Matter, Medium, Information
Lucretius, Marshall McLuhan and Claude Shannon on why transmitting the world is not the same as understanding it
With this tenth triad, Cerchi d’inchiostro opens an international passage while remaining rooted in its Italian corpus.
A note for Italian readers follows at the end.
We have become very good at moving representations of the world. We are less disciplined about distinguishing the world from what reaches us.
An image can cross the planet in seconds. The file arrives and the image is visible. None of this tells us whether what it shows is true, whether we understand its context, or whether the system presenting it has already organised our attention.
This distance is where the tenth triad of Cerchi d’inchiostro — Circles of Ink begins.
Lucretius, Marshall McLuhan and Claude Shannon belong to different centuries, disciplines and intellectual worlds. Putting them together does not make a genealogy of communication. It makes a distinction: matter, medium, information, what the world is made of, the environments through which it becomes perceptible, and what can be formalised and transmitted. Our present keeps folding these levels into one another.
The triad deepens a line of thought already present in my essays. In The Power to Read Signs (Il potere di leggere i segni), I argued that turning chaos into a legible order is already a form of power. Every framework makes something clearer, but it also creates a danger: the temptation to confuse the framework with the world. In Who Decides the Sun? (Chi decide il Sole?), the problem moved one step earlier. Before asking how we interpret signs, we had to ask who controls the light in which those signs become visible. Interpretation became a question of visibility, and visibility a question of power. Both essays were originally written in Italian. Each includes a short English note for international readers and is also available on Medium.
Lucretius, McLuhan and Shannon help separate three layers that both essays had already begun to touch on.
Lucretius: reality does not depend on being legible to us
The wind cannot be seen, but it bends the trees. Dust suspended in a shaft of sunlight makes an invisible movement perceptible. Bodies combine, separate and disappear from sight while matter continues its transformations. De rerum natura repeatedly moves between what appears and the material processes that make appearance possible.
Lucretius does not anticipate digital technology. His atoms are not modern atoms, still less bits. His simulacra are not photographs or screens. Those analogies would make Lucretius smaller, not more modern.
Behind his materialism lies a discipline: appearance is not self-sufficient. In the Epicurean tradition he inherits, sensation is itself a physical event. Error enters with the judgment we add to what appears. The world therefore cannot simply be reduced to whatever account of it happens to be available to us.
In The Power to Read Signs I was concerned with the frameworks through which reality becomes readable: myths, maps, sciences, statistics, algorithms. A framework can reveal structures that would otherwise remain invisible. It can also become so effective that we forget it remains a framework. Lucretius goes further: material reality is not produced by our capacity to classify it.
Our technological environment makes this easy to forget. What appears weightless on a screen still depends on matter: semiconductors, cables, energy, cooling systems and human work lie beneath the apparent immateriality of the interface. A representation can be exact without exhausting what it represents.
This distinction is clearest when we speak about material reality. Social reality is more complicated: categories, reputations and institutions can help produce the realities they claim merely to describe. A system capable of shaping reality still does not become identical to reality.
McLuhan: when the medium becomes an environment
With Marshall McLuhan, the problem moves from the material conditions of reality to the conditions of perception.
A medium does more than carry something. It changes scale, speed and rhythm. It can alter the structure of an experience before we have developed the language to describe what has changed. This is the force behind the medium is the message when the phrase is rescued from its life as a slogan.
McLuhan’s provocation can tempt us to make content secondary. I would not go that far. A truth and a lie remain different; so do a private message and a propaganda campaign. But very different contents can arrive through the same environment. A feed can contain a war, an advertisement, a family photograph, a political statement and a private grief. Their meanings are not equivalent. Yet they arrive through the same gesture of scrolling, inside the same economy of interruption, repetition, ranking and disappearance. The content occupies the foreground; the medium also modifies the background.
This is where McLuhan meets the line opened by Who Decides the Sun? That essay argued that when light becomes an environment, it no longer merely reveals the world; it begins to establish the conditions under which the world can appear. McLuhan sharpens that position: an effective environment also shapes how we learn to see.
When a technology is new, we tend to look at it. When it becomes an environment, we look through it.
That transition becomes politically consequential when an environment is also designed, owned and governed. Ranking systems, recommendation mechanisms, interfaces, default settings and notification regimes are not abstract properties of “the medium”. They are decisions embedded in platforms and institutions. Once repeated often enough, however, those decisions can be experienced less as decisions than as the ordinary shape of reality. That is how normality becomes power.
McLuhan offers no complete political theory of platforms; ownership, incentives and governance require other tools. What he gives us is the prior act without which that analysis arrives too late: making the environment visible again.
Shannon: information without meaning
Claude Shannon takes us to a third level.
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In The Power to Read Signs, I described a broader historical movement: from the world as organism to the world as mechanism, and now to the world as information. Shannon forces us to use that final word with greater discipline.
In 1948, A Mathematical Theory of Communication addressed a well-defined engineering problem: how can messages be represented and transmitted through a channel subject to limits and noise? To answer it, Shannon deliberately restricted the field. Information is treated as a matter of uncertainty among possible messages and the probabilities attached to them. Coding, channel capacity and noise can then be analysed without asking what a particular message means. Meaning is bracketed because it is unnecessary to the engineering problem being solved. A mathematical model becomes general because it refuses to describe everything.
An abstraction’s success can travel beyond the boundaries that made it rigorous. Shannon did not offer the social critique that follows. The next step is ours. A formal measure remains useful while we remember what it measures and what it leaves outside. It becomes ideological when its exclusions disappear from view and its precision is allowed to speak on behalf of meaning, truth or value.
A message can arrive intact and still be false. An archive can become immense without becoming knowledge. A fluent answer can be produced without relieving its reader of the responsibility to judge it.
By the precision of his own method, Shannon teaches us to respect the boundaries of formalisation.
The mistake is not abstraction.
The mistake is forgetting the price that made abstraction possible.
When transmission outruns understanding
The three authors should not be collapsed into one another. Lucretius’s simulacrum is not a signal, McLuhan’s medium is not Shannon’s channel, and the atom does not lead to the bit. Their distance is what makes the triad productive.
Our own systems move in the opposite direction. Once something is represented as data, it becomes easier to compare, rank, classify and automate. When those classifications are repeatedly embedded in interfaces, institutions and decisions, a technical order begins to influence the social order. What was designed can eventually be experienced as given; what was ranked can appear naturally important.
Not every classification is domination. Classification becomes political when it begins to organise visibility, access and consequence while concealing that other classifications were possible. In Who Decides the Sun?, I called this problem a sovereignty of the visible: the capacity to shape the horizon within which others may experience a decision as if it were simply the natural arrangement of the world. The triad shows the structure beneath that sovereignty: none of the three levels can speak for the others.
The technical victory of our age is real. We can transmit immense quantities of data, correct errors, search archives, generate images and language, and connect distant points of the world almost instantly. Understanding has not become automatic. We let speed stand in for importance, availability for knowledge, measurability for truth. We sometimes carry the achievements of transmission into domains where transmission alone cannot decide what something means, whether it is true, or what should be done with it.
The capacity to make the world legible gives no system the authority to become the measure of the world.
The work of judgment begins in the distance that remains: between reality and its representation, between an environment and what it trains us to see, between information received and meaning understood.
Nota per chi legge in italiano
Questa volta l’ordine si inverte.
L’archivio originario di Cerchi d’inchiostro resta italiano, mentre questo articolo nasce direttamente in inglese per aprire il progetto a un pubblico internazionale senza costruire una seconda identità separata.
La linea teorica prosegue due saggi centrali: Il potere di leggere i segni, sul rapporto fra interpretazione, leggibilità e potere, e Chi decide il Sole?, sul governo della visibilità.
La triade Lucrezio — Marshall McLuhan — Claude Shannon porta quella ricerca su tre piani distinti: la costituzione materiale del reale, l’ambiente che forma la percezione e la formalizzazione dell’informazione.
Editorial note
This essay accompanies the tenth triad of Cerchi d’inchiostro, an editorial project by Alessandro Gentili built around authors, ideas and systems of thought.
Cerchi d’inchiostro is conceived as a living intellectual atlas. Authors are treated as nodes inside a network of works, concepts, disciplines, inheritances and contemporary problems. Individual guides build the nodes; triads place them under tension; essays test those tensions against the present.
The project has now reached ten triads:
1. Truth, language, power — Plato · Dante · Machiavelli
2. Capital, values, desire — Marx · Nietzsche · Leopardi
3. Time, form, disenchantment — Seneca · Aristotle · Weber
4. Unconscious, hegemony, sovereignty — Freud · Gramsci · Hobbes
5. Interpretation, money, exchange — Averroes · Georg Simmel · Adam Smith
6. Republic, opinion, decision— Cicero · Tocqueville · Condorcet
7. Elite, mass, government — Polybius · Gaetano Mosca · Vilfredo Pareto
8. Who — and what — forms a people? — Manzoni · Collodi · Pasolini
9. Desire, relation, judgment— Epicurus · Gabriel Tarde · Daniel Kahneman
10. Matter, medium, information — Lucretius · Marshall McLuhan · Claude Shannon
The website remains the primary home of the project. Medium is a space of distribution and encounter: a way for individual essays to travel while preserving the larger architecture from which they come.
Explore the English edition: Circles of Ink
AI tools were used as operational support for research comparison, structural review and editorial quality control. The thesis, selection of authors, interpretation, final language and editorial responsibility remain entirely mine.
If this essay helped you see part of the present more clearly, you are welcome to share it with someone who may find the same distinction useful.
