Information isn’t a Substance and Ideas are not Viruses

Look at that image above. Every ring on this “memory plane,” or RAM module, would represent one computer bit. Do those rings look like abstract 1s or 0s to you?

One reason I’ve released my 14,000 word post Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad Faith Adversary is to put our socially constructed perceptions of “information” in its place. Especially its fluid nature; we hear everyday that information “flows” and “spreads” around our mediated environment.

This makes intuitive sense at the basic level of how gossip gets around, or how events or ideas come to everyone’s attention all at once when broadcast and widely discussed. However, at risk of being thought of as a guy who always just states the obvious, there are a few mantras I’d wish I could convince everyone to repeat to themselves daily:

1. Information does not have substance. It is not water or air or earth—it does not surround you or whisk you away.
2. There is nothing behind or inside your screens or your computers besides microelectronic circuitry—for the same reasons The Lone Ranger or Zorro was not hiding inside radio sets in the 1930s.
3. Human communication is not a matter of exchange of ideas—we are not delivering parcels or packages or units of information between each other. When we truly communicate, we are embodied creatures who become each other and change each other and bring each other to exist within the same perceptions of the world around us, in cycles of merging and separating.
4. Art creates new spaces for our perception—and “knowing” that they’re not real changes nothing. Scary films are and roller coasters are still scary even though you know you are safe. The world inside your computer is real to you no matter how many times you say otherwise.
5. Our embodied relation to our world is slowly entrained, through exposure and play, into new equilibria. You could tell a teenager in five minutes how to drive a car—what the pedals do, when to signal or perform shoulder checks, etc.—but you wouldn’t expect them to be immediately good drivers. Change is a slow process, using all of our body and senses; not so much our words or concepts.
6. All media content, all information systems, are artistic illusions creating imaginary spaces for our bodies to inhabit. By using high-level computer interfaces, you teach your body that they are real, just like real-world physical objects are.
7. The only solution to  putting the illusory spaces of information content into its place is to make the real objects more real than the illusions. Our media environment will not turn itself off. Therefore, you must learn what computers are by learning where they came from, the same way you learned where all the other inventions in the world or where you and your family came from. Their story must become part of your story and the story of our world. We are, culturally, in the same position to computers as we’d be in relation to films if nobody ever knew what cameras or film sets were, and if we thought that  actors or directors were wizards to whom the laws of physics did not exist.
8. Tech workers are not tech experts. They are, for the most part, specialists in one tiny, tiny aspect of a vast, overwhelming machine whose history is not taught anywhere. They cannot place the content inside of its container again for you. They are useful for performing a job and getting paid—they cannot speak for any larger pictures, nor can their teachers or bosses. As Princeton history professor Michael S. Mahoney lamented, we’re nowhere close to properly reading the real history of computers, because they are too protean and chameleonic to pin down in our material universe.

The notion of idea virality—that ideas and perceptions are contagious like a virus—was a useful metaphor which has become clichéd and, thus, no longer metaphorical. It rests on this perception of information as a substance which can spread like germs or influenza or ink from a leaky pen. It’s thought to flow through wires and “word of mouth,” as though with a life of its own—reducing humans to mere passive transmitters helpless to resist the urge to share it around.

A lot of this has to do with how 100 years of consumer research and therapeutic culture has impressed the importance of being open, speaking up, sharing what’s on your mind, expressing your emotions, being yourself in a performative, open-book sense. The person who doesn’t immediately share and spread things has some latent capacity for holding back—and that’s bad for market research. That’s bad for training the algorithms. Remaining silent, or keeping opinions private, makes it hard for any individual to be identified for targeted messages or prescribed treatments. From the perspective of the machine, communication between people which does not produce useful “information” is wasted, like natural gas burned off from an oil well. “Why are people talking to each other for nothing when they could be giving us valuable insider info while they do it?” asked the social media corporations.

If information weren’t thought to be a substance, it couldn’t be commodified or mined or shared or spread. If our physical environment seemed to be full of physical objects called computers, instead of feeling like a whirl of swirling information, we wouldn’t be so anxious and off-balance and pressured by the whole world crashing in on us.

If information weren’t talked and experienced like a substance, but as a faint ghost upon a material screen or object called a computer, our bodies would exist in the material space of objects—not the imaginary cyberspaces where our minds become someone else’s business model, and our actions become predictable, and someone else’s fantasies become so tantalizingly seductive as to possess our bodies.

If we stopped talking as though it were ideas, spread like viruses or contagions, which directed people’s actions, we’d start to see that it was the sloppiness of our embodied relation to our material world—taken for granted—which creates the vulnerabilities in our individual and collective psyches.

Such a change starts with mantras and words as I’ve proposed and as I’ve written here. But they only amount to more than mere words when we begin to fill the vast holes in our perception regarding our material environment, and build the perception of the physical nature of of our heavily mediated world laying beneath the shiny illusions which float upon its surface.