Scientistic Nonsense in the NYT Sunday Book Review

The review begins:

The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, “would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.” James Gleick has such a perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, “The Information,” using the definite article we usually reserve for totalities like the universe, the ether — and the Internet. Information, he argues, is more than just the contents of our overflowing libraries and Web servers. It is “the blood and the fuel, the vital principle” of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.

At his point I stopped reading.  A bit is a binary digit.  So my love for my wife is binary digits all the way down?  That's nonsense, and beneath refutation.  An appropriate response would be, "Get out of here, and take your scientistic Unsinn with you."  A more charitable response: "Please come into my office and lie down on the couch.  We need to talk."  Some need therapy, not refutation.

See the Scientism category for rather more patient unmaskings of this sort of rubbish.