War & Peace Quote by Norbert Wiener

Wiener turns a technical anxiety into a beautifully abrasive metaphor: information isn’t a timeless substance you can warehouse like canned goods, because the world that gives it meaning won’t sit still. The first sentence attacks a comforting mid-century fantasy that data, once recorded, retains its potency indefinitely. He’s writing in the shadow of WWII and on the cusp of the Cold War, when “information” was rapidly becoming both a scientific keyword (cybernetics, feedback, control) and a strategic fetish (signals intelligence, command-and-control, early computing). His point is that context decays faster than archives can preserve it; value doesn’t vanish because paper yellows, but because reality changes the question the information was answering.

Then he lands the real punch: “fill their barrels with information.” It’s a wicked reversal of the usual technocratic optimism. If you treat information as just another payload, you end up with an absurd image of postwar militaries trying to keep their edge by stuffing yesterday’s hardware with a new magic ingredient. The subtext is a critique of institutions that want the benefits of transformation without paying its costs: new models, new infrastructures, new ethics, new ways of thinking. Information doesn’t simply upgrade old systems; it reorganizes them.

Wiener’s deeper warning is about depreciation as a structural feature of modernity. In a fast-moving world, knowledge becomes perishable, and any polity that confuses storage with understanding will keep discovering too late that it has amassed records, not readiness.