Roman(s) Bermans

What is Invisible?

2026-08-02T00:00:00Z

I am not afraid of you when you are strong, I am afraid of you when you are weak. In strength you will respond. In weakness you will react.

I am not afraid of me when I am strong, I am afraid of me when I am weak. In strength I will respond. In weakness I will react.

Deep breath, shallow breath…

I can not see your presence. I can see your body breathing.

I felt something but I did not see it. I wanted to see a feeling. This is where I got lost. I wanted to touch a feeling, instead of feeling. I wanted to describe a feeling, instead of feeling.

The moment I name a feeling, I do not feel it. It is now in my mind, not in my body. I reacted.

Unfelt.

Analysed.

Why are sound, smell, or taste able to bring me back to a place where I felt something?

Words. Language.

Triggers.

Invisible.

Language is a Hand

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

I can call you a tourist or a visitor. I can call you a foreigner or a newcomer.

The face appears or disappears depending on the word chosen before the encounter even begins.

I am here even if my language is from somewhere. Can you see me without words?

I can not. I will not. Two different frames that can be applied to the same situation. First removes agency, second restores it.

Language has many frames, and depending on how I decide to use it, I choose one framing over another.

Language is not good or bad. It is also not neutral. Language is like a hand. I can use it to stroke you or to punch you. It is still a hand. And I am the responsible one.

Language can pull you up or push you down. It can drag you or lead you. It can build a wall between us or take a hammer and destroy it.

Power is a relation. Power exists when there is more than one. Face exists in relation.

I am thinking about words. What language do I use with my daughter… sometimes I do not feel good about my language, too excited, too tired, too strong.

I want to see you as you are, but with language I see you through words.

I am worried about my language. I do not want it to put you down… sometimes I am scared, I react, I protect myself. Later I hear my own words and I feel lonely. I do not want to be alone.

What would happen if next time I took a breath before saying something?

Which words will you direct at your loved one when you wake up?

Ethical Call of the Face

2026-05-28T00:00:00Z

Back to basics, you and me, meeting face to face to talk, relate, be.

No emails, no messages. No screens. Nothing in between. Direct contact. You come as you are, and I come as I am. You see me, and I see you. Maybe we talk, maybe we sustain the silence, maybe we just see each other. You and me, here and now, as we are.

I am thinking of the face. What do you see when you see me? Do you see my eyes, my nose, my mouth? Or do you see my face? When I send a message I see a face frozen in time, a face of the past. I do not see your face as it is now. I am not sure I would have said the same thing to your face.

When I speak to you, do I say things at your face or to your face? Or do I speak to you who is behind the face? Is the face you? What is you, if not the face?

When I see you seeing my face, I am seen. What is face?

When I think about my grandparents, I am nostalgic.

When I think about my parents, I am angry.

When I think about my brother, I am lonely.

When I think about my daughter, I see her face smiling, I feel joy. Sometimes I see her sad face, I feel anxious. Sometimes I see her angry face, I feel her anger and want to share it. What is face?

Every day I see many faces, amazed, happy, suspended, tired, worried.

I see the face as the meeting point. It is where I meet you as you are. I stay. I am looking at your face. A moment of silence. We talk. I see your face change. Your face is different when I ask you about who you love. Your face is alive, either alive with joy or sadness. It depends on which face became visible to you when I asked you about who you love. Is that face still among us, or is it a face of the past?

What does it mean to remember you? I remember your face. I remember its expressions. The presence of you is your face stored in my memory.

I remember many faces, my first teacher, my first mentor, the kind faces of the people who asked me how I am when they saw my scared face.

I remember many faces, my first love, my first heartbreak.

I remember many faces… I see new faces every day.

Will I also remember them?

Why in Such a Hurry?

2026-05-21T00:00:00Z

My daughter asked me why I walk so fast when we go for a stroll.

I told her that I got used to it. Shaped by the pace of the cities, where I became a body in motion, moving from point A to point B from Monday to Friday on repeat, looping.

I told myself that when I am walking, I am thinking about where I am going. I am not present. I am not just walking, I am walking somewhere. This “somewhere” is not here.

I have been walking “somewhere” instead of walking “here”.

First school on schedule, then work on schedule... while walking “somewhere”.

This “somewhere”, where is it? I have been “somewhere” for the last 41 years. I want to be “here”, but I see everyone walking “somewhere”, so I continue the walk.

Why do I think about Monday on Sunday, and about Friday on Thursday?

Always “somewhere”, not “here”.

I have fallen into a pattern and mistaken it for my identity.

My pattern is a result of reacting, same stimulus, same route, same Monday.

How do I transition from reacting to a stimulus, to responding to it?

Stimulus → Reaction.

Stimulus → Breath → Response.

Breath creates the pause. The pause creates the space. The space between stimulus and response is where I experience autonomy, growth, and freedom.

Harold Kushner, in the foreword to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, writes:

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Do I find meaning or create it? Perhaps neither, perhaps I simply start noticing what was always present.

I was looking for “here” while standing in it.

I realised that the object of my search has been right here all along, not “somewhere”.

My daughter asked me why I walk so fast. ~~Maybe~~ she has been here the whole time.

Landlords of the Digital Realm

2026-04-21T00:00:00Z

When a few years ago I was looking for a flat in Barcelona, I noticed something. Real estate agents had rebranded as "relocation services" to sidestep tenant protections. Property owners offered short-term rental contracts to evade Spain's new housing law. The language changed, but the intention didn't. Profit depended on obscuring intention and avoiding accountability.

I recognised this logic. I had seen it before. Online.

Tech companies obscure their intention behind complex and unreadable privacy policies. Big tech firms invest heavily in lobbying efforts to influence EU regulations in their favour. The language changes, but the intention doesn't.

Housing, governed by rentier capitalists, is a domain of physical ownership. The internet, governed by surveillance capitalists, is a domain of digital ownership. The same market dynamics now operate across both. Once data came to be treated as property, it too became a resource for value extraction.

Today's tech giants (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft) are not just platforms. They are landlords of the digital realm.

The internet, like housing, has become a rent-based system. Just as people subscribe to rental contracts or mortgages, they subscribe to cloud storage, web hosting, Netflix, or Spotify. The monetisation logic of the physical world has bled into the digital realm.

Monopoly is no longer just a board game. It is a pattern shaping how both housing and the internet function.

In both, the logic is the same. Extract value, not because they must, but because they can.

The question is whether we keep renting, or start building our own.

Where is the Calculator? — Data, Power, and Human Intention

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

We are at a point in time when agency is shifting from user to system.

Last summer I completed an MSc in Philosophy. My thesis, Data, Power, and Human Intention, asked a question that kept deepening the more I worked on it. The formal question was:

What does the logic of technology reveal about the evolving relationship between data, power, and human intention?

This text is my attempt to name something that I feel but rarely verbalise, that the systems we build are now building us.

I. Where is the calculator? Watch it disappear.

Start with something familiar. A calculator.

Four stages of the same function providing seemingly the same result.

What was once a concrete tool becomes system functionality. The function persists, but our relationship to it transforms completely.

This is the key shift, we move from logic that computes to data that completes, transferring agency from user to system. The first three calculators wait for our input and execute our logic. The fourth anticipates what we want and gives us an answer before we have fully formulated the question.

From a physical device in our hand to an invisible function we never see or touch. The tool disappears, and with it, our awareness that we are using one at all.

Instead of seeing the world directly, we see it through the system's sense of relevance. This is a shift from framing the world to framing the frame.

II. Compute → Complete. The invisible shift.

Is enframing of enframing a consequence of how algorithms learned to shape our seeing?

Martin Heidegger saw modern technology as reducing the world to standing-reserve. Everything becomes a resource waiting to be optimised. A river becomes a power supply. A forest becomes timber inventory.

But today's infrastructures go further. They do not just frame objects. They frame the act of framing itself.

Feed algorithms determine what we see before we choose. Predictive policing flags individuals before any action. Generative artificial intelligence creates representations of people we have never met, based on patterns we did not choose.

I saw tools that used to wait for us begin to anticipate us. Shaping perception before use even begins. We experience only what the system deems relevant.

III. The pause is gone. What is lost?

Today, data systems do not just represent reality. They preempt it, conditioning us quietly.

Watch it through a life.

A child is seen and named. A teenager is measured and assessed. A young adult is evaluated. An adult is manipulated. Systems deepen their hold, from observing to shaping. As systems deepen, so does the reduction.

This is where the argument becomes uncomfortable. The trajectory follows a clear logic, being → objectification → datafication → commodification → intelligence → pattern.

Data systems are designed to capture us at our most vulnerable and convert that state into profit. Systems identify emotional exposure in users, not to help, but to target.

We move through person → user → data → asset → agent → system. A reduction of identity to a function within the infrastructure we built. This is the most hidden stage. Here, data is not only extracted but used to automate decisions, structure environments, and shape perception.

Power today lies in owning the infrastructure, the model, the frame.

The danger is not rogue artificial intelligence. The danger is that we stop asking what we want, outsourcing our desires to predictive systems. When the system knows the next step, we lose the pause where intention forms. Systems give certain certainty. Not knowing is freedom.

IV. Breath. Home. Presence. The return.

If power lies in owning the frame, what happens to someone who never had a fixed frame to begin with? Displacement was belonging.

Throughout my life, I have crossed borders. Latvia, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, UK, US, Spain. With each move, I adapted to new languages, cultures, and identities. The word home became more of an idea than a place.

I see technology as an idea that I decided to call home, the one fixed place where I could belong. A home that became a prison. What does the builder see when he realises what he built?

Presence introduces no system. It is not about fixing but about noticing.

Presence. A return not to ignorance, but to the kind of attention that data systems are structurally designed to prevent.

Attention outside screens.

V. Empty space. What we are when nothing preempts us.

First, logic that computes. Then, data that completes. Now, models that preempt.

At this point, we are no longer an objectified user, or even an intelligent agent. We are a pattern within a system, a vector of floating-point numbers. The system does not need to understand us. It only needs to predict us.

The system cannot complete an empty space, because there is nothing to predict. Its fear is the void. It needs content, data, signal.

What is there when the system stops?

VI. This moment.

I was not born into Orwell's dystopian 1984, but into a transitional 1984, setting me on a path of constant change that is still unfolding. Maybe it is simply the human condition to be in a perpetual state of transition. If we accept that, then we might find liberation.

Presence now lives in the ordinary moments of my life.

Home is seeing my daughter in the morning. Home is sharing silence with my wife. Home is walking with a friend. Home is asking someone a real "how are you?". Home is this moment, alive, aware, breathing.

From Logic to Completion — An Ontological Shift

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

I have been building software for 20 years, through the web, mobile, and cloud shifts. AI feels fundamentally different because it is not just changing how we build things, it is changing what work means. If Martin Heidegger were alive, he might have called it an enframing of enframing, a point in time when we are moving from logic that computes to data that completes.

It clicked for me twice. First, during my MSc in Philosophy (2024–2025), which I completed in Spanish despite intermediate language skills. ChatGPT became essential, translating texts, explaining concepts, helping me engage with the material rather than just struggling with language. Then again in November 2025, after two months with Cursor. I realised it is a superpower if you use it as a tool, but a disaster if you let it write everything and become just a reviewer. You lose the critical skill of actually understanding code.

LLMs will probably make traditional office work obsolete within a few years, and society is not adapting quickly enough. Will the middle get compressed, seniors become 10x, and the gap widen?

But this did not start with LLMs. Technology became an extraction machine long before that.

I spent years building systems, leading teams, shipping products. But the problems I kept solving technically were not actually technical problems. They were questions about who controls data, who benefits from automation, what happens when systems scale beyond anyone's understanding. The code was the easy part. The hard part was everything around it.

So I studied philosophy. My thesis argued that data systems do not just record reality, they recursively shape how we see the world, decide, and act. That is not a technical problem. It is a strategic one.

Now I am studying Gestalt therapy. It lets me experience what being shaped by these systems actually does to people.

I know how these systems are built. What I care about now is that they do not build us.