the future cannot be the same as the past. The universe could even be careening toward a “heat death,” some far-off time when the total stock of energy had uniformly dispersed, achieving a state of maximum entropy, after which no further change could occur.
If information gua entropy could not be conserved, then Wiener concluded it was folly for military leaders to try to stockpile the “scientific know-how of the nation in static libraries and laboratories.” Indeed, “no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing.” Any such efforts at secrecy, classification, or the containment of information would fail, Wiener argued, just as surely as hucksters’ schemes for perpetual-motion machines faltered in the face of the second law of thermodynamics.
Wiener criticized the American “orthodoxy” of free-market fundamentalism in much the same way. For most Americans, “questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American criterion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market.” Indeed, “the fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold;” most people, he observed, “cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.” Wiener considered this view to be as wrong-headed as rampant military classification. Again he invoked Shannon’s insight: Since “information and entropy are not conserved,” they are “equally unsuited to being commodities.”
Information cannot be conserved—so far, so good. But did Wiener really have Shannon’s “information” in mind? The crux of Shannon’s argument, as Weaver had emphasized, was to distinguish a colloquial sense of “information,” as message with meaning, from an abstracted, rarefied notion of strings of symbols arrayed with some probability and selected from an enormous universe of gibberish. For Shannon, “information” could be quantified because its fundamental unit, the bit, was a unit of conveyance rather than understanding.
When Wiener characterized “information” throughout Human Use, on the other hand, he tilted time and again to a classical, humanistic sense of the term. “A piece of information,” he wrote—tellingly, not a “bit” of information—“in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous common stock of information.” This was why “schoolboys do not like Shakespeare,” he concluded: The Bard’s couplets may depart starkly from random bitstreams, but they had nonetheless become all too familiar to the sense-making public and “absorbed into the superficial clichés of the time.”
At least the information content of Shakespeare had once seemed fresh. During the postwar boom years, Wiener fretted, the “enormous per capita bulk of communication”—ranging across newspapers and movies to radio, television, and books—had bred mediocrity, an informational reversion to the mean. “More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value.” “Heaven save us,” he pleaded, “from the first novels which are written because a young man desires the prestige of being a novelist rather than because he has
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