Dear Amanda,
(Replying down here because the subthread above got a bit long.)
I think Tom Banks starts with a lot more structure than I do... which might, incidentally, be necessary. The most obvious criticism of my ideas is that they may be too parsimonious to achieve sufficient explanatory power, but I do have some reasons to be hopeful that I can get somewhere worthwhile from this direction.
"Made of information" is a good description of my approach, although I wouldn't choose that terminology myself simply because it's already been used to describe a lot of theories that really involve a lot of auxiliary structures. The information is observer dependent, but not the laws of physics.
I have my doubts about a lot of aspects of recent black hole physics, simply because we know that it resides near the horizons of validity of the theories involved (no pun intended). I view it as worth taking seriously, and it's certainly worthwhile to explore the consequences, but I would not be surprised if certain aspects of it turn out to be artifacts of theory stretched beyond its bounds. Take care,
Ben