I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of information. Data, knowledge, wisdom, science, call it what you want. ‘Stuff’ would be another word you could use. In particular I’ve been thinking about information in a corporeal form, immanent in the world. This computer I write on represents a huge amount of information, not just in the actual stored data, but in every aspect of its physical presence, from the chipsets to the LCD to the stickers on the keys that let me know which button to press to summon which character on the screen.
I’m listening, as I write this, to Bob Dylan’s ‘I Am A Lonesome Hobo’ from the John Wesley Harding album. It’s a pretty simple song in terms of the arrangement. We’ve got guitars, drums, cymbals, bass, a mouth organ, and Bob’s voice. It was recorded in 1967 so we’ve got magnetic tape, analogue mixers, speakers, headphones, various microphones, valve compressors and EQ units, and probably spring reverb units. We have drumsticks and plectrums and hundreds of yards of cabling. Given the limitations of editing at the time we have razor blades and Scotch tape. We have electricity and we have pressing plants to make vinyl, master tapes that were later remastered through more modern iterations of the same equipment and converted into strings of 1′s and 0′s for CD release, and that digital version has in turn been put through the MP3 encoding process so I can carry it around with another thirty-odd thousand pieces of music on an external hard drive the size of two cigarette packets stuck together. Take any one of those items and you have a whole other subset of processes. A snare drum needs trees to be felled, timber planks to be cut and then cut again, sanded, shaped and glued and finished and bearing edges cut, painted or lacquered, drilled for the shell hardware. Iron ore needs to be mined, refined, mixed with other things and put through the process that makes steel that can be cast for the hoops and the lugs, which are, in turn, chromed to protect them from erosion. Tension rods and their receivers need screw threads machined. Skins have to be made, in this case more than likely using the process Remo Belli came up with in the late 50s using PET film, a type of plastic, to provide a more durable skin than the traditional old bits of animal carcasses. Remo skins need the plastic, they need the coating, they need the metal collar that fits under the drumhoops and they need the glue that anchors the edge of the skin in the metal collar. Then you’ve got your snare wires, stretched spirals of steel, tensioned across the bottom skin to provide the rattle. There are probably other aspects of the process I’m forgetting, but you get the idea. A relatively simple instrument like a snare drum – which is just a box with a lid designed to be hit with a bit of wood – and yet we require forestry, carpentry, machinery, mining, metallurgy, plastic chemistry, and so on. Every hit on that drum that I’m hearing is the outcome of the work of hundreds of people. And you can take any one of these processes and add a whole other chain. The guys who fell the trees for example: their axes or chainsaws, the petrol for the chainsaws, the vehicles they drive to get to the site, the clothes they wear and the coffee they drink. Take the coffee and you end up with a whole other process tree, a whole other screed of technologies and people. Everything links into everything else, an endless flow of embodied information.
The quote that I’ve used for the title of this post is from the original Patrick McGoohan version of The Prisoner. It’s the obsession of number Two, in all of the various incarnations of that role, that they get the information from number Six. Information that only number Six has, the reason for his resignation. The kind of information that our storytelling is obsessed with because it doesn’t have an easily accessible physical existence in the world. It’s secret, hidden, wrapped in the grey mess of neurons that we all carry around in our heads. We privilege this kind of information because it gives good drama. Except, there’s just as much drama in a packet of cigarettes. Follow the chain, follow everyone involved in the process of putting this paper tube of tobacco (and other assorted garbage) between my fingers, trace all the lines and look at every person involved in that process and you have a human drama so massive and enveloping that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. You’d need millions of words. I’m not saying it would be necessarily be an interesting read, but it would nonetheless be something incredible.
Everything we touch is embodied information, embodied history, embodied community. Everything we do relies on the structures other people have built in the world. Clever people, smart bastards, stupid people, lovely people, idiots and drunks and maniacs and narcissists and murderers and lovers and thieves, dancers and scientists and engineers and poets and fisherfolk. All of them. Because everything links. It’s terrifying and awesome and quite exquisite. Follow the journey of a fish from the sea to the plate of a diner in a restaurant. Follow the track of the construction of a running shoe to the winning of a race. Follow the path of a bullet from conception and design through manufacture and sale to the point when it slams through a president in a motorcade on a sunny day in the early 1960s and reshapes the world.
There are stories to be told that we haven’t even touched on yet. There are myths to be made. What if you knew that the bullet that killed a president was the bullet you made, or that you were the person who sold that bullet to the strange young man with the intense stare? What if you knew that the tree you felled was the one that ended up used to make the snare drum that Mitch Mitchell played with Hendrix on the studio version of ‘Purple Haze’? And then what if you knew that the coffee you harvested was the stuff that lumberjack drank the day he cut down that tree? Or that the jeans you stitched were the ones he was wearing? Or that the oil you pulled out of the seabed was the stuff that ended up as petrol in his chainsaw when its teeth chewed through that wood? Chains of meaning and value; I am the man who made the sandwich that fed the woman who knitted the hat that the man wore who cut down the tree that became the snare drum that Mitch Mitchell played with Jimi Hendrix on ‘Purple Haze.’ Really? That’s fantastic; I am the man who tapped the rubber that ended up in the seals of the spacesuit that Neil Armstrong wore when he stepped on the Moon. Imagine knowing, as a guy who gets up every day to slash trees with a sharp knife to harvest rubber, that you were part of the process of putting a human being on the Moon. Think about the value in that for a moment. And yes, I know, it was probably synthetic rubber, but even then you have the rig workers who coerced that black gold from the seabed or the guts of the earth, the people who tankered it, those who refined it, and so on.
Of course, there is the dark side; I am the person who made the fabric of the suit that Politician X was wearing when they decided to put through the legislation that resulted in me losing my job. Really? That’s terrible, but it could be worse; I am the person who quality-assurance checked the gaffer-tape that the latest media-darling murderer used to bind his victims. But, that’s another chain of thought for another time and besides, we should all practise getting better at taking satisfaction in the good things rather than assigning ourselves false responsibility for the shit in life.
Everything we touch, everything we use, is a string of people and moments and the long tail of all the knowledge we have as a civilisation (and by that I mean global, not local), an information piñata, and if we hit it what falls out? I’d like a world where when I buy an object I can pull data from a chip that contains everything about it, the names of those involved in every part of the process, the locations, the effort they put in to providing something for me recognised by more than just the old tired formula of giving each worker in a chain the minimum possible financial compensation for their effort. There’s a part of me would like to be able to thank those people. And I know that’s never going to be economically viable, in either time or money, but we’re living in the ‘what if?’ for a moment here. Everything we touch is an information piñata. What falls out is sweet, sweet knowledge, and the more we know about other people the easier things like empathy become. And empathy is vital if we’re to survive as a species. Empathy drives a lot of good shit in this world, and that’s not to deny self-interest because self-interest is, in fact, the fundamental component of empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel how everything you do that affects them damages or enhances their self-interest is the foundation of empathy. And at the risk of sounding like some fucking liberal hippy nutter, the world could do with a lot more empathy.
Nothing here is radical thinking. On the contrary, it’s commonplace. If I’ve thought about it then everyone else has thought it at some point because, you know, I’m not that smart or unique. I’m just another part of the same network of information that you’re part of. But it’s important. We should take time out every now and then to look at the chains. Obviously we’re limited creatures, and our tiny brains can’t comprehend all the links at the same time, but it’s worth looking at something from a different angle now and then, being thankful for a moment for all those unknown people whose work allows you to read these words, to drink your coffee, to turn on a fucking tap and have drinkable water come out. Profoundly commonplace things are wonderful. Beat on an information piñata for a little while every now and then. Trust me, it’s excellent exercise for your skull muscle and it will enrich your life.