🏡 I Don’t Resonate With You

Resonance is radically non-instrumental, Rosa stresses, so it cannot be used to maximize an outcome. It has no goal. Unlike harmony, it allows space for dissonance. In fact, resonance requires a certain friction. Paradoxically, when two people entirely agree on a point, when their experiences are fully congruent, or when an idea doesn’t encounter a... See more

Echo chambers lack that friction. So do “filter bubbles,” which are essentially the digital incarnation of echo chambers. In his book Filterworld , Kyle Chayka explores how personalized searching, algorithms, and online behavior flatten our culture by continually offering us more of what we’ve already consumed, shrinking our digital worlds.

The main point of concern here is not that an LLM such as GPT-4 is reductionist in its representation of reality per se; it is that various AI models, each reductionist in their own way, are converging. An echo chamber of echo chambers of echo chambers.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa thinks that resonance has social currency. According to him, resonance changes the object’s role. When listeners hear an idea that resonates with them, they become creators. When followers hear an instruction that resonates with them, they become participants. In his 2016 book, Resonance , Rosa examined the philo... See more

Emile Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence,” the ecstasy shared by participants in music, sports, dancing, or spirituality. Rosa believes that attuning ourselves to this intense feeling of invigorating camaraderie is a necessary alternative to measuring, mapping, analyzing, and exploiting the world. In this sense, resonance is the interpe... See more

What we can try to do—and what only human curation, so far, can make possible—is to find creative ways out of our house of mirrors. “Leave the door open on your way out” is one of our commandments, and it is an invitation to bring parallel worlds and universes, antagonists and dissidents, renegades and rebels into our beautiful bubble, and to engag... See more

Artificial Intelligence is not going to make this any better. New research suggests that AI is reducing complexity, or at least our experience of it. A recent study, The Platonic Representation Hypothesis , shows that as AI models become more powerful, they form increasingly similar statistical representations of the world. The result is that we ar... See more