Sci-fi short film imagines a world without paper

What would our world be like without paper? According to the renegade scientist in “Scattered,” a sci-fi short film adapted from a story by author Ken MacLeod, it’d be a place freed from the restrictions of human history. Without the original source documents, mankind would have a clean slate. In this world, “we look to the future, not the past,” and some sort of modern human existence could be created based on all of the advancements that have brought us to where we are today.

It’s an intriguing idea that’s well explored in “Scattered,” which is the graduation project for two students from London’s MetFilm School. The original Ken MacLeod story, “The Surface of Last Scattering,” was published in the sci-fi anthology TFSF, which comes from the MIT Technology Review.