Book Review: The Information
Thoughts on James Gleick's "The Information".
At the beginning of the year, I made it my mission to read far less. But I also made it my mission to read books of greater depth. Why? I sought to tune my channel, eradicate a vast portion of the informational noise that exists today and hopefully come up with better “takes”. We live in a world filled with Too Much Information. It’s increasingly difficult for one to fixate on what is actually important. The first book of great depth I would leap into this year would be “The Information” by James Gleick. Gleick is an amazing writer of the explainer sort. Through this book, I hoped to learn about how we came to live in a world with such ubiquitous and dare I say, cheap information.
The essence of it all
The Information is a story— a narrative— about how we tell ourselves tales. It’s also a narrative about how we came to understand how we tell ourselves said tales. In this understanding, we found the ability to transcend apparent physical limitations and grant ourselves access to near-infinite amounts of information. But the path it would take to get here was far less straightforward. Gleick highlights this in every chapter with a new perspective that shows us the gradual growth in means through which humanity sought to understand and create information.
Ease of access.
Just centuries ago we could have only dreamt of the ease of access we have to information. Access to information through communication had been mostly relegated to sounds or oral communication. More complex iterations of this primal medium had been the elegant use of drums for communication by various sub-Saharan tribes, a fact unknown to Europeans until the early 1700s. As Gleick narrates, the drums had a certain verbosity about them.
They could not just say “corpse” but would elaborate: “which lies on its back on clods of earth.” Instead of “don’t be afraid,” they would say, “Bring your heart back down out of your mouth, your heart out of your mouth, get it back down from there.”
It is with this that Gleick begins his telling of the story of the dynamism with which humanity had told itself stories.
“Writing” as James later explains, was not merely a way of detailing our thoughts, it was a medium that encouraged and modified the way we thought as well. The proliferation of words required the categorization thereof. And in doing so we elevated our modes of thinking, creating various fields that would further help humanity transcend. Along this line, logic was born.
The ambitious aren’t always rewarded
The story of information is also one of “moonshots” with its most thrilling and somewhat heartbreaking one being Gleick’s telling of the intellectual partnership between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, a man whom almost no one knew what did, but who still emanated grandeur. Gleick’s description of Babbage details him as the quintessential tinkerer. One who dissolves even the most random things to their smallest essence and derives from them applicable insights.
An American Eulogist described him this way:
“He showed great desire to inquire into the causes of things that astonish childish minds,” … “He eviscerated toys to ascertain their manner of working.”
Ada herself an intellectual beast sought nothing more than respect in a male-dominated world. For Charles, it was the desire to rid humanity of the mundanity of manual numerical computation. In each other, they found an intellectual haven like none other and would together embark on a journey to create a machine of truly extraordinary significance: The Analytical Engine.
They would sadly not get to see the fruition of said endeavor. Ada would die of cancer, a disease whose severity had been hidden from her by her caretakers. Charles would die too with the rest of the world seeing his ambition as a great waste of resources— at least at the time.
This machine would be the first attempt at building what has become the modern computer, the machine whose invention had been introduced with no respect to the prior attempt of Lovelace and Babbage. I felt it bittersweet that we currently have the beauty and power of the modern computer while the efforts of those who had largely launched this revolutionary device had died in such an unappreciative manner.
In his death, Gleick tells us of Babbage’s desire to live in the future, words that truly saddened me.
Some years before his death, he told a friend that he would gladly give up whatever time he had left if only he could be allowed to live for three days, five centuries in the future.
It was in this that I was reminded that intelligence and ambition aren’t always rewarded. It needn’t have been an external reward either, but perhaps even the satisfaction of knowing that the mundanity of numerical computation had been made rather “unmundane”. That it was through machines that “crunch numbers” that we have been able to reach the Moon as well as land and fly helicopters on planets far beyond our own.
“Information” as a concept was created.
Gleick goes on to tell us of Claude Shannon, a man who albeit not necessarily being a scientist— he was an engineer—created intellectual work of such significance that it be that very work that enables what I post.
Gleick explains that Shannon sought to create a complete theory of communication. One that would allow a mathematical manipulation of said theory. It would be because of this theory that we would find ourselves engulfed in a world of bits— or the fact that the word “bit” exists in the first place.
This abstraction was also not without cost. With this computational dexterity, however, we accidentally put ourselves in a situation where the essence of information—its meaning, became an optional feature. This of course has been gradually replaced by the sheer quantity of it we have today.
This exchange of quantity for meaning had been predefined by Shannon himself, who felt the definition of “meaning” too subjective to be placed in any mathematical context.
The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose. Introducing The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon had to be blunt. He simply declared meaning to be “irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Forget human psychology; abandon subjectivity.
But that the meaninglessness defined or rather left undefined by Shannon would permeate past its abstract constraints and would find itself in our lives whether it be through algorithmic sorting or Wikipedia, is rather fascinating, if not scary. Abstractions aren’t meant to be taken as reality itself. They are models of reality. It would happen to be that Shannon’s abstraction of the essence of communication and in so doing his quantization of the nature of information would have strong bidirectional consequences. A testament to the power of Shannon’s work. Soon everything became bits. Gene sequences, letters, numbers, visualizations, everything.
There’s a lot to be learned from this book.
In this book Gleick, sometimes heavy to read— I can’t lie sometimes it did get quite verbose— Gleick makes it apparent to me that the world of today was far from linear. That inventions like the telephone may have never come to fruition had we abided by a few business people’s definitions of what counted as “useful”. That ambition may never get rewarded. That it often takes us asking really simple questions to truly change the world.
I’d recommend this book(not an amazon referral btw) to anyone seeking to know more about the origins of the bit-ridden world overall and especially those not fearful of engaging in somewhat technically difficult readings occasionally.
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