Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

What do a book, a radio broadcast, and the human voice all have in common? Today the answer is easy: they all contain information. But if you asked someone the same question 100 years ago, they would struggle. They would not have easily identified that these different things all share an abstract property like information. The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge2 to articulate that there was something universal underlying sound, electromagnetic waves, symbols on paper, and much more. Although humans have been creating and using information technologies like writing, printing, and telegrams for hundreds or thousands of years, it was only in the last century that we articulated clearly what all of these things have in common, and realized that they can be understood as a category…