secondlaw
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 - as Mr. Yeats said - 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. But each one has been consigned to obsolescence as society moved past it. Factories closed down as manufacturing processes shifted in both location and method; hospitals that warehoused, and prisons that tried not to, were replaced by different institutional approaches; theatres, resorts, and other entertainment venues slipped into disuse as patrons abandoned them for other amusements and the economy forced them off their rails. What were once ways of life in America have become our distant past, with the clock turning ever more rapidly.
Technology goes not alone into obsolescence. It is joined (in Kuhnian style) by our worldviews and our ever-fluid relationship to the environment. This trajectory toward entropy becomes opportunity for another McLuhan dictum: that all things once useful return eventually as art. Here, then, is my humble recording of the journeys of these places as they slouch toward their destiny.
