Information Wants to Be Free . . . Again

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Information Wants to Be Free . . . Again

5/4/2005

By Terry Calhoun

IN A DIGITAL INFORMATION AGE, WHAT D'ES 'FREE' MEAN? UNRESTRAINED? AT NO COST? BOTH?

I recall once, during my lawyering years, getting out of my car on a windy day. I set my legal briefcase on the trunk of my rental car and opened it, and then the wind gusted and hundreds of sheets of fairly important pieces of paper blew away like a flock of magician’s pigeons.

I wonder if that’s how the management of a company like LexisNexis feel when they hear that personal information about hundreds of thousands of people has "flown the coop," so to speak? The analogy breaks down and d'es strange things to legal notions of copyright, of course, when you realize that, unlike my briefcase, the LexisNexis computers still had everything in them that was there before.

The origin of the phrase, "Information wants to be free," is with Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, C'Evolution Quarterly, and the pioneering online community The WELL. He coined it in 1984 at the first Hackers’ Conference, saying:

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." (Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49.) (Note: At the time, "hackers" meant "programmers.")

John Perry Barlow analogized that since we have no good solution to the challenge of securing digital information and that we are rapidly digitizing everything possible, we are on a sinking ship which is leaking information out from within and taking on water from without.

"Legal efforts to keep the old boat floating are taking three forms: a frenzy of deck chair rearrangement, stern warnings to the passengers that if she g'es down, they will face harsh criminal penalties, and serene, glassy-eyed denial." (Wired Magazine, March 1994, “The Economy of Ideas”)

Every time I read these kinds of statements from more than 10 years ago I internally shake my head at their brilliance and my – at the time at least – cluelessness. Sigh.

But I have a thought of my own to add to the discussion. I regularly hear statements about how each person today consumes so many times more information than people did hundreds of years ago. Some would consider me a poster child for that thought, since I read and write and browse the Web all day long and then go home and read the Ann Arbor News, the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, USA Today, and the New York Times (but not the sports pages). Then I often read a novel and have averaged about one book a day for just about 50 years now.

But I just don’t think it’s true that the average human (or even me) nowadays consumes (more precisely takes in, it’s still all out there, except for olfactory information, which is based on actual physical substances which get used up as we receive the information they carry) more information than humans hundreds of years ago, and here’s why.

First, there is no doubt that we have far more bits and pieces and kinds of information available to us that ever before. But it’s pretty likely that without physical and electronic augmentation of the human brain that we do not have yet, that human brains have not only a ‘carrying capacity’ in terms of storage, but a number of variable limitations on incoming information bandwidth.