Acknowledging that “we do not usual

Acknowledging that “we do not usually think of information as a liability” (p. 116), Bennett proposes an analogy to make his conclusion plausible. “Intuitively, the demon’s record of past actions seems to be a valuable (or at worst a useless) commodity. But for the demon 4yesterday’s newspaper’ [the result of a previous measurement] takes up valuable space, and the cost of clearing that space neutralizes the benefit the demon derived from the newspaper when it was fresh” (p. 116). Arriving belatedly in the tradition surrounding M axwell’s Demon, Bennett can appreciate more easily than his predecessors that there is a strong correlation between his explanation and his historical moment. He ends his article with the conjecture that perhaps “the increasing awareness of environmental pollution and the information explosion brought on by computers have made the idea that information can have a negative value seem more natural now that it would have seemed earlier in this century”The surplus meaning characteristic of heuristic fictions thus receives explicit acknowledgment from within the scientific community. Moreover, the play of excess meaning has brought forth interpreta-tions of the heuristic that are concerned with the way information is created and destroyed. The stage is set for a self-reflexive moment to occur.