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Comment by random3 | Hacker News Reader

what does that even mean?

People want things. Information doesn't want anything. People want property rights for both physical and intellectual property.

Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved with current technology. A single person can read a ton of stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a system can.

So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want access to more information, at the same time they don't want others to have accees to the same information. However having access to more information has marginal effects when capacity is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes all the difference and this puts a small class in disproportionate advantage.

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It usually means that the US government should give for-profit entities billions of tax dollars to benefit the elite and corpo class.

A funny anecdote I found the other day is that during the Korean War the US government wanted to break up AT&T but AT&T got the Army to argue that AT&T was instrumental in winning the war, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out if AT&T won the Korean War but one of the end results was rewarding AT&T with additional lucrative military contracts.

Not putting words in OP’s mouth from the comment you’re replying to. But from my understanding, the default state of information is to spread itself, it’s an inherent characteristic. You have to put effort to suppress it (example making info classified or enforcing secrecy). If you don’t actively put effort into suppressing information, it will spread.

This was a catchphrase from... the 1990s, maybe?

The defining character of information is its reproducibility. Even verbal speach: "And then she said..." But digital information in particular is almost infinitely reproducible, without loss, worldwide.

So when people say "information wants to be free", what they actually mean is that trying to restrict the movement of information is fighting against the essential nature of information.

Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill.

> Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill

Water flows downhill to maximise entropy. The equivalent for information is dissolution into randomness. If anything, by this analogy, the “freedom” that involves information being copied and transmitted is the equivalent of pumping water uphill.

Freedom takes work. You don’t get it for free.

It's a literary analogy, not a physical analogy.

And I disagree about the work when it comes to information. Our natural inclination as humans is to share things we find interesting. Like "check out this song" or "check out this article". I don't think this takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the information is free like the stream is free to flow through the hills.

On the flip side there is substantial effort put into impeding this free flow of information with schemes like DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the free flow resumes.

Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also substantial effort put into building the infrastructure to make information accessible to many more people. As a library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.

> It's a literary analogy, not a physical analogy

When the phrase was coined in 1984 [1], it was a valid hypothesis. The last forty years have given evidence for the null.

The more plentiful information has become, the more we've sought (and in some cases, needed) to corral and control it. Sometimes for our own purposes. In many cases because absent such archiving entropy takes its toll.

The problem with "information wants to be free" is it presumes a natural force which doesn't exist. There also isn't a natural force that wants to make DRM and NFTs. But there is one that wants to forget, to corrupt and re-interpret. (There are very human forces that wish to control.) Sit back and let information do what it wants, which is precisely nothing, and the forces that beckon us into control and forgetfulness will win.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

"To maximize entropy". What does that mean??

Water takes the path of least resistance. Why would anything exist to maximize entropy?

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