What might this mean for our personal information? Biological? Biographical? That is, of course, our current frontier and the object of most (actual and potential) value. The tech industry is still in the process of discovering what is valuable about certain kinds of information. [7] Does “the more information [mean] the less meaning?” [8] The conclusion Terranova reaches on information, signal/noise, and non-information (materiality) is that the potentiality to become informated [9] colors the “minute and apparently inconsequently decisions” of everyday life and behavior, online and off, with real economic and political stakes. [10] Entropy is a measure of a lack of knowledge in a system – a measure of uncertainty, of unknowability – and when information is the raw material, the means of production and the commodity, then all available resources will be mobilized and put to work to mine, make, and process more. There is urgency:
“The cultural politics of information does not address so much the threat of ‘disembodiment’, or the disappearance of the body, but its micro-dissection and modulation, as it is split and decomposed into segments of variable and adjustable sizes (race, gender, sexual preferences; but also income, demographics, cultural preferences and interests).” [11]