My wife has recently become a fan of saying “everything is information” when she hears a juicy bit of gossip. What she means when she says it is something along the lines of “what you’ve just said feels like it could be a fragment of something scandalous, so I’m gonna file it away for later, cheekily.” And she’s of course being funny when she says it—it’s the sort of line that they would say on Ru Paul or Summer House—but unfortunately she’s started to roll out this new phrase while I’ve been reading The Crying of Lot 49. So instead of having a normal reaction to someone saying something cute and innocuous like “everything is information,” like, I don’t know, laughing or just continuing the conversation normally, I’ve found myself in a mental state of something like befuddled catatonia. While the conversation continues I get mentally trapped in a place where my eyes face opposite directions, my teeth start chattering, and I foam at the mouth in a state like either religious ecstasy or secret government splinter cell activation.
If such a strange intrusion in the way you go through life and interact with language sounds like fun and not like a reason to consult a general practitioner then I would strongly recommend reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
The thrust of CoL49 is largely the same: that everything is information. And over the course of the novel it becomes clear that information can be harnessed and controlled by those savvy enough to the power of information that they can use it to bend history. Some are particularly tuned to the telluric lines of information that flow through the world. They can see the nodes in the constellations of power and leverage that information to get what they want and shape the world to their will. Part of this process means that everything that isn’t information must become information. Unsightly ideas or places or people that find themselves existing in nuanced places must have their middles evicted so that they can more uniformly snap to the digital grid that has been built to overlay our world. Spectra must be schizzed into Schrödinger-like choice, forced to choose between their two heads: 0 or 1, false or true, slow or fast. And there are demons outside of the system who control the partitioning.
But wait, Pynchon wasn’t the first person to figure out that everything is information. He wasn’t even the first author. I’m looking at how John begins his testament to the life of Jesus Christ. Old Jack seemed to know that he was running anchor in a race already run three times, so he decided to spice his telling up a bit and ended up with what I consider to be the most interesting leg in the tetralogy. Here’s how he starts things:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Heavy stuff right off the bat. Certainly more involved than joking about new phrases your wife picked up. But now we’re seeing that from the start of Western literature a lot of people have had this idea that everything is information. The Bible is full of weird little nods like this to information. Jesus is the Word made manifest. Angels come from the word άγγελος, which means message or messenger (honestly just don’t remember which and I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment, but it’s one of those). And then the main time that Jesus shared his ability to perform miracles it was to give all of the disciples what other power than that of the flaming tongue—the ability to speak any language so they could continue to proclaim the Word to anyone anywhere.
That particular gift of language is pretty pivotal to The Crying of Lot 49. The disciples were given this gift 50 days after Easter/Passover. So CoL49 explicitly exists in a space that’s just one unit shy of revelation. There’s a stunting to the flow of information. It can only come from some phenomenon or—let’s be real, it’s Pynchon after all—some conspiracy strong enough to stop the flow of information itself in its tracks. This is ultimately what CoL49 is about: the networks of people and business interests that exist outside the flow of information who would try to manufacture moments of order in an otherwise organic/chaotic system of data floating about.
To midwife this idea of information control into the world Pynchon uses an engineering metaphor that deals with both thermodynamics and information theory: Maxwell’s Demon. Stick with me because I won’t go into much depth. The gist of Maxwell’s Demon is that he’s a little guy who sits on the outside of a box of particles putting the slow particles on one side of the box and the fast particles on the other side of the box. This results in a localized decrease in entropy (chaos). Now there is a region of fast particles (hot) and a region of slow particles (cold). This creates a gradient that can be used to power a piston and generate energy. All without doing any work.
If that sounds kind of…impossible…then don’t worry, here’s Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of CoL49 sharing that apprehension:
“Sorting isn’t work? […] Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you.”
But, well, whether they require any input work or not, demons not unlike the one that James Clerk Maxwell described in his thought experiment operate in our world all the time. They sort everything they can get their hands on into binary systems, cutting off the rough edges of the world and snapping it to a grid. This lets them remove any hint of nuance or ambiguity, normally the region where intelligence lives, now given way to “intelligence” that lives outside the system and must be invoked when a moment of predictability is required by shareholder interests.
This “intelligence” lives in shadow, pruning reality where it may. Sometimes it wears olive fatigues in Caribbean operations to oust heads of state and sell fruit. Sometimes it goes on night raids in the deserts and mountains of insurgence, dressed in bone charcoal black or else in perverted pantomime, hacking villagers to pieces to fight Terror. Even today it can’t help but appropriate Native American imagery for its dark mythology, gesturing to a brutality that can only be a reflection. All in pursuit of a world that is pragmatic and programmable. Thomas Pynchon saw the attempts that these cabals made to wend the flows of information to the will of the elite as they swirled around the events of John Kennedy’s death and the package and sale of land in the United States.
“Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Nar-ciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”
Perhaps if enough counterfeit messages are scrawled in charcoal burned from the bones of the innocent, a message of confession will reveal itself over the hollow story they keep telling us. Perhaps this timeline of revelation is taken into account by the architects of these stories as they forge the medium for their messages. Perhaps they simply don’t care about their eventual confession as long as it takes sufficient time for the ink to reveal itself.
And while the demons of Capital perform their black miracles, hoping to confuse the Angel of Death, we will sit in holy waiting. We will tell each other cryptic tales and let metaphor be our lamp through the strange folds of history and conspiracy and information. If informational entropy can be momentarily controlled, then perhaps its inevitable return can provide a comforting metaphor since, of course, everything is information.
“The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. […] She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.”