second law I

Marshall McLuhan’s laws of media, the second law of thermodynamics, and the poet William Butler Yeats collide where things begin to deteriorate. McLuhan’s second law tells us that all new technologies dispatch a contemporary technology to obsolescence; the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, suggests that the universe moves from order to disorder. Here at the crossroads of obsolescence and entropy, things definitely fall apart.

The arrival of the automobile sent the horse and buggy to the pages of history; the compact disk (and finally the MP3) sealed the phonograph’s demise. Mr. McLuhan’s other laws explain in lovely symmetry how those older technologies reappear. But here I’m concerned with only the second law – the one saying that new technologies always obsolesce an older technology. And the second law of thermodynamics: all systems break down. And Yeats’s Second Coming: the center cannot hold, the anarchy of the inanimate overtakes us.

Each abandoned site was once a humming, functioning, part of American culture.