http://mv.lycaeum.org//M2/filterz.html
notes and thoughts about: information, wealth and scarcity
19-DEC-94:
The increase in interconnectivity due to computer networks and the increased velocity of information neccesitates filtering of incoming messages, and selective responding. This effect is identical to the flood of neural messages, both sensory and inferential, encountered during the psychedelic experience.
A measure of confusion is the average inferential distance between any two facts. An index of information velocity is the average interconnecting distance between any two nodes or pieces of information on a network.
World Wide Web, for example, is a hypertext system that links multimedia and text documents distributed throughout the global information network into a chaotic but unified tangle of inference and digression.
(cf. Michael Shamberg's notion of an information economy.
Paco Xander Nathan's notion of an economy of attention.
Scotto's notion of a community as an attractor for ideas.)
Where one draws the boundary of ownership. These boundaries are arbitrary, contrived descriptions. Bluffs, essentially.
Intellectual property as a form of artificial scarcity. Information
is negentropic by definition (measured as negative entropy, see
Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communications"). Since information can be copied without limit and without reducing the original "supply" from which it is copied, information can never be scarce unless it is deliberately withheld.
Our relationship to this unbounded abundance of information resembles our relationship with nature before the invention of agriculture: an information economy is a hunting-gathering economy.
Money is stored violence, tokens of a wealth gradient maintained by armed force. The world DOES owe you a living, but it can't fullfill its contract because it's occupied territory.
It is not information that is scarce, but sources of new information that are scarce. If an idea does not exist, it cannot be copied. If value is a function of scarcity and demand, the only thing valuable in an information economy is the means to create new ideas: novelty.
(McKenna's model of time as the influx of novelty into history)
Entropy is central to the thermodynamic model of time. Dissipatives systems (cf:Ilya Prigogine) export entropy to increase their level of complexity. Exporting entropy is isomorphic to importing negative entropy, that is, importing information.
(Buckminster Fuller's notion of ephemerialization)
Information, in the form of design intelligence, allows one to do more with less. The net perceived effect is a decrease in the amount of material or energy required to accomplish a given function. This represents a decrease in demand, and a reciprocal perceived increase in supply. Here again, information acts negentropically.
Information is neither matter nor energy. It violates the laws of
thermodynamics that govern the behavior of matter and energy.
Yet, information is capable of transforming matter and energy into novel configurations that are self-propogating. (Rupert Sheldrake's notion of morphogenetic fields) Since information is non-physical, it may also be unconstrained by the laws of general and special relativity: information may travel freely across space at faster-than-light velocities, both forward and backwards across time.
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SubMemes:
Paco Xander Nathan: filtering incoming messages due to response time required.
Aldous Huxley: reducing valve theory of consciousness/psychedelics
Shamburg(Gene Youngblood?): Computers are the LSD of business...
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4JAN95:
Since value is a function of scarcity relative to demand, and wealth
is a function of abundance, wealth and value are opposites: As abundance increases, value decreases. The more wealth there is to go around, the less precious it is. The definition of wealth as "surplus" also supports this notion: Surplus is what you can afford to trade or give away - surplus is that for which its posessor has no demand.
(cf. the Native American concept of wealth: persons who "give away" are considered wealthy; hording is preceived as a symptom of poverty. Traces of this concept also emerge in industrial European culture: Philanthropy is typically an activity for the wealthy.)
Novel information is scarce: for example, software development is still a matter of hand-crafting, and requires enormous innovation and skill on the parts of software designers and programmers. Actual value, in this case, consists of the network of working relationships embodied in software and engineering firms, not the organized information (software) they produce. Data is not wealth, the capacity to give form to novel information, programming, is wealth; clearly the goose is more valuable than the golden egg. As more of the process of programming becomes
automated, Metaprogramming will come to represent wealth.
Metaprogramming is scarcer than programming by definition. A product will always be more abundant than any process that repeatedly produces it. In a way, this is a redefinition of wealth=capital; an assertion that it is the means of production, not the product, that embody real wealth.
notes and thoughts about: information, wealth and scarcity
19-DEC-94:
The increase in interconnectivity due to computer networks and the increased velocity of information neccesitates filtering of incoming messages, and selective responding. This effect is identical to the flood of neural messages, both sensory and inferential, encountered during the psychedelic experience.
A measure of confusion is the average inferential distance between any two facts. An index of information velocity is the average interconnecting distance between any two nodes or pieces of information on a network.
World Wide Web, for example, is a hypertext system that links multimedia and text documents distributed throughout the global information network into a chaotic but unified tangle of inference and digression.
(cf. Michael Shamberg's notion of an information economy.
Paco Xander Nathan's notion of an economy of attention.
Scotto's notion of a community as an attractor for ideas.)
Where one draws the boundary of ownership. These boundaries are arbitrary, contrived descriptions. Bluffs, essentially.
Intellectual property as a form of artificial scarcity. Information
is negentropic by definition (measured as negative entropy, see
Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communications"). Since information can be copied without limit and without reducing the original "supply" from which it is copied, information can never be scarce unless it is deliberately withheld.
Our relationship to this unbounded abundance of information resembles our relationship with nature before the invention of agriculture: an information economy is a hunting-gathering economy.
Money is stored violence, tokens of a wealth gradient maintained by armed force. The world DOES owe you a living, but it can't fullfill its contract because it's occupied territory.
It is not information that is scarce, but sources of new information that are scarce. If an idea does not exist, it cannot be copied. If value is a function of scarcity and demand, the only thing valuable in an information economy is the means to create new ideas: novelty.
(McKenna's model of time as the influx of novelty into history)
Entropy is central to the thermodynamic model of time. Dissipatives systems (cf:Ilya Prigogine) export entropy to increase their level of complexity. Exporting entropy is isomorphic to importing negative entropy, that is, importing information.
(Buckminster Fuller's notion of ephemerialization)
Information, in the form of design intelligence, allows one to do more with less. The net perceived effect is a decrease in the amount of material or energy required to accomplish a given function. This represents a decrease in demand, and a reciprocal perceived increase in supply. Here again, information acts negentropically.
Information is neither matter nor energy. It violates the laws of
thermodynamics that govern the behavior of matter and energy.
Yet, information is capable of transforming matter and energy into novel configurations that are self-propogating. (Rupert Sheldrake's notion of morphogenetic fields) Since information is non-physical, it may also be unconstrained by the laws of general and special relativity: information may travel freely across space at faster-than-light velocities, both forward and backwards across time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
SubMemes:
Paco Xander Nathan: filtering incoming messages due to response time required.
Aldous Huxley: reducing valve theory of consciousness/psychedelics
Shamburg(Gene Youngblood?): Computers are the LSD of business...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
4JAN95:
Since value is a function of scarcity relative to demand, and wealth
is a function of abundance, wealth and value are opposites: As abundance increases, value decreases. The more wealth there is to go around, the less precious it is. The definition of wealth as "surplus" also supports this notion: Surplus is what you can afford to trade or give away - surplus is that for which its posessor has no demand.
(cf. the Native American concept of wealth: persons who "give away" are considered wealthy; hording is preceived as a symptom of poverty. Traces of this concept also emerge in industrial European culture: Philanthropy is typically an activity for the wealthy.)
Novel information is scarce: for example, software development is still a matter of hand-crafting, and requires enormous innovation and skill on the parts of software designers and programmers. Actual value, in this case, consists of the network of working relationships embodied in software and engineering firms, not the organized information (software) they produce. Data is not wealth, the capacity to give form to novel information, programming, is wealth; clearly the goose is more valuable than the golden egg. As more of the process of programming becomes
automated, Metaprogramming will come to represent wealth.
Metaprogramming is scarcer than programming by definition. A product will always be more abundant than any process that repeatedly produces it. In a way, this is a redefinition of wealth=capital; an assertion that it is the means of production, not the product, that embody real wealth.
), principle that information itself is neither matter nor energy, they seem to think that by "violating" the laws that govern matter and energy that somehow information holds a special place in the world around us.