Illegal Numbers, Ayn Rand and Jetpacks
Why is it illegal to write 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0?
Meandering around in my head recently has been this thought: ideas are just numbers.
This sounds like a silly thought experiment. The sort of thing a drunk crypto-bro might say at a party as droplets of Brewdog fly from his mouth to your jumper. And maybe it is. But it’s still the case that any concept that can be stored on a computer is just a series of 1s and 0s. Avenger’s Infinity War is a number. Great Expectations is a number. Season 4 Episode 7 of The Bachelor is a number. They’re just really long ones.
New ideas are numbers that no one has realized are cool yet. The next Spider-Man film, which hasn’t even been filmed, already exists out there somewhere as a number. Michelangelo supposedly remarked that when sculpting David, he chopped off all the bits that didn’t look like David. In a sense, when we make films, we are discarding numbers that don’t look like great movies.
A whole parallel universe of ideas exists out there in our numbers. There’s a number that corresponds to a Star Wars film where Han Solo was played by Betty White. There’s a number where Jaws was a budgerigar. One where the third Matrix film was good. If you were to type the right digits you could watch one of those films that don’t exist. They are deep fakes taken to the next level. A deep fake is just another number after all.
This is all a mad thought experiment though. The number of digits you’d need to type is impossibly long, with so many variations that you couldn’t possibly try them all before the heat death of the universe. Just to “type out” a single film in blurry standard definition would require 6,000,000,000 characters. Typing every minute of every day without sleep, with perfect accuracy, at 100 words per minute, it would take 30 years to produce the Betty White Star Wars.
But this isn’t entirely abstract. Court cases have determined that certain numbers are “illegal”. In America, it is (arguably) illegal to write:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This is a DVD encryption key that allows you to copy the contents. A May 2007 court case concluded that distributing or owning this number was illegal.
The thing is, it’s so short. You could write it on a post-it note. You could memorize it and recite it at parties if that was the sort of thing you were into. One of Elon Musk’s children is probably called it. It feels mad that this number could be outlawed.
As a result of the court case, the number was published so much it became more famous than if had it never been made illegal. I can hear the crypto-bros braying again.
What we’re really talking about here, though, are secrets. It’s as annoying for people to go around reciting that number as it would be if someone kept shouting out your Gmail password in public. And while it might seem mad that some numbers should be “illegal” it is clearly a necessary part of society that certain things should be banned. Hate speech is just a number. Child pornography is just numbers.
Perhaps, when it comes down to it, this idea that numbers are ideas is one of those fascinating but empty thoughts. Intellectually amusing, but ultimately useless, it could be the subject of endless circular Twitter arguments. Which themselves are just numbers too.
Elsewhere
I hesitate to include short stories in this list of articles, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps it’s because you need to be in a different mood to read something fictional, and if you encounter fiction at the wrong point it can fall flat or feel overly indulgent.
But there is something about My Slut Shaming Ghost Can Go To Hell by Gwen E Kirby in Electric Literature that made me decide to buck that trend and include it here. It is full of life. Messy and firey and all those things that short stories so often aren’t. A little NSFW, but a really fun read.
An oldie from the now-defunct Toast. Daniel Mallory Ortberg imagines Harry Potter as if written by Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand’s Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone:
“What’s Hogwarts?” Harry asked.
“It’s wizard school.”
“It’s not a public school, is it?”
“No, it’s privately run.”
“Good. Then I accept. Children are not the property of the state; everyone who wishes to do so has the right to offer educational goods or services at a fair market rate. Let us leave at once.”
It simultaneously manages to ridicule Harry Potter and Ayn Rand. Ortberg wrote a whole series of Ayn Rand pastiches. I’m surprised I haven’t come across these before and glad that, even though the Toast may have stopped publishing, the content is all still on the internet. Although we think of webpages as less permanent than physical items, had this been published in a physical magazine, these would have been lost by now.
Dave Eggers in The Guardian: ‘It’s a glorified backpack of tubes and turbines’: Dave Eggers on jetpacks and the enigma of solo flight.
We have jetpacks and we do not care. An Australian named David Mayman has invented a functioning jetpack and has flown it all over the world – once in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty – yet few people know his name. His jetpacks can be bought but no one is clamouring for one. For decades, humans have said they want jetpacks, and for thousands of years we have said we want to fly, but do we really? Look up. The sky is empty.
Eggers’ piece is really one of those humorous “look at this weird thing” articles. And it’s a lot of fun to see how weird this industry is. Hiring jetpacks is like the segway or those experience days you buy in department stores for £99.
But it’s this first section that leaves me pondering: our dream of jetpacks has been realised. But who cares.
Perhaps we had the wrong dreams.
That is all for this edition. Until next time
Simon