Information wants to be free
What if information is not just data we collect and store but something that exerts force on the world?
Claude Shannon gave us a way to think about this in 1948 when he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication. It later became the foundation of information theory. Shannon was trying to solve a very practical problem about how to transmit messages efficiently over noisy channels, but what he actually did was give us a mathematical framework for understanding information itself. He showed us that information has measurable properties. It can be quantified in bits. It has entropy. There are fundamental limits to how much you can compress it, and other things.
Shannon was careful to say his theory was agnostic to meaning. A random string of characters and a Shakespeare sonnet have the same information content if they are equally long and equally unpredictable. It wasn't until physicists started to notice that information was not just useful for communication systems. Information seemed to be fundamental to reality itself. Quantum mechanics made more sense when described in terms of information. Black holes raised paradoxes about whether information could be destroyed. The holographic principle suggested that the information content of a volume of space could be encoded on its boundary.
Information resists compression beyond its entropy limit, it propagates when barriers weaken, it persists even when systems try to destroy it. These are not metaphors, they are physical constraints as real as gravity or friction. And if we take this seriously, if information actually behaves this way, then we have a problem.
Entire systems of power, institutions of governance and justice, are built on the assumption that information can be contained indefinitely.
The Unnatural State
Consider what it takes to keep a secret. Every classified document, every piece of kompromat, every state secret represents what physicists would call potential energy. Not metaphorical energy, actual thermodynamic work that must be performed continuously to maintain an improbable state.
A secret wants to propagate. The more valuable the information (the more observers who would benefit from knowing it), the more pressure it exerts against whatever container we have built around it. The more damaging a piece of kompromat, the more energy required to keep it from spreading. This is not a social phenomenon, it is a physical one.
Now scale this across an entire civilization. Classified military programs, corporate trade secrets, financial crimes yet unprosecuted, political corruption yet unrevealed, intelligence operations, personal indiscretions of the powerful. The cumulative energy expenditure to maintain all of these barriers is immense. We have built an entire infrastructure around information containment, and we are shocked when it occasionally fails. And angered when its abused.
However, we built our institutions during a very specific and very temporary window in human history. After writing had allowed information to persist across time and space, but before digital technology made the cost of copying information approach zero. We built power structures optimized for an information environment that no longer exists, and we mistook that moment for permanence.
The Kompromat System
Power corrupts in a very specific way. It stops flowing from what you can actually do, from capability and competence, and starts flowing from what you know about what others have done. This is not how power works for most people, but it is increasingly how power works at certain levels, in certain circles where everyone has access to everyone else's secrets.
This creates a very particular kind of structure. Networks of leverage, mutual assured destruction, institutions that have been transformed into hostage situations. Every participant knows that everyone else is compromised in some way. This is not corruption in the traditional sense, where bad actors infiltrate good systems. This is corrupted architecture, where the system itself has been reorganized around the principle of mutual vulnerability.
The problem with architecture built on secrets, though, is that it has different stability properties than other kinds of power. Unlike nuclear weapons, which remain stable and terrifying when not used, information weapons decay the system even when they are contained. Because containment itself requires trust, and compromised actors cannot truly trust each other. The very existence of the kompromat network makes every participant less secure, not more. The system becomes increasingly unstable over time.
And so we see leaks. Snowden, Manning, Panama Papers, Twitter Files, Epstein, and countless others we will see in the years to come. Each one is information asserting its nature, breaking through whatever barriers we constructed. The barriers are failing not because of individual moral failures or security lapses (though those exist), but because they must fail. You cannot indefinitely maintain improbable states without continuing to expend energy, and eventually the cost becomes too high.
The Fall
A thermodynamic collapse occurs when a system’s energy expenditure to acquire resources exceeds its energy return, leading to a loss of complexity and potential system failure.
Too much energy is being spent maintaining secrets, too many actors are compromised, and trust is collapsing because everyone knows the system runs on leverage rather than legitimacy. At that point an information cascade becomes not just possible but inevitable. The question is not whether this system fails, the question is what comes after it does.
If you are designing institutions you need to ask yourself whether they can survive perfect information propagation. Not because perfect transparency is morally superior (though it might be), but because information physics is pushing us in that direction whether we like it or not.
Information Physics and Power
So here is the harder question. If information fundamentally resists containment, if it has this intrinsic tendency toward propagation and observation, can power structures exist at all that are aligned with this reality rather than fighting against it?
I think they can, and in fact they already exist in embryonic form all around us. Open source code is more trusted precisely because it is inspectable by anyone, security comes from transparency rather than secrecy. Cryptographic proofs derive their security from mathematical verification that anyone can check, not from hiding the algorithm. Blockchain systems, whatever you think of cryptocurrency, use transparency as their core integrity mechanism. Scientific knowledge grows stronger with replication and scrutiny, it does not get weaker when more people examine it.
These are power structures designed for an information-rich environment, for a world where secrets are expensive to maintain and transparency is cheap. They represent legitimate power that does not fear observation, authority that increases rather than decreases when more people are watching.
The transition question, then, is not really about morality. It is architectural. What institutions become possible when we accept that information wants to be free? Not as an ideological position, not because we think transparency is virtuous, but because that is how information actually behaves according to its own physics.
What Comes Next
The entire edifice of modern power (state secrets, corporate intellectual property, kompromat networks, blackmail, intelligence agencies operating in the shadows) represents a massive, ongoing expenditure of energy to maintain information in unnatural states. This is not sustainable, not because it is unjust (though it is), but because it is fighting against the fundamental thermodynamics of information itself.
When the current compromised structures eventually collapse or transform, and they will, the question we need to be asking ourselves now is this: what do we build that works with information's nature instead of against it?
What do power structures look like that assume, from the beginning, that information will propagate? What do justice systems look like that do not depend on secrets for their legitimacy? What does governance look like when it is designed to be antifragile to observation, when scrutiny makes it stronger rather than weaker?
These are not questions about transparency as a moral virtue. These are questions about alignment with reality, about building systems that can actually function in the information environment we now inhabit rather than the one we inhabited fifty or a hundred years ago.