This is sad news. Eastman Kodak is ending production of Kodachrome, its colour film brand, because we have all gone digital. This recalls, of course, the Paul Simon song of the same name:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colours
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

I can see the necessity of ending mass production of Kodachrome, but I wonder whether there is not a niche analogue business there, along the lines of Polaroid and vinyl records.

The New York Times reported last month on the efforts of an Austrian entrepreneur to revive Polaroid film. Instant film is what the brand still stands for – I always thought the attempt to put the Polaroid name on televisions lacked credibility:

“This project is about building a very interesting business to last for at least another decade,” said Florian Kaps, the Austrian entrepreneur behind the effort. “It is about the importance of analog aspects in a more and more digital world.”

Meanwhile, there is still a thriving niche business in making vinyl records. The FT noted last year that Portalspace Records had bought EMI’s former vinyl record factory in Hayes, west London in order to keep on pressing discs.

I can read the writing on the wall, as Paul Simon sung in 1973, but surely someone can come up with a use for Kodachrome?

I have a written a column for the FT this weekend on Twitter and Iran:

Technology gets a bad rap in the old media. In books and films, it is often the machinery used by governments to crush individuality.

In 1984, George Orwell’s book about an imagined police state, the Ministry of Love used telescreens to monitor the inhabitants of Oceania: “The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.”

In The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film, Gene Hackman played a surveillance expert drawn into a murder plot as he eavesdrops on a young couple. Hackman reappeared in Enemy of the State, a 1998 film about a rogue circle of government agents using satellites and phone-monitoring software to hunt down and kill people.

A funny thing happened on the way to the digital dystopia. Far from being a tool for repression, the internet has become a means by which people shake off state censorship.

The internet has pushed governments in undemocratic and semi-democratic countries on to the defensive. They used to be able to control the flow of information on televison or in newspapers with relative ease. The ability of anyone with a mobile phone or a video camera to broadcast at will has confounded them.

Twitter, the 140-character message social network, is the latest internet phenomenon to thrust power into the hands of the citizenry. In Iran, it was the tinderbox that fanned the spark of revolt among supporters of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the defeated presidential candidate, into rallies and protests against the election result.

But do not count out the repressive uses of technology. Every Twitter follower and Facebook user who signs on for updates about popular protests in Iran or China, or uploads videos to YouTube, signals his or her revolutionary sympathies. That is not only news for free-thinkers but also potential intelligence for Big Brother.

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