Tension in Information

Macroinformation.org and Knatz.com both recount how I had once told R. Buckminster Fuller of my headache in trying to understand the structure of a tensegrity mast on display at MOMA. I confessed my bewilderment at what held it up. The hosts who’d invited him were late to that afternoon’s Meet Tonight’s Speaker and Bucky was well into his explanation of how humans are well familiar with compressional structures, as the crowd filled in to one side of us. Bricks sit on top of bricks, lintels on posts. But humans are typically at sea when it comes to universe’s parity with tensional structures. Newton had seen how the earth’s moon could "fall" and collide with earth. Newton had simultaneously seen how the moon could "fly" away from the earth like a shot from a sling. What Newton surmised was that in the case of the moon and earth the two forces happened to cancel each other, to balance: establishing an orbit. Falling and flying cancelling each other establish an orbital curve. Earth and moon are each compressional members: like "bricks." Newton’s gravity, in which all mass is mutually attractive with all mass provides the structural tension.

Universe uses both compression and tension freely. With few exceptions up until Ken Snelson’s discontinuous compression sculptures,
men have built by compression alone.
(*Exceptions include the Middle East’s ancient tripod chair -- with leather (tensional) seat and sailboats -- with lines, stays ... wind, sails.)
This is all wonderful in itself: but I am overdue to return with more and more specific informational analogies. The first thing that I wish to point out in today’s assay at the topic is that universe’s gravity seems to be a mono-tension: it’s all matter (compression), it’s all gravity (one force): it’s the spacing of the two that makes the tension. The informational tensions I shall first consider are all poly-tensions: they are minimally two sided. Male and female, for example.
I am confident that most will agree that matter, energy, velocity, gravity ... are objective things. I trust that male and female will follow suit. The first group is from Pleroma, the second from Creatura, but a bulk of us will recognize them both as real.

Universe is at least fourteen and a half or so billion years old. We know of no vacations that gravity has taken in that time. Gravity never drops either end of its rope. In Creatura, neither, so far as we can see, has either male or female dropped its end. Male and female wax and wane, forming complex sin curves over time. Gender differences are more conspicuous among baboons than among humans, more conspicuous among Muslims than beatniks, but neither anchoring end of the tension ever severs.
I supply additional examples, any of which may move further and further away from the simple objectivities of Pleroma: Yin and Yang ... Life and Death ... Eros and Thanatos ...
And, er ... how about: Yes and No? On and Off?
A key relationship I’ll develop in this vein will be between Bateson’s cybernetic buzzers, oscillating between On and Off, and my macroinformational buzzers: such as "salad days." (My head is still buzzing since I first encountered Shakespeare's noun-redundant oxymoron. Indeed, the buzzing has increased with time!)

I draft my plans here at the blog. I’ll be developing examples (into classes of example) over time. Gradually it will all get well developed at Macroinformation.org: as Informational Tension.