“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.” 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 all in your head.

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

“Oh nooo.  I’ve been using the internet and now I can’t concentrate.”  It’s not the net, it’s you.  Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  The net doesn’t make you unfocused, you do.  I’ve been using the web since it was and although I went through a period where I realized I was just too distributed through various channels, I got ahold of myself and started prioritizing and organizing. I learned to use tabs while browsing.  I got NetNewsWire.  I stopped reading everything right away and started building chronologies of stuff TBR (to be read) on del.icio.us and now Laterloop.

Not only can I still read books, I read books that are longer than human history.  That’s right, I put that link there to distract you!  You can’t resist clicking on it, can you!?  No, because the web and email have made you an unfocused idiot.  The problem here, Carr—the only problem—is that while you are literate, you are not web literate.  It’s changing the way you think because you don’t know how to control it.  It’s no different than television, folks, either you know when to turn it off, or you’re a couch potato.  It ain’t the TV that’s the problem.

JESUS FUCK STOP IT I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS??? EVERYTHING YOU CREATE IS CANCER AND MADNESS

Ok. Now that that’s out of the way, I will attempt to comment on this article over at Wired about the major label’s new strategy: everybody pays for all the music! That’s right. Now the RIAA has decided that they can make ISPs charge a fee to their customers in exchange for access to “a database of all known music.” Where does one begin? First of all, one begins by pointing out to the author of the article that the record companies do not own all known music. Duh!

Exaggerated claims aside, this plan is basically a plan to turn the major labels into clearing houses, which, let’s face it, that’s what they really have always wanted to be. Doing marketing and promoting is hard! Why can't we just collect money from musicians and customers! I hate coming up with ideas.. And ask yourself this: will the fees be optional? Of course not! This is one of those brilliant plans that is utterly dependent on everyone else’s cooperation. And that’s worked AMAZINGLY well in the past. Most people demand that they be able to pay for the tripe crap that the industry unfailingly continues to waste its investments on because everyone knows that people who pirate music shoot guns and do drugs.

Moreover, this move will really haul the new talent in. Let’s see, you’re a musician and you want to get your music out to people. Do you hand it over to a giant conglomeration who will then give you some teeny tiny percentage that they’ve bullied out of ISPs, OR you sell it on your web site or maybe through iTunes with services like Tuencore?

Come on!

But there is reason to rejoice because, let’s face it, this is really just surrender. Apparently there is not an ounce of creative thought remaining in these five lumbering behemasloths. They can’t figure out decent new formats, can’t figure out decent marketing strategies or maybe team up and work with a Digg for music. They’ve got nothing, so they’re turning to begging. It’s sad, but saccharine. R.I.P. big five. Your likes will not be missed.