In Search of Certainty

Chapter 3. Digilogy: Cause, Effect, and Information: How transmitted information shapes the world from the bottom up.

“We are thus obliged to be modest in our demands and content ourselves with concepts that are formal in the sense that they do not provide a visual picture of the sort one is accustomed to require...”

Niels Bohr, Nobel Address

One of the running jokes, between myself and another British colleague, during the early years of founding a company around CFEngine, was my job description. “Mark is the CTO—he does stuff with things”.

When two British heads come together, a wicked resonance of absurdity known as British Humour™ typically emerges, resulting in an unstoppable if confusing force over which the remainder of the cosmopolitan workforce generally roll their eyes in pity. Doing stuff with things seemed like the most appropriate irony for the puffed up job of a Chief Technical Officer who had neither feathers nor military honours.

Still, never missing the opportunity to ruin a good joke, the recollection of these exchanges reminds me now of a crucial difference between stuff and things that forms a stepping stone on the path to control over technology; and so I must proceed now to dissect it for the good of the present story. In brief, the point is this: there might be much stuff, but there are only so many things.

If you are still with me, ‘stuff’ is a continuous measure, like ‘bread’ or ‘gold’, but a ‘thing’ is a discrete measure like ‘a loaf’ or ‘a bar’. Hence: the ...