If the planet needs us to speed up information, and slow down matter, what does this mean for the complex relationship between information and nature? There is a growing awareness of the importance of studying the behaviour of matter in its full complexity. According to Manuel DeLanda, author of A Short History of Matter, this is partly the result of experimentation with non-homogeneous materials. DeLanda explores some of the philosophical issues raised by new developments in materials science, including the significance of the idea that many different material and energetic systems may have a common source of spontaneous order. The historical emergence of uniform, homogenous, predictable materials like steel entailed great gains -- DeLanda focuses on some of what may have been lost in this process, for human beings, technology and the philosophy of matter.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (which says a lot); and it is fully capable of surviving the advances from free-floating New Agers as well as the equally inevitable rebuffs from academic Old Agers. De Landa's greatest strength, no doubt, is his ability to synthesize - to create a self-sustaining system of theories that are merged, as it were, into an intellectual meshwork. Here, however, a final irony emerges: in the concluding pages of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi Strauss muses that anthropology - the science that informs one culture about another - should be called entropology because the exchange of information serves to erode the boundaries between the cultures and ultimately homogenizes them....

by Manuel DeLanda

The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow the rest of the paper. I will then discuss a few of the ideas put forward by open-source philosophers (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond) focusing not on their weaknesses but on their practical consequences. In particular, Stallman's achievements go beyond the creation of programs and involve the design of a contract (the GNU General Public License, or GPL) which has been arguably as crucial to the success of the movement as any piece of software. The spirit of the license is clearly informed by Stallman's moral philosophy but its unintended consequences go far beyond it. Similarly, Eric Raymond's attempts at an ethnography of the movement, and to distill "rules" which capture its dynamics, fall short of success but he has in addition provided good material to study those unintended consequences....