Anyway. In my fond imaginings, when my children are old enough, we’ll watch Fight Club together. I would like to see their reactions to it. Specifically, I would like to see their reaction to the twist at the end of the second act. Then, even better, we’d watch it again, and see if the film stands up on a second viewing, when you know what the twist is. (It does.)

But, realistically, that will never happen. Because there is just no way they are going to get through the next several years of their life without someone, somewhere, spoiling the twist for them. Even if almost everyone agrees on a norm of “no spoilers”, it just takes one person to disagree with that norm, and tweet out/post on Facebook/stand in Piccadilly Circus with a megaphone shouting “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time”* to undermine the whole thing. And if there are millions of people, you can be pretty sure that someone is going to do exactly that. They don’t do this because they want to ruin films for everyone: they actually think that it’s fine to give away plot points, as long as the film is sufficiently old.

This is not going to be a piece about spoilers, although I am tempted to make it one. My own position is that now that we can all watch any film from any era at a moment’s notice, wouldn’t it be polite to try to keep plot details quiet? I still wonder what it would have been like to watch The Empire Strikes Back when it came out and not know the I-am-your-father twist. If you want to talk about the plot, do it in DMs, not in public.

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But I digress. There’s a concept, first mooted by the philosopher and AI theorist Nick Bostrom, called the “unilateralist’s curse”. It’s probably easiest to illustrate with an example, so here’s Bostrom’s own. Imagine you have a group of scientists researching a vaccine into HIV. While doing so, they accidentally discover a way to make a variant of the disease which can spread via air droplets. They could publish their findings, or keep them quiet, “knowing that it might be used to create a devastating biological weapon, but also that it could help those who hope to develop defenses against such weapons”.

Most of them think it’s a bad idea to publish, so they keep quiet. But one disagrees, and mentions the finding at a scientific conference, so the discovery spreads rapidly.

The two options are asymmetric: keeping the information quiet relies on everyone doing it, while making it public can be done unilaterally. If the dissenting scientist is wrong, and making the information public is actually a terrible idea — which, let’s face it, sounds likely — then the wrong outcome is almost inevitable, at least if there are lots of people involved.

Bostrom’s HIV example may sound somewhat far-fetched, but it’s not. In 2016, Canadian scientists revived the extinct horsepox virus, using DNA sequencing techniques. Horsepox is a close cousin of smallpox; the scientists believed that it could be used to create a better smallpox vaccine. Others pointed out that the same technique could also be used to bring back smallpox itself. In 2018 they published their findings, despite widespread concerns that the risks outweighed the benefits.

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Or consider the development of the nuclear bomb; Bostrom points out two occasions when the unilateralist’s curse has applied. In 1939, the Polish physicist Joseph Rotblat “noticed that the fission of uranium released more neutrons than used to trigger it, realising that it could produce a chain reaction leading to an explosion of unprecedented power”, Bostrom writes. Other scientists, he assumed, had had this insight too. Initially he kept it to himself, but then grew concerned about German efforts to create a bomb; so he told James Chadwick, his colleague at the University of Liverpool, and essentially started the British nuclear programme. Later he would decide this had been a bad idea, and helped start the Pugwash anti-nuclear campaign, for which he would win the 1995 Nobel peace prize.

And in the 1970s, Progressive magazine published the mechanism for the hydrogen bomb, which at the time was only known by four countries, arguing in a lawsuit ahead of publication that nuclear secrecy was a greater risk than that of other nations developing the bomb.

All these examples are of the spread of information, which has the toothpaste-like quality of being easy to squeeze out but hard to put back in the tube. But the unilateralist’s curse applies to other situations. For instance, it only takes one person to introduce a breeding colony of rats to a Galapagos island — or rabbits to Australia — to devastate an ecosystem.

Or, very soon — maybe even right now — we could take steps to geoengineer our planet to reduce the impact of climate change, perhaps by pumping aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun’s rays. It might be a good idea; it might not. But if, say, 50 countries have the technological capacity to do it, and 49 countries decide it’s too dangerous, then it will happen. (And, of course, now it’s not just nation states who can do this: Silicon Valley billionaires are discussing geoengineering methods of reducing ocean acidification. The more potential actors there are, the more likely it is that one of them will act.)

More prosaically: almost all of us agree that abusing women and people of colour on social media is not a good or helpful thing. But some small percentage disagree, and it only takes a very tiny percentage to send a huge number of abusive messages and make Twitter an unmanageable hellscape.

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Or much less prosaically: Bostrom and others, such as his fellow Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, worry about existential risks — that is, things which could wipe out humanity, or at least permanently and severely limit its future. The most pressing, they think, are bioengineered pandemics and artificial intelligence, both of which are vulnerable to the unilateralist’s curse — both at the development stage (if 99.9% of the world’s AI companies agree to keep their amazing superintelligent AI designs secret, but one single company publishes its code on Github, then it’s out in the open) and at the use stage (it only take one psychopath to release a genetically modified virus on the Tube, even if no one else thinks that’s the best idea).

These are incredibly hard problems to solve. How do you convince hundreds of people to abide by a decision not to share some information, if some number of those people are sure that sharing that information is the good and moral thing to do? How do you convince millions of people not to send horrible messages on Twitter, if some small number of those people think that those horrible messages are just what the recipients deserve? But if you don’t convince all of them — or at least almost all — then it hasn’t worked.

(And remember, this is all just assuming that everyone is acting in what they think is humanity’s best interests. If some people are selfish bastards or appalling trolls, then it all gets even worse.)

Bostrom considers a “principle of conformity”: a rule or social norm that we don’t act unilaterally even when we think doing so would be for the common good. It’s quite a small-c conservative idea — Chesterton’s Fence-like — but, as Bostrom points out, there are obvious concerns, not least that quite a lot of good has come in the past from people acting unilaterally (he gives the example of the leak of the Pentagon Papers). Plus (it seems to me) the principle of conformity itself suffers from the unilateralist’s curse — if 99% of us agree to conform to it, but 1% don’t, then a lot of unilateral decisions are still going to get taken.

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I have no clever answer for this. It seems to me a really big problem; it’s part of a wider group of problems, coordination problems, that come when you have lots of individuals making decisions.

Game theory is all about coordination problems. Take the tragedy of the commons: you have some common resource of constant size, such as a meadow. Imagine it can support 100 cattle comfortably, and there are 10 farmers. If each farmer has 10 cattle, everything works out fine. But if one farmer adds an 11th cow, then that farmer gains 100% of the benefit from that cow, but pays only 10% of the cost. And if another farmer does the same, and another. It’s in everyone’s best interest if they all stick at 10, but it’s in each individual’s best interest if they add more and more: so the resource inevitably gets degraded. And if your neighbour does it, you’d be a sucker not to do it yourself. The parallels with the climate crisis could hardly be more obvious.

Almost everything that is wrong with the world, I think, is caused not by people being bad or evil, but by coordination problems. The unilateralist’s curse shows that this doesn’t just apply when people are acting self-interestedly, but even when everyone is trying to be noble and good. And short of banning whistleblowers, ending open science and generally sliding into totalitarianism, I’m not sure what the best way to minimise the problem is.

Film spoilers are, probably, the most trivial example of this you can imagine. But they matter to me. By the time my kids are old enough to watch an 18-rated film, probably in the year 2027 or something (I won’t make them wait until they’re actually 18, obviously; I’m not Mary Whitehouse), it is functionally impossible that they won’t have seen some meme or other spoiling Fight Club for them. Someone will spoil it for them. And, by extension, some bugger is clearly going to use a lorry full of drones to release aerosolised smallpox over New York City, and there’s sod all we can do to stop it.

*Yes, this is a different film. No, I’m not giving away the twist in Fight Club in a piece pegged to the idea of not giving away the twist in Fight Club

The 64MB phone in your pocket contains 512 million bits. Bits of what? Bits of information: every single one a little digital flipflop. It’s a one or it’s a zero. And yet get enough of those ones and zeros together in one place (with the help of some cunning technology) and you have a device that might as well be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Speaking of the galaxy, did you know that we are able to make a pretty reliable estimate of how much information there is in the entire universe? “10⁹⁰ bits”, was the estimate of John Archibald Wheeler, then the last surviving collaborator of Einstein and Bohr. That’s a lot, obviously — but it’s a number you can write down. Mind securely blown.

What unites these two things — the phone in your pocket and the cosmos of which it’s an infinitesimal part — is information. And the question of how much information there is in something was effectively impossible to ask until relatively recently. If you’d asked a medieval librarian how much information there was in his library, or — for that matter — the head librarian at the British Library in 1947, they wouldn’t have understood the question. How can an amount of information be measured?

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That’s where my book of the decade comes in. We live in the “information age”, but until I read James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), I had little or no idea what that actually meant. It’s the story of how we learnt to measure information, and it begins with a man called Claude Shannon, a mathematician who worked for Bell Labs in the 1940s. 

Bell was a telephone company, and a big one: “By 1948 more than 125 million conversations passed daily through the Bell System’s 138 million miles of cable and 31 million telephone sets.” Like its similarly vast successor Google, it didn’t mind giving its research people the chance to tinker around. With its “vast, monopolistic” mission, writes Gleick, “AT&T at midcentury did not demand instant gratification from its research division.” 

Anyway, what Shannon published in 1948 was a paper in an in-house magazine (The Bell System Technical Journal) called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. He was seeking to answer, in a systematic way, the question of what it actually was that all those miles of telephone cable were carrying. Conversations? Words? Electricity, obviously. But how do you measure that stuff? Reading the volts and amps won’t tell you much about what Mavis said to Dolly when they had a natter this morning. 

Shannon proposed the idea of a thing called a “bit”, which he described as “A unit for measuring information”. And so “Information Theory” was born. A bit is a binary digit: something is either there, or it’s not. It has a value of 0 or a value of 1. This is a tiny unit, and a quite dizzyingly big idea.

When it was made simple — distilled, counted in bits — information was found to be everywhere. Shannon’s theory made a bridge between information and uncertainty; between information and entropy; and between information and chaos. 

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A bit is the atomic unit of information, in other words, and once you start to see the little buggers, it turns out they are all over the shop. Economies are systems of information. So are people. DNA, for instance, is replicable, measurable information that comes with all the other properties of information: noise and signal, deterioration in transmission, and so on. Evolution “embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment”. Matter itself can be understood in informational terms — as Gleick puts it rather poetically,  

“When photons and electrons and other particles interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.”

If, as has been argued, information is the stuff that underpins the very fabric of the universe, then this really is a theory of everything.

The joys of Gleick’s book are his ability to explain some pretty complex mathematical issues in a way that non-mathematicians will be able to understand; the fantastically agile connections he makes; and the engrossing examples he uses. Where he writes about entropy and chaos, information is an ice-cube in the gin-and-tonic of randomness, a temporary state of organisation.

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After introducing Shannon, for instance (who en passant we meet having lunch with Alan Turing), Gleick zips back to look at African talking drums. The funny thing about these drums — which could communicate complex messages over large distances, and were understood by everybody — is that they seemed to send much more information than was necessary. If a drummer wanted to say “come home”, the message would be: “Make your feet come back the way they went/ make your legs come back the way they went,/ plant your feet and your legs below,/ in the village which belongs to us.” 

This looks like inefficiency — but it’s the opposite. The drums replicate a tonal language, and a common two-tone word, on the drums, could be any word with the same two tones — but glossed with recognisable standard formulas, like Homeric epithets, the meaning becomes clear. They were — not that they’d put it that way — recognising the necessity to “allocate extra bits for disambiguation and error correction”. Redundancy helps overcome ambiguity. Like when army signallers say “Bravo Victor Tango” rather than “BVT” to prevent mishearing. 

A mathematical understanding of communication starts to make it possible to talk about how that works – and to see how information isn’t just about saying stuff, but about creating a structure out of a chaotic field of possibilities. Information, as one writer put it, is “negative entropy”. Gleick gallops on through Morse code, the multilayered history of written language, the ideas behind logarithms and computation, telegraphy, cryptography, Russell and Godel, towards the compression of digital signals that makes it possible, among other things, for me to watch Wonder Woman on Netflix.  

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The genius here is that Gleick gives you all the technological history, from cuneiform to cybernetics, but at the same time gives you the theoretical underpinnings — the basic ideas in probabilities and logic that make possible everything we do. That make it possible, in fact, for me to transmit this article to UnHerd, and for you to make sense of it. Make it possible for me to be here in the first place, and you likewise, come to that. 

“I think that this present century,” Shannon said in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania, “in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business; the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another, and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it.” He was certainly onto something there. 

And that’s why this book really is essential for making sense of the way we live now. It describes a revolution in the way we understand the world arguably as far-reaching and tentacular as the development of the written word; and, indeed, it encompasses that.

But in his closing chapters – which cover everything from the growth of Wikipedia to David Foster Wallace’s grim warnings of “Total Noise” — Gleick addresses what it means to be drowning in the present-day’s flood of information. How do we sift meaning from all this “information overload”?  

I was on the panel for the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction (as it then was) the year Gleick’s book was published and it remains a source of regret to me that I wasn’t able to get his book on the shortlist. It’s stayed with me longer than many of the books that got further in the competition. It not only helps you make sense of the digital world (or neurobiology, or macroeconomics, or astrophysics, or linguistics), but also to glimpse the very foundations on which it’s built. That’s got to be worth — so to speak — a bit of your time.