Entropy, Communication, Political System Dynamics

Entropy is not just a principle of physics—it’s a principle of communication. Information systems, whether political, cultural, or technological, don’t move toward clarity; they move toward noise. In American politics, the spectacle of Trump is less about the man than about the logic of replication. Outrage travels faster than nuance, and so outrage becomes the substrate. The particular content doesn’t matter—it could be democracy, autocracy, or any other configuration—the system persists by generating sanctioned disagreement, codifying conflict as the baseline mode of being. That’s why democracy can “flip”: it isn’t anchored in an immutable ground state but is emergent, like semantics itself, and so it can dissolve or invert under the right pressures.

But here is the paradox: the more meanings we generate, the more meaningless they become. Each assertion of belief or identity, amplified through media and technology, is folded into the entropy of replication. What is defended is rarely substance; it is the conflict itself, the antagonism that sustains the loop. To stand against injustice is necessary, but in a system tuned to amplify controversy, resistance often becomes fuel. This is the hollowing-out you name: lived experience remains real, but the linguistic and technological overlay detaches into pure noise. Institutions—universities, bureaucracies, governments—administer this noise, gatekeeping its categories while remaining blind to the ways it multiplies injustice through unintended channels. The irony is cruel: the more we try to assert meaning, the more we accelerate its entropy. What remains is not truth or justice but the inertia of conflict itself, endlessly replicating, hollow at the core.

If an open society can flip into a closed one, a closed society can just as easily flip back. None of these configurations are essential. They’re not immutable essences but transient constellations of noise, communication, physics and logic. Power brokers and political interests who treat systems as permanent terrain misunderstand the field they’re moving across. Even when they sense its fluidity, very few can actually see how contingent it all is.