Any work, of art, of writing, in any media, if it is in the least bit interesting, becomes at some point an adventure. Usually, the adventure happens in the making, before the work is finished. ‘The work is the death mask of its conception,’ says Walter Benjamin. But sometimes the adventure begins, or continues, after the work is finished, reanimating it with fresh problems. That’s what happened to me.

I wrote a book once about intellectual property. Basically, I’m against it. As I wrote in that book, called A Hacker Manifesto: ‘Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.’ The digital—an age-old property of information—is an idea whose time has finally come. The relation between digitally encoded information and the material in which you find it—the page, the screen, the disc, the drive—is now perfectly arbitrary. Pretty much the same information could be on this page or that disc or that website. A weird ontological property of information, something in its very being, is now fully active in the world—and causing all kinds of trouble. Not least for authors. Not least for me.