The Associated Press reports on “self-destructing” or, more prosaically, disposable, DVDs:
Each disc contains a chemical time-bomb that begins ticking once it’s exposed to air. Typically, after 48 hours, the disc turns darker, becoming so opaque that a DVD player’s laser can no longer can read it. (Discs can live as little as one hour or as long as 60 hours.)
Sound familiar? William Gibson, collaborating with Dennis Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos, tried this trick with the art book/electronic poem AGRIPPA over a decade ago.
Posted by mgk at November 12, 2004 03:31 PMExcept, in Gibson's case, he did it with a self-destructing floppy disc—optical media were nowhere near so commonplace then—and a book whose pages blackened themselves on exposure to air.
And Gibson didn’t do it from a DRM perspective—in fact, he fully expected the text of the book to be made available via the Internet (yes, even in 1992), and it was. I recall clearly sitting in a UVA computer lab downloading the samizdat from the Usenet or an FTP site. His point was rather about the fungibility of life and of memory—and maybe about the fact that although the physical artifact disappears, the essence remains among the collective memory.
Of course Matthew knows all of this, but I wanted to put it out there for everyone else. Gibson's own remarks on the text are at the bottom of this page: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp.
Posted by: Tim Jarrett at November 13, 2004 07:27 PM | Link to CommentRight on all counts, Tim. Including your last remark: FWIW, AGRIPPA forms the intro to my book. ;-)