We’d do a “your mom” strapline, but honestly with Christine here it’s a bit weird

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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

1 Comment

  1. Anonymous
    August 19, 2014 @ 7:02 am

    "And nothing is more entropic than shit."…
    Nothing is more entropic than a mass(m)* at a temperature(T) of 0.000…001 kelvins, where dT/dt tends to 0 actually. I'll mention this because I'm not overly happy to hear classical thermodynamics misdescribed. Entropy isn't decay or rust or piles or trashed computers. It's energy which exists (because energy cannot be created or destroyed), but has become completely useless. Just a little bit higher than abolute zero

    Shit is just about the best fertiliser available. Because large organisms in the ecosystems we understand are capable of only very incomplete combustion (because digestion is just another form of combustion), shit contains very large quantities of thermal energy and chemical-potential energy. This also makes large quantities of shit into small but perfectly viable ecosystems in their own right. Not entropic.

    The expression you are looking for is not entropy but Energy which has degraded to such a state as to make it unprofitable to exploit for commercial gain in the current conditions of market. Make no mistake; early Industrial Revolution slag heaps were made of anything up to 60% recombustible carbon, which could be reburned in modern combustion systems, and then stored again until such time as a second-reburn system becomes available.

    Science-fiction is anxious about obsolescence because sciemce-fiction was born to be obsolete. Think about the pejoratives that always go along with science-fiction: 'disposable', 'pulp', 'immature', 'adolescent'. The solution to this is not to try to make science-fiction into a slave's flattery or child's copy of some bourgeois idyll of a 'timeless classic', or even into an environmentalist's idea of a nice overcoat or good pair of boots that you can repair or patch up for decades and decades. There is nothing wrong with ideas returning to the nothing from which they came. There is no law of conservation of ideas. There will never be a shortage or an excess of ideas, and they don't have to be responsibly disposed of or go into landfill. When their function is rendered obsolete, ideas leave no entropy at all. It's myth we have to dispose of: dismantle, tear to bits, recycle and melt with fresh pig until there is no trace of it left. And ephermera is one of the best weapons we have to do it.

    *because molecular density is so high, gravity is incredibly high in this condition, and so any discussion of 'weight' is meaningless.

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