  We suggest that holography can be formulated in terms of the information
capacity of the St\"uckelberg degrees of freedom that maintain gauge invariance
of the theory in the presence of an information boundary. These St\"uckelbergs
act as qubits that account for a certain fraction of quantum information. Their
information capacity is measured by the ratio of the inverse St\"uckelberg
energy gap to the size of the system. Systems with the smallest gap are
maximally holographic. For massless gauge systems this information measure is
universally equal to the inverse coupling evaluated at the systems' length
scale. In this language it becomes very transparent why the St\"uckelberg
information capacity of black holes saturates the Bekenstein bound and accounts
for the entire information of the system. The physical reason is that the
strength of quantum interaction is bounded from below by the gravitational
coupling, which scales as area. Observing the striking similarity between the
scalings of the energy gap of the boundary St\"uckelberg modes and the
Bogoliubov modes of critical many-body systems, we establish a connection
between holography and quantum criticality through the correspondence between
these modes.

High Energy Physics - Theory;General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology