A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni

It seems that an evil Nazi scientist, Dr. Hagen Krankheit, had escaped Germany with a prototype of his Müllabfuhrwortmaschine, a fearsome weapon of war “anticipated in the work . . . of Dr. Claude Shannon.” Krankheit’s machine used the principles of randomized text to totally automate the propaganda industry. By randomly stitching together agitprop phrases in a way that approximated human language, the Müllabfuhrwortmaschine could produce an endless flood of demoralizing statements. On one trial run, it spat out “Subversive elements were revealed to be related by marriage to a well-known columnist,”“Capitalist warmonger is a weak link in atomic security,” and “Atomic scientist is said to be associated with certain religious and racial groups.” Remarkably, these machine-generated phrases were indistinguishable from human propaganda—and now it was feared that the machine had fallen into the hands of the communists.