What Is Information?

We live in a world that runs on messages. They flash across our screens, pulse through cables under oceans, ripple through our cells, and shape our relationships, economies, and decisions. But what do we really mean when we say information? Nearly a century ago, Norbert Wiener - the mathematician who founded cybernetics - was asking a question that still defines our time: what is information, and what does it mean for life itself?

For Wiener, information wasn’t simply a byproduct of communication. It was the fabric that tied everything together - from the way our nervous systems sense and react to the world, to how societies coordinate, and how machines might one day “think.” He saw information as the common language between living organisms and machines: the invisible thread that runs through every act of perception, decision, and control.

Imagine catching a ball. You see it flying toward you - that’s incoming information. You decide where to move your hand - you’re processing that information. You feel the impact and adjust your grip - you’re sending new feedback into the system. This constant loop of perception and adjustment, input and response, is the essence of life as Wiener saw it. Whether we’re walking, speaking, or building a computer, we live through feedback loops - ongoing conversations between what we sense and how we act.

Cybernetics, the field Wiener created in the 1940s, was his attempt to describe these loops mathematically, using the same language for animals and machines. “Control and communication in the animal and the machine,” he called it. On the face of it, that sounds mechanical - but Wiener’s vision was humanistic. He believed that by understanding how information flows through systems, we could understand how life organizes itself, learns, and how it goes wrong.

Information as Life’s Grammar

For Wiener, information is what holds chaos at bay. The universe, left alone, tends toward disorder - what physicists call entropy. Things fall apart, signals degrade, systems collapse. Information is what resists that drift toward chaos. It organizes, stabilizes, and creates order - whether in a living cell repairing itself, a thermostat adjusting temperature, or a society coordinating collective action.

Every living being, he argued, is an island of temporary order sustained by information. We survive by perceiving change and responding to it - by keeping our internal organization intact amid the noise of the world. A human being is not just flesh and blood, but a pattern that maintains itself. Our tissues change every day; the atoms in our bodies are constantly replaced. What persists is not the matter itself, but the organization of information that defines us.

This insight is as poetic as it is scientific. To live, for Wiener, is to communicate - not in the narrow sense of sending messages through speech, but in the sense of being open to feedback from the world. A heartbeat, a thought, a conversation, a computer algorithm - all are forms of information processing, moments of exchange in a web that connects us to everything else. Information, then, is life’s grammar: it is how the living and the mechanical speak the same structural language.

Wiener believed that modern technology - especially computing and automation - represented a new kind of organism: one capable of adapting to its environment through information flow. Yet he also warned that these new systems could easily escape our control. A self-regulating machine can be benevolent when its purpose is aligned with human needs - but destructive when it serves power, secrecy, or war.

Norbert Wiener

The Ethics of Information

Wiener wrote during the aftermath of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, when science was entangled with military ambition. He saw clearly that the same principles that made feedback and communication so powerful could also be weaponized. In his book The Human Use of Human Beings, he warned that information could be used to liberate or to enslave, depending on who controlled it and why.

For him, the danger was not just the rise of machines, but the way human institutions were starting to behave like machines - hoarding information, automating decisions, and replacing ethical judgment with procedural efficiency. When information becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, or hidden, it loses its life-sustaining quality. It becomes something dead, something that feeds hierarchy and control instead of communication and understanding.

He argued that information wants to flow. Its value lies in being shared, not stockpiled. Knowledge, unlike gold, loses power when it’s locked away. A secret scientific discovery, he observed, only delays progress - it doesn’t stop others from finding it. In the long run, secrecy harms everyone, even those who think it protects them. If civilization turns information into private property, Wiener warned, it will collapse under its own entropy - not just physical disorder, but social decay.

Communication and Control

One of Wiener’s most radical claims was that communication and control are two sides of the same process. When you give a command, you’re communicating. When a system reacts to feedback, it’s exercising control. Both rely on the same flow of information. Whether it’s a military order, a heartbeat, or a signal between neurons, the logic is the same: to survive and act, systems must both send and receive information continuously.

This idea changed how scientists and philosophers thought about freedom. In a cybernetic world, control doesn’t always come from above. It can be distributed, automatic, and invisible - built into the feedback loops themselves. That’s why Wiener’s question still matters: What is autonomy in an age of predictive algorithms? What does it mean to be free when control is embedded in the systems we rely on?

His answer wasn’t to reject control, but to humanize it - to design systems that include feedback not just technically, but ethically. True control, he believed, depends on openness: the ability to receive feedback, to adjust, to learn. A society that suppresses feedback - by silencing dissent, restricting information, or automating decisions without accountability - violates the very principle that makes it capable of surviving in the first place.

Wiener foresaw a paradox that has only intensified in the digital era. The more information we collect, the more complex and unstable our systems become. Governments and corporations, in their quest for total control, build vast hidden infrastructures that hoard and analyse data in secret, believing that more information means more power. But as Wiener would have seen, secrecy undermines feedback. When control loses transparency, systems drift toward instability and error.

Leaks, breaches, and whistleblowers are the inevitable consequences of this imbalance. They are the feedback signals of an over-controlled system trying to restore equilibrium. The irony, as Wiener might note, is that these “leaks” often strengthen the structures they expose - justifying more surveillance, more secrecy, more control. The feedback loop becomes pathological, feeding on its own fear of collapse.

In the decades since Wiener, the world has built exactly what he foresaw: a civilization driven by information systems, feedback algorithms, and self-regulating networks. We have created machines that learn, adapt, and may predict our behavior. We are surrounded by systems that communicate constantly but listen poorly, that collect everything but share little, that promise connection but often deliver control.

Information is not neutral. It is a living force. It can preserve life or destroy it, connect or isolate, liberate or dominate. Its value lies not in possession but in circulation - in the open feedback that allows systems, societies, and selves to learn and adapt.

So when we ask today, “what is information?”, we are not asking a technical question. We are asking a human one. Information is what makes life possible, and also what makes it fragile. To understand it is to understand that every message, every decision, every line of code carries an ethical weight. The future of life in an informational world depends on how we choose to use, share, and respond to that flow.