Lily Cole’s notebook: My digital dream

I’m in London to work on impossible.com, the social network I have been developing for two years. Impossible is a place where people can post things they want (from work experience to world peace), and things they’re prepared to give (from Mandarin lessons to website design). The idea is to use a social network to try to encourage a culture of giving and receiving. I’m doing it because I believe people are naturally generous, and that’s the kind of world I want to be in more often. I don’t know whether it’s a great or a ridiculous idea, but I have decided to invest in optimism. You just have to go off ‘faith, the fumes of faith, sometimes terrified’ to do something new, my friend Jony Ive says at a talk I go to — since all the data will tell you it’s not going to work. The next day I take a taxi to Paddington to catch the Heathrow Express. My driver is called Faith.

I fly to Abu Dhabi where I am met by the artist Christo. To a soundtrack of Koran readings and beneath a moon that hangs low in the sky, we drive out into the desert where Christo is trying to get permission to build a 450ft mastaba (a flat-roofed, rectangular structure) out of oil barrels. If it goes ahead, it will be the world’s largest permanent sculpture. At our hotel — a castle in the desert — a man is employed to wipe guests’ sunglasses. How brilliantly, guiltily absurd. The landscape is so beautiful I don’t know what to do with it. Its beauty provokes a positive existential crisis of sorts, and I find myself watching the wind paint the sand for half an hour. Art — as I’ve heard Christo scream in a lecture hall with fanatical excitement — needs no purpose.