The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Running Log
I was going through the chapter on the “powers” of written work and damn, this was genuinely interesting. There was a time when language and writing were still babies, and imagining that phase is wild. Writing was not natural back then. It was tangled with speech, memory, and presence.
Putting pen to parchment in this time of barest literacy, he tried to examine the act of writing and the effect of words: “Frequently they speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent.” The idea of writing was still entangled with the idea of speaking. The mixing of the visual and the auditory continued to create puzzles, and so also did the mixing of past and future: utterances of the absent. Writing leapt across these levels. Every user of this technology was a novice. Those composing formal legal documents, such as charters and deeds, often felt the need to express their sensation of speaking to an invisible audience: “Oh! all ye who shall have heard this and have seen!” (They found it awkward to keep tenses straight, like voicemail novices leaving their first messages circa 1980.) Many charters ended with the word “Goodbye.” Before writing could feel natural in itself—could become second nature—these echoes of voices had to fade away. Writing in and of itself had to reshape human consciousness.
I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, [says Socrates] that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.… You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer Unfortunately the written word stands still. It is stable and immobile.
This chapter felt very similar to ideas from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and that connection alone made it insanely fun to read and think about.
Thoughts
One thing this book makes very clear is that humans in the past were basically like us. Curious, confused, easily distracted, and interested in everything. Not smarter, not dumber. Just running on different tech. Technology is the only thing that changed, and it let us operate at higher and higher levels of abstraction even when we do not fully understand what is underneath.
The dictionaries chapter was unexpectedly fun and slightly unhinged in the best way. It shows how flimsy language actually is. One of the earliest dictionaries was written by a deeply eccentric person, and that single individual shaped English for generations. Gleick’s point that spelling works like a compression algorithm really stuck with me. It reduces ambiguity and makes language more efficient, but at the cost of flexibility.
The dynamic relation between the eccentric Babbage and his failed machine, and the divine goddess Lovelace, was fascinating, especially when you read their letters of correspondence, which are genuinely fun.
The history of the telegram was also wild. Watching electricity get converted into structured meaning feels like watching power being invented. The book was much more fun than the Wikipedia page, because there’s context, and that’s awesome. Control over information quickly became control over people. It takes a very specific kind of mind to design systems that anticipate futures that do not exist yet.
I am fully in love with Shannon and plan to read his biography next. I also plan to read his thesis sometime, that apparently had a huge effect on this world? Fun. The quantum information section was heavy, maybe a bit too heavy for the flow of the book, but still very cool.
The final chapter ties everything together. There was a time when knowing very little was normal. Now there is too much to know, too many paths, too many signals. Weirdly, the book does not treat this as a tragedy. It treats it as a condition. It is a strange condition to be in, but not a bad one.
Quotes
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation. When the head on a Turing machine erases one square of the tape, or when an electronic computer clears a capacitor, a bit is lost, and then heat must be dissipated. In Szilárd’s thought experiment, the demon does not incur an entropy cost when it observes or chooses a molecule. The payback comes at the moment of clearing the record, when the demon erases one observation to make room for the next. Forgetting takes work.
“All colours will agree in the dark,” as Francis Bacon said in 1625.
Quantum information is like a dream—evanescent, never quite existing as firmly as a word on a printed page. “Many people can read a book and get the same message,” Bennett says, “but trying to tell people about your dream changes your memory of it, so that eventually you forget the dream and remember only what you said about it.”♦ Quantum erasure, in turn, amounts to a true undoing: “One can fairly say that even God has forgotten.”
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” — T. S. Eliot
He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book - John Donne
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver,” says Fred Dretske.
Beautiful closing
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.