Margaret Atwood: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes. So I said to somebody, “Why can’t we do a remote book signing?” They laughed at me because they were more technically knowledgeable than I was. Then I said, “See if it exists.” They went off and looked. And they came back and said, “It doesn’t exist. The closest thing to it is remote surgery.” Which is quite a different thing because you don’t want to sort of scribble on a body with a knife, unless you’re in a Kafka story. I said, “Well, if it doesn’t exist, why don’t we invent it?” So we invented it. It took four prototypes, one of which blew up and flew across the room. But we did it. It was more difficult than we thought. We did it. And we ended up signing books remotely because the idea was to do remote book signings for people who couldn’t have them, couldn’t have real people because their publishers would never send them there. We ended up doing that, but we couldn’t . . . Can I use a verb? We couldn’t scale it. We didn’t know how to scale it. So then it segued into another area of life. It passed through the valley of the shadow of the digital. Maybe before three years ago, there was a period when people were saying, “Everything’s going to be digital, so why are you wasting your time doing this stupid thing?” And they said all books are going to be e-books. That’s not true. It didn’t turn out to be true. And it turns out that not everything can be digital, and we now know why. Why is that? Because it’s so screamingly hackable. The thing is that a lot of higher kinds of documents will not accept digital signatures, as such, if you can’t produce a pen-and-ink paper version. We were the only people who, as it turned out, could do that. If you’d like to read more about that, you go onto the internet, and you put in “syngrafii.com” and there’s the whole story. So the remote signing device that was originally intended for books moved over into business and the area of security and compliance. Women have faced many disadvantages in history, but it seems, in the written arts, they’ve managed to overcome those disadvantages much more easily than, say, in painting. Why do you think that is? There’s even Tale of Genji, 18th century, Jane Austen. Quite early, large number of —…

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