Thermodynamics:
Most people like the first rule. It makes sense. Matter is neither created nor destroyed; what I had yesterday, I will have tomorrow. But most people don't like the second rule. It means that over time the usable energy in a system must decrease, that complete disorder is the end result of any closed system. It means that in trillions of years, the universe will expand, diffuse to its outer limits and freeze -- a heat death. Randomness over time destroys everything.
Nature seems to be the ultimate insult to randomness. It is unthinkable that fantastically complicated, intricate and amazing life came from random sludge at the bottom of a dead ocean. People see themselves as minions of the first rule of thermodynamics, fighting the second rule; we harness the energy around us to beat down chaos and decay.
But, life is tool of entropy. Living things take trapped chemical energy and rapidly convert it to heat energy which they shed, in the process increasing the entropy of their surroundings. Life's frantic movements on the skin of our planet only serves to increase the rate of resource flow across our planet. The insane naked ape, the human, finds every locked up store of energy it can and unlocks it as fast as possible, increasing the entropy of our universe. And why? To build fantastically organized and structured systems.The giant cities; the cubical-homes; the glop-foods; all for the 25 billion souls that need water and air and heat and food. The more complicated the system, the more inclined it is to fall apart because of the tendency towards entropy, so the more work it takes to maintain. The more work something takes to maintain, the more energy needs to be expended. And every time energy is unlocked and used for work, some of that energy is necessarily released as entropy -- randomness and heat. We are a cosmic joke, a frantic species that fights entropy only to increase entropy.
We find solace in the realm of pure thoughts. Abstract thoughts are pure, eternal, and are not bounded by the rules of thermodynamics. Our minds overcome the gross decay and waste of the physical world. I guess that's why our society ranks the mind above the body. But minds disappear before their ideas are fully communicated, and the great ideas of the past grow dim as we fail to properly pass them on to our children. For thousands of years, the limits of communication bounded the pure realm of abstract thought.
The net destroys the boundary of communication. Any person may save and share a pure idea, and rest assured that the idea will never change unless they want it to. The net is the realm of abstraction, populated by data forms that emulate real objects but are themselves eternal. And the net grows as people build their ideas into it. It is beautiful that my friends can build whole worlds into their rooms. These worlds are perfect and free from any true, destructive randomness. The net allows our minds to conquer entropy, to finally experience the world of our choosing.
Look at the bed in my room. It is perfect; the lines are crisp, the sheets just the right fractal texture. It models the real bed I sleep in, but it is an abstraction of my bed. If I wanted to, I could add a program to present a mussed-up bed model in my room, but that is not truly entropic, it is just a better model for what my bed looks like.
I am scared of the net because it encourages people to flee from the ugliness of this decayed reality and only experience the reality they want to. We need to stop being afraid of entropy. I think there is something beautiful about the idea that nothing is eternal, the idea that an object changes and diffuses over time. It means that the god-awful cubes that make up every room in this horrible city will someday crack, collapse, and the stiff lines between walls will be freed into infinitely varied jagged curves.