🏡 I Don’t Resonate With You

Is it possible that we must be passive to experience resonance? Do we only hear those loud, clear, deep, and continuing sounds—perhaps the heartbeat of the universe—when we forfeit control and let the wind blow us where it may? Does our grammar know more about the world than we do—does it embody wisdom that eludes the modern mind?

The thing about resonance? It’s unpredictable. A highly anticipated Broadway musical, written by a star composer, can sputter at the box office and become the flop of the season. An obscure single from an unknown artist can top the Billboard chart out of nowhere. A Czech writer who has been dead a century can become the hero of generation TikTok. W... See more

I can’t help but think of the I-resonate-with trend as a cry for help dressed up in terrible grammar. As the anthropocene gives way to the life-centered economy, we humans feel thrust from our thrones. We want to return to being the subject of the sentence, the active voice, the element in command. When something resonates with us, we are relegated... See more

You can’t try to resonate. Ultimately, resonance is beyond us. Like happiness, it can’t be a goal.

Like resonance, the term echo chamber has both literal and figurative meanings that are related, but not the same. In the former sense, an echo chamber is an enclosed space that naturally amplifies an original acoustic signal. Literal resonance differs from echo because it is based on the idea of vibrations (good or bad). In physics’ terms, resonan... See more

Interestingly, echo chambers also come with benefits, not only for their “residents,” but also for society at large. In fact, they might be essential as markers—and makers—of shared identity and values, places of belonging and comfort. Isn’t any community, by definition, an echo chamber? The House of Beautiful Business certainly is. We have no illu... See more

In a dialogue with fellow scholars Thijs Lijster and Robin Celikates, Rosa imagines resonance as a descendant of 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 necessar... See more

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

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 are effectively simplifying our understanding of the world and t... See more