The Lenses · Lens 04

Information Half Life

What survives, what decays, and what should.

Information has a usable lifespan. Some of it is still true next year. Most of it isn't. The problem is that organizations treat all information as equally durable — the policy written in 2019 sits in the same system with the same authority as the decision made this morning. Information Half-Life is the temporal lens. It asks not whether something is accurate but whether it is still accurate, still relevant, still load-bearing. Most organizations refuse to honor the decay. They hoard. The knowledge base grows. The signal degrades. Nobody audits what should have expired.