The Grand Communication: Where the information frame illuminates and where it flatters

I have run a business on documents that pretend to be pure information. A tender packet, an RFQ, a revised drawing: send it cleanly, receive it cleanly, and the deal is supposed to be done. It never was. The bid I signed carried numbers, and it also carried what I hoped the client meant, what my vendor would actually honor once the site got difficult, and how much trust was left after the last late payment. Treat that packet as bits moving down a channel and you get the wiring right and the deal wrong. I have gotten the deal wrong, more than once, with the paperwork perfect.

The frame did not stay in engineering. Norbert Wiener built cybernetics on it. Konrad Zuse proposed in 1969 that the universe is a digital computer, Edward Fredkin coined digital physics in 1978, and John Wheeler compressed the whole ambition into three words, it from bit. Physics, biology, and cosmology all borrowed Shannon's vocabulary and kept stretching it. Then the objections landed. John Searle noted that if everything computes, a wall performs every computation, and a claim that fits everything has stopped telling anything apart. The biologist Paul Griffiths called genetic information a metaphor in search of a theory.

My claim is smaller than the grand ones, and I think more useful. A frame explains by being selective, and it flatters the moment it is stretched over everything. The question worth asking about any everything-is-X claim is not whether it is grand but where it stops being true.

This is a short book about the everything-is-information and everything-is-computation ideas, the critique of pancomputationalism in plain terms, Shannon entropy and the channel, cybernetics, digital physics and it from bit, and the limits of the information metaphor across biology, physics, and ordinary work.

This book is written from an Indonesian operator's context, though the temptation to let one frame explain everything is not local to any market.