the whole story almost too obvious: domeniu. In the old sense, the domain was the estate — the land of a boyar (a Romanian nobleman) or a monastery. In the new sense, it is a website's address. When I began working on the web and registered the first domain for a client, it seemed an amusing coincidence. It no longer amuses me.

For over twenty years my trade has been building online presences for institutions and firms. One of the things I tell clients, almost obsessively, goes something like this: do not move your entire existence onto a platform that is not yours. You need your own domain, your own website, your own contact list. The Facebook page is useful, but it is not yours. Tomorrow an algorithm changes, and half the audience you built over ten years disappears. Tomorrow your account is closed for a reason no one explains, and there is no one to appeal to.

Sometimes, when the technical arguments do not land, I turn to proverbs. Don't swap the sparrow in your hand for the crow on the fence. Your website is small, has few visitors, looks modest beside a page with tens of thousands of followers. But it is in your hand. The crow on the fence is large and glittering, but it flies off when it pleases. And I usually add another I first heard from my grandfather: what you hold in your hand is no lie. A paid domain, with your data on a server you control, is the only thing in your entire online presence you can say with certainty will still exist tomorrow.

Only late did I realise that in saying this I was repeating my grandfather's dying-breath law. Do not sell the land. It does not matter what they give you. It does not matter that it is more comfortable to live on someone else's.

And the clients do exactly what my grandfather's neighbours did after 1989: they sell. Not for money — for convenience. They close the website because "no one visits it anyway" and move entirely onto a platform. For a few years it goes well. Then the platform changes its rules, as any estate owner does once he has gathered enough tenants: first he welcomes you with bread and salt, then he demands a tithe, then he demands days of labour. Cory Doctorow gave the process an ugly, exact name: enshittification. I, raised in the countryside, recognise it under an older name. It is the agricultural tenancy agreement.

The Man Who Gave Everything Away and Woke Up with Nothing

Tim Berners-Lee is, in this story, a special figure. He did not sell the land. He gave it away. He invented the Web and refused to patent it, insisting it remain an open standard, free of royalties. At the opening of the London Olympics in 2012, a sentence appeared on the screen that became the title of his memoirs, published in the autumn of 2025: This Is for Everyone.

The gesture was one of great generosity. And yet, reading the memoirs, I had the sense of a man narrating the tragedy of someone who gifted a piece of land and watched fences rise on it. The book openly concedes that the Web, having launched an era of creativity and collaboration, has triggered a commercial race that today endangers democracies. The solution he proposes is again one of architecture: a project called Solid, in which every person keeps their data in a place of their own — he calls it a "pod" — and decides who has access to it.

Reading about Solid, I could not help thinking of Creangă's cockerel — the one from The Purse with Two Coins, a Romanian fairy tale. The cockerel finds a purse on the road, and a boyar takes it. The cockerel does not resign himself. He chases after the carriage and cries out relentlessly: Master, give me back my purse. The boyar throws him into a well, and the cockerel drinks it dry. He throws him into the oven, and the cockerel spills the water and puts out the fire. He throws him among the cattle, and the cockerel swallows them all. Until the boyar, tired of him, lets him into the treasury — and the cockerel swallows all the money and goes home with far more than he lost.

Berners-Lee's project is, in essence, the cockerel's cry: give us back our data. I do not know whether it will have the strength to drink the well dry and put out the oven. Critics have been divided, and some found the book too optimistic for a man who has seen what he has seen. But I am struck by the direction he has arrived at: after thirty years of "for everyone", the Web's inventor proposes, in essence, that every person once again have a plot of their own. A data pod is a digital smallholding. With a boundary. With an owner. With the possibility of saying: "you do not enter here."

My grandfather never heard of Berners-Lee. But I believe he would have understood perfectly.

What We Sold Without Knowing It

What is truly hard to admit is that we — the generation that built the Romanian internet — sold the land without realising it was land. We never felt it under our feet, never watched it green in spring. We gave away our data, our relationships, our habits, our children's photographs, our private conversations, for a series of free services. And the buyer was a single one, even if it had several names.

They did not force our door. We opened it ourselves. Like the kids in Creangă's The Goat with Three Kids, we heard at the door a thin, gentle voice telling us it had brought milk and a bag of maize. The wolf in the tale had laid his tongue on the anvil to make his voice thinner. The platforms hired psychologists, designers, and entire user-experience teams to do the same thing: to sound like mother. Two of the three kids opened the door. So did nearly all of us.

And once inside, we swore an oath. Terms of service, which nobody reads, are the modern version of the oath in Creangā's Harap-Alb (a fairy tale of disguise and servitude). The young prince had been given clear counsel by his father: beware of the red man and above all of the spinned one. And it was precisely the Spân he failed to beware of. He let himself be lowered into a well, and to get out he had to swear on his life that he would be the Spân's servant, that he would give him his name and his identity, that he would never tell anyone who he really was. Many of us climbed down into that well for convenience. We pressed "I accept" to get out into the light more quickly, and emerged with another name. Our data became someone else's identity, and the Spân carries them proudly to the court of the Green Emperor.

Shoshana Zuboff called this surveillance capitalism. Varoufakis speaks of technofeudalism: a world in which we no longer produce for a market, but pay rent to platform lords, like serfs who worked the boyar's land. The words belong to economists, but the image is one my grandfather lived twice in his lifetime: once at collectivisation, once facing those who, after 1989, came with cash to buy the land of old people who no longer had the strength to work it.

I do not believe we must return to the plough. Nor do I believe I can persuade anyone to close their Facebook account merely by telling them about my grandfather. But I believe my grandfather's dying-breath law has a very concrete application today: keep a piece that is yours. A domain, a website, an archive you control. Even if you do not work it. Even if it goes to thistles. Even if it brings you nothing. Because the day you need it is the day you can no longer buy it back.

And one more thing. Land is not valuable merely because it is yours. It becomes valuable through the care you give it. Man consecrates the place, my grandfather would say when passing a well-kept garden. And so with a website. It is not the address that makes it matter, nor the technology, nor the design. What makes it matter is the person who returns to it, who tends it, who weeds it. An abandoned domain is just a derelict estate. A tended domain, however small, is a home.

Part Two: The Grandmother and the List of Names

The Accountant of Souls

My grandmother was, in this respect, the most organised person I ever knew. She knew little of documents, of banks, of calendars in the modern sense. But she knew exactly when each memorial rite fell for every dead person in the family. Three days, nine days, forty days. Three months, six months, nine months. A year. And then every year, up to the seventh. She knew who had died on which day, whose commemoration fell at the Winter Ancestors' Days (Moșii de iarnă — the Orthodox feast days for the dead), whose at the Summer ones. She knew what must be set on the table, who must be invited, how many loaves are given out, and to whom.

She kept a list of names — a pomelnic — written in indelible pencil on a yellowed sheet folded so many times the creases had torn and been mended with sticky tape. On one side, the living; on the other, the dead. When someone died, the name crossed from one side to the other. My grandmother would strike the name from the first column with a single careful line, so it stayed legible, and rewrite it in the second. She never erased anything entirely.

Towards the end of her life, she spoke almost only of this. It rather bored us grandchildren. She would tell us who each name had been, how they had died, what kind of person they were. She told us that after she was gone, it would be our turn. Not to leave the dead unremembered. A dead person left unremembered is a person forgotten twice: once by the world, once by their own. And she would add, with a kind of resigned sadness, that eyes that are not seen are forgotten. Hence the need for the list of names, for the coliva, for the candle. To see them, at least once a year, with the mind's eye — those we can no longer see any other way.

I understood only later, reading the Church Fathers, that for her commemoration was not nostalgia. In the Orthodox tradition, to commemorate someone does not mean to remember them fondly. It means to pray for them, to keep them in connection with the community of the living, not to leave them alone. The "eternal memory" of the funeral service is not a wish that the dead person remain in our memory — our memory is fragile and dies with us. It is the prayer that they remain in God's remembrance. And we who commemorate them are merely the witnesses of that remembrance, the ones who keep it alive on earth.

The difference is essential, and I will come back to it. Commemoration is not an archive. It is a relationship.

The Network That Remembers Everything and Commemorates No One

The internet remembers almost everything. I have photographs from 2004 on a server somewhere, emails from twenty years ago, comments I wrote on forums and would rather were forgotten. There is an entire industry — and an entire body of European law — built around "the right to be forgotten", precisely because the network forgets too little.

And yet, at the same time, it forgets catastrophically. The old people used to say: words fly away, writing remains. On this our whole culture was built, from princely charters to my grandmother's list of names. Vint Cerf, one of the two men who wrote the TCP/IP protocol, warned in 2015 that the proverb is no longer true. That we are heading towards a "digital dark age", in which writing flies away too. Everything we store today depends on formats, programmes, and devices that will become illegible within a few decades. A twelfth-century monk's parchment can still be read. A floppy disk from 1995 is already, for most people, a dead object. My grandmother's sheet, written in indelible pencil and mended with sticky tape, outlived my first three computers.

I lived this firsthand. The first websites I built no longer exist. Nor do the servers they lived on, nor the firms that hosted them — sometimes not even the institutions they were made for. A few survive, in fragments, in the Internet Archive. Most vanished without a trace. And no one commemorated them.

The paradox is this: the internet has an enormous memory, but no commemoration. It keeps everything and cares for nothing. A dead person's Facebook account can stay active for years, receiving automatic birthday wishes from people who never learned they had died. The platform later introduced "memorial accounts", an administrative form of mourning. But a memorial account is not a commemoration. No one makes the coliva. No one lights a candle. No one wonders, at forty days, whether that soul is passing through the toll-houses and needs the prayer of those left behind.

In our fairy tales there are two waters the hero must fetch from the edge of the world: dead water and living water. When the hero is cut to pieces, dead water is what joins the pieces together. The body becomes whole again, beautiful, without a wound. But it does not breathe. Only living water brings him back to life. It seems to me the best image for the difference my grandmother felt without being able to formulate it. The digital archive is dead water. It gathers the pieces, orders them, preserves the perfect form of a person: their photographs, their messages, their recorded voice. But it does not bring them back. Commemoration is living water. It does not preserve the form; it preserves the connection. And only the connection keeps a dead person alive among us, in the only way the dead can still be alive.

The Internet's List of Names

While writing this text I set myself an exercise my grandmother would have understood. To make the network's list of names. To put on paper the names of those who thought it up, and who are no more.

J.C.R. Licklider, died 1990. The psychologist who wrote in 1968, with Robert Taylor, that within a few years people would communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. Who foresaw communities united not by place but by interest. And who asked a question no one has asked since with the same clarity: for society, the impact will be good or bad depending on one thing alone — whether being online is a privilege or a right.

Jon Postel, died 1998. The man who administered, practically alone, the internet's system of names and numbers for years. The one who wrote the robustness principle: be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.

Paul Baran, died 2011. The engineer who imagined the distributed network, without a centre, capable of surviving a nuclear strike — and who warned, as early as the sixties, that computer systems would endanger privacy.

Aaron Swartz, died 2013, aged twenty-six. The one who, in July 2008, in a monastery in Italy, wrote a manifesto on freeing knowledge locked away by private publishers, ending with a simple question to the reader: will you join me?

Douglas Engelbart, died 2013. The man who showed the world the mouse, hypertext, and videoconferencing in a single demonstration in 1968, and who spoke all his life about the augmentation of collective intelligence.

Hal Finney, died 2014. Cryptographer, cypherpunk, the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction. His body was cryopreserved, in the hope of a technological resurrection.

Robert Taylor, died 2017. The man who started the programme out of which ARPANET came.

John Perry Barlow, died on 7 February 2018, a day before the twenty-second anniversary of his Declaration.

Tim May, died 2018. Author of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.

Larry Roberts, died 2018. The architect of ARPANET.

May the earth lie light upon them.

If I gave this list to a priest in Botoșani, at an Ancestors' Day service, he would read the names as he reads all the others. He would not know who they were. It would not matter. That is precisely the beauty of the list of names: it makes no hierarchies. An engineer from ARPA and an old village woman are commemorated alike.

Youth Without Age

One name stopped me for a while: Hal Finney. This man chose not to be buried. He chose to be kept, frozen, in the hope that future technology would bring him back. I do not judge his choice — he was ill, and hope is a human thing. But it is perhaps the purest expression of the difference between archive and commemoration.

And it took me straight to the fairy tale my grandmother used to tell us on winter evenings, with a seriousness I did not understand at the time: Youth Without Age and Life Without Death. The hero refuses to be born until he is promised exactly that. His father promises it, then cannot keep his word, and the son sets out alone to find the realm where no one ages or dies. He finds it. He lives there happily, never feeling the centuries pass. Until one day, hunting, he wanders unwittingly through the Valley of Weeping. And then he remembers his own. His father, his mother, the place he came from. Nothing can hold him. He returns. And as he nears home, the time he had eluded catches up with him. He finds the palace in ruins, his parents dead for centuries. And Death, who had waited long, touches him and turns him to dust.

My grandmother told the tale as a lesson, not a tragedy. For her, the moral was not that the hero was wrong to return. It was that you cannot have both immortality and your own people. The deathless realm is a realm without memory. The moment you remember, you become mortal again. And memory is the more precious of the two.

Cryonics is the realm of youth without age: the body kept intact, outside time, awaiting a reader who will know how to decode it. My grandmother's commemoration is the Valley of Weeping: the place where you remember, accept that your dead are dead, and keep them close precisely through that acceptance. One rests on technology. The other rests on people who do not forget to make the coliva.

And I believe the whole internet — not just Finney — was built on the nostalgia of the deathless realm. The promise that nothing will be lost, that everything remains, that we are forever young in our profile photographs. Perhaps that is why it is so hard for us to commemorate online. Because the network was imagined as a place where you would never have to pass through the Valley of Weeping at all.

Who Makes the Coliva for the Network?

My grandmother's question, the one she repeated obsessively in old age, was: who will do it after me? She cared less about who inherits the house. She wanted to know who keeps the list of names.

I ask the same question about the internet of the first decades. Who makes the coliva for Licklider? Who remembers his question — privilege or right — and asks it afresh, each generation? Who reads Postel's principle as an ethic, and not merely a technical specification?

There are people who do this. The Internet Archive, which tries to save the Web page by page, is the closest thing to my grandmother's idea: an enormous list of names for dead websites. There are communities that keep Aaron Swartz's memory alive, holding events in his name every November. There are researchers who reread the founding texts not out of nostalgia, but to understand what we have lost.

But most of us who use the network daily know nothing of these people. It is not a guilt; it is a condition. I do not know either the names of the men who planted the first electricity poles in my grandfather's village. And yet my grandmother would say that this is precisely the duty: to commemorate also those you never knew, because otherwise the world rests upon dead whom no one recognises any more.

Commemoration as Resistance

There is one more thing I came to understand reading about the years my grandmother's village lived through communism. The commemorations never stopped. Sometimes they were discreet, sometimes open, but they never stopped. The state could close churches, take the land, send priests to prison. It could not stop a woman from making a coliva and sharing it with the neighbours "for the soul of" the departed.

My grandmother had a saying for this, which she used whenever those times came up: water passes, stones remain. The regimes passed. The activists who came to count the hens in the coop passed. The collective farm passed. The list of names remained.

Commemoration was, in its way, a form of resistance. A memory no power could confiscate, because it kept in no institution. It kept in kitchens, in lists of names written in indelible pencil, in the habit of spilling a little wine on the ground before drinking.

Today's network has exactly the opposite problem. Our collective memory now lives almost entirely inside a few private institutions. If tomorrow one of them decides to erase an archive, an account, a group, a page, we have no kitchen in which to keep it. We have no paper list. We gave everything into a single hand. And in this world, the platforms are the water that flows, and we are the stones. Except we have forgotten to remain stones.

My grandmother's dying-breath law, translated for the network, would sound like this: keep the list of names yourselves. Do not leave it only in the hands of others. Make copies. Write by hand, if you must. Tell the children the names. And if a platform promises to remember everything for you, recall that an archive no one loves is merely a warehouse.

Part Three: The Uncle and Joy Without Excess

The Man Who Rose From the Table

My uncle was the merriest man in the family. I remember him at weddings, dancing first, pulling after him those who sat at the edge. I remember him singing. I remember him telling stories that never ended the way you expected.

But I also remember him for a small gesture I did not understand at the time. At large meals, when everyone ate until they could not, he was the first to rise. He did not leave; he simply stood up, went out into the yard, looked at the sky, lit a cigarette or didn't. When I asked why he had stopped eating, he would say it is good to rise from the table while you are still a little hungry. That way the joy lasts longer.

It was the same with wine. One glass, perhaps two. Never three. He was not a religious man in the strict sense; he did not keep every fast, did not attend every service. But he had a form of moderation that was almost instinctive. He never let anything carry him to the very end. Not work, though he worked hard. Not anger, though he had his troubles.

He had a saying of his own, delivered with a smile, as though it were a joke — though it was not: neither too much nor too little (nici prea-prea, nici foarte-foarte). He said it when someone boasted too loudly, when someone raged too fiercely, when someone drank too much or worked themselves into the ground. Neither too much, nor too little. A man who gives himself over too far to anything, he said — even to a good thing — ends up without joy.

When he died, someone said at the wake that they had never once seen him either drunk or furious. And that he had lived, all the same, better than many who took everything life handed them.

Only when I read the Philokalia — the Orthodox compendium of spiritual writings — did I find the word for what he did: apatheia, dispassion. Not absence of emotion, but freedom from passion. For the Desert Fathers, passion was not a bad thing in itself, but a joy that had lost its measure and become a master. Gluttony is not the pleasure of eating; it is the inability to stop. And the village had its own formula for this, shorter than any ascetic treatise: gluttony spoils humanity. My uncle had never read the Philokalia. But he lived it more faithfully than many who had.

A Tool That Will Not Let You Rise From the Table

I have worked on the web long enough to know how an interface is built. I know what "engagement" means, what "retention" means, how time-on-page is measured and optimised. And I know, from the inside, that almost the entire digital industry of the last fifteen years has been built on the opposite principle to my uncle's.

The proverb says appetite comes with eating. The industry took the proverb and turned it into a business model. The infinite scroll exists so that you cannot rise from the table, because every mouthful opens the appetite for the next. Notifications exist to call you back before you are hungry. Videos that start automatically, one after another, are the third glass someone pours you without asking. Everything about the design of a large platform is made so that you do not stop. So that you never feel that moment of satiety when my uncle would go out into the yard and look at the sky.

Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality and a man from inside Silicon Valley, has written about this more clearly than anyone. In his books — above all the 2018 one on why you should delete your social media accounts — he says in essence that the platforms are not designed to serve us, but to modify our behaviour in favour of those who pay. That we are, without knowing it, kept at the table.

I do not think Lanier would use the word "passion". But he describes exactly the mechanism the Desert Fathers described fifteen centuries ago: a small pleasure, repeated endlessly, until it is no longer pleasure but need.

The Promise of Happiness

It is interesting to reread, in this light, the 1968 text by Licklider and Taylor. The two were optimists. They believed the network of computers would make people happier, that it would make work easier and more pleasant, that online life would be richer than offline life because it would be chosen, not imposed by the accident of geography. They went so far as to suggest that unemployment might disappear.

And they were not entirely wrong. The network brought real joys. I met extraordinary people through it. I found books I would never have found in Botoșani. I built a trade and a life.

But my uncle would have had a saying for Licklider too: don't go to the praised tree with a large sack. The tree of the internet was praised as few trees have ever been praised. It promised happiness, knowledge, democracy, the end of loneliness. We went to it with the largest sack we could find. And we did gather fruit, it is true. But less of it, and more bitter, than we had been told.

Licklider and Taylor were wrong at a point my uncle would have spotted immediately. They assumed that more means better. More communication, more information, more connections, more time "at the console". They never asked the question of measure. They never asked: when is enough?

Douglas Engelbart was perhaps the only one of the founders who had this instinct. He did not speak of spending more time at the computer. He spoke of becoming more capable, together, of solving hard problems. For him the computer was a tool of augmentation, not of capture. A good tool, in his vision, is one you put down when the job is done, wiser than you were before. Not one that keeps you glued to it.

The difference is exactly the difference between my grandfather's hammer, which he hung back on its nail after driving in a stake, and a glass that fills itself.

Postel's Principle, Read as a Way of Living

There is one more technical testament I would like to set beside my uncle's. Jon Postel's robustness principle says a system must be conservative in what it sends and liberal in what it accepts. That is: careful, precise, restrained in speaking; and forgiving, tolerant, generous in listening.

Engineers have always read it as a protocol rule. For some years I have read it as a rule of conduct. And every time I read it, I think of my uncle, who spoke little of himself and listened much to others. Who sent nothing in excess — no words, no anger, no praise — but accepted gladly whatever came towards him. Neither too much nor too little, he would have said; and Postel, had he known Romanian, would I believe have agreed.

Today's internet has inverted Postel's principle. Each of us sends enormously: posts, opinions, reactions, photographs, indignation. And accepts very little: we block, we filter, we shut ourselves into bubbles where we hear only what confirms us. We are liberal in what we send and conservative in what we receive. Exactly backwards.

My uncle would probably have said this is the recipe for unhappiness. A person who talks much and listens little is never content.

Moderation as Architecture

I do not want to end this part with a simple sermon against the telephone. I do not believe in it. Nor did my uncle preach abstinence. He drank his wine, danced at weddings, ate well. He simply knew when to stop.

I do believe, however, that my uncle's dying-breath law has a very concrete application for those of us who build things on the web. We can design interfaces that end. We can build websites that do not demand continuous attention. We can refuse to add notifications where none are needed. We can write texts that have a clear ending, after which the reader can rise from the table satisfied.

There is, as it happens, a small movement in the technical world, sometimes called the "small web" or "slow web", that attempts exactly this: personal, simple websites without algorithms, that read like a book and close like a book. My own network of four websites, with their different registers, is a modest attempt in this direction. I do not have millions of readers. I do not want millions. I want a few people who read a text to the end and then go out into the yard to look at the sky.

Part Four: Two Deathbeds

To Whom Do You Leave Your Dying Words?

Set side by side, the three testaments of my family and the testaments of the internet's founders have much in common. My grandfather and Berners-Lee speak, in essence, of the same thing: keep a piece that is yours; do not depend wholly on another's master. My grandmother, and Cerf, and Swartz, and the people of the Internet Archive, speak of memory as duty. My uncle, Engelbart, Postel and Lanier speak of measure, of the tool that serves rather than rules.

But there is one difference that struck me as I wrote, and that I do not think I can avoid.

The dying-breath law of the countryside always has a precise addressee. My grandfather did not say "do not sell the land" to the world in general. He said it to us, his grandchildren and children, by name. My grandmother did not entrust her list of names to humanity. She entrusted it to my mother, and through her to us. My uncle did not preach on television. He spoke to the people at the table.

The internet's testaments, by contrast, are addressed to everyone. Barlow's Declaration is addressed to "the governments of the world" and to "us, the people of cyberspace". Swartz's manifesto is addressed to anyone with access to knowledge. Berners-Lee's sentence is precisely this: this is for everyone.

And here, I believe, lies one explanation for why these testaments were so easily betrayed. A testament addressed to everyone binds no one in particular. If the land is "for everyone", no one feels guilty when it is sold. If memory belongs to everyone, no one makes the coliva. If moderation is a universal value, no one rises first from the table.

In the fairy tales, the father's counsel always has an addressee too. The old king does not give his warning about the spinned man to just anyone, but to the son leaving home. And when the son ignores it, the tale shows him exactly what he pays. Not the world in general — him. In the countryside, likewise: betrayal of a dying wish had a name and a face. Everyone knew who had sold the old man's land. Everyone knew who no longer held the commemorations. Shame was a form of social control — sometimes cruel, but effective. Online, betrayal is anonymous and collective. No one is guilty, because everyone is.

The Three Ways

I wrote at the start that the laws left "with a dying breath" are either carried out or betrayed. I now accept that this is a simplification. There is a third way, which I see in my own family and which I also see in the digital world: reinterpretation.

We did not keep my grandfather's land exactly as he left it. We do not work it. But we did not sell it. We did what could be done so that it remains ours, even though it no longer produces anything. An imperfect execution — but an execution.

We no longer keep all the commemorations as my grandmother did. Some have been lost, some merged. But the list of names still exists, and the names are still read. And I, in writing this text, perform a form of commemoration my grandmother could never have imagined: I place her name — without writing it — beside the names of American engineers, on a website that people all over the world can read.

I have not managed to live with my uncle's moderation. I admit it: I sit too long at the computer, work too much, read too much on a screen. But I have him as a bearing. In moments of clarity, I know what he would have said. Neither too much nor too little.

Perhaps that is all we can do with the internet's testaments as well. Not execute them literally, because the world in which they were written no longer exists. Not betray them, because that would mean giving up everything that was good in those people's dream. But reinterpret them — faithful to the spirit, free of the letter. Keep a piece of the network that is ours. Commemorate those who built it. Use the tool without letting the tool use us.

Epilogue: What Remains After the Coliva

Last year I stopped at my grandparents' grave. The cross had tilted a little, and the names had begun to fade. Standing there, I thought that in another generation no one will know who they were. That the list of names will break somewhere — at a grandson who left for Italy, at a great-grandchild who no longer speaks Romanian. And that, however much I write about them, my texts will sit on a server which, one day, will stop.

But I thought of something else too. That Grandfather Mihai said "do not sell the land" without knowing whether we would listen. That Grandmother Aglaia wrote her list of names with no guarantee anyone would read it after her. That Uncle Ticu rose from the table without preaching. They did what they had to do and left the rest to us.

That is what Licklider did, and Postel, and Swartz, and Barlow, each in his own way. They asked a question, wrote a principle, issued a call, left a declaration. They did not know what would come of it. Some died believing they had been right. Others, as Berners-Lee is doing now, live long enough to see what their dream became — and to try to mend it.

I do not believe the network can be saved by a text. But I believe it can be commemorated. And I believe, like my grandmother, that commemoration is not merely a form of sadness. It is a way of saying: what you left still matters. It still binds us. We have not yet sold it all.

The hero of the tale returned from the deathless realm because he remembered his own. Perhaps that is what is asked of us too. To step out, now and then, from this realm of youth without age, where nothing is lost and nothing matters, and to pass through the Valley of Weeping. To remember where we came from. Even if it costs us.

And so I mounted my horse and told you the tale as it was — as the old storytellers used to close.

God rest them all. Those at the deathbed in the old house, and those at the deathbed of the network. And may He give us the sense to rise from the table while we are still a little hungry.

Author's Note

This text belongs to the personal-confessional register of this site. The family figures are real, but the concrete details of the scenes (gestures, objects, phrases) are reconstructed from memory and may be, in places, idealised. A grandson's memory is not a neutral source. The idea of the text began with a discussion on the terrace about elderly mothers and their spiritual comfort to talk about guidance "with the tongue of death" after they leave on the final road.

Rhetorical tools used. The systematic parallel between the family testaments and those of the internet's founders is a declared device, not a demonstration. The wordplay on "domain" (estate and web address) is used deliberately as a bridge between the two worlds. Proverbs and fairy-tale formulas are used as semantic anchors, not ornament: Youth Without Age and Life Without Death (in Petre Ispirescu's version), The Purse with Two Coins, The Goat with Three Kids and The Story of Harap-Alb (Ion Creangă, the great Romanian storyteller), as well as the motif of living water and dead water, common to many Romanian tales. Some proverbs are placed in the mouths of family members; this is a literary licence, though the sayings circulated in their village. The text also contains one admitted lizard: the comparison between digital platforms and agricultural tenancy agreements — and, further back, collectivisation — suggests more than it states about the nature of present-day technological power. I leave that to the reader.

Possible errors and perspectives that may be wrong. The parallel may force similarities where the contexts are very different. Barlow and my grandfather were not, in fact, talking about the same thing, and setting them face to face risks doing an injustice to both. The reading of the fairy tales is a personal one: Youth Without Age has far richer interpretations than the one proposed here, and Hal Finney's choice does not deserve to be judged through the grid of a story. The tradition of Orthodox commemoration has regional variations I have not detailed. The patristic interpretation of dispassion is simplified for the needs of an essay.

Transparency. In line with my editorial policy, I state that the structure and drafting of this text were produced with assistance, according to that policy, based on the themes, characters and direction I set. The facts about the history of the internet were checked only broadly; the reader is invited to verify them against primary sources.

Bibliography

Primary sources: the internet's testaments

Reception, criticism and commentary

Digital memory and the network's list of names

The Orthodox tradition of commemoration

  • The order of memorial services after death, BZI: https://www.bzi.ro/cand-se-fac-pomeni-dupa-inmormantare-iata-ce-trebuie-sa-stie-credinciosii-despre-aceste-ritualuri-5444908 — according to the Orthodox rite, thirteen individual memorial services are held over seven years, most in the first year. Confirms the calendar the grandmother keeps in the article.

  • Ancestors' Days (Moși) in the Orthodox calendar, HotNews: https://hotnews.ro/?p=1825934 — the word "moși" comes from "strămoși" (forebears) and designates both the dead and the feast days devoted to them.

  • The thematic archive on the "commemoration of the dead", Mărturie Athonită:https://marturieathonita.ro/tag/pomenirea-mortilor/ — texts by priests on the coliva, the memorial service, and the theological meaning of commemoration; useful for the passage on commemoration as relationship rather than archive.

  • The Philokalia, translated by Dumitru Stăniloae (Humanitas or Harisma editions). No reliable online address; the printed edition is recommended for the concept of dispassion.

Fairy tales and folklore