Extracted from How We Disappeared: A Personal Information Story by Thomas S. Mullaney with permission of WW Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2026 by Thomas S. Mullaney.

What is information?

It is a word to which we have become accustomed and unimaginative. “How much information,” we asked, “can this hard drive store?” Or “The average person has more information at their fingertips than ever,” we commented. Information, it seems, is a kind of ethereal fluid, quantifiable like water or gasoline.

Even more restricted is our use of the term information technologies. This phrase evokes devices and machines: laptops, flat-screen TVs, QR codes, ChatGPT. Elegant things. For history buffs, perhaps our scope will expand to include the book, telegraphy, Braille, radio, and other computer systems of the pre-computer era. Either way, an information technology is some type of object, tool or machine, and information is the liquid material that it channels, stores, retrieves or produces.

This clinical understanding of information derives largely from the work of Claude Shannon, the brilliant mathematician often called the father of the modern information age. In The mathematical theory of communicationIn his groundbreaking 1948 work, Shannon defined information with impressive precision and elegance. Information was something transmitted: a message sent from a source to a destination through a channel. End point. Shannon’s information was indifferent to semantic meaning: it could be anything from a string of random digits to a love letter. The central issue concerned “the reliable transmission of messages over noisy communication channels.”

Shannon is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of entropy to information science, transplanting it from physics as a way of quantifying information. Specifically, Shannon’s goal was to quantify the uncertainty of any given message. He asked: How many binary, yes-or-no questions would it take to determine the content of a given message, with each symbol of that message represented by the toss of a coin? The more unpredictable a message was, the more guesswork it required and therefore the more costly it was from the point of view of a communications system.

Consider two sequences of five characters, the first random and the second a common English word: “XQZJP” and “LIGHT.” Now imagine trying to deduce the content of these messages using a series of fifty-fifty brute force guesses. Since the first sequence is a random assortment of letters, each character has an equal chance of being any of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. With a binary coin flip question that divides the total number of possibilities in half each time, it would take an average of 4.7 coin flips to discover each individual letter, or an average of 23.5 to discover the entire message. For Shannon, “XQZJP” has high entropy because it is high in uncertainty.

However, as devotees of Wordle’s daily puzzles know, the word light It’s not random. It is due to certain types of statistical irregularities in the English language. when the letter I is found at the beginning of a word, for example, the next letter is much more likely to be a Yo. instead of a b or a unknown. Because of the relative predictability of English, it takes on average only 1.5 coin flips to determine any given symbol, or only 7.5 yes-or-no questions to decipher the word “LIGHT,” much less than the 23.5 required for the random string. “LIGHT” is low entropy, because it is low in uncertainty.

It is impossible to overstate Shannon’s impact on our contemporary world. By reducing the concept of information to an abstract and quantifiable measure, what he called entropyor the measurement of uncertainty: Engineers could finally approach the core elements of modern telecommunications (encryption, transmission, error correction, compression, and more) as a formal science built on the foundations of mathematical certainty. Today, every compressed file, every transmitted video, and every encrypted message depends on Shannon entropy to ensure that information is transmitted as efficiently and reliably as possible, minimizing wasted space and ensuring message arrival intact. His work laid the foundations for the digital age.

However, Shannon’s precision and sterility came at a conceptual cost: an editing room floor filled with deleted scenes from the history of information technology. Simply put, information technology is not sleek or clean, and never has been. They are slimy, messy and strange.

Let’s play a guessing game. I’ll describe one thing or another and you’ll try to figure out what it could be.

The “men of rags and bones” travel through a modern European city in search of the most disgusting prey: dirty underwear. They pile the dirty linens into their carts and take them to one of the many riverside workshops that dot the landscape. They are dumped into noxious vats of oat-like sludge and left to ferment. The fat, feces, urea and fiber are left to sit for days and workers crush the sludge with sharp knives. After a while, another team pours this creamy muck into rectangular frames, crisscrossed with wire filaments, extracting the excess liquid and adding the fat extracted from the animals.

We know it as paper.

Lumberjacks trudge through a dense thicket of jungle, axes sharpened and ready to bring the goliaths to their knees: gargantuan trees, eighty feet high, with trunks as wide as grown men. Collapsing to the ground, millions upon millions of these giants will have their arteries ripped open with an axe, bleeding a small amount of gummy blood onto the forest floor: gutta-percha, as it was called in Malay, a natural bioplastic. This is the woodcutter’s reward: he will be paid today. Half a world away, factory workers pry open vats of forest blood, spewing it up and down the surface of thick, veined, braided metal cables, long nerve cables that will be wound onto immense spools, loaded onto colossal ocean ships, and strung like hemispherical extension cords across the black, underwater face of the planet. Filament by filament, this vast, diaphanous bathymetric network will soon vibrate with electricity, carrying messages between generals, stockbrokers, journalists and lovers, all at a speed just below light.

We know this as telegraphy.

A family of four gathers around a small, rapidly vibrating sliver of glass, whose job is to snatch a particular voice or song from the ether, plucking it from a cacophonous sea of ​​otherwise inaudible sounds. The crystals are mined by hard-working workers in near-slavery conditions and then refined by precision magicians wielding saws made of diamonds. Other witches explore the heavens and take daily measurements of the atmospheric orbs that surround the Earth: layers of sky that expand and contract in tune with the sun and the seasons. Sorcerers send coordinates to the music makers, telling them exactly how loud to sing and the exact angle at which to crane their necks to bounce their voices off the sky and reach all those crystals in all those living rooms.

Radio, we call it.

Hunters climb other trees to harvest the encrusted droppings of an industrious insect: the female Laccifer lacca Kerriidae family that lives in the forests of India, Thailand and Burma. The bulbous excretions are crushed, purified, and mixed to form a rigid black substance capable of containing a spiral of engravings whose complexity would make the Rosetta Stone look like wallpaper by comparison.

The phonograph.

So how does something as rebellious as information come to be portrayed as pristine mathematical abstractions? If information is strictly “something communicated,” where does all that bug shit and dirty underwear go? Even before communicating a message across channels, the question remains to be answered: how do humans transmit information? information first of all? How do we categorize the immense repertoire of things that humans use to store, send and organize meanings? Egg whites, isinglass, flour paste, candle soot, spermaceti, rubber bands, binder clips, highlighters, correction fluid, tape, scratch cards, talking dolls, bone discs, third base trainers…

Everywhere you look, the information is much stranger than we think.

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Thomas S. Mullaney is a historian, professor, curator, archivist, and composer. Author of How We Disappear, Mullaney is Professor of History and UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and former Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress. He is director of Stanford’s Science, Technology, and Society Program and also directs SILICON, a Stanford presidential initiative that promotes endangered, at-risk, and digitally disadvantaged languages ​​around the world. How We Disappear is his eighth book and the first published in a major trade press.

Awards for the House of the Future of Popular Science 2026

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