What struck me as such an odd conundrum is what Bill Gurley, author of Above the crowd has to say about this matter. Apparently, there are laws that imply art can be divided into two separate constructs. In one case, art is something physical that you buy. In the second case, art is something that only briefly occupies the circuits of a computer that you own. In his article he quotes from the first sales doctrine:

“The doctrine allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell, lend or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been obtained.”

It’s not at all implied in the law, but the way that companies tend to stream media implies that because I have experienced a work of art, and because I cannot somehow physically recover the bits–the work of art in its basic coded form—I can no longer experience it again. That is strange when one considers that I have a memory—in the very, very personal computer in my head—of said work of art. I could, of course, re-create the work in my own fashion, but that would likely get me sued. This is one of those classic US laws that has become silly over time. I can redraw a lot of art I’ve seen—I’m happy to do it for experimentation, and I wouldn’t ever release a counterfeit. I respect artists too much. Let’s instead assume that information is out and about on the internet and is really “out there“—as if to say, the work of art is not residing on any particular piece of physical hardware at all times. While that’s possible, it’s rare and don’t matter so much. The substrate of a work of art is hardly the point of any work of art.¹ Chances are, in the case of streaming artwork, it resides on your personal property (your computer) for a time (and then your brain). Said work of art certainly uses your resources and, if nothing else, adds to your electricity bill. But then, once it’s over, it’s not yours anymore. What a dodo. I promise you that you will forget which cell phone you had in ’98 but that you will never forget a sanctioned smooth part of the wall of the MOMA labeled Art.² That seems reasonable until such a time that I ensure that my machine copies every frame as it “streams” to property that I own, and physically so. So if I have bits on a DVD, I can trade it, but if I stream it, copy it to my hard drive and give you a copy on a USB disk copy—I bet distribution companies wouldn’t like that so much.

The “first sales doctrine” should include my hard drive—frankly, any equipment owned by me, utilized in the streaming process, should count as a “physical” copy. The business I rented the movie from borrowed my resources (with my consent) and then proceeded to show me a work of art. And I can no longer access it once all the bits have arrived on my equipment? I don’t find that circumstance to be distasteful most of the time, because, let’s face it; most video you can stream isn’t worth watching twice. But this is yet another chunk of the right to copy removed from us and handed over to those who claim that there is such a thing as intellectual property. I rail against the idea of intellectual property quite often and so it should be no surprise that I do not think the separation of a work of art from its medium of distribution should suddenly create brand new rights for the producers of the artwork. It’s not like we’re talking about the artists here—we’re talking about the corporations trying to legalize their business model. Their business is an anomaly that’s only been around for the last few hundred years and it deserves to go down the drain but they would rather ruin Netflix instead.

There are more technical meanings for triangulation (with regard to IT), but I only mean it here as ensuring that your facts have multiple sources at their origination. Daily there are stories transmitted through blogs (and twitter) that are farmed and aggregated on yet more blogs, and often these stories even find their way on to radio and television. These media echo chambers are a sure way to distort an accurate world-view precisely because of the way that humans transmit and value information. Many psychologists argue that one reason that we commonly make conjunction fallacies is because we are inherently “wired” to discount sources of information (Bovens and Hartmann, 2003). As we gather information, we consider its source, and based on that sources’ reliability in the past, we can better consider the evidence. But this process of gathering information is biological in nature and in no way accounts for how we’re getting our information these days, often from multiple sources simply repeating the same information. The repetition is a problem for us, because if we treat each source as independent, we increase the evidence that we have for some event without true justification. ¹ This problem is all the more exacerbated by media outlets that are not objective.

Which brings me to the concept of the information portfolio. When constructing a stock portfolio, it’s important to consider how the stocks in the portfolio balance one another out. What you do not want to have is a portfolio of corporate bank stocks or only stocks in the shipping industry. That kind of clumping can get you into trouble when an industry-wide event occurs. Instead, it’s better to diversify—have a little of each industry. And I tend to try to think of my reading matter in the same way. I’ve yet to find a measure for it, but the central tenet in how I decide what I regularly read—there’s always room for new samples—is if I feel they’ve achieved maximum disagreement. If you can look at your regular reading catalog and you don’t find a lot of disagreement amongst the reporters and pundits, your information portfolio could maybe use some diversification.

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki (of the “The Wisdom of Crowds” fame) makes the assertion that life is getting hard for corporations “in the mushy middle”—high, middle and low being demand markets. The high-end market is one where consumers are concerned with and will pay a premium for quality. Conversely, the low-end markets are made up of consumers that are purely cost-conscious. His two principle points are that reaching consumers with a message of quality is getting harder because of the ready availability of information that critiques products, and also that same ubiquity of information is making it easier to be a niche player. Well, he doesn’t make this second point precisely, but it’s floating around in the article. I think that there is an additional reason why this trend is occurring—one that is on the demand side. The middle class is (and has been) getting squeezed.

It used to be that brands were a signal of quality to consumers, but they are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Or at least they are becoming more like beacons than bat signals—there to help you steer to them, but not as real indicators or anything anymore. He doesn’t cite his information, but he makes the claim that consumers now consider generic store-brand items equally as good as the brand-name items. I know this is true for me in the grocery store, but I don’t know where else this phenomena occurs. Most people don’t know it, but many of the brand name products that you buy are bought by the brands themselves from “private label” companies, usually but not always with exclusive contracts. I know a lot of the wares I used to find on Canal street in Chinatown (NYC) didn’t “fall off a truck,” they were just private label overflow with the brands added illegally. But I digress, and to this point that Surowiecki makes, I think there is a real test to be had in looking at how consumers change their purchasing strategies based on greater quantities of information. I like, specifically, the way he puts it, “In effect, the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price…” That strikes me as a testable behavioral economic proposition.

He also makes the point that because of economies of scale it has become easier for companies that specialize in “quality” of high-end products to do so with a slimmer margin of cost. I’m not sure what he means since these economies of scale are available specifically to large corporations that can leverage their size against their own suppliers. This is true to the extent that small Chinese factories can’t argue too much with a company like Apple or Dell, but does that in anyway ensure quality? I think that’s entirely up to the standards established by the designers and engineers of the contracting company. Dell would love to be considered high-end; they don’t know how to do it. But to this point as well; that’s it’s easier for any company to focus on high-end products, so long as those companies are working in niche markets (or create their niche), they have whole new channels available to them in order to reach new consumers worldwide.¹ To that extent, going after the “middle” consumer isn’t necessary since you can focus on customers with highly particular (or peculiar interests).

As has been pointed out in numerous places (among them, this MIT study the middle class has been and is shrinking. Granted, the middle class and mid-level consumers are not synonymous, but it does mean that there are fewer people overall with large amounts of cash with which to conspicuously consume. Some might be high-end consumers when it comes to power tools, but a low-end consumers when it comes to electronics. Nonetheless, overall, more folks are going to worry about reducing spending, while a few others will have far more to spend on luxury and high-end goods.

So overall, I agree with Surowiecki’s observation that companies would be wise to figure a path out of the middle. But I would also suggest that those companies wanting to avoid mere commodity markets for the more lucrative high-end markets make their number one priority the quality of their goods. The cluetrain has left the station and those not prepared for the overwhelming amount of information available to consumers will be left chomping at thin margins for price competitiveness. Advertising has been the traditional (in the last fifty years or so) way for a company to gain marketshare. With the exponential growth of information channels ahead of us in the next decade advertising will increasingly become noise in the din of public conversation.

“So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet…”

Consider a simple glass. It is not a complex object in shape. And it is not relatively complex into terms of its materials. To simplify it, we can just say that a glass is made out of sand. But that’s not all that makes a glass. To construct a glass requires energy. It also requires information. The glassmaker must know the temperature to heat the glass to, how to cool it, and numerous other things. The more complex the structure of the glass, the more the glassmaker must know. But the information is not transferred to the glass. The energy it takes to sustain the glassmaker, the energy his motions require, that energy is transferred to the glass. Gradually, if that glass were left on a sandy beach somewhere, natural forces would tear it apart. We call this increase in disorder in the universe entropy. Glasses tend to shatter and not form themselves from nothing. It is as if the natural resting state of the universe is total disorder and randomness and everything is moving in that direction. Everything except the glassmaker, that is.

Archaeologists are quite able to find human tools that are tens of thousands of years old. They are able to identify the tools because of the telltale signs of work that were performed on the stones. But the stones don’t possess information. They retain the structure leftover after forces had done their work. And you can further illustrate this fact by not asking an archaeologist if the stone was made by a human but how the human made the tool. A good scientist will tell you that she can only speculate on that, however. And given the simplicity of the task, she might even likely be right. But the reality is, the information on how any particular stone tool was made, is lost forever when the cybernetic organism that built it finally succumbed to entropy—just like the glass or the tool that it made. And its not just us; spider webs follow the same path along with the spiders that made them.

What is this force, then? Or rather, what is this particular locality of a lack of entropy? In fact, one would have to go so far and say anentropy. It’s not really a word, don’t look it up in the dictionary, but I’ve seen it tossed around and I think its fair to refer to life as an anentropic arrangement of the universe. Life seems to do little else in common other than replicate itself in a defense against entropy. If the individual organism cannot be sustained, then parts of it can be used to make new life. And so far as we know, it is an extraordinarily fleeting arrangement of matter and energy. Consider the vast stretches of nothing between galaxies and between stars. Consider the relative densities of stars versus galaxies (stars are much more dense). Consider the acres and acres and acres of barren rock and gas on all the other planets accept for our own. And even on our own, the biosphere, is nothing but a fragile and thin skin on the surface of a massive iron and dirt orb filled with magma. Places in the universe where entropy is decreasing are very hard to come by—even if there are more worlds out there like our own—we are vastly outweighed by a Universe that would prefer to scatter our atoms evenly across the Cosmos.”

Codes, however, do not occur without a designer. Examples of symbolic codes include music, blueprints, languages like English and Chinese, computer programs, and yes, DNA. The essential distinction is the difference between a pattern and a code. Chaos can produce patterns, but it has never been shown to produce codes or symbols. Codes and symbols store information, which is not a property of matter and energy alone. Information itself is a separate entity on par with matter and energy.
—Perry Marshall

I see where Mr. Marshall is coming from and I think it is an enormous misconception that largely stems from Claude Shannon‘s Information Theory. This semantic problem is so embedded in current scientific language that wikipedia even has it wrong in the very first sentence: “Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information.” I’m working on a much more deep analysis of this, but suffice it to say, in brief here, that information does not exist without cognition. There is data “out there” in the universe, but that statement is vastly different from saying that information is “out there.” Information is the transform of some physical entity like a photon into a perception like color. Data, when contextualized, becomes information. There is no information “out there”—that information in the world could be quantified without any cognitive interpretation or context. It is simply not a standalone entity on par with matter and energy the way that Mr. Marshall would have us believe. It is a relationship between matter and energy. It is a construct, a configuration, dependent on energy. Mr. Marshall, for all his intelligence, doesn’t seem to recognize that the universe is rapidly moving towards disorder, not order. Hm. Maybe he thinks God is dying.

He goes on (in the mp3 you can download from the page) to say that DNA is information not unlike the code that’s sent around the internet, but this, too, is a mistake. If it were truly information like that on the Internet then we would have a very clear understanding of what DNA does and how it does it. As it stands now, we are only just beginning to explore that realm after having completed the Human Genome project. In fact, the DNA is data, it is a thing that can be perceived, counted and measured, and we are extracting entirely new information from it. Once again, information does not exist outside of cognition. There was no information in DNA before humans worked out what it did. In fact, there’s no information in DNA now; the information is in all our heads. We’re not sure what that structure is, but it is probably some kind of network of potential electrical charges.

Cellular automata can be used to easily show that some patterns are chaotic while some repeat quite reliably. Even numbers repeat, prime numbers seem to pop up without pattern. This does not in any way indicate that one pattern is information while the other one is not. None of these patterns, repeating or otherwise, contain information without context. Until I tell you that 0 means false and 1 means true, then the string 00101010 has no meaning for you, no information. And even if I told you they meant true or false, true of what? A quote from the web site, says, “Information theory shows us why this is so: In communication systems, Random Mutation is exactly the same as noise, and noise always destroys the signal, never enhances it.” As well, in his lecture, he uses music as an example of something that is designed. But listen to generated music and you’ll find that it is music, but it’s not designed at all.

I think this clarification will seem picky at times, but I’ve come to see that it has extraordinary consequences in my own field, cognitive psychology. We humans, have still really not come around to the idea that we exist on a spectrum of cognition. We are really only the latest in a long line of animals (alive and extinct) that have had and do have the ability to perceive, process and predict. There’s nothing magical about that, no need for a deity to explain it. Once a creature has some mode of perception and a few neurons, that creature has developed a powerful adaptation that literally sets it (it’s brain) apart from its environment; things become thinking-things. And that shift doesn’t require a distinction between patterns and design or noise and information. The universe is data. Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. But that never indicates the existence of information “out there” because information is always in your head.