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The Bureau has watched, for some years now, the steady expansion of what the networks permit a person to publish. One may post the photograph, the moving picture, the recorded sound, the looping animation, the spoken word rendered as text, the text rendered as spoken word. One may, at last, publish very nearly the whole of the sensible world. With one exclusion. The networks will not carry a smell.
This is not a small omission. A great deal of the tradition the Bureau files cannot be honestly transmitted without it. The basement that smelt of damp concrete and cigarette. The pressing plant. The valve amplifier as it warms. The crowd at the third hour. None of these survive the upload. The platforms return, in their place, a photograph of the room and ask the reader to imagine the rest.
The Bureau is aware of the engineering objection. There is no agreed format for an odour, no codec, no compression standard, no receiving hardware in the common handset. A smell cannot, at present, be reduced to a file and reconstituted at the far end. The Bureau accepts the objection and finds it insufficient. The same was once said of sound.
What troubles the Bureau is not the absence of the apparatus but the absence of the ambition. No network has announced that it is working on the problem. No platform lists the odour among its forthcoming features. The reader may publish a meal, a flower, a fire, a body, and in every case the one quality that would most fully convey the thing is the one quality silently dropped.
Solder. Mildew. The inside of a flight case. Stage fog as it settles. The particular staleness of a venue that has not been aired since the previous night. A record sleeve opened after thirty years. None of these may be posted. All of these are the form.
Bureau holdings, scent column left blank throughout
The result is an archive of the senses with a hole in the middle of it. The reader of the networks comes away believing the world is made of images and sound, because those are the parts that travelled. The smell stayed in the room. The Bureau notes that an entire dimension of experience has been quietly agreed to be unpublishable, and that almost no one has complained.
The Bureau complains.
The Bureau records the refusal of the olfactory as the principal unaddressed limitation of the present networks. It declines to propose a solution, having none. It asks only that the omission be acknowledged rather than ignored, and that the next reader who posts a photograph of a basement understand that the better half of the basement did not come with it.
Filed by the Bureau editor
VAGO
c. the present age · last revised c. the same