 I'm James. I'm a writer, and I'm a publisher, and I'm a technologist, and the greatest of those three years publishing. It's a thing that I've been doing for some time, and that I love deeply. I actually had a background in computer science, in cognitive science, in artificial intelligence. That was what I studied, because I kind of thought that computers were the future, and by the time I finished a four-year degree in computers, I hated them so much that I went to work in very traditional book publishing, which I'd always, always loved, and gave me the opportunity to work with writers and to work with them to shape their work and then put them into this physical form and put them out into the world as books. I can promise you there is no more wondrous experience than handling a book that you've worked on yourself. But there was a problem that was kind of increasingly evident, which was that all that stuff that I'd been studying for and was trying to ignore was kind of coming. The internet was approaching. I had a friend of mine describe it the other day as being attacked by a very slow snail, which I quite like. We've all had this idea that the internet's coming to destroy our various industries, and it's, oh God, the snail is coming, but it's sort of coming very slowly. So I was trying to look at this, and I was really interested in the ways in which we think differently about these things when they become digital, because make no mistake of it. The books, and a lot else, but the books particularly, they're sort of subliming. They're kind of going up into the air, and they're becoming something radically different. And I was really interested in how this changed our kind of perception of them. Why it felt different, because if you asked anyone in publishing 10 years ago about what was going to happen with the ebooks, they basically sort of went, ah, I'm not listening, it's not going to happen. And if you asked a lot of committed readers, and even quite casual readers, like why, how they felt about these things, you got these responses that were very physical, they were very tactile. You got people talking about the feel of the paper. You get people talking about the smell of the book. They're obsessed with how books smell. It's this really odd reaction they get. They talk about how you can read them in the bath and all this kind of thing. And I got those. I get those objections, but to me they never spoke to literature itself, to the stories that are inherent in these things and why they're important. And they seemed like bad reasons. And I looked at what books actually were, what they truly mean to be. And what they really are, are embedded encoded experiences. They're things that we spend time with. And the problem with these ebooks that we were building is that they didn't encode in them this memory and this history that's kind of an increasingly important part of how we enact culture. And you can kind of see this happening everywhere if you look for it. You can see it in the way that now we increasingly kind of treat digital photographs. You can see that people, we used to take our photographs and you put them in shoe boxes and you put them in albums. You kind of leave them there, but they were these totemic things that you could return to. And now that's changed with digital photographs because we put them online and we share them. And what is that kind of sharing process that's happening there? It's an actual kind of, it's a form of memory itself that by interacting with these digital things we're actually, we're committing them to memory in some strange form. Instagram is a really good example of this. If you haven't used it, it's a service just for taking little photographs. But the thing that everyone does is they put these filters on them. And they're weird filters because they make it look like it was taken with a camera that we've never used. There may be our parents' cameras and that really bothered me for a while. I didn't understand why people would do this with these things. Except that what we're doing there is codifying these things as memory. We're taking experiences, times that we've spent to and we're kind of protecting them in this guise of something. And that's what's happening with the books as well. It's what disturbs us when we make the shift from the physical to digital. And once you start noticing the shift in kind of everything you notice all these weird cognitive effects that are happening everywhere. I'm incredibly amazed at the strange technologies that are kind of incredibly normal to us now. I can take out my phone and I can look at the world through the eyes of a satellite. It's like a superpower. It's the most extraordinary thing that's come across in my lifetime. And yet people use it for driving directions. It's so kind of dull and unimaginative that the potentialities of these things. But it's because we don't see them as encoded memories and histories. We don't understand our kind of physiological and psychological reactions to them because they've kind of crept inside ways. While we were thinking about NASA and living on other planets these other kind of crazy extraordinary powerful technologies have come along. And they're kind of pulling their way through our culture. They're taking our literature and they're transforming it into something radically new and they're doing that to almost all of our cultural products. And yet we don't quite see it because we don't have a language for discussing not just physical and digital but the entire process by which our culture is mediated by these technologies. I have kind of various touchpoints for looking at these things and I'm only going to introduce you to one of them which is my favourite. These are the render ghosts. These are my friends, the render ghosts who live in the buildings that we haven't built yet. They're always there kind of staring daisidly out at the city in this kind of beautiful way. And a lot of them have children playing and they're kind of wonderful things. But they're this kind of this beautiful symbol of this kind of idea that technology is kind of visualizing this potential future for us but we haven't quite worked out how we're going to kind of live in it and enact it. I have a silly name for that as I have a silly name for many things which is the new aesthetic. And the new aesthetic stands not for the artifacts of this technological progression but the experience of living in a world where our cultural objects are spread through all the devices that we have where our memory is outsourced to the network and is kind of partially retrievable but is also just kind of out there and formed out of everything. And for me the experience of working with books and literature and seeing the cognitive processes involved in that change are a key to almost every one of these things recognizing that every time we interact with technology we're also committing something of ourselves and our experiences to it and becoming part of that larger network which enables that. When you start to look at the world in those kind of ways it makes a very different kind of sense. So I don't have a vast point for you except to ask look more carefully at the way you behave with these things and think what it is that we really want to be doing with them. Thank you very much.