Think of all the YouTube videos or songs that could have served humanity so much better if they had deleted themselves right after you heard them.

Seeing this video both warms and breaks my heart.

“You wouldn’t eat an ice cream twice…”

I’m one of the folks responsible for the forensics and emulation. There’s a detailed account of the “hack” explaining exactly how the poem (not prose) got posted all of the internet here:

http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/kirschenbaum-matthew-g-with-doug-reside-and-alan-liu-no-round-trip-two-new-primary-sources-for-agrippa

It didn’t involve “ripping” any of the executables. The business about the file name is also incorrect (it didn’t work that way, and you can experiment for yourself using the disk image we provide).

Also, the “photoreactive self-destruction” never really worked out. It was planned for the project but never came off. MGK

Held in the hand, mercury is a shiny ball of wondrous liquid that moves around quickly, almost of its own will, breaking into smaller droplets and leaving tiny mirror-balls of itself in the friction ridges of your palm or fingertips. You can make these balls come together and breakup, apparently without leaving their substance behind on your hand. If you have a magnifying glass, however, you might see tiny balls of shiny mercury left behind. Don’t inhale them.

Reading “Agrippa” will not cause permanent neurological damage, but it is likely to cut a few new neural pathways.

My professor’s retort was lovely. “Every books dies, but this one confronts the grim reaper head on.”

Beyond the wonderful format, it’s quite a beautiful poem.

So this was the original DRM right?

Don’t they know that you’re not supposed to copy that floppy?

In a way it’s cool to see this near legendary artifact, or the other hand, the whole point of this piece was planned obsolesence so a drive image copy devalues it a bit in my eyes.

On the third hand (having three hands proves that I’m a mutant) I really DO WANT a copy, and have wanted this ever since I read about it’s existence.

…Not long after that, someone ripped the EXE – it might have been a COM file, it’s been so damn long – and posted the prose all over the place. The justification for what some decried as a wanton act of piracy – duh! – was that not only had Gibson offended everyone by making his work self-destruct after people had paid for it, but it wasn’t that good a hack job to begin with. 16 years later, I have to agree with that last bit. It wasn’t that good of a laugh in the mechanism at all.

…On a side note, what I’ve always wondered was whether or not anyone scanned the inside cover that also photoreactively self-destructed, and if any unopeneed copies are still intact after all those years.

Reading “Agrippa” is like stepping into a stream: it’s never the same poem twice, it never seems to be about the same thing it was last time I read it.

I’ve seen it in many forms online and in print, and examined the huge Ashbaugh album-book, which I recall (incorrectly, I think) as being printed on photosensitive paper that deteriorated when it was viewed. This is the first time I’ve read it in the destructo-disk version, and it was, as always, an experience like to cupping mercury in my hands.

I’ve already seen them in my local liquor stores, you buy DVD’s that will stop working after 48hrs of exposure to oxygen (opening the package)…

Apparently they’ve been around for quite some time now:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/sep/11/thisweekssciencequestions1