The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a media market that rewards the loudest and most strident voices at the expense of truth and the common good. The powerful AIs employed by social media giants like Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), YouTube, and TikTok have been trained to generate the...

A couple of years ago, I published a book that worried the quantitative conception of information, by suggesting that “information” constituted a problem not because it lacked ways of being defined, but because it could be defined at once in so many competing and oftentimes contradictory ways. In the book, I was concerned specifically with radio broadcasting and the wartime literary field; but also, at a methodological level I was not entirely aware of until late in the composition process, with how forms of mediation and needs for remediation had created conditions in which the political charge of description and classification was suddenly, if also temporarily, to the fore. I tried to get at how this seemingly primary issue of definition is, in fact, the product of acts of and disputes about classification through which the “data of culture,” in Lisa Gitelman’s phrase, are put into meaningful sequences and mobilized, used, and managed—a in short, how they are put in formation. [1]