HERB KIM: So it's become an annual, um, experience for us
We close Thinking Digital with a talk from Tom Scott
and every year he manages to find an even crazier
and wackier way to surprise us and delight us
and this year he is actually going to be joining us
via a live link.
Tom?
Can you hear me?
TOM SCOTT: Yes!
I'm here!
Hello!
Hello Thinking Digital!
Okay, either my earpiece has stopped working, or you guys are really quiet.
AUDIENCE: Hello!
TOM: Right.
I've had to step outside to do this talk today, I do hope you don't mind, it's just that the
Sage's health and safety team, quite understandably, wouldn't let me do this talk inside.
I'll get to why that is in a couple of minutes, but first a little bit of background.
I don't like having stuff.
I don't like accumulating physical things.
Stuff builds up.
Stuff is something you have to deal with, to tidy, to dust, to lug around with you when
you have to move.
Ideally, I'd be able to fit my life into a suitcase.
On the other hand, I hoard data.
My email archive goes back to 1999, that being the year when I learned how important backups
are.
I have a copy of nearly everything digital I've ever made.
But then digital data is a lot easier to preserve.
It takes up no great amount of space.
I can create backup copies in seconds.
All my data is safe in multiple places, and as an absolute last-resort backup, there's
a 60GB file sitting on Amazon Glacier, in case someone hits London with an electromagnetic
pulse weapon.
This, meanwhile, is my hoodie.
It is a Jerzees ActiveWear Super Sweats hoodie, code 4997M, Large, in a colour called Oxford
Grey.
It is incredibly comfortable, but that's because I've owned it and worn it for more than ten
years.
It was given to me on the 21st October, 2002.
The word on the front, NORDICS, refers to North Dickinson County School, in Felch, Michigan.
That's not a joke, Felch is actually the name of the town.
When I was 17, I spent six months touring around small-town America, and I spent a day
at North Dickinson County School, where - among other things - a much gawkier version of me
-- could we cue the photo in, Nathan?
-- did an "Ask a British Guy" session.
Afterwards, the person who was showing me around took presented me with the NORDICS
hoodie.
I never realised how much sentimental value I was attaching to it.
But this NORDICS hoodie has followed me for ten years.
It's become associated with who I am, to the extent that I somehow look a bit
wrong in pictures where I'm wearing some other jacket.
If you were at this conference in past years, you'll have seen me in it.
It was with me when I went round Australia, all through university,
onto a submarine in San Francisco, It was duct-taped to a shipping container
along with me to see if I could walk like Spiderman.
Er, I couldn't.
It was with me when I toured Bletchley Park, catching beads at Mardi Gras in New Orleans,
and standing on the gunwhales of a canal boat in Llangollen with nothing between me and
a 200-foot drop.
It was with me when I moved to London, when I took a trip to abandoned sea forts,
and throughout all the time I was filming a TV show last year.
What you saw there was the last ten years of my life summed up in a few photos.
This hoodie is the only physical thing I have that connects me to that gawky 17-year-old.
Sure, there are a few things in storage at my parents' house, I could probably find that
godawful shirt if I went looking for it, but they're not been continuously with me.
Nothing has.
Nothing at all.
There is no other thing I own that links me to the kid from ten years ago.
They don't make these hoodies any more, incidentally - they haven't done for years.
There's a reasonable chance that my NORDICS hoodie may actually be the last remaining
one in existence.
The trouble is, it's too tattered and worn to wear any more.
It was probably too tattered and worn years ago, but I held out for as long as I could.
And it's beyond reasonable repair.
It's been patched up lots of times but now every single bit of stitching is coming apart.
The letters have worn and faded so much that it basically says "NOROICS" now.
The lining is so thin after ten years of wearing and washing that I usually have to wear a
second layer underneath in order to keep me warm enough.
I can't throw it away.
I realised that.
It's got too much sentimental value attached to it; it can't meet a half-arsed end in a
bin somewhere.
It's too tattered to be donated, and while technically it could be shredded, and converted
into wiping cloths by a textile recycling company, that doesn't really sit right with
me either.
The name of this conference is Thinking Digital.
And I realised that I really do think that way.
If this was digital data, I could compress it, archive it, and look back every now and
then, when the mood took me.
But it isn't: there's no TRON-style digitisation ray that means I can keep it without also
having to store it.
And storing it... isn't an option for me either.
So this talk is my digitisation ray.
The story I've told here, the pictures I've shown, the emotion behind it, is being backed
up as well as I possibly can on this camera.
I'll put this online.
And it won't matter if anyone watches it because: the story's been told.
I can look back, remember why this was important to me, without having to keep a busted and
broken physical object around just because I'm sentimental.
This [take off hoodie] will become hoodie.mp4, and it'll keep exactly as it is, bit-for-bit,
as long as I keep my backups up to date.
So one question remains: now I've uploaded my hoodie, what do I do with the body?
This isn't a destructive upload, I didn't have to slice it apart to index it, and now
I've transferred it to digital, there's still this apparently-precious physical object hanging
around.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking that this is actually water, or that there's some clever camera trickery
going on here.
It isn't, and there isn't.
But this is very much a test for me, because until I got to this place, until I had a can
of paraffin in my hand, I didn't know whether I'd actually go through with this.
If I really could believe that I could upload my hoodie to a video file and then the original
wouldn't matter any more.
The stories we tell, the things we do, and the memories we have - either in our heads
or in our backups - are more important than any physical object.
This is why I'm here.
This is why this hoodie will be a ball of ashes shortly.
And that is why this conference is called Thinking Digital.
Thank you very much.
I've been Tom Scott.
Goodnight.