Entropy, the offer, and market penetration…

Robert Smithson, the great land artist of the late 60’s and early 70’s, saw entropy as a central component of his art.

Entropy is a term to describe the drift toward disorder in any closed system moving through time, best expressed as the second law of thermodynamics in which processes spontaneously move towards a state of greater disorder.

Think of heat coming out of an air vent into a room, the heat always flows from a hot object toward a colder object and dissipates over time.

Smithson, saw entropy as something to be encountered in a work of art, since it is something so central to how our reality is constructed.

This is juxtaposed against what is traditionally thought in the art world of preventing entropy.

Keeping the artwork as intact as possible from when the master painted it, and restoring it if anything goes wrong.

The Smithson work that I feel best expresses this concept is not his famous spiral jetty but the work he did on Kent State in memorial for the shootings, an old wooden shed in which he piled dirt on top and left it so that what remains today is only the concrete foundation.

He wrote a lot about how entropy influenced his art, and his writings on culture become more relevant as time moves on.

He saw entropy in operation not only in our physical environment but as well as a cultural and social pull towards disorder.

Things naturally break down and become replaceable.

If there isn’t a law passed to preserve our historical markers societies seem to just pave way for newer things.

If you’ve seen Downton Abbey, think of the anxiety they all felt as one by one each great estate becomes sold off.

If fact, in the 20th century 1 out of every 3 country estates were demolished.

Or think of a place like Saudi Arabia, thousands of years of history and some of the earliest Islamic sites, and yet, because that history doesn’t align with the current Islamic views the government has swept these landmarks aside, destroying their own history.

I remember being in Egypt, a city with thousands of years of history right under your feet, and having this weird feeling of uncanniness as I walked around a clean, modern, air conditioned mall, feeling like I could have been in Patterson, New Jersey or Omaha, Nebraska, apart from the women in full burkas.

This is what Robert Smithson is alluding to as entropy in culture.

The urban sprawl of the shopping center full of multinational conglomerates where the Big Mac and Coca-Cola taste the exact same whether down the street from my high school or in Paris, France.

Entropy in culture is the tendency toward sameness and the uniform of easy exchange in globalized late stage capitalism.

Another way to put it would be tending towards the lowest common denominator in society.

This is why TikTok or Instagram become the stand in for genuine connection, when the ability to express myself has been stripped away a meme or a reel becomes the equivalent of the 19th century calling card.

The viral nature of those mediums lends itself to this lowest common denominator exchange.

What has always fascinated me about the viral phenomena on social media has been the seemingly group decision that this week we’ll be making content about so and so.

Then we all make these videos where the uniqueness of the creator’s personality is portrayed by their take on the latest viral moment.

And then overnight the next viral moment occurs and we all move on.

A really fascinating practice if you find yourself addicted to these apps is to disconnect and delete it for a period of time and then come back to it while observing the groupthink.

It can be quite jarring if you’ve allowed enough time to pass between social media binges. 

Since entropy can be seen in our physical environment as well as our cultural and social milieus then we can also see it in the marketplace.

With every new leap in technology the ground is set for a new new offer to displace the established ways.

Think of the heyday of the blackberry and then its utter destruction when the iPhone launched.

Yet this radically new idea of a phone as everything becomes so commonplace now that the difference between the latest iPhone and the competitors are that one’s camera can zoom into the moon.

Entropy has set it.

Now without a radically new upgrade to the software the only way to get someone to upgrade is to pile on the additional offers, get $1k rebate for turning in your used iPhone while also getting 6 months free service with your carrier and so on.

Offers are new and revolutionary but as market saturation begins the revolutionary becomes the commonplace.

The only way to fight against this entropic convergence is to remake the offer if you cannot remake the product.

It’s not so much that the market has cooled off but that the individuals that make up this abstract market have changed.

More and more it seems as time wears on we see a marketplace that has become more distrusting, more hesitant to change, and really unable to believe in the change a product can produce if there aren’t heaps of social proof or scientific studies.

Now this certainly means that the access to information that the population has, has shifted the power away from the seller and into the buyer, which is certainly a good thing.

Think of what Carfax has done to car sales, where in the past the car salesman had all the information and unless the buyer was educated, there was no chance for a fair deal.

However all that glitters is not gold, information is one thing, but distrust from a history of being burned by infomercials or websites or used car salesman or their own government and the banks where they keep their money, is another thing entirely.

This surely is far different than simply more access to valuable information.

It is the entropic breakdown of the levels of trust.

We are left with only what we can actually see, hear, and feel.

A radical empiricism where trust can only be built through a shift to the authentic. 

• The value proposition of the offer in a shifting marketplace…
• Heidegger, Fallenness, and Social Media’s Viral Manipulation
• Content Marketing Failures: Why Your Strategy Isn’t Working
• The Hidden Dangers of Clinging to the Past: How History Traps You In Little Gidding
• Content Marketing vs. Ads: Lessons From a Financial Crossroads

If this is sparking something in you—a desire to lead with precision, speak with impact, or shape the unseen currents—step into Leadership, Influence, Poetry. It’s where strategy meets soul, and persuasion becomes an art form. For those who move worlds with words and presence. Read Leadership, Influence, Poetry: A Journey in Rising from Defeat 

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