Physicist David Kaiser discusses information proliferation and metaphorical shifts

David Kaiser is a physicist atypically interested in the intersection of his science with politics and culture, about which he has written widely. In the first meeting (in Washington, Connecticut) that preceded the crafting of this book, he commented on the change in how “information” is viewed since Wiener’s time: the military-industrial, Cold War era. Back then, Wiener compared information, metaphorically, to entropy, in that it could not be conserved—i.e., monopolized; thus, he argued, our atomic secrets and other such classified matters would not remain secrets for long. Today, whereas (as Wiener might have expected) information, fake or not, is leaking all over the other Washington, information in the economic world has indeed been stockpiled, commodified, and monetized. This lockdown, David said, was “not all good, not all bad’”—depending, I guess, on whether you’re sick of being pestered by ads for socks or European river cruises popping up in your browser minutes after you’ve bought them. To say nothing of information’s proliferation. David complained to the rest of us attending the meeting that in Wiener’s time, physicists could “take the entire Physical Review. /t would sit comfortably in front of us in a manageable pile. Now we’re awash in fifty thousand open-source journals per minute,” full of god-knows-what. Neither of these developments would Wiener have anticipated, said David, prompting him to ask, “Do we need a new set of guiding metaphors?” 108 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016328