something to say! Heaven save us likewise from the mathematical papers which are correct and elegant but without body or spirit.” Wiener’s treatment of “information” sounded more like Matthew Arnold in 1869? than Claude Shannon in 1948—more “body and spirit” than “bit.” Wiener shared Arnold’s Romantic view of the “content producer” as well. “Properly speaking the artist, the writer, and the scientist should be moved by such an irresistible impulse to create that, even if they were not being paid for their work, they would be willing to pay to get the chance to do it.” L’art pour I art, that 19th-century cry: Artists should suffer for their work; the quest for meaningful expression should always trump lucre. To Wiener, this was the proper measure of “information”: body, spirit, aspiration, expression. Yet to argue against its commodification, Wiener reverted again to Shannon’s mathematics of information-as-entropy. Flash forward to our day. In many ways, Wiener has been proved right. His vision of networked feedback loops driven by machine-to-machine communication has become a mundane feature of everyday life. From the earliest stirrings of the Internet Age, moreover, digital piracy has upended the view that “information”—in the form of songs, movies, books, or code—could remain contained. Put up a paywall here, and the content will diffuse over there, all so much informational entropy that cannot be conserved. On the other hand, enormous multinational corporations—some of the largest and most profitable in the world—now routinely disprove Wiener’s contention that “information” cannot be stockpiled or monetized. Ironically, the “information” they trade in is closer to Shannon’s definition than Wiener’s, Shannon’s mathematical proofs notwithstanding. While Google Books may help circulate hundreds of thousands of works of literature for free, Google itself—like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and their many imitators—has commandeered a baser form of “information” and ex