The Regulon

If exponentiality is fatality, as one writer suggests, then information is creating a new kind of ecosystem that violates natural laws of selection and survival. Modern media have no predators, and are not subject to biological or Darwinian-style selections -- the Regulon. Thus media can proliferate eternally, overwhelming coherence and reality. There is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, is one new theory about information.We could use some help from physicists and biologists here.

Can modern media be killed? Does information have any natural predators? Or will it grow exponentially, forever, until it approaches the Omega Point -- the computer-science fatalist theory that continued rapid change eventually leads to something that dramatically transforms the fundamental situation of people in the universe. Is there any way -- natural, electronic or organic -- to stop information from proliferating?

The answer from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who fled the States for Paris, in part, so his child could get a respite from the American information explosion, is a firm No. In this age, media defy natural laws of the survival of species. Lots of information languishes, is ignored, or ends up stranded in dead links and ghost sites, but it only seems to replicate.

In his engaging book Paris To The Moon, Gopnik describes a visit to an intellectual salon where an economist lectured on exponentiality.

"Exponentiality is fatality," the economist announced, explaining that the exponential proliferation of biological life -- each codfish has a million offspring; each young codfish has a million of its own -- means that the codfish, or slime mold or antelope, would cover the earth unless something stopped it.

"Therefore," Gopnik quotes the economist as saying, "there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon, which prevents this from happening."

Gopnik wisely points out that Darwin pretty much covered this ground. Predators will eat most of the codfish. Most of the remainder die. Life is hard, and members of many species don't make it.

But I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information. We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check. Each is breeding information and media. We can't stem or steer the natural proliferation of movies, TV shows, books, songs, poems, pitches, spins, videogames, junk mail, ads, Washington talk shows and radio hosts.

The global economy remains a chimera. It's really much more about the flow of information than of goods. It's information that's being globalized, at least within the English-speaking world, information that's proliferating at a rate that suggests that media are not subject to Darwin's theories. Information can't be killed or curbed unless you want to live like the Unabomber.

The early hackers opened a Pandora's Box by proclaiming that information wants to be free. Increasingly it is free, but nobody dreamed there would be so much of it, spreading so wildly. Look at media coverage of sensational stories -- like the death of Princess Di, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky mess or the recent electoral nightmare. In the absence of a Regulon, information could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us. Picture a world in which all those codfish live.

With so many Web sites, Web logs, mailing lists, networks, magazines, instant messages, conferences, shows, gasbags, lobbyists, experts, scholars, junk mail and politicians bombarding us that we really have no idea what might or might not be true. The public is beseiged to the point of stalemate, a possible explanation of the dead tie in the presidential election. In the absence of natural selection, information spreads. And spreads.

Media seem to live apart even from accepted business rules. Companies like Disney, Microsoft and G.E. all want to own and make media sites -- Slate, CNN, ABC News, MSN, MSNBC -- even if they aren't profitable and have no chance of ever succeeding, viewing them as synergistic economic necessities. So the sites aren't subject to the economic or social versions of laws that govern biological species like the codfish. It no longer seems to even matter if they have readers or how many. This isn't to say that all media is consumed or successful. There are now a billion Web sites out there. How many have you been on? And dead links are everywhere in cyberspace. Still, they aren't technically dead, just dormant.

This suggests that information is creating its own eco-system, a meme-driven, self-replicating technology that won't quit and can't be killed.

Or can it? Gopnik says you can kill some of it by pulling plugs, but in an increasingly wireless world, that may not be an option for long. Can anything destroy it? Will it self-destruct naturally? Maybe not. As the Net continues to decentralize -- Open Source, freenet, Gnutella, P2P, Napster -- it seems inevitable that media will also continue to grow, exponentially at an even faster rate. Everybody who makes it to the Net or the Web can produce information, pass it along and replicate it, share music, video and text files; create Web pages; open e-mail and other accounts; join mailing lists and Web logs, store material. And that's with only half of Americans having access to computers, and a fraction of the rest of the world's population. The number of people generating their own information will multiply in coming years, while the people already generating information will simply be producing more of it?

Governments, potentially, could seek to censor the Net and reverse the free flow of information. But none has yet emerged that seems up to the task technologically, even if they like the idea ideologically. Certainly the miserable efforts of the U.S. Congress to pass Communications Decency Acts failed spectacularly.

Corporations have a better shot at curbing information, but they have no motive to do so. Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner, along with the music companies have the legal ability and access to technical resources. But they want to make more information and they want to profit from its spread, especially once they figure out how to charge for it, as Bertelsmann is trying to do with Napster. And they are increasingly dependent in information for their own business operations.

As for traditional institutions like religion, academe, law enforcement and politics, they haven't got a prayer at keeping up. The teenagers writing code are light years ahead of them when it comes to creating and circumventing new information technologies. No member of the clergy or school principal can reverse the trend, and most parents have quit trying. They know their kids need computers to survive in the world; they know they can't control them once they turn the machines on. Apart from some pathetic efforts with blocking and filtering software, adults mostly cross their fingers and hope the young are headed somewhere healthy.

Concludes Gopnik: "There is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is a wildly abstract way of saying that there is no 'natural predator' to stop the proliferation" of media. They do and will, he suggests, overwhelm the world, and with it reality.

"It is hard to see how you save the carousel and the musical horse in a world of video games not because the carousel and musical horse are less attractive to children than the Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up."

Comments

My Battle with Infinite Information

[Bonker]

The 'regulon' you're looking for here, the limiting factor, is humanity's limits to absorb this information. If there is not a demand for it, the information won't be replicated, and therefore won't exist in any substantial sense.

When I go home at night, I have to perform a careful balancing act, like most technically minded people with real lives I would guess, to do a little surfing, read a little news. Watch a little anime that I've downloaded from Alt.binaries.multimedia.anime. Then I do something that does *not* involve the rest of the world or the internet. I spend time with my wife. I play a game. I read a real, print book. I write or draw. I spend time working on my 3d artwork.

I discard over 99% of the information available to me, and refuse to let it take away the kind of life I want to live. The information that I'm not interested in simply dies with me. It doesn't get passed on to anyone I know or reproduced on my website for general consumption. It has 6 billion other ways to procreate, but will not do so through me.