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in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly that he would not “publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists.”30 He remained ambivalent about the transformative power of new technologies, indulging in neither the boundless hype nor the digital utopianism of later pundits.

“Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions,” he wrote, in Human Use. He was concerned about human-made restrictions as well as technological ones, especially Cold War restrictions that threatened the flow of information so critical to cybernetic systems: “Under the impetus of Senator [Joseph] McCarthy and his imitators, the blind and excessive classification of military information” was driving political leaders in the United States to adopt a “secretive frame of mind paralleled in history only in the Venice of the Renaissance.” Wiener, echoing many outspoken veterans of the Manhattan Project, argued that the postwar obsession with secrecy—especially around nuclear weapons—stemmed from a misunderstanding of the scientific process. The only genuine secret about the production of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was whether such bombs could be built. Once that secret had been revealed, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no amount of state-imposed secrecy would stop others from puzzling through chains of reasoning like those the Manhattan Project researchers had followed. As Wiener memorably put it, “There is no Maginot Line of the brain.”

To drive this point home, Wiener borrowed Shannon’s fresh ideas about information theory. In 1948, Shannon, a mathematician and engineer working at Bell Labs, had published a pair of lengthy articles in the Bell System Technical Journal. Introducing the new work to a broad readership in 1949, mathematician Warren Weaver explained that in Shannon’s formulation, “the word information…is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning.”31 Linguists and poets might be concerned about the “semantic” aspects of communication, Weaver continued, but not engineers like Shannon. Rather, “this word ‘information’ in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say.” In Shannon’s now-famous formulation, the information content of a string of symbols was given by the logarithm of the number of possible symbols from which a given string was chosen. Shannon’s key insight was that the information of a message was just like the entropy of a gas: a measure of the system’s disorder.

Wiener borrowed this insight when composing Human Use. If information was like entropy, then it could not be conserved—or contained. Physicists in the 19th century had demonstrated that the total energy of a physical system must always remain the same, a perfect balance between the start and the end of a process. Not so for entropy, which would inexorably increase over time, an imperative that came to be known as the second law of thermodynamics. From that stark distinction—energy is conserved, whereas entropy must grow—followed enormous cosmic consequences. Time must flow forward;

30 Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1947.
31 Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 8 (emphasis in original). Shannon’s 1948 papers were republished in the same volume.

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