Fight Entropy: From Group42 to Mycal Music
From CR-ROM burners to AI music, Mycal traces 30 years of defiance against decay—a hacker’s hymn to persistence.
Tinkering with Time, Tech, and Culture #23
In 1994, buried inside a cracked jewel case hand labeled Group42 Sells Out, a short poem called Fight Entropy appeared.
It wasn’t meant to be poetry—it was a hacker’s growl, a text file wedged between assembler code and ANSI art.
In my twenties, wired to the dial-up hum, I tried to bottle rebellion before the world digitized it.
Entropy always wins, they say,
But fight I must, win I may...
Back then the fight was visceral.
Propagation meant children, chaos, motion—“I’ll chase lust and legacy, make chaos and children.”
But embedded between those reckless lines was a seed of foresight: “I’ll upload my soul, give it computer control.”
Even then, I saw the other paths. Fight Entropy wasn’t just a snarl—it was a sketch of competing escapes: through blood, through code, through surrender.
I was too young to choose, so I wrote them all.
This was pre-broadband, pre-cloud—already dreaming of data as afterlife.
In 1994, uploading a soul sounded like stoned science fiction, but in hindsight it was premonition—the earliest whisper of what would become our entire mode of living: the digitization of self, memory, and presence.
Every username, every status update, every saved file—each an echo of a person diffused across circuits.
We weren’t preserving bodies; we were preserving patterns.
The Hacker’s Dilemma
Entropy was the perfect metaphor for a generation raised on solder and static.
Every system tended toward failure. Hard drives died. Capacitors bulged.
The hacker’s instinct was to push back—patch, rebuild, overclock, recompile.
Fight entropy, line by line.
In the BBS era we learned that information could outlive hardware.
Copying was resurrection. Sharing became an anti-entropic force.
Somewhere between thermodynamics and telecom, the physics of decay became a philosophy of persistence.
There was something almost monastic in it.
Hacker nights felt like rituals—restoring damaged code, porting lost files, migrating dying BBS content to FTP servers.
The value wasn’t only in the files; it was in the act of refusing loss.
That refusal became identity.
Three Decades Later
In early 2025, I began writing Fight Entropy again—not as a rewrite, but as a reawakening.
It became one of the first songs I created while experimenting with AI-assisted music.
The mantra stayed: Entropy always wins.
But the medium had changed.
The twenty-something hacker wanted immortality through reproduction and code.
The fifty-something builder wanted legacy through meaning—children, ideas, music, archives.
The original screamed I will live!; the new version whispers:
Let the echo continue.
Fight entropy, fight, fight entropy / Find a way.
Same defiance, now in harmony—not noise but resonance.
That’s the shift.
What once was brute assertion became quiet persistence.
I don’t want eternity. I want echoes.
Not to conquer entropy—just to make it stumble.
Fight Entropy is still unreleased, one of my earliest AI-music experiments,included above as a cronosonic, a format I defined in an earlier post, pairing song and essay as a single act of persistence.
It exists in that liminal zone between rebellion and code, where the instinct to fight merges with the tools that make persistence possible.
East vs West: Two Ways to Face the End
In the Eastern frame—Taoism, Buddhism, Shinto—entropy isn’t the enemy.
Impermanence is the point.
The river erodes its banks because flow is truth.
Acceptance brings peace.
The Western frame—Prometheus, Camus—says the opposite: meaning is carved from rebellion.
Mortality gives defiance weight.
Build the tower, knowing it will fall.
Forge the sword, knowing it will rust.
Neither is wrong; they map two poles of human temperament.
The East cultivates serenity in decay.
The West manufactures purpose in spite of it.
Both are necessary.
Fight Entropy lives between them—aware that the current will carry everything away, yet hammering paddles anyway.
When I work on the song, I feel both impulses: the Eastern clarity that all things pass, and the Western refusal to let them go quietly.
The rhythm is resignation; the melody is defiance.
Legacy as Resistance
In 1994, fighting meant survival through reproduction.
In 2025, it means persistence through information.
Archive. Record. Compose. Document.
Every Git commit, every lyric, every byte in a backup is resistance.
Even in 1994, I sensed that fight taking shape.
The second stanza of the original poem already imagined survival through creation—books, videos, anything that could outlast flesh.
I didn’t have the language for digital persistence yet, but the instinct was there.
That impulse soon turned physical with the first Group42 disc.
I remember burning that first disc in late 1994—borrowed equipment at the office, CD-Rs at $10–15 each, watching the progress bar crawl with the sick knowledge that if the buffer underrun or someone jostled the desk, it was money gone and hours lost.
We were doing something new: HTML on CD-ROM, exploiting Netscape’s file:// protocol to create a hybrid format nobody else was publishing yet.
But it was more than technical novelty.
It was remembrance—archiving the things my friends and I had created: ANSI art, code, manifestos—burned into polycarbonate to live forever.
The finality of pressing burn was its own kind of entropy: commit or fail, no undo.
Every successful disc felt like theft from time itself.
AI has become part of that same resistance.
It doesn’t replace creation; it extends it.
Code and composition now merge—algorithms amplifying intention.
Collaborating with a machine is still defiance: using entropy’s own tools to delay its victory.
Modern creation is warfare against forgetting.
We don’t escape entropy; we dilute its half-life through duplication and connection.
A song uploaded to a thousand nodes is a digital torch—every copy a protest chant in the void.
Curation has become an act of rebellion.
Naming a file correctly.
Tagging it with metadata.
Organizing a drive.
These are quiet battles—tiny, intentional gestures of resistance against chaos.
We build not to preserve perfection, but to preserve trace.
Legacy is not permanence.
Legacy is pattern.
Why Keep Fighting?
Because surrender is boring.
Because order is fleeting, but style can echo.
Entropy wins the war — but meaning wins the moment.
We don’t fight for eternity; we fight to burn bright enough that even our decay leaves a pattern — a faint interference in the noise.
The heat death of the universe may mute the song, but until then there’s rhythm.
So don’t look back and wish that you did.
Do it now. Prove you lived.
Leave behind something with edges sharp enough to catch in memory’s gears.
A word, a sound, a trace of heat in the static.
Thirty years later, I still believe it.
The syntax changed. The medium evolved. The instruction remains:
Live so hard that time resists.
Not for salvation. Not for fame.
But for that one impossible victory:
the moment when even forgetting hesitates—
and remembers your name.