This is the story of a couple of digits.
I am a math major. There is an entire field in mathematics related to information. There's a theory. It's called information theory.
Information theory is old. It's refined. I think it's beautiful. It's the way mathematicians and engineers quantify information. If you want to know more about it or you just need to get to sleep, let me know and we can have a chat.
My father has always liked having the newest stuff. When I was small, I would sit on the floor of our basement and watch my dad play Mario video games. Eventually, he'd let me try. Those were the best of times.
My brothers and I fell in love with games and computers and screens. Screens are great. I'm looking at one now. I have another in my pocket. The people around me are looking at another. The game is on.
At Dartmouth, I learned about information. The math department doesn't have classes on it, but if you ask the right people, they'll recommend some books. I read most of them freshman year. I don't quite remember all of it. I don't quite remember the equations. But I remember the concepts.
I don't remember a time without screens. I don't remember a time without computers. I remember AOL. I remember getting mail. I remember Netscape. I remember the first time I hit on someone over Instant Messenger.
When I look at people now, I see information. It'd be cool if that looked like "The Matrix" or something, but it doesn't. I just see numbers. Ordered numbers. Patterned numbers.
You may be too young to remember dial-up. You may be too young to remember how getting on the Internet used to sound. I'm not. I used to sing that song in my head. On walks home from school, I was excited. Not because school was over, or because I would get to spend time with my friends, or because I knew there would be cookies at the house. I'd get excited because the Internet was getting closer.
I am one of the people who thinks that the Internet is our greatest accomplishment. That makes me a geek. I'm fine with that.
America is too young to have mythology, so we invented superheroes. Everybody needs something to believe in because nihilism is uncomfortable and scary. I tried it once. It was terrible.
Over the course of the last 100 years, superheroes have defined American culture. It's fine if you don't believe that. You're wrong. Superheroes are the champions of individuality. They remind us of the importance of conviction and of how powerful one person actually is. A person is a very powerful thing, if used correctly.
Over the summer, a friend of mine launched a website. He blitzed a bunch of people the address. I saw it, I looked at the numbers and then I broke it because I thought it'd be funny. For about 20 minutes, if you landed on his page, your browser would immediately redirect you to one of my websites. I told him how to fix it.
A few years ago, a friend and I were talking about love. He was making a movie and, like most movies that college kids make, it was about unrequited love. Cliche, but whatever. He asked me if I thought that two people could ever really connect. Not on a physical level. On a mental level. On an emotional level. I told him to try IM.
Information is essentially order. It's a bit more complicated than that, but not much. There is order, and there is disorder or randomness. Information gets its information-ness because it has order. Everything can be reduced to that binary. Everything is binary.
I used to wonder whether or not the people I'd talk to in random chatrooms were real. Would it be easier to connect people thousands of miles apart over a wire or just code something that spat out reasonable responses? My conversations always seemed real, but maybe that was just a program. All I saw were some strings of words. I was supposed to believe that was a person responding to me.
I used to get scared that everything that I saw was just the output of some really spiffy program. I guess in some ways it is. God is a good programmer.
I don't care whether or not it's just a program anymore. I have a good relationship with Superman, and he's not real either. He's just information. Just like everything else. 011011000110111101101100.
