smelly media

Years ago, i remember we got asked at UCL (say 1994) would it be possible to carry a smell over HTTP - The question sounded intriguing (this was before a lot of spam) so we asked for more detail - turned out the sender was a very sensible person who traded fish from Scotland to England, and told us that many experts would check out the fish in the markets in Scotland by smell, to see how fresh they were - so he wonderd could you do this remotely-  of course, there was absolutely no reason why a MIME type, or an HTML markup or whatever couldn't be developed to carry smell, but the main challenges, we suggested, were the analysis at the sender side, and synthesis at the receiver side (analog to digital and vice versa, olfactory devices not being widely available) - of course ,there had been some (unfortunate ) movies in "Snifferama" (e.g. pink flamingos) but those relied on reproducing a single smell that had been pre-canned, as it were. A general solution entailing mass spectrometers and fancy miniaturised chemical factories might be feasible, but likely very expensive (though who knows, now, with 3D RNA printers and airport security tech, maybe more affordable).

So recently, I recalled reading as a kid about an idea for catching people who pee in swimming pools by adding a reagent to the water that reacted with urine to form an indelible dye that would stain their swimming trunks a bright color (a bit like those things they put in bags of money to deter people from stealing them due to being covered in same)...

And I thought of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and their nonsense on the Interweb, and wondered if we could not combine these ideas - if someone continues to emit excremental remarks on the net, social media could add a smell to all their future posts (or at least until they calmed down, or recanted.

Then everyone would know to take what they say with a pinch of salt, because it would be immediately obvious (with appropriate browser and phone/tablet pong-tech support) that there was something fishy about their remarks.