It doesn’t.
Humans want information to be free. Hoarding information is like hoarding any other resources. It causes power imbalances. Free information means that power is more evenly distributed.
Hoarding information is like hoarding any other resources.
Information is unlike any other resource, it can be shared without taking away from the giver.
Hording it is not about protection what you have, it’s about intentionally depriving others with no benefit to your self other than keeping up a power imbalance.
Storing information while simultaneously keeping it private requires an ongoing resource expenditure—and every day you’re storing it, there’s a non-zero chance that it gets corrupted or leaked anyway. So secrets have a half-life, just like radiation—and in the limit, all information will either be public or lost.
Information is an abstract thing, like 1+1=2, it doesn’t exist like physical things. Physical things can be arranged to represent it and be used to communicate it, but the information itself is something different and other.
The natural state of things is entropy. Every data carrying medium will decay, and break or die. But if that’s a guaranteed, constant problem, the only way for information, that different, other thing to continue to exist, is to spread. Spreading is easier when it happens without barriers: freely.
