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Information is not like money or any other commodity. The cracks that it can slip through are almost infinitely small, and it can be duplicated at almost zero cost. Soon information will be like air, like the weather, and as easy to control.

Similar Quotes

information is simultaneously a relationship,
an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a noun.
Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that,
when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It
doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined.

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In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage... What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash.

Information is our latest, our brightest, commodity. “In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.

It is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

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At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life. …

We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

Money is the universal equivalent form of all commodities, which already show in their prices that they ideally represent a specific sum of money, expect to be transformed into money, and only receive the form in which they can be converted into use-values for their possessor by changing places with money.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.” Our

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