The Nature of Information

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1. How Information is Formed: Connection, Intersubjectivity, and Legibility

In common usage, information is often mistaken for raw, unmediated facts about the world. However, as historian Yuval Noah Harari demonstrates in his historical inquiry Nexus, information is not the "raw material of truth." Instead, information is formed through the generation of intersubjective networks—shared symbolic representations, operational categories, and communicative protocols that bind discrete entities into cohesive functional systems.

Connection Over Representation

The primary evolutionary and physical function of information is relational rather than representational:

• Biological Coordination: At the molecular level, DNA does not "represent" an organism in an abstract philosophical sense. Rather, genetic information functions as a set of operative instructions—chemical code that initiates synthesis, coordinates cellular metabolism, and sustains negentropy against physical decay.
• Intersubjective Realities: For human societies, information originated through shared mythologies, spoken rituals, and collective stories (as analyzed in The Social Construction of Reality - A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge). These narratives did not necessarily accurately map astronomical or biological reality, but they successfully synchronized millions of individual behaviors.
• Administrative Legibility: The historical development of writing, ledgers, and numeracy was not driven by poetry or science, but by bureaucratic accounting. Cuneiform tablets recorded tax obligations, grain stores, and military levies. Writing divided an unruly, complex physical environment into standardized administrative units, rendering human populations and resources legible to central authorities.

2. Information vs. Truth: Dismantling the Naive Equivalence

A pervasive assumption of the modern era—often labeled the Naive View of information—posits an automatic, linear progression from data to truth, and from truth to wisdom:

Under this view, political polarization, social delusions, and irrationality are treated merely as deficits of information. The prescribed remedy is simply to supply more facts, widen network bandwidth, and increase data access.

Historical evidence and communication theory refute this assumption entirely. Information does not inherently generate truth.

                  ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                  │              Incoming Information             │
                  └───────────────────────┬───────────────────────┘
                                          │
                    ┌─────────────────────┴─────────────────────┐
                    ▼                                           ▼
       [ Truth-Seeking Pipeline ]          [ Control-Seeking Pipeline ]
       • High verification cost            • Low computational overhead
       • Error-correcting friction         • Immediate behavioral compliance
       • Often destabilizing to power      • Enforces social cohesion & order
                    │                                     │
                    ▼                                     ▼
            Empirical Veracity                       Systemic Equilibrium

The Three Views of Information

Drawing upon Harari's historical taxonomy, societies conceptualize the relationship between information and truth through three distinct paradigms:

1. The Naive View: Posits that information has an intrinsic affinity with truth. Flooding a network with data will naturally cause truth to triumph over falsehood. This view ignores the reality that uncurated information networks frequently reward sensation, outrage, and cognitive ease over arduous verification.
2. The Populist View: A cynical reaction to the naive view, asserting that information is nothing more than a weapon of power and self-interest. In this perspective, objective truth does not exist; every claim is merely propaganda deployed by competing factions to dominate one another.
3. The Systemic / Historical View: Recognizes that information produces two completely distinct outcomes: truth and order. While truth describes empirical realities regardless of human comfort, order requires coordination, shared dogma, and obedience. Because truth is often complex, disruptive, and socially divisive, information systems routinely prioritize order over truth.

Why Truth is Costly and Fragile

Truth possesses an inherent structural disadvantage against sheer information:

• Asymmetric Cost of Production: Establishing empirical truth requires rigorous verification mechanisms, institutional peer review, independent legal inquiry, or cross-validated measurements. By contrast, fabricated narratives, rumors, and self-serving fictions can be generated at near-zero energy cost.
• Disruptive Friction: Objective truth often challenges existing power structures, exposes systemic failures, or invalidates unifying national myths. Unfettered truth threatens institutional equilibrium, whereas tailored narratives preserve operational stability.
• Cognitive Selectivity: As analyzed in Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922), human beings do not react directly to the complex real world, but to a curated "pseudo-environment." Information that flatters existing prejudices and guarantees social belonging is processed far more readily than inconvenient empirical truths.

3. The Functional Teleology of Information: The Will to Control

If information does not naturally aim at truth, what is its primary function? What an organism, institution, or governing system requires from information is the capacity to exercise Control.

Information is actionable signal. Its value is measured not by whether it mirrors a metaphysical absolute, but by whether it allows an agent to steer, stabilize, predict, and manipulate its environment against the disruptive forces of Entropy and chaos.

Cybernetics and Negative Feedback

The formalization of information theory in the mid-twentieth century by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener explicitly decoupled information from semantic meaning and truth:

• Shannon's Mathematical Formulation: In Shannon's theory, information is defined strictly as the reduction of uncertainty—the measure of bits required to resolve a choice between distinct states. It makes no judgment regarding whether the transmitted message is true, false, moral, or trivial.
• Wiener's Cybernetics: Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as "the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine." In cybernetic systems, information exists purely to close the feedback loop:
  1. Sensors sample environmental state variables.
  2. Comparators evaluate discrepancies against a target setpoint.
  3. Effectors actuate corrective forces to restore homeostasis.

In this circular architecture, information is the energetic constraint that prevents a dynamical system from disintegrating. A thermostat does not require an understanding of meteorological science; it requires only the minimum informational difference necessary to toggle a furnace. To an operational system, information is the currency of steering.

Administrative and Imperial Power: Space and Time

In media ecology, Harold Innis demonstrated that communication systems are historically designed to establish monopolies of knowledge and territorial command:

• In Innis (1950) - Empire and Communications and Innis (1951) - The Bias of Communication, Innis illustrated that empires expand by deploying space-binding media (such as lightweight papyrus, paper, and telegraphic codes) to transmit administrative commands across vast distances.
• These networks did not exist to disseminate truth to subjects; their purpose was tax extraction, troop mobilization, resource accounting, and the centralized enforcement of imperial decrees.
• When an administrative bureaucracy gathers information—census data, land registries, credit records—it does so to render citizens predictable, manageable, and extractable. The goal is administrative mastery, not philosophical clarity.

Power, Panopticism, and Modulation

The trajectory of social power reveals how information operates as an evolving technology of human governance:

• Disciplinary Enclosures: As mapped by Michel Foucault, modern power transformed from sovereign spectacle to panoptic surveillance. By compiling dossiers, psychiatric evaluations, school report cards, and criminal records, the disciplinary apparatus observed and molded human bodies into obedient, productive units.
• Societies of Control: In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze diagnosed the transition from physical disciplinary molds to continuous network modulation. Power no longer requires walls and prisons; it operates through digital passwords, tracking metrics, dynamic pricing, and continuous access codes.
• The Dividual: As analyzed in Dividual, the human subject is dismantled into behavioral data points, telemetry, and marketable fragments. Algorithmic governance uses this informational residue not to understand the authentic person, but to modulate their commercial choices and attention in real time (explored further in Simmel and the Attention Economy — Abstraction, Alienation, and Cognitive Capture).

The Manufacture of Consent

When information is deployed across democratic publics, the imperative of control takes precedence over democratic enlightenment. As detailed in Edward Bernays' seminal 1928 work, Propaganda and Chomsky and Herman's The Propaganda Model, modern public relations and mass media operate by filtering, selecting, and shaping the informational flow to "manufacture consent."

The ruling elite and institutional managers deploy information to circumscribe the boundaries of acceptable debate, channel mass anxieties, and engineer consumer desire. The measure of success for such information campaigns is not whether the public arrives at an accurate understanding of geopolitics or economics, but whether social order and capital accumulation proceed without disruptive rebellion.

4. Comparative Matrix: Information as Truth vs. Information as Control

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Resonant Notes

The following notes in the vault share direct thematic, sociological, and philosophical connections with the nature of information and control:

🔴 Power, Surveillance & Control Systems

• Control — The comprehensive ontological, cybernetic, and philosophical treatise examining control across physics, neurobiology, and political theory.
• Postscript on the Societies of Control — Gilles Deleuze's foundational analysis of how power shifted from physical disciplinary enclosures to continuous digital modulation and code-based governance.
• Michel Foucault — Establishes the relationship between power and knowledge (pouvoir-savoir), detailing how panoptic observation produces docile, administrable subjects.
• Dividual — Explores the fragmentation of the individual into discrete, metricized data traces utilized by cybernetic control apparatuses.
• Simmel and the Attention Economy — Abstraction, Alienation, and Cognitive Capture — Analyzes the contemporary monetization and algorithmic modulation of human attention.

🟡 Media Ecology, Propaganda & Social Order

• Innis (1950) - Empire and Communications & Innis (1951) - The Bias of Communication — Harold Innis’s foundational media-ecological studies showing how communication media create monopolies of knowledge to administer geographic space and historical time.
• Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) — Demonstrates how modern governance relies on the manufacture of a simplified "pseudo-environment" to manage the democratic public.
• The Propaganda Model & Edward Bernays' seminal 1928 work, Propaganda — Examine the structural filters and public relations mechanics designed to engineer social consensus and political compliance.
• McLuhan's The Medium is the Message & Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) — Clarifies that the structural properties of communication media alter human perception and social organization far more profoundly than the specific content transmitted.
• The Social Construction of Reality - A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge — Analyzes how human collectives institutionalize intersubjective fictions and symbolic universes to establish social stability.

🟢 Systems Theory, Entropy & Signal Processing

• Entropy — Details the thermodynamic and information-theoretic principles of disorder, illustrating why physical and social systems must expend information and energy to maintain negentropy.
• Signal vs Static - Breaking Down Communication Noise — Applies Shannon's communication model to organizational clarity, distinguishing functional operational signals from disruptive background noise.
• Yuval Noah Harari — Contextualizes Harari’s broader macro-historical work on intersubjective narratives, cognitive revolutions, and human coordination networks.

Backlinks

• Control — The Nature of Information provides the epistemological and informational engine for the systemic mechanisms outlined in the Control guide.
• Postscript on the Societies of Control — Information operates as the primary medium through which continuous modulation and dividual tracking replace spatial confinement.
• Innis (1951) - The Bias of Communication — Illustrates the material embodiment of information as an instrument for managing spatial conquest and bureaucratic rule.
• The Propaganda Model — Demonstrates how institutional information systems prioritize ideological containment and social control over empirical truth.
• Entropy — Serves as the physical and mathematical counterpart to information, representing the baseline chaos that information-based control seeks to resist.

References