New Criticals

Information is essential to our discussion of shifting definitions of labor, new forms of production and manufacture, modes of digitization, and computer-machines. The earliest intersection of information and technology is in the field of cybernetics, computation and mathematics, which influenced certain developments of the first computers and, later on, the early internet. Let’s briefly unpack the term to better understand it, looking for a deeper and more rich understanding of a term that, due to its superabundance in contemporary discourse, is very nearly an empty signifier, susceptible to ideological cooptation by the ever-shifting needs of capitalism.

Information has two basic, yet intriguing characteristics. It is, at least partly “less-than-material,” and its content is involved with a communication or communicative act, in the sense that information arises during some (now multivariate and heavily mediated) process that tends to move from one place/person/thing to another. [4] In that way, information is both an object that is measurable and quantifiable, yet constantly threatening to or succeeding in escaping boundaries – its intangibility, ease of reproducibility and volatility are central to its essence. Information can have a material quality, but materiality is non-essential to information. More "primitive" forms of information (for example, biological information) possess a material character, but it is un-readable in any conventional way; blood contains information in the form of DNA, but how do we read it? The fundamental precariousness of information is revealed by a cursory glance into informational dynamics and two aspects of information: the signal and the noise.