Page 11-13: The Body of the Meaningless:
A few monts ago an article on the front page of a Chilean newspaper's business section caught my eye. The Article talked about a Chilean who had bought one of the world's most expensive car. The car, a Bugatti Veyron, had a sticker price of more than $2.5 million, and it's purchase represented one of the most flaboyant acts of cospicious consumptions I have ever seen.
After a quick web search I estimated the per-kilo price of the car, which turned out to be $1,300 (or about $600 a pound). To put this price in context, we can look at the per-kilo price for gold and silver. depending on the day, the price of a kilo pure silver is about $1000, while that of gold is around &50,000. For comparison, consider the per-kilo price of regular car ranges from $10 for a Hyundai Accent to $60 for a top-of-the-line BMW such as the M6. So although the Bugatti is not worth its weight in gold, it is worth more than its weight in silver, and a Hyundai Accent is worth at least its weight in bronze.
Now, you may argue that comparing a kilo of Bugatti and a kilo of silver is pure nonsense, since it is not much you can do with an actual kilo of Bugatti. yet this nonsense has much to teach us about how physical order, or information, is packed into a product.
Imagine for a second that you just won a Bugatti Veyron in the lottery. Pumped up, you decide to take your new car for a drive. In your excitement, you crash the Bugatti into a wall, escaping unharmedbut a little sad, since you did not have any car insurance. The car is a total wreck. Now, how much is that kilo of Bugatti worth?
The answer to this question is not obvious.
The dollar value of the car evaporated in the second it took you to crash it against the wall, but its weight did not. So where did the value go? The car's dollar value evaporated in the crash not because the crash destroyed the atoms that made up the Bugatti but because the crash changed the way in which these were arranged. As the parts that made the Bugatti were pulled apart and twisted, the information that was embodied in the Bugatti was largely destroyed. This is another way of saying that the $2.5 million worth of value was stored not in the car's atoms but in the way these atoms were arranged. That arrangement is information.So the value of the Bugatti is connected to physical order, which is information, even though people still debate what information is. According to Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, information is a measure of the minimum volume of communication required to uniquely specify a message. That is, it's the number of bits we need to communicate an arrangement, like the arrangement of the atoms that made the Bugatti.
TWO ISSUES AND A QUOTE:
First: The value of luxury goods has an additional component besides atoms and information: the premium brand value (i.e. vanity factor) is larger than the utility value, hence the price does not reflect any kind of material worth.
Second: Production may be fully automated (by robots or 3D-printing). The logical configurations (denoted information by Hidalgo) still exists and may be relicated at any time and at a marginal cost.
“Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.”
― Neil Postman (1931-2003)