Huenemanniac

Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information (Riverhead Books, 2021)

Scharf is a physicist who argues in this book that the main subject of our planet has been information. Life itself is a system of storing and reproducing information, intelligence is a way of collecting, storing and sharing information, and our current preoccupation with digital intelligence is an intense dedication of energy to the growth of information. 

People might say that information wants to be free, but whatever it wants, the fact is that information costs a heck of a lot. As Scharf relates, data centers around the world consumed about 47 billion watts of electricity in 2021, and that number has been growing by about 40 percent per year, with the consequence that in about 18 years data centers will require all of the energy are likely to be able to produce: “by sometime around 2040 the world’s computer chips will demand more electricity than is expected to be produced globally” (39). There are real limits about how much energy we can produce, but there is apparently no limit as to how much data we yearn to produce and consume.

So there is some reason to place information, or the “dataome”, as Scharf calls it, at the center of the story. And maybe, as he argues, we are in the middle of an informational equivalent of the explosion of life on Earth once oxygen became abundant. Once there were systems who could consume and excrete large volumes of information (humans), the dataome expanded in mad fashion, seemingly without limit. Eventually, humans may turn out to be a stepping-stone species leading to far more efficient and productive algorithmic entities, if the dataome has its way. Scharf suggests that “the rise of data and its informational load is not just loosely similar to the oxygenation of Earth, but is actually exactly the same kind of fundamental phenomenon. The sheer scale of the dataome indicates a profound shift in evolution, comparable to the major shifts and events scattered throughout the history of life on Earth” (245).

It’s an interesting idea, whether the whole of human culture and indeed our whole existence is just the vehicle by which information gains ascendency over an ever-growing region of spacetime. A scholar is a library’s way of producing another library, as the saying goes. We might think we are living and breathing data, but maybe data is living and breathing us.

I like Scharf’s book for raising this possibility and giving us the relevant materials for thinking more seriously about it. But, lord, how I wish that there were editors. I think Scharf may be one of the more information-promiscuous authors out there, sharing everything he can think to say on a topic. Reading his book is a bit like waking up only to find your roommate has been up all night drinking coffee and reading Wikipedia, and boy does he have some things to say.