My pet peeve: "information wants to be free" just means the universe tends towards entropy. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, once information has been distributed it will take energy to "undistribute" it. Trying to extend this to "information wants to be encrypted" is both stupid and inaccurate - people want things to be encrypted, but the plaintext "wants to be free" as much as any other data.
The more complete quote from Brand is: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.”
People often only remember the first bit…
——
“ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”
> But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.
> The universe believes in encryption.
> It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.
Perhaps they should have said "information wants to be encrypted" Computers are getting better and better at cryptography all of the time. Applies the same logic behind "information wants to be free."
As an aside...
>the universe tends towards entropy.
To me, the paradox of entropy is that it represents chaos and yet it is an inevitable end state of the universe. It would seem that all efforts against the natural order are themselves a form of chaos. I question the distinction between the two.
