I didn’t know what to call this post. It would almost be better as poetry. The subject is naturally metaphorical, impressionistic, interpretive.

Information is all around us. Light, sound, temperature, pressure, smells, tastes. Life is information, both figuratively and literally. DNA encodes the information that makes life possible.

Organisms live or die based on their ability to interpret and understand their environment. They—we—experience our world through our senses. We absorb information, make inferences and plans, and act.

Messages travel from our sensors to our effectors, with stops in the neural ganglia—including the brain—along the way. We have external and internal sensors. Our guts process information on our behalf.

Pain and pleasure are information. Emotions are information. Art are science are information. Knowledge is information. Society is culture is language is information. Relationships are information.

Culture is an informational medium. It is both made of information, and a medium for it. Layers upon layers, including rules for understanding and interpretation.

Success or failure—whatever they might mean—depend on information. Which is why the ability to manipulate, confabulate, manufacture, and distribute information is so powerful. It is why people lie, and imitate, and counterfeit.

With the right information, in the right form, you can be anyone to anyone. If you can send the right messages to the right people at the right time, they will do what you want, and give you anything you ask for. You merely need to know how to ask.

Computers are a simplified and formalized version of the same thing. Simpler, because their languages are so much simpler. But because of the formality, they feel unnatural to most people. Computers are alien. And while they are much simpler than living things, the culture of software—in which computers reside—is still much more complex than any one person can truly understand.

So many cultures. So many languages. Every discipline and profession has its own languages and culture. Business, industry, engineering, finance, marketing, entertainment, law, politics, military: different cultures with their own vocabulary; their own special nouns, verbs, and adjectives; their own symbols and cermonies, priests and gods.

We cannot escape information. Our lives are information. Our memories, choices, preferences, intentions, dreams, predictions, goals and plans: information. We cannot survive without it. We cannot succeed without the right information.

Yet it’s all relative. Culture tells you what success means. We don’t simply use information. Information uses us. As life uses us. As we use one another. We are information. We are both medium and message. Along with everything else.