# [[The Best of all Possible Worlds]] ##### On Gambas, Gardening and Panglossian Optimism **I - How the narrator attended a Portuguese dinner in Munich, and what Horto revealed about the destiny of mankind** At the recommendation of my colleague Hortensio (we call him Horto from Porto) this years team dinner took place at the most magnificent of portuguese restaurants in all of Munich, as it offers both portuguese pork sandwich and Schnitzel. We were a small group of four, yet the table was aching with goods: three types of Gambas, swimming in a sea of oil and garlic, ten different variations of fried things with a dip of unknown provenance, bowls of rice with red peppers in it, side dish salads prepped with bavarian understatement, three main dishes per person, ranging from pork sandwich drowned in Molho de Francesinha to a full swordfish stuffed with onions and more gambas. As it was our custom on these kind of events we would philosophize about the great matters of concern: layoffs in Tech, war in the middle east, a prospect of peace in eastern europe, the specifics of national cuisine from our home countries, the demise of US American democracy and respective hedging of private investments with silver or parmigiano wheels from Emilia-Romagna. While I was working my way through a tower of shellfish, Horto picked up his favorite topic: "You Germans don't like Musk, but you are looking at it from completely the wrong perspective. The things he writes on X, his coalition with Trump, the elderly scrambled by Teslas, all of this is like a stresstest for the system mankind is building right now to reach its destiny. We have to move fast and ruffle some feathers if we want to arrive there in time. All of these things you complain about are not more than slightly darker patches on a poster from a Science Fiction movie, a movie about the great journey of mankind reaching for the stars!" I was about to ask Horto how he would feel when it would be him getting his feathers ruffled, but I was interrupted by a brief situation of urgency, when another colleague nearly suffocated on a 1-inch long piece of bone from his Bacalhau, hidden between two slices of the most tender octopus he had ever tasted, as the colleague confirmed when he regained his breath. Refilling the glasses of our group with Vinho Verde, Horto picked up the incident to continue: "Look, of course it hurts when a piece of Espinha is stuck in your throat and you have to start petitioning the lord for your sins. But there are larger causalities at play and they may well require sacrifices here and there. In 1755, the city of Lisbon, the proud of our beautiful people, was shaken by a terrific earthquake with a 9.0 magnitude, causing tsunami waves of fifteen meters and a firestorm raging for five whole days. Around 50.000 souls died that day in the city alone, but I will ask you my friends: would you consider this body count a godforsaken calamity, or a necessity when you know what I am about to tell you? The earthquake of Lisbon birthed the scientific field of seismology, a magnificent example of applied reason, eventually gifting mankind with the skill of reflection seismology to help with the discovery of new oil fields. To process these signal reflections, a company in Dallas had to deliver new hardware, which made them found a new branch called Texas Instruments, which, as all of you my proficient colleagues know, created the foundation of the semiconductor marvels we enjoy today." "If everybody would follow your bleak philosophy, our society would be an absolute hellhole." I mumbled with frustration, while fiercely peeling a pair of Gambas. But as usual, Horto was only motivated by my objections. "Of course, it sounds cold to draw conclusions this way. But thats exactly the point! As a species, we may not let our perspective be clouded by emotions. From beneath the rubble of Lisbon, the 1755 earthquake is a tragedy, but if you zoom out enough and apply sufficient reason you will see even the worst disaster becomes a stepping stone on a trajectory to what we achieved today!" Gently pushing my hand aside, Horto refilled my glass with Douro Tinto and continued: "I can read your face, we have been here before my friend! Of course you will insist the supply chain of the chips in our smartphones have motivated heartbreaking child labor and caused poisoned ground water here and there, all of that is well known and not to be questioned. But you have to see the full picture! Digitalisation is pushing literacy everywhere around the globe, people are better informed and know how to live healthier lives on average, make better informed decisions. Of course democracy will not be able to keep pace with the speed we can make up our opinions today, but there will be other, more effective forms of organizing societies and distributing ressources in the near future anyways. God forbid, I am not talking of communism here, it is likely going to be governments you Germans would call right wing extremists. But you have to see, this is only a TEMPORARY concern: if you zoom out to the species level, the smartphone is doing a perfect job, it is very well designed for the trajectory humanity has to take on the path towards the stars that Moores Law has revealed to us. We are approximately doubling our capacities every two years, that means any kind of remaining local suffering is equally halved every two years. Who are we to stop humanity on this path?" I attempted to ask if it would be a CEO dictator or a godlike AI guiding the path in Hortos worldview, but we were interrupted by the Chef himself, delivering a round of Port Wine to our table. **II - How José chewed through barbed wire, caught a Bible, and arrived at a sulphurous basement in Munich** The Chef of the venue was of memorable appearance: weighting likely more than 120 kg, carrying a warm smile on his face distorted by a large scar. "I am Senhor Antunes, but you may call me José!" he shouted while serving the Port Wine in a generous swing without missing a drop. After we did our salute with the Chef, Horto inquired about Josés origin, so he started sharing his story while we were having the second round of Port Wine: "My story is a tragic one and I hope I will not disturb your evening. But it is what it is and I don‘t mind sharing it over a good glass. I grew up on a farm in Angola, learned to weed sisal and grow piri-piri before I could walk. In 1974 I was a teenager when we heard the news on the radio about the revolution in Lisbon. The day after things changed, all hell broke loose and we had to leave everything behind." Horto jumps in:"Wise people able to read the flow of cause and effects, making a necessary call to align themselves with history, Good on you!" José responds mildly: "It was not a choice we made, it was a necessity. The neighboring villages got burned one by one, either for participating in the fighting or for not participating in it. The only way left was the way out.“ José continues: „Next I found myself separated from family, trapped in barbed wire between the two factions at the 15th degree of latitude. At Night I managed to fight my way out, but I had to chew through the last line of rusty wire with my teeth, leaving me scarred for life as I am until today. When I arrived in Luanda, I had missed the last plane to Portugal, but a Benedictine showed pity with my miserable appearance and took me with him on a freight ship to Brasilia. On the journey he treated my wounds with sea salt while teaching me everything about preparing Bacalhau I know today." "A true agent of faith!" Horto rejoiced. "He must have foreseen your great potential for spreading the Portuguese gospel from your future kitchen in Munich!" José refilled his glass. "It was less glamorous than that. When the padre was about to get onto the freighter, a crowd of refugees formed around him. He turned away towards the sea and threw his bible over his shoulder, right into the crowd behind, stating: "Whoever catches the bible shall be resurrected!" I only happened to catch it because an old man before me, well more deserving than me, slipped on a dead fish." At this point, José started pouring Ginjinha into a spread of small glasses for us."This started a complicated journey across a safe house in brazil, exile in Sweden with a fake passport where I happened to learn a bit of cooking and eventually myself ending up standing in front of a closed restaurant in Munich I inherited from a distant uncle." "Just the perfect place at the right time to become your own boss?" Horto asked while serving the second round of Ginjinha. "Not really" José responded, "I assumed I could just keep the place running for a while until I could sell the real estate with a big profit. But when I learned this place is not sellable due to a tiny local well of sulphur which may rupture the basement any day, I already had invested too much and so I just kept running the restaurant." José went into the back of the restaurant and returned with an unlabelled heavy apothecary flask. "We arrived at the end of the road I went so far my friends. Lets burn away the hardship with my best Arguardente Medronho. As my Grandmother used to say: The complications of life are many, but greater is the power of constant misunderstandings. Salute!" **III - Of a scooter, a root, and an unexpected garden** When I left the restaurant with my colleagues, I had to realize the last subway home had already passed. In high spirit I decided to grab a scooter and ride home myself down into the lower parts of the city next to the river. The scooter buzzed with excitement at 95% battery capacity. In even higher spirits I enjoyed the breeze while flying through the park, contemplating the philosophical revelations of the evening, when I realized my scooter had literally sent me flying, turned into a catapult by a root disguised in the dark, my airtime increased by at least a second from the path facing down the hillside with at least an angle of 20 degrees. Mid air I could see myself approaching a thicket, its thorns contoured sharply by the LED light of the scooter on its independent trajectory through the evening night. While bracing for impact into a maze of cold spikes I evaluated my chances, ready for surrender to terminal cause and effect, when I landed in a soft bed of leaves smelling of late autumn mushroom. With not more than a few scratches on face, hands, arms and bottom, I realized I had fallen right through the thicket into a small moonlit clearing. Next to me sat a man in a sleeping bag, obviously woken up by my sudden arrival. "Good evening" he said kindly. "Quite a flight you had! Lets have some tea, shall we?" He started to cook water on a little camping stove and then got up to collect some herbs from the clearing around us. "You know, some time ago I arrived here just like you did. On my nightly run in pitch black I tripped on a root and it sent me flying. I wanted to get back out to my duties in the city, but then I realized there is more than enough for me to care about right here in the thicket. Over there is a little walnut tree - it requires my care in dry summers, but it rewards me with walnuts in autumn and winter. Right here used to be a puddle from melted snow, I managed to turn it into a little pond. Now my friends the frogs are singing for me and just recently I even managed to give some abandoned fish a new home. If I want, I can grow cucumbers, lettuce and carrots. I have to keep the rabbits at bay, but thats about all it takes." Sipping some tea, I let my gaze brush through the nightly scenery. What used to look like nothing but thorns and bushwork, started to resemble something like a little farm, invisible from outside the thicket. "Did you ever consider going back eventually?" I asked the Gardener. He poured me another cup of tea and thought for a while. "You know, I used to move things around. Frameworks and ideas mostly. Taking something from here, packaging it, sending it there. I had become very good at producing things that moved through the web without friction. But the more people I reached, the thinner my work became. By the end I couldn't recognize my own thoughts when they came back to me. They'd been processed through so many other minds and machines, averaged out into something smooth and easy to pass along. I was able to slip through this system with ease and I used to be proud of it, but this did not last long. Something of me moved with all the things I shared. " He gestured at the clearing around us. "Nothing here moves like that. The walnuts fall and stay where they fall. The frogs came because the pond was right, not because I advertised it to the frogs. I couldn't explain this place to someone who isn't standing in it. That used to bother me. Now I think that's exactly what keeps it alive." He refilled his cup. "Out there I was legible. Searchable. Everything I did had to leave a useable trace for others, mostly for machines actually. In here, nothing accumulates except the soil." After a moment of silence, only interrupted by rabbits moving through the underwood, I asked: "Where can I find the soil for growing walnuts?" It was hard to see if the Gardener was smiling when he responded: "You would have to find your own thicket first." --- *Notes:* *1) This text is a contribution to Venkatesh Rao‘s [2026 Contraptions Book Club](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/contraptions-book-club), based on my reading of Candide by Voltaire* *2) Thanks to my friend Miguel for his inspiring faith in technological progress and his good taste in restaurants* *3) Part 2 references the readworthy paper [“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme“](https://joelvelasco.net/teaching/167win10/gould%20lewontin%2079%20-%20spandrels.pdf) by Gould & Lewontin, 1979* *4) Part 3 is heavily inspired by Aneesh Sathes ideas on „thickets“ as alternative places for digital expression, in particular his great essay [“The Kernel and the Arc“](https://aneeshsathe.com/2026/01/11/the-kernel-and-the-ark/)*