There is a certain conceit in this rush toward technological solutions to remedy shortcomings that are, in reality, exquisitely human. It is proclaimed that a protocol, a set of rules written in code, can restore dignity to honesty. It is a perspective as fascinating as it is profoundly illusory. It mistakes the map for the territory.
Take this protocol, Nostr. It is portrayed as the champion of incorruptibility, the impartial judge that will finally separate the good from the wicked. But this is precisely its tragic presumption. To believe that integrity, a quality of the soul, can be certified by a transaction on a digital ledger. It is the triumph of form over substance, the ultimate, definitive act of distrust: we no longer trust even the possibility of virtue, so we imprison it in an algorithm.
We delude ourselves into thinking that once words are made "immutable" and "public," man will change his nature. But history, the real one, made of paper and blood, proves otherwise. Human ingenuity in corrupting and finding shortcuts is infinitely superior to the rigidity of any protocol. New hierarchies will be created, new forms of exclusion based on technical mastery. The honest person who doesn't know how to use a private key will be doubly a fool: honest and left out.
It is the surrender of the community. The admission that we are no longer capable of looking each other in the eye and believing a given word. That we need an iron witness, an automatic judge, because the judgment of our peers has failed. Instead of curing the disease—the crisis of trust—we rely on a high-tech symptom. It is an act of desperation, not progress.
The truth is that no protocol will ever be able to force a man to be integrous. It can only force him to appear so. And in this dystonia, between being and appearing, lurks the very evil it claims to fight. A gilded cage is built for honesty, but a cage remains. And the man who emerges from it, perhaps, will no longer be a free man, but just a cog in a mechanism he has lost control over.
Good night
There is no wasted time, we have dedicated every time to what we believed in, and right or wrong, it has always taught something.
The father is bent over the notebook, the pencil poised. The little girl looks at him, then at the blank page. A moment of silence heavy with ancient expectation. Then, the father's hand does not rest on her shoulder, does not point to a letter. It reaches out, with a gesture now automatic, and picks up the tablet. The scene, framed to be tender, is instead a domestic coup. It is an abdication.
This is no longer a toy, a tool. It is the appointment of a new guardian. That luminous device does not merely provide an answer; it establishes a new order of loyalty. The primary, the ultimate authority to turn to is no longer the off-key voice of a father trying to remember, his smell of coffee and newspaper, the laborious patience of shared learning. It is an algorithm.
This is not evolution. It is the replacement of vital organs. A child is built to construct their map of the world through the gazes they meet, through the hands that hold them, through the tone of voice modulated for them alone. These are the coordinates that chart a soul: presence, love as a physical, tangible fact, disappointment and joy shared in the same breath. The flat screen, however rich in information, is an emotional desert. It has no warmth, no scent, no heart that beats in unison with yours.
Handing a child over to this digital orphan means building a house on sand. An intelligence is erected, perhaps, but a human being is dismantled. The emotional foundations, those that bear the weight of an entire life, remain empty. A technically competent but emotionally orphaned adult is created, a sophisticated puppet with a heart of binary code.
And when childhood, the primary breeding ground of humanity, is delocalized into the virtual, the project becomes vaster and more sinister. A humanity that learns from its first steps to depend on a prosthesis, to see the world through an intermediary, is a humanity that renounces its wild, imperfect, wonderful autonomy. It becomes malleable. It becomes, in a word, programmable. The ultimate goal is not a more informed child, but a more docile citizen. It is the silent manufacturing of perpetual consent, the unnoticed transition towards a post-human condition, where the digital is no longer a tool, but the very habitat. And in that habitat, man is no longer the master of the house. He is a guest.
