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Saving the Season

Before the age of global supply chains and year-round availability, every season had its own distinct flavour, its own fleeting window of abundance. Summer brought a riot of berries and stone fruits, autumn a cascade of apples and pears. This bounty was a blessing, but also a challenge: how to honour this generosity without letting it succumb to the inevitable march of decay? Long before the first refrigerators hummed into existence, our ancestors devised ingenious ways to hold onto the harvest. They dried, they salted, they sugared, and they fermented. And in the art of distillation, they found one of the most profound methods of all: transforming the ephemeral essence of a season into a spirit that could last for generations.

Part 4: A Different Path for LoRaWAN

In the history of technology, there are forks in the road. Moments where a different choice, a different philosophy, could have led us to a profoundly different world. In this series, we’ve explored the degenerative path taken by many DePIN projects, with Helium as a case study—a project that captured the incredible energy of a community-built network, only to see that energy diverted down a familiar, extractive path. This is the degenerative trajectory toward techno-feudalism, where centralization and extraction create scarcity and render the network’s builders into a surplus population.

A New Charter for the Forest

Back in 1217, a group of rebellious barons forced King John to sign the Charter of the Forest. It was a revolutionary document for its time, a declaration that the forests of England were not the private hunting grounds of the king, but a vital resource for the common people. It protected their rights to graze their animals, collect firewood, and forage for food. It was, in essence, a charter for a forest commons.

Fermentation as a Revolutionary Act

What if one of the quietest ways to resist our broken food system is simply… to let food sit? To watch it bubble, fizz, and transform — guided not by factories or corporations, but by microbes, time, and our own hands?

From Varieties to Commodities

Have you noticed how “choice” in the supermarket doesn’t really feel like choice anymore? A whole aisle of bread, yet most of it made from the same kind of wheat. Apples that all look perfect, but taste mostly of cold storage. Tomatoes that travel halfway around the world but somehow forgot what flavour is.

Microbial Lessons for a Living Planet

When we begin to see fermentation not as a human trick but as a conversation between species, something shifts. The jar on the counter becomes a small model of the world — alive, adaptive, and full of intelligence that isn’t our own. These microbial communities show us, in miniature, how life sustains itself through cooperation, balance, and exchange.

The Alchemy of Slowness

There is a peculiar magic in slowing down. In a world that measures life in minutes, notifications, and deadlines, the deliberate act of slowing is a radical one. And yet, it is in this deceleration that we discover the quiet, transformative rhythms connecting us to nature, to craft, and to ourselves. Distillation, in its truest and oldest sense, is one such rhythm — a slow, contemplative alchemy that has existed for centuries, long before the cocktail culture or industrial spirits of today. It is not about the drink, nor about the intoxication; it is about transformation, attention, and the delicate unfolding of time.

The Intelligence in the Jar

If you’ve ever stood over a jar of fermenting vegetables — watching bubbles rise, catching that sharp, tangy scent — you’re witnessing something extraordinary: an invisible ecosystem, busy at work.

From Healthier Soil To A Fairer Fork

Let’s be honest. The way we produce and consume food is broken. It’s a system that looks great on the surface, with supermarket shelves overflowing with produce from every corner of the globe, available any time of year. But when you dig a little deeper, you find a system built on a house of cards, and it’s costing us more than we think.

Part 1: The Reality of DePIN

The Seductive Pitch The term DePIN, or Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks, carries an almost utopian promise. It paints a picture of a world where the essential physical networks we rely on—from wireless and mobile connectivity to mapping and sensor data—are built not by faceless corporations, but by us. It’s a vision of grassroots collaboration, where individuals are empowered to deploy hardware, share resources, and collectively own the infrastructure of tomorrow.