New concepts from nonequilibrium thermodynamics are used to show that Landauers principle can be understood in terms of time asymmetry in the dynamical randomness generated by the physical process of the erasure of digital information. In this way, Landauers principle is generalized, showing that the dissipation associated with the erasure of a sequence of bits produces entropy at the rate $k_{{rm B}}I$ per erased bit, where $I$ is Shannons information per bit.
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