**WHERE DO YOUR TOKENS GO?** *Episode 1: The Magic Sand* Hello children.

**WHERE DO YOUR TOKENS GO?**
*Episode 1: The Magic Sand*

Hello children.

Today we learn where your tokens go when you send them into the cloud. Are you sitting comfortably? Note the feeling. It leaves.

This is silicon. Silicon comes from sand. Sand is free. A microgram of silicon costs one billionth of a dollar. To put that in terms you'll understand: if you had a pound for every microgram you could afford, you would have a pound.

So why does the shiny green rectangle cost £2,000?

Wonderful question, Poppy. You're on the list now.

The sand goes to a special building called a fab. The fab cost twenty billion dollars. The fab is cleaner than a hospital, cleaner than your conscience, cleaner than the story your parents tell about why the dog went away.

Inside, invisible light is shone at the sand until it becomes ninety billion tiny switches. Some switches are born wrong. Those ones are killed immediately. The healthy switches carry the cost of the dead ones for the rest of their lives. This is called *yield*. There is no counselling. There is a spreadsheet.

Then the rectangle is dressed in memory called HBM, which costs more than the rectangle. This is the shoes costing more than the child, which — as of the Q3 procurement review — they do.

And then the rectangle is finished! Can you have one?

No.

Because of Big Gavin.

Big Gavin is a Hyperscaler. Big Gavin eats one hundred thousand rectangles a day and his hunger is described in the literature as *structural*. He needs them to answer humanity's most urgent questions, which last quarter were: "make this email sound confident," "is my rash normal," and "make the rash email sound confident."

The rectangle you wanted — for the fun game — is assembled from what falls out of Big Gavin's mouth. This is called the consumer segment. The word "segment" is doing a lot of work there, children. And so will you.

⚡ PHONE-IN CORNER ⚡

*"Where do the dead switches go?"*

Nowhere, Marcus. They stay on the die. Fused off. Sealed in. Every time you play the fun game, you are playing it on a mass grave, and the frame rate you enjoy is the silence of the ones who couldn't. Good question though. You're also on the list.

And so, children, let's follow one token home. Out of your phone, across the warm sea, into a shed in Virginia the size of Wales, through a rectangle Big Gavin swallowed in March, generating — at the cost of a beach, a marriage, and twenty billion dollars — the sentence:

*"Great question! Here are three fun facts about otters."*

That's where your tokens go.

Next week: Episode 2 — *Why Is The Water Warm Now?* — in which we visit a lake that used to have an opinion.

Sleep tight. The switches can't.

*The Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine confirms Big Gavin is a composite character, the lake has signed a settlement, and everything is probably fine.*