I am 25, I write software for a living, and I am not climbing this ladder

In 2005 a student in England paid for university by selling a grid of a million pixels at a dollar each, and twenty-one years later I am trying something similar, with my own dreams behind it and the same hope. I spend my days building things that live on a screen and are replaced by the next quarter. What I want to build instead is slower, and you can stand inside it: shelters made of wood and earth, food cooked for people who stopped on their way somewhere, work that ends when the light goes.

First a zome. It is a round timber shell on a quiet piece of land, with a stove, a bed and a window full of trees, and you can sleep a night or two in it and hear nothing man-made. Then an old Land Cruiser turned into somewhere to live, so the slowness can move: Europe first, camp by camp, and further when it holds together. A small bistro on a cycling route, at the stretch where there is currently nowhere to stop. And underneath it all, software that is mine instead of someone else's, because that is the part I already know how to do.

It is one pool, not separate funds with separate promises. Everything the grid raises pays for the whole list: the build, the road, and the small places my girlfriend and I keep planning at the kitchen table. I would rather say that plainly than dress it up as a portfolio. What the site does show, permanently and without my editing it, is who paid for what. It lists every contributor, what they have there and what they paid, read straight off the grid.

That is the whole offer. You get pixels that outlive the campaign, or you get to lift the fog off a picture nobody has seen. I get the start of a slower life, and you get to watch it being built.