You Are a Ripple of Information

Think about yourself as an action more than a object, and the whole world starts to make more sense.

In an earlier column, I wrote about a way to look at the stars so that they give you a helpful perspective on your place in time and space. In this column, I’m going to show you how the same technique provides a powerful, surprisingly personal way to think about your connection to the people and things around you.

The first step in this journey is letting go of the common conception of information as an inert thing – like a collection of boring numbers that get crunched in a computer – and to think of it instead as an action. Once you do that, you move past a bunch of mental barriers, clearing your view to a much more expansive landscape.

The idea of information as action may sound hippy trippy, but it’s rooted in straightforward science. Every event creates information, the “when-where-how” defining that particular event. Information then ripples outward in all directions as fast as nature will let it go – that is, at the speed of light. The more complex the object involved is, the more detail there is to its cumulative ripples of information. (Seth Lloyd at MIT wrote a great book on this topic.)

As a thinking, breathing, acting human you constantly generate a three-dimensional ripple of information from the moment you are born. You are a ripple of information. It is the evidence of your existence, radiating from you into the universe. In some small way (infinitesimal, perhaps, but never zero), the heat of your body, the gravitational pull of your mass, the electromagnetism of your thoughts, and everything else you do touch all of reality around you.

You can also think about information the opposite way: Everything in the universe that is touched by your ripple could potentially be aware of you. So, for instance, if you are 40 years old, extraterrestrial beings on a planet that is 40 light years away from us would just now be entering the ever-expanding, spherical information-ripple of your existence.

Practically speaking, those distant aliens couldn’t actually train a telescope on Earth and witness your birth; no technology could do that (at least, no technology that we know of). But in principle, they are bathed in the information of your existence starting at the moment when your personal ripple reaches that far out into space.

The chain of information exists even if there is nobody at the other end to receive it. When you gaze into the night sky, those faraway stars and their planets are connected to you, and you are connected to them. Think of it as the optimist’s spin on Nietzsche’s famous quote: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” 

At Close Range

You don’t need to look far out into space to experience this kind of universal connection. As a ripple of information, you are entangled with everything closer to home as well: your immediate surroundings, your neighborhood, your planet. Whatever happens to Earth and its inhabitants, you are a part of it.

People often talk about your “carbon footprint,” “water footprint,” and so on. Those concepts are often more misleading than enlightening; the carbon footprint, in particular, is often used to treat the problem of climate change as one of personal responsibility, not one of public policy and corporate action. I find it more meaningful to think in terms of your information footprint: where your information goes, and how it affects the world around you.

Your information footprint is a more comprehensive measure of the way you live. It records much more than just the quantitative aspects of your life, such as how far you drive or how much electricity you use. It encompasses every aspect of your being, including how you engage with the people around you and what impact your behavior has on them.

Kindness provokes different reactions than cruelty, and it leaves a different information footprint. In more specific terms, you leave a distinctive information footprint if you drive an elderly neighbor to the polls to vote; if you speak up in support of a local wind-power project; if you vaccinate your kids; or if you mentor a bright young person who faces barriers breaking into your line of work. You also leave a distinctive information footprint if you don’t do those things.

Information ripples are cumulative things. Just as many individual light waves add up into a wavefront, so many information ripples add up into an information front. Elections are information fronts. Wars are information fronts. Social movements are information fronts. Pop culture is a collection of information fronts. (If there were a way to measure these collective ripples, you’d definitely be able to pick out a Taylor Swift blip.)

If you’re starting to wonder whether “information ripple” is just a highfalutin way of saying “take responsibility for your actions in the world,” you’re not entirely wrong. What I find powerful about the information ripple concept, though, is that it takes broad, ethical-philosophical concepts about how to live your life and frames them in terms of concrete physical actions and consequences.

In ways both big and small, the cumulative information-ripples of human behavior influence life on Earth and radiate out into the cosmos. The ripples from billions of people have made our planet a very different place than it was a thousand year ago, or a hundred years ago, or a decade ago. Those changes are easily measured and mapped by Earth-observing satellites. And even if you fancy yourself an individualist or a loner, you cannot escape your impact.

Your information is imprinted on everyone and everything around you, for better or for worse.

The Ageless Information Age

Once you start thinking about information that way, you begin to understand why the conventional definitions of information are so impoverished. Thinking about information as “the results from an experiment” or “the input that goes into an AI model” is useful, but it is a woefully incomplete and limiting way to look at such an important concept.

How did our ideas about information go off track? It’s impossible to retrace such big cultural ideas to a single origin, but here’s a plausible starting point. Back in 1960, an imaging expert named Richard Leghorn coined the term “information age” to describe the staggering recent advances in computing and data collection. He offered the name half-heartedly, hoping that someone else would soon come up with “a more symbolic title.” Instead, his term caught on a little too well.

The notion that we live in an “information age” has fed a popular misconception that information is something uniquely modern and technological. In reality, information is persistent and universal. It links all of physics, from the subatomic to the extragalactic. Properly understood, “information” is not synthetic. It is not digital. It does not set us apart from the rest of nature. Information illustrates the way that we are inextricably tied to the natural world, and vice versa.

None of this confusion is Leghorn’s fault. He was thinking about information from the peculiar and narrow perspective of military surveillance, at a time when he was running Itek, a defense spy contractor. (Later, Leghorn became Chief of Intelligence and Reconnaissance Systems Development at the U.S. Department of Defense, to give you a sense of where his head was at.) By his own admission, he was merely offering a convenient shorthand for what he saw as an emerging technology trend.

But all these years later, we can, and should, do a lot better in understanding our relationship to information. It will help the modern world make more sense. It might even help make us feel a little more connected and a little more compassionate.