As much Entropy as the System can Hold
The Devil is in the Details, and the Details are in your Search History
I reject efficiency. Not in full; I do not reject a little efficiency. I do not reject a waiter checking in to top off my ice water or a mechanic remembering to put the cap back on after an oil change. I like that degree of efficiency, as I like an onion ring in my Burger King fries, looking at my receipt in the car and finding out they didn’t charge me for the Ranch Dressing, or sneaking forward from the cheap seats into the empty seats along the third base line. These are little efficiencies, and I like them. I do not reject a little efficiency, but I do reject the goal of total efficiency.
I reject the predominant social project, the one that seeks to eliminate all offense from social discourse and replace it with a utopian flowchart of over-precise vocabulary. I reject the desire to substitute the complexity of human relationships with a ledger of credits and debits that reduces friendship and courtship and intimacy to an Excel spreadsheet. I reject the onslaught of efficiency propelled by the mania of discomfort avoidance, of over-medicalization of emotion, of outlawing peanut butter at school just because one kid is allergic. I reject these efficiencies, and readily accept all of the possible consequences should they ever be dismissed into oblivion. I do not believe in the benefits of these efficiencies, despite many efforts to convince me. I believe in hurt feelings, being the “odd one out,” and not being able to do certain things because your body is weird or shitty in a certain way. I believe in these things not because I think the opposite is not possible, but because I believe it very much is possible and will be happening soon.
I do not believe these efficiencies are good, I believe they are evil.
The efficiencies promise us a type of utopia. This utopia is a frictionless society where all people are free to pursue their passions without suffering rejection, embarrassment, weakness, or boredom. The utopia is one to which we can all contribute, all be lovable, all find communion and purpose and meaning without ever having to feel the pain of judgment or exclusion. The utopia is one in which each and every personality is named, where each person’s weakness is a diagnosis, where the answer to every negative feeling is a treatment. The utopia is efficient; a system of perfect balance in which inputs equal outputs. Inequality is the sin of this utopia, and if it happens, those responsible will be punished.
(It will not be called “punishment” though, for a utopia cannot punish; a utopia may only correct or remind)
The abundance of food and housing and recreation are all but guaranteed in this utopia, even though the means of producing these things is a bit unclear. Especially since we have abandoned the project of Philosophy and injured the Hard Sciences unto death, replacing the pursuit of maximal truth with a psychotic preoccupation with identity. One need only glance at the table of contents of any formerly respectable academic journal to see how the spirit of free inquiry has been completely subsumed into a fixation on a racialized or sexualized interpretation of stuff that no one really gives a shit about in the first place. We have less people thinking about wormholes and ever more thinking about their front holes.
Yes, we will always have new iPhones and Smart Refrigerators, as there will always be a statistically meaningful crop of eggheads bursting out of wombs at any given time, but technical and mathematical mastery can only manufacture slight improvements on that which is already here. To move things forward requires imagination. To foster imagination, one must first take away any and all restrictions of thought so as to encourage those with vision to peek beyond the veil of the real and possible and assumed. No matter the level of human talent, all the labor wrought from the hands of the exceptional will be wasted without imagination. At its best, it will be wasted on meaningless micro-improvements of extant creature comforts, and at worst on efficiency.
Efficiency used to be the endpoint of mechanical methodologies. It could describe steam pressure loss in a closed system, the movement of river-water over a turbine, or the amount of gas burned relative to the power produced by its combustion. As commerce evolved, it was increasingly used to analogize economies. Over time it made its way into circuitry. But there was always a bridge between the mechanical and the human. Even when efficiency was applied to the body, it was mostly used as a means of metaphor; comparing the ejection fraction of blood from the heart to a car’s fuel-injector. The human was the one thing that defied efficiency; so valuable that no amount of money could be placed as a price on a human life. The human was the beneficiary of efficiency, not the purveyor. It was when science fiction came into our hands and pockets that this all changed.
The smartphone is the tool that allowed the mechanical notion of efficiency to saturate the human system. The vast network of interconnection and interpersonal data sharing created a planet of self-powered nodes; a feedback system with the ability to instantaneously gauge affective responses to myriad stimuli. It started innocently enough, and boy howdy were we all excited about how Twitter catalyzed the “Arab Spring” (must be winter again). But we couldn’t see the bigger picture, not like those who worship efficiency could. Over less than a decade, the cult of efficiency has rendered the human populace into a mechanism of constant surveillance, moral measurement, memetic churn, and cultural flattening. Without a single thread, we are ceaselessly tethered to the concerns of work and notifications about high school friends’ divorces and a live view of our grandmother’s pacemaker. Most importantly, the choices we make are mediated through the conduit of the phone and its endless cloud storage space of perfect memory.
Thus we are recorded. Thus we are monitored. Thus we are controlled. Thus we are efficient.
Like any machine, the parts must be oiled and tightened and even replaced from time to time. But why? Certainly not so the machine feels better about itself, but because the machine produces something that is “needed,” and when things are needed they can be sold, and when things can be sold they are often bought. By who? You! For who? Hmm. You tell me. Certainly not for humans. Even the humans at the top of the food chain take the money they make and give it to other humans for other stuff. But if not for humans, then for who? Maybe a techno-capital singularity pushing its eldritch tentacles of causality back through time from the far distant future for all we know. Maybe nothing and no one. Does it matter? Maybe, if we have any chance of stopping it.
But do we? If we are indeed, as I have stated, stuck in the chokehold of the efficiency regime, what use is it to learn about it? If it is all so inevitable, why not just enjoy the remaining years of our corporeal existence and die with a smile on our faces fifty years from now? Well, for me, it is because I wish to make sure I go to heaven and not to hell. And this utopia that is now being created is most certainly the first stages of hell incarnate.
Awhile back I wrote a post called I Choose to Stay and Die. In this post, I lay out what some would say is a laughably implausible future scenario that I find extremely plausible. Namely, that humanity is hard-charging toward a time in which the choice will be offered to “terminate” a human’s physical body and upload their consciousness to the cloud. Though I didn’t articulate this at the time, it is this hypothetical that has formed the foundation of much of my belief in and submission to God. The path of submission became crystal clear to me when I was finally able to articulate the end game of all of this to myself. Every story about how the devil would operate on earth through means of seduction, pleasure, and mental anesthesia finally made sense. Of course the devil works undercover; what benefit would there be in prancing around with cloven hooves, red skin, and devil horns? Very few people want to be evil, and those who aren’t justifying their evil or making excuses are instead busy assuming that they are the good ones. Either way, there won’t be many takers for a position on the “be evil and burn in hell for all eternity” team. But there would be quite a few that would follow a debonaire devil in a suit, especially if he could promise to identify huge savings for your Q3 numbers (and also rid you of racism and give you a script for ADHD meds)
Efficiency - the tendency away from chaos - is where i see the clearest articulation of an antichrist. But how so? In almost any conception of the cosmos, chaos is seen as an annihilating force; it munches and swallows and absorbs anything that has become whole, and then shits it out again as a cloud of a billion fractured pieces. “Chaos” is “bad.” How then could a social movement that seeks order and compliance and “goodness” be so evil as to warrant my accusation of Satan incarnate? Well, because Chaos is not the opposite of God. The Devil is the opposite of God.
Chaos and order were both created by God. Both, therefore, are of the divine and in the divine. As our world descends further into the atheistic malaise of post-modernism, the idea that darkness can inhabit light and light can inhabit darkness has become unpalatable (does anyone doodle the yin-yang anymore, anyways?). The idea that the divine could be in pain and sorrow as much as love and beauty does not follow the adolescent conception of the world held by our increasingly adolescent-minded human population. To not understand the nature of God in all things is exactly what would invite in a force that would choose to co-opt the light and tempt those toward their downfall.
To resist a horned beast would not represent courage or virtue or wisdom; it would represent fear and anxiety. How could we know the strength of our faith if the evil of this world held up a big sign proclaiming itself as such? On the other hand, if the evil should come into our world promising the opposite of fear and anxiety, the opposite of ugliness or pain or grief, then would that not be harder to resist? So hard to resist, in fact, that one wouldn’t even consider resistance as an option. Something so tempting and yummy and cozy that anyone who doesn’t join you is just plain wrong, or worse - hateful. Now that is a little harder to resist, especially when Gretchen down the street did a TikTok story on why following the “good” guy was so “good.” You’ve been crushing on Gretchen for awhile, and also she is awful and will cancel you if you don’t support the good guy too, so why not follow her lead?
Maturity is knowing that chaos, like order, has its place. The balance between them is what gives the world its beauty. The forest has a system of growth and death and life and light and things hidden from the light too. It has enough order to grow, and enough chaos to be beautiful. After all, how often do people find wonder in a forest walk, and how often would they find the same sense of awe while walking down six straight rows of pre-planted trees. Same amount of trees, but not enough entropy. Useful, perhaps, but not beautiful. Interesting, maybe, but not wild.
The balance of nature requires both order and chaos; entropy and negentropy. A forest is effective because it has the most allowable level of entropy possible while still maintaining its identity. If the efficiency of the forest were to be increased indefinitely, it would be turned to a tree farm - or burnt to the ground. Both produce a higher level of actual output, and therefore both could be considered “efficient.” Both also end with no “forest” to speak of…the efficiency has consumed the identity and left little but signposts in its wake.
As efficiency encroaches upon every facet of our life, monitoring our “productive screen time” and weighing our food portions and stealthily taking our resting pulse rate while we take a morning shit, the space left for us to merely exist as we are erodes. In this way, the rabid urgency of Gen Z to establish their silly little micro-identities can almost be pitied. Some part of them probably feels like the horizon of that which is wild and untamed and free is drying up. While their descent into indentured digital servitude advances, there is some part of them desperate to find out who they are. So they name themselves. So they insist you refer to them by the name they choose. When this still doesn’t fill the void, they turn toward endless entertainment just to take the mind off the fact that their lives are losing more and more chance. They sink their minds into digital mediums that give the illusion of messiness and randomness and true, honest-to-god truth. They don’t like it, they know they don’t like it, yet they are trapped. Liking it is part of the path. And if they complain, they are medicated, silenced, “othered,” or mocked.
Because who could possibly have an issue with all of this progress? Who wouldn’t want a world that is safe and predictable and pleasurable? Who in the world would want their lives to be a surprise? Wouldn’t it be better if everyone just knew what was going to happen in the end? Too much suspense not knowing. Living life is too hard. Who would want to live a life when an algorithm could live it for you?
For what it’s worth, I would. Letting someone else march me down a path they prescribed for me doesn’t sound like utopia, it sounds like hell. I know it will probably feel better if I just give in, but what can I say? I’m just not willing to sell my soul to the…algorithm.