Introductory Entroponetics

"Yes, everything is possible for this world."

This essay draws from ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021) and Robert Kurvitz’s Püha ja õudne lõhn/Sacred and Terrible Air (2013). Citations to the former are given through FAYDE and citations to the latter are (Chapter #, Page #) as found in Group Ibex’s fan translation. While there aren’t spoilers-as-such since the subject is not the plot of either story, it’s inevitable that the discussion will reveal bits and pieces from both.

“Entroponetics is the scientific study of the pale. Or a recent iteration of it, by way of Graad. The study of the pale reaches back 6,000 years — the Perikarnassians called it the Western Plain.” — Joyce Messier

The pale is a phenomenon that covers 72% of Elysium, and is “the most dominant geological feature of the world”—equivalently, there is twice as much pale as there is non-pale, and between the two, the pale is growing¹. The pale is silent, still, and uninhabitable, and yet it brims with noise. It’s an impenetrable fog through which communication is possible, but only with intense work. It destroys what it engulfs and preserves the debris. My goal here is to present it as thoroughly as I can with what we know of Elysium.

Preliminaries

We begin with descriptions of the pale, which all agree on one point: the pale is the physical manifestation of the apocalypse. This is conveyed varyingly as the pale being “the end of the world”², “death, but for the Universe”³, and “less than less than nothing[, t]he final rest state for reality”⁴. One way or another, the pale spells the doom of the world. Diamaterialism argues that the pale “somehow *consists* of past information, that’s degrading”, that it is “rarefied past, not matter”⁵. Those who have experienced the pale—been inside it, that is—report that it’s “churning with [time]”. The rise of the pale has been equivocated with the rise of the past, such that “someday both will cover the whole world”⁶.

The nihilists of Elysium recognize this last point. The final Innocence, the nihilist and pale accelerationist Ambrosius Saint-Miro, announces to the world that they will collectively “go to live in the past”. All that will be left of the world “is a memory, an entroponetic catastrophe”. He emphasizes the irreversibility of this process (9, 96). The pale-resistant nihilist entroponaut Zigi explains that “all the lost things are jumbled up [in the pale], sad and abandoned. The pale is the world’s memory of the world… History swallows the present… There will be no future” (12, 133). Pin that last one: History will be a recurring character here.

Physically speaking, we are given the following account:

"Achromatic, odourless, featureless. The pale is the enemy of matter and life. It is not *like* any other — or *any* thing in the world. It is the transition state of being into nothingness." — Joyce Messier

For clarity: the pale is superimposed on the rest of the physical world. Extensive entroponautic accounts report that within the pale, physical matter exists much as it does outside the pale. Forests can sit covered by the pale, machinery will remain operable under the pale’s blanket, and so on. But the pale envelops and suffuses into all the matter it reaches. In this respect it is all-consuming.

On the nature of the pale, then, several things are clear: if we take diamaterialism at its word (as we should), then the pale consists of information rather than the familiar physical sort of matter. This information is, in particular, the accumulation of the past. We notice that there is an arrow of time implicit in the very possibility of the pale—a final rest state implies previous activity, implies that the activity precedes the rest, and implies that nothing can happen after the rest. Deep enough into this process the state of the world will be essentially isochronous and isotropic; deep enough into a state of rest, the world will look the same whether we gaze into the future or the past, whether up or down or any other direction. But if everything looks the same in every direction, direction loses meaning. Temporal and spatial direction cannot be meaningfully measured deep enough into the pale. This result of arriving at the stasis of a rest state explains the following commentary:

“It’s difficult to describe—or even measure—something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic… The further into the pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical—*numbers* stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier. It may be impossible.” — Joyce Messier

The breakdown (“suspension”) of properties within the pale constitutes the deterioration of temporal and spatial distinctions themselves. This is perhaps conceptually extreme. How can “rarefied past” be so cataclysmic?

To make this more lucid, we note the following: “entroponetics” is a portmanteau of entropy and the suffix netic, analogized from its appearance in the names of various disciplines (genetics, kinetics, cybernetics…). This isn’t just an etymological observation, but a signpost! The upshot is that we can make much more sense of the pale once we understand it as, quite literally, a high-entropy phenomenon.

Entropy

Allegedly, “no one really knows what entropy is”⁷. More optimistically, there are several ways of conveying what thermodynamic entropy is: it is the amount of disorder in a system; it’s a measure of how “spread out” the energy of a system is; it’s inversely related to the amount of usable work in a system. A little more formally, it’s the number of possible microstates corresponding to the system’s macrostate.

We’ll start with the last. Imagine a room full of air. Imagine assigning the following macrostate to the air: (very) loosely say that the air is evenly distributed across the room. Now imagine taking stock of each individual molecule, and assigning it a location that will corroborate this macrostate. With no further information, you can imagine that any molecule could be just about anywhere—there are vastly many microstates corresponding to different assignments of location to each molecule such that the resulting macrostate is “spread out”. This is high entropy.

Imagine instead that all the air is collected in one corner. Try assigning locations to an arbitrarily chosen molecule and you will find yourself with fewer options to choose from. Indeed, there are comparatively few microstates, qua assignments of properties to individual particles, that will correspond to a macrostate of “everything’s in one corner”. This is low entropy⁸.

The usable work description of energy will do a lot for us, so: suppose the room is split into two chambers connected by a narrow pipe. Inside the pipe is a turbine which, when spun, produces electricity. Compare the following initial conditions: first, imagine the air is evenly distributed between the chambers. Naturally, it won’t do anything—nothing internal to this system will compel a significant and sustained movement of air through the pipe. The turbine doesn’t move; we get no electricity. The system began at maximum entropy, so there was no usable work.

In the second case, imagine the air begins sequestered in one chamber. Of course, it’ll rush through the pipe as soon as our mental simulation begins, driving the turbine and producing electricity. The air has done work; it could do this work because the system began at low entropy. Once it’s done, the entropy increases in place of the work done, and the turbine will rest again.

Entropy in this sense is the object of the second law of thermodynamics. For our purposes the most vivid statement of the law is this: in an isolated system (that is, a system which can neither be worked upon from the outside nor perform work outside itself) entropy will never decrease, and it will tend to increase. Put in now-familiar terms, the amount of available work in an isolated system will tend to decrease over time. As stuff happens, there will be less work available to make more stuff happen—until no more stuff can happen at all.

Most intuitively, the system will tend toward the macrostate with the most microstates corresponding to it. This is because, insofar as the microstates of the system will vary randomly over time and each microstate is equally probable, the system will be increasingly likely in the long-term to be in one of the many microstates corresponding to a high-entropy macrostate than one of the few microstates corresponding to a low-entropy macrostate. Simply: the air in the room is a lot more likely to spread around and even out than it is to cluster in one spot, because there are many ways for it to be in the former state and rather few ways for it to be in the latter. Roll two dice over and over again, and which outcome would you expect: a long sequence of snake eyes, or a mix of results that on average sum to a number around seven?

By the way: life is able to sustain itself on the world precisely because the Sun is a source of low-entropy energy. This energy is captured by the primary producers that ground the whole food chain (excepting, say, extremophiles that gorge themselves on benthic vents—but note! The world’s core will cool eventually, the vents too will die). We’re spared from the worst of the second law of thermodynamics because the world is not an isolated system at all, but nourished by the Sun.

What does all this have to do with entroponetics? Look: the second law encodes an arrow of time. Entropy grounds this arrow. The second law prohibits the decrease of entropy and describes its tendency to increase in one direction—the future. Equivalently, the direction of entropy increase just is the future. In one interpretation the direction of entropy increase is what defines the future. Whereas virtually all physical law is time-symmetric, the time-asymmetry of the second law of thermodynamics offers us an explanation of the arrow of time from past to future.

This insight has a converse: if a system is in a state of maximum or near-maximum entropy, the second law of thermodynamics forces stasis. There is no way for the entropy of the system to measurably change because it cannot decrease and there’s no room for it to increase. All the stuff has happened, and no more stuff can be made to happen. The system, having arrived at a very high entropy macrostate, simply rests. And this resting, in one telling of the tale, constitutes the disintegration of the arrow of time. If the system is unchanging in every direction then past, present, and future must merge into meaninglessness. This isochrony is the fate of an isolated system subject to the laws of thermodynamics⁹.

Pale

Put few and few together: the pale consists of rarefied information made physically manifest, which sits in perpetual rest at the end of all possible dynamical development. Deep enough into the pale such differentiating measurements as location and time lose meaning. Pale is degraded and continually degrading information. But we’ve just seen this, haven’t we? The threads connect:

The pale consists of exactly those regions where substantial amounts of information are at a state of very high entropy. This is the one and only principle from which entroponetics flows. If we understand this fact, we can make sense of every known entroponetic phenomenon.

First: the pale cannot precede the widespread existence of information. Here we restrict information to intentional information: we count a textbook entry explaining spectroscopy as information because it consists of symbols that represent the properties of spectra; we do not count a spectrum itself, because the appropriate relationship between representation and content is not present when the representation just is the content. The word “heat” conveys information by virtue of being a symbol with a relationship to the world. By contrast, the average kinetic energy of particles in a room just is that information. We use information in the former sense rather than the latter, or else the world is nothing but information of the most trivial (if fascinating) sort.

Taken this way, information requires thought to produce it—meaning needs a mind to ground it. In a narrow view, what is needed for meaning to be produced on any significant scale is people. People, as thinking things, produce information and fill the world with it. But then, the pale cannot precede people. How can there be pale before people if pale is information and it’s people that produce information? And indeed, we are told about ourselves:

“The pale, too, came with you. No one remembers it before you. The cnidarians do not, the radially symmetricals do not. There is an almost unanimous agreement between the birds and the plants that you are going to destroy us all. It is a nervous shadow cast into the world by you, eating away at reality. A great, unnatural territory. Its advent coincides with the arrival of the human mind.” — Insulindian Phasmid

In pithy terms, “instead of air, we exhale thoughts”¹⁰. This is where the pale must come from: people create information, and Elysian information is subject to the principles of mechanical entropy. In an isolated system, then, this information will tend toward a state of increased entropy. It’s precisely those areas where information has developed into a very high state of entropy that the pale occurs. More precisely, the pale just is this high-entropy information.

This is also why the pale is virtually unnavigable. The further someone goes into the pale, the closer its conditions approach to total isochrony and isotropy—and therefore, the less possible it is to discern direction. This could explain the presence of a threshold “in the pale superdeep… where every step you take is one step further from home, no matter the direction”¹¹. Although someone in the pale superdeep is literally surrounded by information, this is information of the most useless kind. Remember, entropy is inversely related with what is available to do useful work! The isotropy of the pale, together with the uselessness of the information soup at this high entropy, means that any movement constitutes floundering in a region beyond reachability.

The fact that the pale is such an information soup explains a pervasive effect called crosstalk:

“When the signal gets routed through pale, all kinds of irregularities take place. You may hear snippets of someone else's conversation, or the voice of your former lover, or an echo of an event that took place 100 years ago. Pale is a shroud of memories and it doesn't really distinguish to whom those memories belong to. You could hear anything.” — Soona

Whereas information is never far in Elysium, only in the pale is it in such a state of disorder that is spread out across the whole of the space. The high-entropy nature of information in the pale means that it becomes impossible to send a signal through it without bumping into something, just as you can’t send an electromagnetic signal through a high-energy cloud without collisions occurring (witness the zone of avoidance). Through the chaos, a signal is bound to be muddled by unrelated information. Crosstalk is what results from this inevitability. Even with the best technologies, there’s always someone else from the past unwittingly on the phone during an interisolary call (18, 216).

We might wonder how it is that signals can be conveyed across such a crowded space at all. Shouldn’t the sheer disorder of the pale work as an impenetrable fog against any signal? In fact, it does: interisolary communication is only possible with the help of pale latitude compressors, devices which can “make the pale more manageable”. Arrays and networks of them can “force a radio signal grid on the pale—literally crunch the distance across it”¹².

A large prime number generator facilitates pale latitude compression, which is not all surprising in light of the entroponetic principle: discovering large prime numbers takes a significant amount of work (this is the basis of much of modern cryptography) and therefore a known large prime number is the conveyor of a significant amount of low-entropy information. A prime number packages very useable information that forces some order onto the disordered pale. Blasting these across the pale in deliberate networks amounts to setting up a low-entropy skeleton that can allow communication to occur. A large Mersenne prime is not quite to the pale what the Sun is to the world, but it has the effect of casting a bit of low-entropy information into it. Of course, this will never be enough to eliminate crosstalk entirely.

Porch Collapse

Between pale and world is a transitional boundary; this is called porch collapse¹³. Porch collapse is the primary site of the pale’s entropic force, which emerges from the tendency of the whole system toward higher entropy. In other words, since porch collapse marks the boundary between low and high information entropy (corresponding to world and pale respectively), it’s here that the second law of thermodynamics is most active. The high entropy pale tends toward absorbing the lower entropy world, analogously to how a puddle of warm water in a pool of ice will eat away the ice at its boundary.

In the process of absorption, porch collapse manifests decomposition:

“[W]hen the pale is only a few days away, it’s always signalled by the same beautiful event. Fruits go mouldy. It grows vigorously on them. Children listen to oranges crackling on the table. Spores sprout from the pulp, apples are hairy with it. If you try to touch them, they crack open.” (15 190)

Decomposition is a process of energy-dispersion. Bodies—botanical or animal—are concentrations of energy (indeed, one definition of life is as the localized maintenance of low entropy¹⁴). It’s natural that the entropic force at porch collapse will induce entropy-maximizing processes in the regions just outside the pale. Mould, then, is the seeping of entropy into the world just before the arrival of the pale. It doesn’t matter that fruit are not information per se—if information is operationalized physically in Elysium and subject to mechanical entropy, then by the same token the familiar sorts of physical matter (as found in fruit) will interact with the entropic force exerted by the information fog of the pale.

Aside from mould, porch collapse is a site of general destruction and the suspension of established physical law. Trees are uprooted and houses float into the sky (11 122), and a general rumble may be heard, said to be “like a wave breaking” (11 125). The wave is a repeating simile: elsewhere it’s said that the “pale rises vertically from the spruce forests like a wave” (13, 157).

The wave is not restricted to simile. In Elysium, a phenomenon known as the killer wave has been known to occur when multiple smaller waves converge to produce a short-lived “monstrosity”. This convergence is a statistical inevitability for small waves in a closed space; the same effect explains the pale-as-wave. At porch collapse, the inevitable convergence of noisy information pushes the pale forward (13, 158-159)¹⁵.

It’s also known that the pale can damage the mind extensively, over-radiating it with the past¹⁶ and inducing catatonia in someone so overexposed that they become trapped in its information¹⁷. Human minds tend to succumb to the pale more slowly than other animals, and hunters will take advantage of this effect to pick off dazed prey in the near pale (16, 210).

We can infer that this is because a mind in contact with the pale is a site of porch collapse. The mind orders information according to its needs—most minds are by their nature areas of low information entropy, of highly-ordered information. Put in contact with the pale, the mind will be pressed upon from all sides by porch collapse. The more complex its organization, the further porch collapse must go to disorder it into pale—thus a goat is overwhelmed much more quickly than a person. But given enough time, a person, too, will be run through with the past as the boundary between their mind and the pale disappears.

Someone who has spent enough time in the pale will “remember everything — even the things [they] never knew”¹⁸. This is crosstalk flooding the mind. Porch collapse gives way to the total inundation of the mind with the noisy information of the pale, which is accumulated past and contains countless memories. This presses upon the mind’s own information, adding to it and displacing it until there is nothing left but past.

At a sufficiently late stage of pale expansion, the effect of porch collapse on the mind can extend well beyond the boundaries of the pale itself. The pale can put information at risk in such a way that it’s liable to disperse irretrievably unless it’s constantly attended to. Something not thought about often enough by sufficiently many people will simply disappear into the pale, as global entropy will be too high even outside the pale to keep certain facts in a state of useful order (18, 218).

This antimemetic effect can erase existing knowledge not just from minds, but from physical documents that contain information—it can be so powerful that it removes people from pictures, acting as a sort of entropy bomb that wipes information into pure disorder (19, 242-243). As the pale dominates the world, global porch collapse turns even the most focussed minds into sieves of memory (19, 251). These memories all spill, of course, into the pale. Thus “the memorial nature of the world becomes visible” (20, 257).

As a point of trivia, it’s received wisdom that alcohol can be aged in the pale, and pale-aged vodka is sold at significant markup. Purportedly, pale-aged alcohol will be stronger; it’s certainly treated as a higher standard of liquor (10, 111)¹⁹. We might speculate that this is the result of molecular decomposition induced by porch collapse; it seems just as likely, though, that the qualities of pale-aged liquors are inflated because of the exoticization of the pale itself. Pale-aged liquors plausibly taste different from other liquors, but the systemic effect here is unclear. No rigorous and replicated studies on the subject are known! So much for porch collapse.

Isolating the System

You may have noticed something missing from this story. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy will tend to increase in an isolated system. An isolated system is one with a fixed amount of energy and matter, and no ability to send or receive anything through its boundaries. But we’ve established that people are the producers of low-entropy information. Are we not the information equivalent of the Sun nourishing the world? Are we not the source of low-entropy information that should hold back the pale from the world?

Well, yes! We should be. In the absence of intervention, it’s inevitable that people will by nature continue to generate information, maintaining the low-entropy state of the world; though total information will increase as the past accumulates, this past can be organized through acts of interpretation and the future can be continually generated. Only in the absence of this process can the pale manifest. In entroponetic terms: only the deliberate closing-off of the world from information generation can allow the pale to emerge.

And as it turns out, there is a political project committed to exactly this closing-off: moralism. We find the moralist project in the maxim: “THE PAST IS THE FUTURE, BUT THE FUTURE IS DEAD!”²⁰ Moralism seeks to freeze the present and project it into the future. As the present sinks into the past, it also persists into the future; but if the past is the future, then isochrony is achieved. The future dies, because there is no arrow of time to follow toward it. It becomes inaccessible and therefore nonexistent. The moralist demands stability; they resist change:

"Thankfully, the region is becoming more and more stable. I'm confident that atrocities like this belong in the past. The future is... *tranquilou bilou!*" — Sunday Friend

“Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change — not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.” — Kingdom of Conscience

Remember our old character, History? The moralist lives to kill History by ossifying it. Revachol, the moralists say, was built to “resolve History”²¹. The moralist would trap us “in the age of History, and in the eyes of History we are always already dead”²². The moralist’s History ceases to be History by becoming stasis. The pseudo-communist Gottwaldians, in fact liberals, would tell us “that it’s an inescapable fact of modernity that we can only repackage our collective history in increasingly ludicrous forms”²³.

Moralism brings the world to a halt. It blocks the processes by which information can be generated so that it can kill the future. This is what produces the pale: the pale is not something that is made per se, but the inevitable result of forcing the world into informational stasis. History becomes scattered, the future is abandoned, and the information that exists is left untouched. It’s then only a matter of time before its entropy grows, and then—pale.

The Innocentic system facilitates this. An Innocence is “a literal personification of History”²⁴ elected into their position as the infallible herald of the inevitable. The interventionist role of the Innocences is perhaps most clear by exception in the case of Sola, the ostensible “anti-innocence”. She “largely left history to its own devices, encouraging people to excel on their own rather than prescribing to a deified model of history”²⁵. Incidentally, and unusually for Innocences, Sola resigned.

By contrast, the “Greatest Innocence” Dolores Dei is responsible for the Moralintern itself. She founded the institution that leads moralism today; she facilitated the industrialization of moralism into a machine that can, globally and in coordinated fashion, suppress the future. Innocentics is the project of enforcing information stasis, and moralism is the banner of this project. This is the process by which the pale accumulates: not unbidden, but because moralists choose to “interfere in the course of our history”²⁶.

Nihilism, by the way, is the conscious acceleration of this process. Recall that the latest Innocence—the final Innocence, in the way that it went—is the nihilist Ambrosius Santa-Mira of Mesque. Ambrosius embraces the pale, preaching indifference. He didn’t promise a better life; he was not elected on some platform of world improvement. In his own hagiography, he was the only one who confronted the pale. The pale is what he promises to the world, and this promise is made with euphoria:

“I’ll give her to you to take, her smell in your hands, a sacred and terrible smell; now rub your face with her. The pale, she is ripe with colour, seeping through the grubby slits; I open the blinds and the intermediate frequencies, all the terrible lost colours of the past come out. Everything is again. This is where nihilism leads. It is no longer what could be, or what could not be. It is. The entire world is a zone of imminent entroponetic catastrophe.” (9, 97)

The nihilist understands the pale and revels in it; the nihilist sees no fruit in resistance and surrenders to the pale blissfully. The nihilist entroponaut Zigi, in his zealous youth, told his classmates there was no point going to school or having children because “there will be no future” at all (12, 135). Zigi himself proves to be immune to the pale—there is no porch collapse for a mind already dripping with past. The nihilist is the ultimate soldier of entropolism:

"Entropolism [is the] faith in and desire to accelerate the spread of pale across the world, until humanity has reached what its adherents call the 'rest state' of humanity, the final reconciliation of past, present, and future in timeless spirit...” — Encyclopedia

The nihilist joins hands with the moralist and is their complement: where the moralist kills the future by securing the eternity of the present, the nihilist kills it by stymying any resistance and embracing the pale. Hand-in-hand, the moralist and the nihilist suppress the generation of new information. This is what unleashes the pale. In the story as it is told, they both succeed.

Fascism and Futility

Where the moralist wants to make past and future one and the same, the fascist desires a return to the past. The Elysian fascist maxim (and dogwhistle) is to “turn back time. To make things richtig”²⁷. In Revachol, the fascist desires the return of the Suzerainty—this is equivocated to saving Revachol itself. The fascist’s only option to do this is time travel; the fascist needs to return to a prior state of being, to turn back the clock.

In pursuit of this the fascist seeks out magic under another name: Gary the cryptofascist collects theories and will speak of cryptids that can turn back time. These are long shots, bits of hopeful hypothesizing that won’t amount to anything, because turning back time is such a absurd project on its face that the solutions must be just as absurd.

In fact, entroponetics can explain the futility of the fascist objective. The progression of time in Elysium is facilitated by a combination of increasing entropy and increasing information. In this way the changing macro-state of the world over time (so long as time continues—so long as the moralist has not won) is irreversible. You cannot delete information, only abandon it; you cannot undo entropy if you only look back, and fighting it is a moot task. This irreversibility is time manifest. The past would not be the past if it was still retrievable.

At least one fascist recognizes this, in the face of fascist optimism about getting history on the “right track”:

"The 'right track'? This is the right track! The only track. This is the world we shaped, a reflection of what we are: cowardly, ugly, and numb. And there are no second chances. We don't deserve them! You can't just go back and restart — that would make everything MEANINGLESS!" — René Arnoux

And it is obvious from the outside:

“YOU HAVE DEVELOPED THIS UNHEALTHY OBSESSION WITH THE PAST. STANDING BEFORE ME, HOPING TO TURN BACK TIME. THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER. REINVENT YOURSELF FROM DEFEAT.

“ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. JUST NOT FOR YOU.” — Measurehead (A, B)

In short: “Fascist magic just ain’t true”²⁸.

Communism

What are we to do, then, to stem the pale moralist tide? We can’t rely on prime number generators. They’re too weak, and prime numbers grow progressively more difficult to find. They’re can’t be our method of sustaining a low-entropy state against the pale. What we need is an intense and reliable source of information.

Well:

“Communism doesn't dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it." — Steban

Where moralism seeks to freeze the present and make future and past the same—where fascism desires an impossible return to a past buried by the present—there communism recognizes a future to be built and actively created. The communist, as diamaterialist and inframaterialist, is engaged in the generation of the future, and the arrow of time can survive by their persistence.

The moralist, the nihilist, the fascist—they do not believe in the future, and this is what differentiates them from the communist²⁹. The former, as enemies of the future, are enemies of mankind³⁰. And the youth of communism, for their commitment to future-building, are the future itself³¹.

This is obvious, really, when considering that the pale and porch collapse are synonymous with the rest state and death of History. Only historical materialism, which is in a constant state of interpretation and re-interpretation of the past, can dredge the churning of the past and give it ever newer order and structure. Historical materialism is the process of perpetually gathering the past and keeping it in a state of low entropy.

Diamaterialism uses History to produce the future. Not only is it engaged in the always (re)ordering of the past, but it’s constantly engaged in putting this past to work to generate the future—this is the pinnacle of low-entropy information production! Communism, through the diamaterialist method, is the information Sun that can press back against the pale. This is how we un-isolate the system. The second law of thermodynamics will be impotent so long as this task is not abandoned.

The inframaterialists take this one step further. According to inframaterialism, sufficiently strong revolutionary fervour can have a loosening effect on the laws of physics themselves³². The inframaterialist claims that the communist spirit can sustain structures that are otherwise physically impossible, and we have reason to believe this is true³³. We can imagine that under these circumstances the principles that hold the pale in place can be weakened, and the pale itself better dispelled.

But we’re not limited to speculation! Note first the inframaterialist hypothesis that “revolution may in fact create a *counter-force* that prevents the pale from expanding”³⁴. Observe next these words from Ignus Nilsen, the Vaasan communist revolutionary and “one of Kras Mazov’s closest associates"³⁵:

“Communism is powerful! Believe in Communism, it’s a burst of enthusiasm! I promise! It’s beautiful when you believe in a person, but without it… Nothing. It was a blizzard, but it was bright, it was morning. Communism is white, it sparkles! Communism is the morning, it is a jubilation!” (16, 206)

This speech was delivered in the pale—and as it was uttered, the pale receded ever so slightly. The mere exhortation of communism is enough to impose order on the pale, just a little. Imagine the practice of communism en masse! This is its promise: a world where the past is understood and built upon to perpetually produce the future. This promise terrifies the nihilist, and is Ambrosius’ antithesis.

So long as there are communists, the world will have a fountain of information that exerts pressure against the pale. Communism is the force to counter the pale’s entropic force. Entroponetics finds its solution to the pale in the ceaseless activity of communism and the ordering it brings. If communism is what forestalls the maximization of entropy, then it’s only through communism that the arrow of time, and the movement from past through present to future, can persist.

Ambrosius says the entire world is a zone of imminent entroponetic collapse. We reply that communism will prevent immanentization. Remember:

“The world will probably end soon.”

“No,” says Frantiček the Brave, “there are still eight years.”

“Eight years? But then everything is still possible!”

“Yes, everything is possible for this world.” (13, 155)

1. Joyce Messier A, B, C

2. Ruby, You

3. Joyce Messier

4. You

5. Joyce Messier

6. Paledriver

7. This is an apocryphal comment attributed to John von Neumann in conversation with Claude Shannon. The joke is that Shannon, now often referred to as the father of information theory, needed to coin a term for what could be described as the uncertainty present in a message. The information theoretic definition of entropy is not, strictly speaking, what is at issue here—however it can be connected directly to thermodynamic entropy when used to express the uncertainty contained in a macrostate.

Intuitively: the knowledge that all the particles in a system are collected in one corner (a state of low thermodynamic entropy) tells you a lot about the microstate, i.e. the individual states of each particle, because for any particle you will know that it’s roughly in the corner (this corresponds to low information entropy); if you know instead that the system is in a dispersed macrostate with the particles scattered around (high thermodynamic entropy), this tells you very little about the microstate—any particle could be just about anywhere until you know more (so there is high information entropy).

If you’re just reading this not knowing the first thing about entropy, it will make very little sense. But in a few paragraphs it will all become clear!

8. The previous footnote should be more intelligible now.

9. For a more thorough but quite accessible discussion of entropy, consider this fortuitously timed video by Veritasium, who has yet to release a similar video on entroponetics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contains a lengthy discussion of the relationship between entropy and the arrow of time—it’s actually far from a consensus position that entropy provides sufficient grounds for the arrow of time, and this proposal is riddled with issues. The SEP also has an even lengthier general article on time. Tragically, the SEP does not have a dedicated entroponetics article.

10. Conceptualization

11. Paledriver

12. Ruby

13. Joyce Messier. This is an interesting coinage in light of the fact that the pale seems to proceed from regions of low population density toward higher population density. Urban centers, with the fewest porches, are the last to collapse. The Dicemaker also alludes to porch collapse.

14. Perhaps the earliest formulation of this view is due to Schrödinger

15. The “killer wave” is also known as halderdingr, deserter wave, Draupner wave, and weird wave.

16. Joyce Messier

17. Encyclopedia

18. Paledriver

19. Frittte Clerk and Shelf of Paranormal Books

20. Egghead

21. Joyce Messier

22. Noid

23. Steban

24. Encyclopedia

25. The Greatest Innocence

26. Encyclopedia. For a more focussed (and very clarifying) discussion of the Innocentic system’s role in Elysium, I strongly recommend socialism: elysian and scientific.

27. You. Observe also the dozens of occurrences of “turn back time”.

28. Racist Lorry Driver

29. Echo Maker

30. Rhetoric

31. Inland Empire

32. A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism

33. The impossible stacking of matchboxes in the Martinaise reading group

34. Steban

35. Encyclopedia A, B