Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.
Murnane again, from “Land Deal” (1978).
[W]e had always clearly distinguished between the possible and the actual. Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud or the waterfall, any faery race inhabit the land below the ocean’s edge; any new day might bring us such a miracle as an axe of steel or a blanket of wool. The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.
Forty-four years later, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, in an interview with Bloomberg’s podcast series Odd Lots, described crypto yield farming in remarkably similar terms:
And then this protocol issues a token, we’ll call it whatever, “X token.” And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or other cool things that happen from this box. And of course, so far, we haven’t exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don’t know, you know, maybe there will be, so that’s sort of where you start.
It was six months later that the dreamers behind FTX were obliged to wake.
Murnane, famously, has never been to the movies or traveled by air. It would not be unfair to characterize his career as an extended commentary on boyhood fantasies of horse racing—so it is no surprise he should have anticipated the speculative (in two senses) quality of cryptocurrency trading.
A dream of my own, from a year before the episode with my hands:
Standing before a wall watching a heat map unfold, as if projected from behind me: atmospheric pressure, say. Gradually an image emerges: the head of a large stag. The stag swings its head side to side. The expressiveness of its eyes, its nostrils. Off to the side, voices, light.
In the years since, this dream has haunted me, for reasons I am at a loss to explain. The scenario—standing outside the party, watching a private film—could express feelings of professional exclusion, or simply the illegibility of my interests to others. The stag could refer to the “stag hunt” (assurance games, dual Nash equilibria) of evolutionary game theory, which preoccupied me that month as I revised The Human Scaffold. Neither of these facts explains why I have been compelled to revisit this dream in fiction, attributing it to a number of characters, summoning it in variations: a thylacine, a guanaco, a a tree fern, a santoku bōchō, the Japanese chef’s knife with a sheepsfoot blade.
Again I sense a relationship between the perception of animacy and tactile charisma of things, but the nature of this relationship continues to elude my grasp.