ESSAY: ‘The Future is Flash’

Last week it was my piano tuner, this week my proctologist. What’s with flash, they both wanted to know.

It’s simple, really: everything’s getting smaller, not only stories.

The lesser Darwin, Charles’ son, George, first proposed fission theory – something about matter breaking up into bits – back in 1879, and it’s been with us ever since.

Then there’s the notion of positive disintegration (PD) as propounded by the great Polish propounder, Kazimeirz Dabrowski. It’s hard to underestimate its influence.

But it took a philosopher, Plato, to nail it. In his Seinfeldias, two knuckleheads have the following exchange. E: Why does it shrink? G: It just does.

Contraction, it seems, is in the nature of things, and the whole world has caught the bug.

As Chekhov once said, ‘Why write War and Peace when you can write a little piece?’