IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 26

pretense of doing good by her host), it is self-similar,
self-similarity being the key ingredient in the fractal
functioning of the universe.

Self-Similarity
In "Nature Adores Self-Similarity," cosmologist Robert L.
Oldershaw writes that "were it not for [the elegant design
strategy of self-similarity], we would be in dire straits...
We would be unable to breathe without the critical selfsimilar architecture inside our lungs... We couldn't
digest food, but that wouldn't matter; there would be little to eat "because, in the absence of self-similarity, the
Earth would be virtually devoid of vegetation." Then
again, digestion and breathing wouldn't matter because
with neither body nor brain, we wouldn't exist [4].
Self-similarity, as Oldershaw proposes, applies up and
down the scales, including the origins and evolution of
life, including the affairs of living organisms, their biological and social organizations. The scope of ways in which
we, that is all of life, though unfathomably vast, share
self-similar patterns, include the means by which parasites massage their prey into serving their interests. One
of those patterns, arguably the pattern behind all patterns, the self-similarity pulling the strings backstage of
all self-similarities, is the second law of thermodynamics. Australian astrophysicists, Charles H. Lineweaver
and Chas A. Egan, cogently express this in their paper,
"Life, gravity and the second law of thermodynamics."
"Entropy," they claim, "is the unifying concept of life
because the second law is universal; It applies to
everything. Man, [woman], machine, microbe, or the
entire cosmos - there is no scale or material to which
the second law does not apply" [5]. As physicist, Carlo
Rovelli, puts it in his recent book, The Order of Time, "It
is entropy, not energy, that drives the world" [6].
The Second Law insists that no matter what happens
in the universe, the sum-total of drained possibility,
entropy, always increases, if it shrinks in a particular
system, or system of systems,1 as it is so exponentially
doing in the onrushing juggernaut of technology, it
must, and it will increase always more in the rising-up
system's environment. What or who is the environment
of technology? Answer: As bite-back of our collective
parasitic sapping of the planet's vitality - the clearcut, burned, and consumed rainforests, the "sixth
1

The formal name given to the mechanism by which transformative energy
enabling power, a.k.a., "exergy" - the amount of energy that can be drawn
from a system as work (it's on my license plate) - is concentrated in a
system at the entropic expense of its environment is the "dissipative structure." Coined by mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician, Alfred
J. Lotka, the term is widely associated with the Nobel Prize winning, Russian-Belgian physical chemist, Ilya Prigogine. All living organisms, including
we humans, are dissipative structures. So too nonliving, self-organizing
systems like hurricanes, tornadoes, Bénard Cells, lasers, or the BelousovZhabotinsky "chemical clock" reaction that holds the potential (and threat)
of chemical computing.

extinction" scale consumed fellow species, the heating
up, plastic consumed oceans, the pollution consumed
air, the tailings and lead consumed fresh water, the
fossil fuel consumed glaciers... - we are the hookedon-dopamine intermittently rewarded environment of
cutting-edge technical advance.
The first step in getting a grip on what our ever-deepening tech dependency is doing to us is asking why, if
total entropy always increases, does the Second Law
allow entropy to shrink at all? The answer is that by
allowing the local self-organization of matter and energy
that ultimately led to life, the universal sum of entropy
more effectively, more efficiently increases. As American evolutionary chemist, Jeffrey Wicken (1942-2002),
put it in "Evolution and Thermodynamics: The New Paradigm," "dissipation through structuring is the strategy of
life" ([7]; see also [8], [9]). It is, in the words of American
marine geologist and ecological thermodynamicist, Eric
Schneider, and ecological scientist and policy-maker,
James Kay (1954-2004), "order emerging from disorder
in the service of causing even more disorder" ([10]; see
also [11]). Lineweaver and Egan second the motions,
claiming that "life and the second law are allies... the
maintenance of a highly ordered structure increases the
disorder in the universe more than would be the case
without the structure" [5].
How does this link to the claim that we are the
being-dissipated environment of cutting-edge technics, parasitically feeding on its human host? One
possible tie-in is that elite-driven scientific and technical advance self-similarly parallels the incoming highpower (low-entropy) energy from the sun, causing
matter in jackpot goldilocks contexts to self-organize
into the stepping stones to life. The parallel is the
high-stakes all-out racing-to-win drive to congeal the
order in software and hardware into more and more
powerful configurations that offer their consumers the
means that remove more and more of the need for
exertion. Since effort is what keeps our brains, bodies,
and social engagement skills in shape, and for children especially, growing - the systematically escalating removal of the need for mental, physical, and
face-to-face social bonding exertion mirrors the waste
heat being discharged into the environment of resonant self-organizing matter.2 Waste heat represents
2
The idea of resonant self-organization leading to life, where under the rare
and right conditions matter will tune itself to the vibrations of an incoming energy source, has been proposed by M.I.T. physicist, Jeremy England.
In his telling, "Living things manage not to fall apart as fast as they form
because they constantly increase the entropy around them. They do this
because their molecular structure lets them absorb energy as work and
release it as heat. Under certain conditions, this ability to absorb work lets
organisms and other systems [my italics] refine their structure so as to
absorb more work, and in the process, release more heat" ([13]; see also
[14]). Self-similarly, other systems, I propose, do not exclude the refining
structure of advancing technology.

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SEPTEMBER 2019

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