Every civilisation has needed a mechanism to promise itself a future. The I Ching is one of the earliest: 64 hexagrams, binary assemblies of broken and unbroken lines. Each one presents a conditional prophecy — a future guaranteed, if certain conditions are met. The I Ching is an early manifestation of binary code, the basis of all contemporary technology. What began as a divinatory promise has, quietly, become an infrastructural one.

Since then the mechanisms have multiplied: capital, ideologies, and now synthetic intelligence. Each proposes its own certainty, and each is trapped in the logic of its own system. A promise made by money can only be redeemed in money's terms. A promise made by an algorithm can only be fulfilled in the algorithm's parameters. None of them can promise anything beyond what they already are.

We ask what comes after these exhausted mechanisms. Not another system claiming to guarantee an outcome, but another way of sense-making. One that favours possibility, exploration, and experimentation over certainty. Promise doesn't tell you what will happen. It gives you a reason to keep going.