When I first figured out that time and the universe, for certain, had a beginning; it was this idea of the "heat death of the universe" which sold it to me. This was when I first came to terms with the questions of religion I had once sneered at. Of course there's no God, I would think, the universe is all just stuff; there's always been stuff, and there's no need to question it.
We know this isn't true, however. There has in fact NOT always been stuff. There had once been nothing, and it's actually strange that anything exists to begin with.
We know this because when you look at far away galaxies through a telescope, the light they emit appears to be "redshifted". It's similar to the Doppler effect. Think of when an ambulance passes you and the pitch of its siren drops. It drops because the source is moving away, stretching the wavelength of its sound. For light, when a source is moving further away, the wavelength is also stretched. But instead of the pitch dropping, like with sound, the wavelength in lengthened toward the red part of the visible light spectrum. Think of the universe and its contents like dots drawn on a balloon. As the balloon is inflated, the dots grow further apart. But they haven't moved, only the space between them has expanded. Everything in our universe is moving away from everything else faster than it was before. It's theorised that eventually, in billions of years, every atom will have moved so far from its neighbour that there will be no more encounters. There will be no more stuff.
Except I learned that there hadn't always been stuff. Instead there had once been nothing. It is in fact a strange ordeal that there exists anything at all. The entropy tendency means the natural state of everything is disorder. Order is active, it is energy intensive. Decay, decomposition, eventual stagnation is the force which pulls on all that exists. The fight against it can be well fought, but it cannot be overcome in its entirety.
I think the theory of entropy is finally coming to the internet. Of course, we had worried once that dumb stuff, made by dumb people, would poison the well or flood the zone until there was very little chance you'd actually encounter anything good on the web. That kind of happened. Most of the internet is and has been nonsense. But it was created by people, so that, in the very least, it had some meaning to someone. More importantly, no matter how dumb a thing was, it was always new. See, when anyone makes anything, all they're doing is filtering out information, ideas, good and bad, from their surroundings and through their selves so that everything, no matter how derivative or disingenous, is still somehow new. Even a new piece of music is new only to you. All they've done is pass their many influences through their own filter. The result isn't always good, but this process is unrivalled. The same process of human filtration brought Dance Monkey as it brought Sunshine on Leith. So at least, for a while, the internet let everyone give what's good a go.
Until the robots came. See, the robots work on a very similar system of filtration. Or rather, regurgitation. They too absorb everything you put into them, and when asked, will produce a response only composed of that which it was fed. Now it seems no different to a human production, only it isn't. The machine has no experience. The machine has no feeling. It has no memories, it has made no mistakes, and it has absolutely no preferences. It doesn't like it's toast burnt, its tea milky or its coffee black. It doesn't like to sleep with the window open, nor does it, compelled by love, keep it closed for the comfort and preference of its lover. It doesn't love or hate Marmite. It does exactly as it's told. It cannot sacrifice. Nor can it be constrained. It won't build a melody on guitar because it doesn't know how to play the piano. It won't stumble upon shitty samples and use them anyway because they're there and it's late and the work needs done. Nor will it ever pull on its emotions or memories to create any kind of art.
In Blade Runner 2049, Ana Stelline reveals something about the making of memory.
"They all think it's about more detail. But that's not how memory works. We recall with our feelings. Anything real should be a mess."
The process of art is, like all things we do, just data collection, storage, and retrieval. We make art to store data. Human data, ineffable, word-of-mouth data like our senses and our emotions. And the best part is, through storage, upon retreival, they are altered. Each person may name the same colours but they see them differently. They may name the same feelings but they feel them differently. These things cannot be computed or replicated, but the human act of trying is what brings art.
The heat death of the internet is likely coming soon. The robots can produce slop far faster than all of human creativity combined ever could. There's a danger it pollutes our ecosystem to such an extent that eventually, the new can no longer encounter the new. Eventually, the pollution will suffocate the interactions which give life to the new. The internet will die on the vine. The same has been happening to our places, our economies and our countries. And what it tells us, if there is anything to be learned by the theory of entropy, is that resisting it is a desperate, energy intensive project. Resistance, in this sense, is existence. The passive state of being is entropy. Buildings collapse and nature reclaims its elements if we do not fight the battle uphill and against it. Entropy has a way of creeping up on us if we forget or devalue the work we were doing to resist it. So take this as a wake up call. Or a call to arms. Everything we have that works is upheld by the hard work of people. Get them to do the work and the rest will work too?