on complexity, entropy, neoliberal globalism and instability

entropy, once an unwanted byproduct of increasingly complex environments, is now a weapon wielded by the unstable

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I live in the southeast United (?) States. those of us that live here, especially those that have lived here for a long time, know that this isn’t a normal place. it’s an enigma, a sort of country within a country. it is both The Penultimate America, a church on every corner, more guns than there are people, deep fried food, crumbling infrastructure, horrible healthcare and education, with a rich and broken culture, as well as a separate place altogether. we know that the state, federal or otherwise, will not save us, because we watched so many people die during Katrina and other natural disasters while FEMA sat on their heels without the funding to do what needed to be done. we have watched as education worsens while money gets subverted to private religious schools and state lotteries. we have served as the vanguard of the New and Old Right, both MAGA republicanism and historical revisionism to prop up a nonexistent ideal of the Confederate South.

in many ways, the Southeast, especially the Deep South where I live, is a net importer. this can be taken very literally: we are largely dependent on federal funding, despite our cultural insistence on decentralized, state-led models. we import far more than we export, and our exports are primarily agricultural. this was a massive problem during the civil war, where the south felt the economic impact of being cut off from the industries in the north. one of our the primary exports aside from soybeans and cotton is the brainpower of our upper quartile intellectuals: the lion’s share of college graduates that are produced in colleges in the Southeast are exported anywhere but here.

I’m not here to talk about neo-confederate philosophy, the new right, soybean exports or industrial imports. this week and for many weeks prior, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the biggest imports that have come into the South over the last hundred years, and the impacts that it has and will continue to have on the South as well as the rest of the United States.

today we need to think about entropy.

entropy in scope

entropy can be thought of as complexity and chaos within a system. it’s not always a bad thing, especially when compared to a stable but brutal system.

we spend a fair bit of time interfacing with entropy, whether we realize it or not. regulations, as we will discuss plenty below, are put in place in an attempt to decrease entropy: in a purely chaotic system, industries would pump whatever waste they could produce straight into our water supply if it meant saving some money and increasing margins. in a purely chaotic system, billionaires would pay you not just the federal minimum wage, but the minimum wage humanly possible to keep you just barely alive in their company towns.

in purely chaotic systems, Things Simply Happen, Results Are Observed and People React More or Less Rationally. the only law is the OODA Loop.

the Americans among you might be making the observation that this is very similar to how life is now, and I would nod emphatically. we live in a fairly unregulated and unrestricted environment in the US. this is by design, both thanks to Reagan and those that followed him, and thanks to the culture that we have painstakingly built. reliance on the federal government is a cardinal sin in the Church of the Stars and Stripes, unless you are a corporate executive with an 8 figure net worth, then it is perfectly fine to rely almost entirely on government subsidies.

the American Social Contract is one in which you trade a certain amount of chaos for a certain amount of potential. sure your kid may get shot in their desk in kindergarten, but you’re trading that possibility for the potential power you can have rising up against the government. sure, your medicaid is being taken away, but the government will have more money to send to Israel, or to a gator infested swamp camp for immigrants. you trade chaos for potential.

entropy is the cost you pay to be American.

entropy in the south

I won’t spend the entirety of this article talking about the south. most people are fairly disinterested in the goings on of “flyover country” and I could spend several articles talking about why that’s an oversight, bigoted and dangerous, but that’s for a later time.

it’s important, or at least useful, to talk about entropy in the south because it is a hyperbolic way of viewing the forces of entropy nationally, even globally. the effects that entropy and complexity have on the south are an exaggerated view on the effects they will have on our country as a whole.

when FEMA is defunded, it is a given that the areas that will feel the negative effects of this policy the most will be areas where natural disasters occur most commonly. California and the southwest have wildfire seasons, while Louisiana and the southeast have hurricane seasons. without downplaying the massive importance of the effects of wildfire seasons on California, comparing the GDP of California to that of Mississippi or Alabama, even Florida, highlights the difference in effect.

the GDP of Los Angeles County exceeded $1.3T in 2023. the GDP of the entire state of Mississippi was $150B in 2024. a single county in the state of California produced almost 10 times the GDP of the entire state of Mississippi. in short, poorer states facing natural disasters have far fewer resources to save people and recover, economically and socially, and the federal government is pushing to reduce investments in federal disaster relief agencies in favor of relying on states to do their own relief.

financial resources to respond to natural disasters are an entropic lever: the more financial resources that a state or country has to respond to natural disasters, the more they can control negative outcomes when those disasters happen. climate change itself is an entropic lever: the worse climate change gets, the more chaotic our weather systems become. when we decrease funding for natural disasters while climate change continues to worsen, we are moving two entropic levers in a bad direction, and they will have exponential effects on outcomes before, during and after disasters.

this is a singular example of a growing trend of increasing net entropy for southern and poorer states. decreasing the social safety net overall is going to have profoundly negative effects on states like Mississippi, who depend heavily on federal aid for things like Medicaid, Medicare, senior living support, food stamps, WIC, etc. decreasing regulations around critical infrastructure, business ethics, food and industrial safety, child labor and agriculture means increasing entropy in these areas, leaving the fates of the residents of the south in the hands of an exploitative rent-seeking capital class and a corrupt and unintelligent political ruling class. this will have exaggerated impacts on areas that depend more on regulation than social contracts, ethics and morals to keep the members of the public safe. the capitol of Mississippi has gone multiple months every year without access to clean and safe drinking water for several decades now, and decreasing regulations around critical infrastructure safety, security and cleanliness is not likely to help that situation. rural healthcare is already horrific, especially in remote and poor areas in the Mississippi Delta, so the “Big Beautiful Bill” slashing medicare and medicaid funding will very likely dramatically worsen care and outcomes in rural areas as struggling rural clinics and hospitals start to disappear.

entropy as a national political and economic force

this theme can be followed at a much higher level, especially in economics and politics. when Robinhood, the mobile-first stock trading platform, reached its zenith, stock trading was no longer just available to the well-off and intelligent. now, anyone could invest, leading to the rise of the retail trader. there are parts of this that are, when cast in the right light, good: access to markets should be equal and shouldn’t be decided by preexisting wealth. what it did, though, was add more chaos to the system: GameStop skyrocketed in price off the back of a gambling forum on Reddit and the stock of a dead company blew through the roof during COVID based on a misread ticker.

I’m not going to put all the blame on mom-and-pop retail traders either. quantitative firms with billions of dollars and dozens of PhD’s have added a significant amount of entropy to the financial system. flash crashes, wild stock swings and more have followed the computerization of stock trading that have ballooned the trading volume on the stock exchanges so much that, on average, there are 2,572 or more transactions per second on the stock market as a whole, and it is highly likely when factoring in dark pool trading, this number would go even higher. when computers are making millisecond-based decisions that affect the lives of anyone with exposure to the stock market, entropy is very high.

when the national tariff policy changes on a daily basis such that every node in increasingly complex supply chains has no idea what price they’re going to pay to move goods from day to day, entropy is extremely high: node 1 doesn’t know how much they’re going to have to pay to move their parts to node 2, who has to ship those components and their own to node 3, who has to pay for all of the above components and their subsequent tariff prices, then they have to assemble them, ship them yet again and hopefully be able to sell them at a price that may or may not be significantly higher or lower than yesterday. these supply chains play out across months, with ships, planes and trucks criss-crossing the globe for weeks on end with tariff rates changing on a daily basis and costs accruing the whole time. with stable tariffs, these prices can all be factored in and the supply chains, prices and unit economics can stabilize. an equilibrium can be reached. even though these complex supply chains have a certain level of inherent entropy (a typhoon in Taiwan is going to have major effects on the construction of data centers in Louisiana), adding tariffs that quite literally change daily adds an exponential amount of entropy that grows with the length of the supply chain.

the solutions, if there are any

in searching for a solution to the societal problems of entropy, there are two popular trains of thought: decreasing entropy via regulation, or increasing society’s ability to weather entropic storms.

regulation is, generally, a mode of decreasing entropy via a series of rules whose purpose is to use state power to punish those who make certain decisions that are thought to be “anti-social.” gun control legislation is meant to limit access to firearms for certain individuals so that, in theory, the likelihood that they will harm people decreases substantially. this limits the possible or likely behavior of individuals with firearms (again, in theory) which limits entropy. stock market manipulation legislation limits the ability of highly wealthy individuals to artificially influence the market for their own benefit, which limits the entropy of the market. speed limits limit entropy by ensuring people aren’t flying through intersections in school zones, industrial safety regulations limit entropy by ensuring waste products don’t end up in your drinking water, you get the picture.

the “hardening of society” train of thought takes a different approach. instead of depending on regulations, which tend to be written by out of touch elitist politicians with special interests in a more or less heavy handed way, why don’t we accept entropy as a natural force and instead seek to “harden” the areas of society that would be affected by it? instead of gun control legislation, we increase gun safety education, invest in inner city youth programs, or arm teachers. instead of stock market manipulation regulation, we… well I haven’t seen a great hands-off approach to this that doesn’t just amount to “we just let the rich manipulate the stock market.” this is the type of ideology that is best exemplified by Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile” (affiliate link) which preaches that we should push for a society that benefits from entropy instead of being harmed by it.

I’m not sold on either schools of thought, honestly, and believe that a realistic solution probably lies in a combination of the two. there are areas, though, where the application of one school of thought does far more harm than good. putting the onus of disaster response on the poorest states in the country that also are most likely to be affected by disaster to “harden them against entropy” is a horrific response, considering the mass death that will result. over-regulating marriage and interpersonal romantic relationships based upon sex, gender identity, etc. is both unnecessary and born out of bigotry instead of a want to limit harmful entropy.

I do not come to you with solutions. I am a humble software dork with a very small reach and an even smaller Substack audience. I am here to present the problems, and to lobby for my readers to start thinking critically about their ideal solutions for limiting, controlling or responding to entropy. the reality is, the government, federal or otherwise, is not going to save us. neither is Meta, Google, Binance, Bank of America, the UN, China, Communism, Anarchism, Liberalism or any other kind of -ism. we need to think critically about the world we are trying to build, the ways it will respond to entropy, and what we can do about it.

mutual aid is probably a pretty good start.