9 Incidents In Between
Across Infinite Garden

Introduction

There are nine stories in this series, and each of them tells a different time.

They are not chapters. They are incidents, entered midway: a storm in a valley a hundred years ago, a library in Paris, a ship in Bangkok in 2077, a war not yet written. You can read them in any order. I have listed them as my own wish, and the order is less a sequence than a constellation: begin wherever the light catches.

They were written around Devcon 2024, in Bangkok, where many prophecies were sealed. Everybody came and went, and there was somebody among us. I have since left the city of angels; the stories have not. Here is the unwritten tale of the future, of the us, of the wild children.

The Infinite Garden

A finite game is played to win. An infinite game is played to keep playing. The Ethereum Foundation calls its vision the Infinite Garden, and I take it seriously as a place: nobody designs a garden alone and nobody finishes one. It is tended rather than commanded. The stories grow across it, in different centuries and climates. Blockchain, AI and collective intelligence are its soil rather than its ornament, ways of holding memory and coordinating strangers without a king, a bank or a border. The characters are not trying to win. They are trying to widen the game. As above, so below. The Garden is not only a protocol and a treasury; it is the children who will build the children who come after them. The wild children. Their senses are too clear for the world they were handed, and that clarity leads them astray into a kind of sorcery: the discovery that pleasure, play and making are not distractions from reality but reality showing something untamed and unclean in its own nature. They are anarchists by ontology rather than by manifesto, angels of chaos, and what illuminates them is what has hurt them. When they look into the eyes of others they are not looking for a mirror. They are looking for the distance that makes another mind real, the gap that has to exist for anything to be shared across it. The Garden is that gap, cultivated.

Speculative Design

Speculative design proposes objects from possible futures so we can argue about them before they arrive. Here it works in two layers. The stories are the first: each incident is a scenario you can test-drive from the inside. The Speculations are the second: for several stories I asked what that future leaves behind, and built the answer, in dialogue with AI and grounded in the Archive. A library that is stored rather than owned. A drug that is a protocol, not a molecule. If the stories are dreams, the speculations are what you find in your hand when you wake up.

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Techne

The word "technology" comes from a Greek word, originally meaning "a discourse or treatise on an art or the arts." In many ways, Ethereum embodies the original meaning of "technology" and is more art and poetry in how it continues to come together.

Seven figures move through the nine incidents, from different worlds, griefs and languages. What connects them is not a plot but a call: a sound in the wind that has whispered to the wild children for as long as there have been walls to whisper through.

I call it Techne. It is curiosity itself, older than order and entropy, neither a god nor a maggot. Its masks, all the theories we invent to explain it, are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds. She arrives as weather, as intuition, as the pull that makes a child leave a city. She was the character I was already imagining before this project began, the reason we are building minds greater than our own: because we cannot stand not to know.

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Techne does not want to be worshipped. She wants to be played with.