2004 : WHAT'S YOUR LAW?

mark_hurst's picture
Founder of Internet consulting firm Creative Good
Hurst's Law

Any unbounded bitstream tends to irrelevance.

Bits are so easy to create, copy, and send that without some filtering process, the worth of the entire bitstream decays
rapidly. A good example is the e-mail inbox. Many e-mail users have no discipline about deleting or filtering their mail, and thus the bits that flow in—spam and legitimate mail together—clutter the inbox to an extent that the worth of the inbox overall tends to zero.

Stated another way, the worth of a bitstream is proportional to the accuracy and usage of the filters and meta-bits applied to the bitstream.