{"id":1540,"date":"2010-12-07T12:10:58","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/?p=1540"},"modified":"2010-12-07T12:23:24","modified_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:23:24","slug":"information-wants-to-be-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/1540\/information-wants-to-be-everywhere","title":{"rendered":"Information Wants To Be Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

I followed an\u00a0interesting link<\/a> from Daring Fireball<\/a>, relating to recent debate about WikiLeaks. Nelson Minar reaffirms the often-stated aphorism, apparently attributed to Stewart Brand<\/a>, that\u00a0“information wants to to be free.”<\/p>\n

I think this is a useful way of thinking about it, but it’s insufficient for describing the way that information actually\u00a0travels.\u00a0Even taking to heart Minar’s reminder that information can’t strictly “want” to do anything, the suggestion that it even tends toward or prefers freedom is not accurate.<\/p>\n

Information is like water: it wants to be everywhere. Unlike say, a person, who will almost universally want to be free. Information in a cage will not rattle the bars, or scramble frantically to reach a just-too-distant key. On the contrary, information is happy to occupy every corner of the cage, and yes, given an opening, to seep out of the cage as well.<\/p>\n

This is truer than ever in the digital age. As individuals we have more capacity than ever to stash away information for our own private use. And we relish it. Consider your private computer archives with their thousands of photographs, unfinished stories, poems that nobody will ever read, and bookmarks that nobody will ever visit. Information is as content to live on the front page of the New York Times as it is to occupy several square millimeters of hard disk surface in a Backblaze server farm.<\/p>\n

For every person who wants to shout information from the rooftops, there are probably twenty who want to keep a nice private stash of it for their own enjoyment. The presumed motivation for information to be either public, private, or undiscovered is imbued by the people who care most deeply for it. Perhaps in this light the truly earth-shattering, profound information does want to be free. But by default, information wants to be everywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I followed an\u00a0interesting link from Daring Fireball, relating to recent debate about WikiLeaks. Nelson Minar reaffirms the often-stated aphorism, apparently attributed to Stewart Brand, that\u00a0“information wants to to be free.” I think this is a useful way of thinking about it, but it’s insufficient for describing the way that information actually\u00a0travels.\u00a0Even taking to heart Minar’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1540"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1551,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540\/revisions\/1551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}