Intropy, Sintropy, and the Rise of Monopolies of Information

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoel WhiteJoel White completed his MA in Contemporary European Philosophy at CRMEP and Paris VIII and his PhD in French Philosophy at King’s College London. His current research is situated in the emerging field of continental philosophy of science and technology. He is currently a Research Affiliate at the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology as well the Executive editor of Technophany, the Network’s journal. Email: jhmw01@gmail.comNotes1 Following on from James Clerk Maxwell’s insistence that the movement of atoms was responsible for quantities such as temperature, Boltzman and Gibbs revolutionised the study of thermodynamics by developing a statistical mathematics that was capable of giving a microscopic statistical interpretation of macroscopic quantities.2 Bernard Stiegler’s attempt at such a task, that informational entropy equates to the becoming-obsolescent of information in its distinction to “knowledge” is inadequate in so far as there is little to no engagement with the actual differences between thermodynamics and information theory. While Stigler had a fairly good idea of what thermodynamic entropy measured, there is no discussion of what informational entropy measures in information theory. See Bernard Stiegler, “Informational Entropy,” Text of an email from 26 April 2020, trans. Daniel Ross.3 Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” 11.4 The prefix in can mean “in, on, or not,” and the stem tropy comes from the Greek τρέπω meaning “way, change, transform, turn, divert,” but also “changing one’s mind;” Clausius’s entropy, for example, meant “transformational-content”).5 See Joel White “Outline to an Architectonics of Thermodynamics: Life’s Entropic Indeterminacy,” in Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, eds. Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell & Dominic Smith (Rowman & Littlefield), 183–200.6 Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 379.7 In its difference to Norbert Weiner’s cybernetic theory of communication, which was developed concurrently to Shannon’s, Warren Weaver writes the following: “Shannon has naturally been specially concerned to push the applications to engineering communication, while Wiener has been more concerned with biological application (central nervous system phenomena, etc.)” Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to The Mathematical Theory of Communication”, in Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 3.8 Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 379.9 Weaver, “Recent Contributions,” 12.10 Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 51.11 Cooper and Hutchinson, Plato: Complete Works, 112.12 Arnheim, Art and Entropy, 20.13 See Joel White “Of Logomachy: The Metastability of the Objects of Sense, Or Heraclitus and the Thermodynamic Logos,” Technophany 1, no.2 (Spring 2023). Forthcoming.14 I have chosen the neologism sintropy partly to distinguish it from Kenneth D. Bailey’s notion of social entropy, which he defines as “the dissipation of social organization.” See Kenneth D. Bailey, Social Entropy Theory (New York: State University of New York (SUNY) Press; 1990). Sintropy is also different to Stiegler’s notion of “anthropy,” which signifies a form of “proletarianization” or the reduction of “knowledge” to “information.” See Stiegler, Neganthropocene, trans. Daniel Ross (Open Humanities Press, 2018).15 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.16 Milord and Perry, “A Methodological Study of Overload.”17 In the 20th Century, the history is earlier with George Simmel writing about city dwellers and the notion of information overload in “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” People, Place, Space Reader, eds. Edited by Jen Jack Gieseking and William Mangold with Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert (New York: Routledge, 2014), 223–226.18 Gross, The Managing of Organisations Vol. 2, 769.19 Miller, “Coping with Administrator’s Information Overload.”20 Toffler, Future Shock, 350.21 Miller, “Coping with Administrator’s Information Overload,” 47.22 Wellmon, Organising Enlightenment; Cf., Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Blair shows how information overload was also a premodern phenomenon. See also Daniel Rosenberg, “Early Modern Information Overload: Introduction,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 1–9.23 Blair, Too Much to Know, 3.24 Hilbert and López, “The World’s Technological Capacity,” 60.25 Ibid.26 From the mid-1970s onwards, desktop personal computers were being sold by Apple, Atari, Commodore and then IMB in the 1980s. For highly accessible and comprehensive history of electronic computing see the Computer History Museum’s online article: “Timeline of Computer History”, https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/, accessed September 16, 2022.27 Tim Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal,” 1989, accessed October 1st, 2022, http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html, 3.28 Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal,” 3.29 DeNucci, “Fragmented Future,” 32.30 Ibid., 222.31 “Search Engine Market Share 2022,”32 Wellmon, “Too Many Links,” in Organising Enlightenment, 262.33 Parisi, “Transcendental Instrumentality and Incomputable Thinking,” 2022.34 Ibid., 40.35 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 128.