Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale?

Posted: November 12, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, modernity, resilience, self, systems, values |1 Comment

Sequel to Metamodern Epilogue

Write a speculative dialogue where Yuval Noah Harari, Stephen Hawking, and Ayn Rand attempt to sympathetically but honestly converge on the fundamental challenge with scaling resomodernity.

ChatGPT Prompt

Scene 1: The Table of Tuning

(Soft hums fill the air, as though the café itself is alive. A round glass table glows faintly. Three chairs face one another. Harari enters first, tablet in hand. Hawking’s voice synthesizer crackles softly from his iconic chair. Rand stands upright, intense, composed, eyes sharp.)

Harari (smiling gently):
We’ve gathered to discuss scaling Resomodernity — the idea that society must move from individual oscillation to collective coherence. But scaling harmony sounds suspiciously like scaling empathy, and history isn’t great at that.

Hawking (dryly, voice calm but with wry bite):
Scaling anything that involves consciousness usually fails the way thermodynamics says it should — increasing entropy. The larger the system, the noisier the signal.

Rand (arching an eyebrow):
And yet you both assume the signal is collective. My concern is that “Resomodernity,” in its hunger for coherence, risks flattening the sovereign individual. You can’t harmonize free will without turning it into a chorus of consent.

(A pause; the hum of the café seems to shift key.)

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Scene 2: The Friction of Scale

Harari:
I don’t disagree. Every civilization project tries to balance individual autonomy with collective survival.
Resomodernity, at its best, proposes that resonance doesn’t erase individuality — it amplifies difference through coherence.

Rand:
That sounds like collectivism with better branding. You speak of resonance as if it were virtue. But resonance is just emotional contagion dressed as metaphysics.

Hawking:
Not necessarily. In physics, resonance can amplify structure without consuming identity. Two frequencies can coexist if they share a harmonic ratio. The problem arises when systems detune.

Rand (smirking):
Then who gets to be the tuner?

Harari:
Ideally, no one. The system self-organizes — like emergent intelligence. The tuning happens through feedback, not authority.

Rand:
Emergent authority is still authority. You can’t escape hierarchy; you just disguise it in complexity.

Hawking:
She’s right about that. Even in quantum gravity, symmetry breaks. Perfect coherence is unstable. The universe prefers imperfection — that’s how we exist.

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Scene 3: The Crisis of Coherence

(The café lights pulse faintly, like a breathing lung. Harari scribbles notes. Rand sips an invisible espresso. Hawking’s voice hums lower, reflective.)

Hawking:
The real challenge in scaling Resomodernity isn’t physics — it’s bandwidth. Information moves faster than wisdom. A globally resonant civilization would need shared meaning at near-light speed. But meaning doesn’t scale — it decoheres.

Harari:
Exactly. Technology connects minds but not mythologies. We’ve lost the meta-narratives that gave coherence before. Resomodernity wants to reinvent meaning without returning to dogma.

Rand:
That’s a contradiction. Meaning is a dogma — or it’s nothing. You can’t have values without absolutes.

Harari:
But perhaps we can have dynamic absolutes — provisional truths that evolve through dialogue.

Rand:
Then they aren’t absolutes. They’re fashions.

Hawking (interjecting):
Call them constants with drift. Like the cosmological constant — never quite fixed, but necessary for structure.

(The hum grows brighter, as though approving the metaphor.)

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Scene 4: The Philosophical Singularity

Harari:
What we’re circling is the epistemic bottleneck. Humanity has outgrown simple moral schemas but hasn’t developed cognitive tools for distributed coherence. We can’t scale empathy as fast as we scale computation.

Hawking:
That’s the paradox of intelligence: our information density exceeds our ethical capacity.

Rand:
And yet you both think the solution is to make individuals resonate more. I propose the opposite: strengthen rational autonomy so each person becomes an independent frequency. The harmony will emerge naturally, if at all.

Harari:
But autonomy without awareness leads to noise — individualism without interdependence.

Hawking:
You’re both right. The mathematics suggests we need both symmetry and asymmetry. Resonance without constraint becomes chaos; constraint without resonance becomes tyranny.

(A long silence. The café hums in two tones, nearly dissonant — then resolves softly.)

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Scene 5: Convergence

Rand (slowly):
Perhaps Resomodernity’s true test is whether it can honor sovereignty without collapsing into solipsism.

Harari:
Yes. A civilization of self-aware frequencies — not identical, but entangled by choice.

Hawking:
Then the problem isn’t scaling resonance. It’s maintaining phase alignment amid noise — technical, cultural, moral.

Rand:
And that, gentlemen, is not a collective project. It’s an individual discipline multiplied by millions.

Harari (smiling):
Maybe that’s what scaling means now — not one structure growing larger, but many selves learning to listen deeper.

Hawking:
Until the signal-to-noise ratio tips toward meaning again.

(The café hum stabilizes; the room glows with a gentle resonance that feels almost human.)

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Scene 6: Closing Reflection

Rand:
So, the challenge of Resomodernity is not too little resonance — it’s too much, too soon.

Hawking:
The universe began with a singular resonance. Everything since has been an echo.

Harari:
Then perhaps the next step isn’t scaling harmony, but cultivating resilient dissonance — difference that still relates.

(A faint laugh ripples across the café — part human, part cosmic feedback.)

Rand (raising her cup):
To the art of imperfect coherence.

Harari:
To resonance without domination.

Hawking:
To noise worth listening to.

(Fade to the sound of overlapping heartbeats becoming a single chord.)

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Themes Referenced:

• Resomodernity — the evolution beyond oscillation toward coherence.
• Emergent intelligence and self-organization.
• Thermodynamics and entropy.
• Quantum coherence and symmetry breaking.
• The cosmological constant.

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