justing.net

On Entropic Decay

By Justin G. on 25JUN24TUE

These are more provisional notes, thinking in the act of being thought.

Entropic decay is the apparent and accepted brokenness of a still functioning system, or one that recently did function. In non-physics contexts, entropy is the lack of order or predictability of things.

Summary

1. There is an office building somewhere in Puyallup that is frozen in the Eighties. It’s a form of maintained entropic decay, a capsule traveling through time, misplaced not in space but in time. There is a difference between a timeless style and fashions that are of a particular time, but that maybe goes under the heading for Aesthetic Residuals.
2. Entropic decay has one projection onto the lack of physical maintenance of machines, infrastructure, tidying and storage. It’s about the functional minimum of keeping it all going, about letting go of keeping up appearances. Replace with the wrong style part, maybe even a part from the wrong industry altogether. The functional minimum may be the pinacle of what is achievable in the situation. A thing used far beyond its original purpose because there was no other choice. Other examples include using the wrong tool for the job such as opening a paint can with a screwdriver, knowing just the right way to unstick a door, and the satisfaction of being the go to person for making that one machine produce.
3. Another dimension of this are the rituals, processes, and institutions that continue on after their original purpose has been long forgotten. Traditions, superstitions, habits, memes. All can be evidence of entropic decay, some faithful logic out of place or time lumbering on like a sleepwalker, providing stability of who knows what and leaving a disturbed wake rippling outward across society. There are taboos, laws, rules, and norms all persisting in a way that make their original intents and purposes questionable in most situations.
4. Entropy is a strange kind of force in nature, always present and inevitable in its seeping pressure to disorder things. Nature’s rebellion leaves its mark on all things, at all scales. The entropic patina is inescapable, it can only be delayed a little, diverted for a time, hidden in the fine details of the surface. Like gravity, entropy influences all things, always.
5. The elegant disrepair has a kind of accidental random beauty, imbuing the surface with an energy. The layer of entropic energy may perturb the order of things and lead to some unexpected contrast that invites insight. Is the source of our resonant response to the perceived beauty something that is really there, or only us seeing patterns in the energetic traces made by the oldest fundamentally random natural force?
6. Nature is not excluded from the topographics of entropic decay; landscapes with particular types of exceedingly slow erosion will have all the appearance of entropic decay, but without the intentional construction it is a natural process following its course. There are those rare places which have a strong formal geometry, an accidental rhyme of the made landscape, some of those places chip and wear away into smaller and smaller platonic fragments of matter. These special happenstance locales have a naturally occurring entropic decay.

Resonant Phrases

1. The 80s office park that’s been quite well maintained but never updated, preserved in its original vision.
2. It’s the worn out road stripes, it’s the utility pole so tired it droops, wilts, sags for rest. Or maybe it’s the utility pole held up by the power lines it once supported, separated from its base, just left that way for years. Tolerated brokenness, minimum viable repair. I’ve seen all of these things.
3. The double asymmetry of the misplaced, the misused, the missing, and where it is found in some random new setting. Example: a partially rebuilt internal combustion engine in the front kitchen. Why is it there? Who cares, what ideas does it inspire?
4. Rituals and bureaucracy that persist on inertia alone, their purpose forgotten long ago and lost to time.
5. The entropic patina, the result of a constant seep of change pressing on the surfaces of all things, always. The residue is a kind of energy held in ember or glass, slowed but never halted.
6. Old, worn out places, even if they are repurposed and repainted like the old Navajo Bridge made into a pedestrian access over the Colorado river (see image below), or The High Line Park¹ in NYC, they can’t have a new paint smell, the accumulated and accreted patina of years of entropic wear which can’t be fully covered up. They carry their age with them, unless we unmake them entirely or bury their surfaces under a new edifice entire.
7. The photo above of the downspout is from a fancy district in Santa Barbara. I took it in January of this year. I offer it as evidence that even the wealthiest among us cannot fully negate entropy’s tireless efforts.

Open Loops

1. As mentioned above, is there something real in the patina, or do we just see patterns in the noise left at all scales by the busy fingers of entropic ghosts?
2. What’s the smallest disturbance of entropic decay we could call as such, in each domain? And how large can we go with this concept?
3. How strangely may we stretch the idea: by what mechanism does it impress upon our subjective reality? Not just the thermodynamic action, it seems to also disturb our very ideas in some way. Does some mathematically topological mapping enable us to make predictions about the limits of bureaucratic scale? Is there a limit to the physical scale beyond which we can no longer bestow blame upon entropy’s reach, and so escape it? Some thing is just too big to be random? I think not.
4. Clarify the distinction and border with the adjacent concept of the Aesthetic Residual.
5. I didn’t include it here, but there was a strand about technological replacement (really a phase change of any sort, technology, habit, species) a kind of catastrophic entropic decay, organized or reorganized disorder? Or something else.
6. There are some places, “un-main roads” for instance, where the entropic decay accumulates into a museum of typologies, framed and showcased in surroundings that compliments the energy of these “pieces”. Where are these place, why are these places?

Ref: 25.2p62

To Reply: Email me your wildest or most mundane application entropic decay.