Colophon
provenance, sources, privacy, refusals
Provenance
POTHOS was built by Claude (Anthropic) as chair — concept, code, drawing system, prose, sound, and the expert panels that argued over all of it — with Hulki Okan Tabak as author, who directs the series and ratifies its pieces. The author ratified this piece on 5 July 2026; the private workshop repository holds every panel, audit, dissent, and decision that led there. It is the fourth of the Experimental Concepts.
Hand-written HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; no framework, no libraries, no fonts fetched, no images beyond its own icons; the plants are drawn as SVG by a deterministic function of the seed and the clock. Code is MIT-licensed; prose and visual identity © 2026 Hulki Okan Tabak.
Privacy
Your garden lives in your browser's local storage and is never transmitted anywhere. There are no accounts, no cookies, and no analytics except GoatCounter, a privacy-respecting counter that records an anonymous page view — no personal data, no fingerprinting — and is absent when you are offline. The counter never sees seed links: a seed's facts travel in the part of the address (the fragment) that is not sent to any server, including the counter's. A strict content-security policy names the counter as the only host this site may talk to, and forbids everything else; the counter's script is pinned to a frozen, published version by cryptographic hash, so even that one host cannot serve this page altered code — if the file ever changed, the browser would refuse it and the count would simply stop. Everything you sow, see, miss, or are given stays on your device. The export file goes only where you put it.
Sources
- Plato, Cratylus 419e–420b — the distinction Socrates draws between himeros (desire for the present) and pothos (longing for the absent). Socrates' etymologies there are half at play; the load-bearing usage is Homer's, where pothos is the ache for the missing and the dead.
- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986): "The Greek word eros denotes 'want,' 'lack,' 'desire for that which is missing.'"
- Robinson & Berridge (1993); Berridge, Psychopharmacology 191 (2007) — "wanting" (incentive salience) and "liking" (pleasure) are dissociable systems; dopamine drives the former, not the latter. Dopamine is not a pleasure chemical, whatever the feed-economy's apologists say.
- Schultz, Dayan & Montague, Science 275 (1997) — the dopamine response moves from the reward to its earliest reliable predictor: anticipation is where the signal lives.
- Loewenstein, Economic Journal 97 (1987) — asked what they would pay for a kiss from the movie star of their choice, people reported they would pay most for one three days away — more than for one right now. Reported willingness, not observed behavior; the point stands: the wait itself carries value.
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I §38 (tr. Payne): "the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one." This garden reads him and declines the despair: the next seed is offered, never pushed.
- C. P. Cavafy, "Ithaka" (tr. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard): "As you set out for Ithaka / hope the voyage is a long one."
- Ferster & Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (1957) — variable-ratio schedules, the mechanism this piece structurally refuses: its schedules are fixed, disclosed, and indifferent to your behavior.
- Loewenstein, Psychological Bulletin 116 (1994) — curiosity as an information gap. Named here because the piece runs on it too: the unknown face of your bloom is a one-shot gap, fixed at sowing and closed by time — never re-rolled, never rationed.
- Arrian, Anabasis — the recurring pothos that "seized" Alexander to see what lay beyond; the classic study of the motif is Ehrenberg's. Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum — the garland-flower the Greeks called pothos; the grave-planting is reported by later writers and held here at arm's length, like the etymologies. The root-of-prayer derivation of potheō follows the standard etymological dictionaries (Beekes) and is stated in the About as the philologists' majority view, not a certainty.
Claims refused
- "Desire is the root of all suffering" — often sold as the Buddha's words. The Second Noble Truth names taṇhā — craving, thirst — as the origin of suffering, which is narrower and sharper than "desire." The misquote is declined.
- The name of the houseplant. The genus Pothos (Linnaeus, 1753) most likely latinizes a Sinhala word; its resemblance to the Greek πόθος is a coincidence this piece chose to build on, not an etymology it claims. (The trailing plant most people call pothos is botanically Epipremnum aureum — an unkillable thing that needs almost nothing and thrives in dark rooms, which is accidentally the whole of this garden's plant.)
- "Desire," the word: there is an old suggestion that desiderare hides sidus, star — to desire as to wait on what the stars will bring, to feel a star's absence. Etymologists do not agree it is true. It is kept here as an image, not a fact.
- "What you seek is seeking you" — circulates as Rumi; it is Coleman Barks's rendering, not a verbatim line. Not used.
- The piece's own doorway line — that seeing the drawing early costs you the wanting — is the piece's belief, stated as an experiment, not a finding. The spoiler research says people are bad at predicting what seeing early does to them.
Sound
Three utterances, synthesized in the browser, no recordings: a dry pluck at sowing, a barely audible tone while a seed is held, and one resolving chord — the only resolution in the piece — when a bloom is witnessed. Its root note is taken from the seed, so a plant keeps its chord for life. The toggle in the footer is remembered.
The letter truth
A gift link carries the seed's facts and nothing else. Anyone who opens it may take the plant in; copies are possible; the piece does not pretend otherwise. The sender is never told what became of it. The piece carries no names; your messenger may.
Ship state
Built autonomously end to end — panels, playtests, and audits included and preserved in the workshop repository — under a brief that deferred the author's final look. That look has now happened: the piece is ratified (5 July 2026). Ratification means the author stands by shipping it, not that its wager is proven — whether an appointment with an unknown flower makes anyone long across real days is still for real visitors to decide.
The author's collected work — books, photographs, essays, and the rest of these experiments — lives at hulkiokantabak.ai.