Our ability to transmit meaningful messages builds on the prior existence of meaningless forms of physical order. These meaningless forms of order are what information truly is.*

The difference between the world where Iris was born and the world of early hominids resides not in the physicality of matter but in the way in which matter is arranged.

it is common for people to confuse the value of products with the value of the knowledge and knowhow needed to make them, or to confuse knowledge and knowhow with ideas.

Social networks help discriminate among strangers by separating complete strangers from those with whom we share mutual friends or acquaintances. That’s what makes a house party different from a bar. In a house party people know that they must have friends in common. In a bar, that may not be the case.

Information, when understood in its broad meaning as physical order, is what our economy produces. It is the only thing we produce, whether we are biological cells or manufacturing plants. This is because information is not restricted to messages. It is inherent in all the physical objects we produce: bicycles, buildings, streetlamps, blenders, hai

Uncommon configurations of atoms, like a Bugatti or a guitar, embody more information than more common configurations of the same atoms, even though technically (and Shannon is right about this) communicating an ordered configuration and communicating a disordered configuration require the same amount of bits if we ignore the correlations that are

a parsimonious way of understanding the islands of central planning that we know as firms is to search for the point at which the cost of transactions taking place internally within the firm equals the cost of market transactions. When the external transactions become less costly than the internal transactions, firms stop growing, since it is bette

Another distinction that I should mention up front is the one between information as something and information about something, such as the information we transmit in a message. Think of a car. I can tell you that my car is red and has a six-speed manual transmission and a 1.6 liter engine. This is all information about my car, but it is not the in

Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both produced successful theories of motion, which are technically time-reversible.2 They explain the motion of cannonballs, planets, and satellites without a clear distinction between where an object is and where it is going. This symmetry, which is true for simple systems, fails to explain why lions eat and digest