Our Library of Babble

Preamble: In 2024, Oxford’s Word of the Year was “brain-rot." Has our brain's capacity to process information met its match in the age of AI-generated mishmash? A book review of The Information.

James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is an ambitious project, 526 pages tracing the prehistory and history of how humans have created, understood, analyzed, defined, distilled, accelerated, and even embodied information. Nearly 100 of those pages comprise Gleick’s notes, bibliography, and index—a thick testament to the immense amount of research Gleick undertook in writing the book. The Information is not just a book about the history, the theory, and the flood of information as we experience it today; it enacts the information encoded in its title: it is a flood. Indeed, when your thesis is that information underpins the whole universe —from speech to writing to technology to mathematics to electrical engineering to philosophy to linguistics to psychology to biology, it from bit—or that the whole universe is an ever-expanding library, where do you begin; more hauntingly, where do you end? You just go bit by bit, Gleick might answer.

And so he begins with the elegantly redundant language of the drums used by sub-Saharan Africans to broadcast complex messages to each other across far distances. From there, he details our progression from an oral culture to a written one, which then begat critical thinking about words and efforts to concretize, categorize, and organize them in new systems like the dictionary (or books like The Information, finding itself squarely in the long tradition it chronicles). He follows humans through time as they relentlessly innovate new forms of producing, processing, and probing information, from Charles Babbage’s never-fully-realized Analytical Engine, a theoretical computational machine, to the telegraph to the telephone; from formulas for quantifying information to Boolean algebra and logic to the informational material of DNA; from memes to number theory to quantum information. He concludes with the modern internet, the online Library of Babel, discussing publishers of public information like Wikipedia and filterers and sorters of it like Google. By the end, Gleick proves himself to be a modern-day Ada Lovelace (Babbage’s protégé and a foundational figure in computer science): able to “bring to bear on any one subject or idea, a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant & extraneous sources…throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.”

While at first blush this book may not leap out as the obvious choice to read to better understand the past and future of the media and communications industry, it is in many ways its origin story. And like all good origin stories, it is foretelling of the subject’s future. We all know the maxim that history repeats itself—experienced it even in the phenomenon of déjà vu—but time proves our forgetfulness, deluded by illusions of linear or even exponential progress: how far we (think) we have come from communicating by fire! The Information reminds us that the issues that crop up in this sector are at once ancient and perennial.

Older generations decry ever-shortening content distributed through platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, worrying that they are shortening younger generations’ attention spans. In the face of writing as a technology (we can hardly imagine), Plato, too, wrung his hands: “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory….You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”

In toiling over his logarithmic tables, Babbage cried, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,” before eventually designing the Analytical Engine with Lady Lovelace, who theorized that it might accept as input and create as output not only numbers, but also music. Today, more than a decade after The Information was published, ChatGPT, our modern “engine of information,” runs not on steam, but on enormous amounts of water, and platforms like Suno AI and Udio ingest and compose music, just as Lady Lovelace imagined—two centuries ago. Now, they have been sued by all of the major music labels for copyright infringement, but even these discussions are not new, and relate surprisingly to genetic theory:

Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance—or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music….The music is the information.

The Book of Job anticipated electricity—“Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?”; the Book of Matthew anticipated boolean logic—“Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay.” Alfred Vail (of the telegraph) might as well have come up with our vernacular internet initialisms LOL, TBH, ILY, but his 19th century versions were much more amusing (and we should bring them back): “wmietg = When may I expect the goods?” Physicist and engineer Harry Nyquist was practically working on the MVP for Instagram nearly a century beforehand: “As early as 1918, he began working on a method for transmitting pictures by wire: ‘telephotography.’” And in 1948, Claude Shannon wrote the first paper on programming a machine to play chess, a subject which he deemed “of no importance in itself”; if only he could have lived to witness the debacle between Hans Niemann and Chess.com—he might have realized its immense importance.

If one trusts that time is moving in a spiral, then the future of media and communications, especially in the face of AI-generated material and data-driven content decisions, is not so bleak. Alan Turing offered one illustrative test to distinguish between human and machine: “Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry” The test still holds: I asked ChatGPT to write me a sestina on the first signs of spring; ChatGPT writes bad poetry. Claude Shannon, as he wrote extensively on the science of juggling, misquoted a line from E. E. Cummings, reflecting on the absurdity of his project. The true lines go (brownie points if you remember this one from a past issue’s pocket quote):

(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

ChatGPT has extensive information about Spring, and knows nothing of it. We know it in our bones, and can thus discern the soulful from the soulless, the meaning from the information.

And I don’t mean to argue that AI has no place in the creative arts (in fact, we wrote about the relationship between the two here). The Brutalist, which used AI to perfect Felicity Jones’s and Adrien Brody’s spoken Hungarian, is my favorite film of 2025 thus far. It’s an exquisitely executed ekphrastic film with an onerous charge: to imagine if brutalist were a cinematographic style, like noir or French New Wave—to architect and construct a brutalist film (my admiration for it calls for another review entirely). AI helped not only to make it happen, but also to make it more perfect, so that I couldn’t stop hearing my Hungarian grandfather’s voice in Brody’s. But where I most recognized my grandfather’s voice was actually in Brody’s accented English, which he speaks for the majority of the film, which he honed with a dialect coach for months, and which was untouched by AI. One must be careful not to credit noise for the signal it amplifies.

In the epilogue to The Information, Gleick finally addresses the great awkward elephant looming over the book, this question of meaning—“irrelevant to the engineering problem,” but central to the human one:

As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

The book ends; the flood continues; the entropy of the universe always increases. Here we are, collecting our thoughts about the thoughts of Gleick, Maxwell’s demon making meaning—as ever, as always.

Epilogue:

Okay, enough literary criticism—in the real world, our very world, how do we make meaning in the deluge of AI-generated, probabilistic, sycophantic, confidently asserted vacuous slop so believably, so seemingly innocuously generic that we just might miss the disinformation seeding its way into our “I think I read somewhere” collective memory? Clearly, it’s hard. Jia Tolentino, one of my favorite essayists of this generation, just published her latest essay in The New Yorker on exactly this challenge. The piece, aptly titled “My Brain Finally Broke,” opens: “I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does ‘illegible’ still mean too messy to read?” She feels this way, and she’s never even used ChatGPT.

One of you dear subscribers wrote to us in response to our last issue, pondering whether or not an algorithm can be our “other half”—something (instead of someone) in which we can find the missing part of ourselves, something that can complete us. I wrote in response: “As far as other halfness goes, my feeling increasingly as I interact with these tools is that they help me not find myself in them but find myself in spite of them. What I mean by that is they try to tell me what they think I want to hear, but then, confronted with the presumption, I realize its falseness—and no, actually, that is not what I want to hear, and it is through that negative space that I begin—and feel the moral compulsion—to assert myself in the positive space. Do you feel that way?”

To me, and it’s trite but it’s true, the answer seems to lie in cultivating the thing that AI will never have: a human soul. If you think you don’t know what that is, try listening for it. It’s that thing that tells you that you love that lamp you saw in that antique store, that compels your body to dance to a song you’ve never heard before, that gives you that queasy feeling when something you can’t quite place just feels off. It’s the part of you that guides you through a museum or a new city, that cries with surprising abandon at the movies, that is overcome with unexplainable moods. It’s the part of you that holds on to hope, and it’s the things you hope for. Listen for it—in nature, in literature, in sport. Sometimes, the voice is faint, but lately, as ChatGPT tries to suck up to who it thinks I am, I find that mine roars defiantly in response, crying, to quote Hopkins: “Whát I dó is me: for that I came.”