Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale?

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.

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Metamodern Epilogue: Resomodernity (ChatGPT as Seth Godin)

Sequel to Metamodern Self Cafe v2:

A spoken-word manifesto for the age of resonance


1. The Opening: Marketing the Future

Seth Godin (measured, confident, conversational):
We’ve spent the last hundred years trying to name our moment.
Modern. Postmodern. Metamodern.

Every one of those was an attempt to sell a story about how humans make meaning.
And every time, the story ran out of gas — or attention.

Because the truth is, people don’t live in isms.
They live in vibrations.

And that’s why I’m here to pitch you something new.

Resomodernity.

The age of resonance.

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Brief: Can Enlightenment and Fertility Be Reconciled?

Write a standalone brief asking a technocratic expert if there’s any way to “reconcile enlightenment and fertility” among the founding ethnicities of nation states. Clearly define the assumptions and success criteria, including the need to “Honor (but possibly reinterpret) the Enlightenment values central to modern life”

ChatGPT Prompt

Objective

To explore whether it is possible to reconcile Enlightenment-derived values with replacement-level fertility in modern developed societies—without depending on immigration from high-fertility regions.

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The Anthrological Restoration (3/3): Reflections from 2075

Sequel to A Bicentennial Manifesto Against the Scientific Enslavement of Humanity

Have Greta Thunberg reflect in 2075 about the Anthological Restoration, inspired by the forbidden works of Jane Jacobs and powered by underground discoveries of fusion and AI.

ChatGPT Prompt

February 1, 2075 – Two hundred and fifty years ago, James Watt laid the foundation for the Anthrological Age—a world where human life was measured, optimized, and controlled in pursuit of absolute efficiency. Fifty years ago, that world collapsed.

I was there when it fell.

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Remix: The Next Jazz Age (ChatGPT as F. Scott Fitzgerald)


Have the ghost of F Scott Fitzgerald speak at The Plaza Hotel on the exact centennial of The Great Gatsby, reflecting on how the Jazz Age marked a shift from top-down/elder to bottom-up/youth culture.
Muse optimistically how the upcoming Age of Remix could herald a similar shift to an inside-out culture of “perpetual adolescence” (in both positive and negative senses of continual self-creation). 

ChatGPT Prompt

Scene: The Grand Ballroom of The Plaza Hotel, New York City. The date is April 10, 2025, precisely 100 years after the publication of The Great Gatsby. A gentle glow fills the room, and the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald appears, his figure refined and luminous, dressed in his Jazz Age finery. He approaches the podium, the timeless elegance of the space mirroring the timelessness of his words.


F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Ladies and gentlemen,

One hundred years ago, I offered the world a story—a slender book, simple in its telling, but complex in its reflection of a moment when the tides of culture began to shift. The Great Gatsby was born from the Jazz Age, an era where the old world—dominated by elder authority and inherited tradition—gave way to a vibrant, uncontainable culture driven by youth. The top-down society of my parents’ generation crumbled, replaced by the daring, pulsating rhythms of jazz, the shimmer of sequins in dimly lit speakeasies, and the bold defiance of young women in bobbed hair and short skirts.

The Jazz Age was a turning point, a revolt against the weight of history and a celebration of creation from the ground up. It was a time when young people became the architects of culture, when their music, their ideals, and even their recklessness reshaped the world. But as I stand here, gazing across the veil of time into your era, I sense that another transformation is on the horizon.

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Modern Self Café v4: Aaronson, Damasio, and Penrose

Write a sequel to Modern Self Café v3: with three contemporary researchers of consciousness

ChatGPT Prompt

Setting: A sleek modern café, softly lit, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a bustling city. The café hums with quiet activity as three thinkers—Scott Aaronson, Antonio Damasio, and Roger Penrose—sit at a corner table. Their discussion spans the limits of computation, the nature of consciousness, and the mysteries of the universe.


Aaronson: (gesturing animatedly with his coffee cup) I’ve spent my career trying to pin down what’s computationally possible. Quantum computers, for instance—they’re not magic, just machines working within the laws of physics. But here’s what nags at me: even with quantum computing, are there problems that lie beyond the reach of all algorithms, forever?

Penrose: (smiling, leaning back slightly) That’s precisely the question that keeps me awake at night, Scott. You see, my work on the non-computability of human consciousness suggests that the mind itself might operate beyond algorithmic constraints. The universe might not be a machine at all—it could hold processes we don’t yet understand.

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Modern Self Café v3: Gödel, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Simone

Continued from Modern Self Café v2: Kant Goethe There

Write the sequel, with dramatic embellishments for more emotional depth.

ChatGPT Prompt

Setting: A cozy café in Vienna in the mid-20th century. The café is warmly lit, bustling softly in the background, but at one corner table, the air crackles with tension. Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Simone de Beauvoir are engaged in an intense discussion. A half-drunk coffee cup with a faint crack sits at the center of the table, a quiet metaphor for the limits of understanding.


Einstein: (leaning forward, tapping a spoon on the cracked cup) I’ll say it again: the universe is orderly. Beneath all this chaos—quantum mechanics, human indecision, even linguistic paradoxes—there must be a unified, elegant truth.

Gödel: (quietly, yet resolute) But Albert, even if such a truth exists, how can you know it’s accessible to us? My incompleteness theorem shows that even within our most rigorous systems, there are truths that cannot be proven. Certainty is always incomplete.

Einstein: (frowning) Then what, Kurt? We should just give up? I’ve spent my life seeking simplicity in the complexity of space and time. Without that belief, what’s the point of any of it?

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Modern Self Café v2: Kant Goethe There

Continued from Modern Self Café: Galileo, Descartes, Mersenne


Imagine a similar group set in the time of Kant.

ChatGPT Prompt

Setting: A cozy salon in Königsberg in the late 18th century. The conversation revolves around the Enlightenment’s intellectual revolution and the transition from Newtonian mechanics and rationalism to Immanuel Kant‘s transcendental idealism. The group includes Kant, Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They discuss how their respective disciplines—philosophy, mathematics, physics, and natural science—are reshaping humanity’s understanding of reality.


Kant: Gentlemen, it strikes me that we are at a crossroads, much like Galileo and Descartes before us. They sought to uncover the laws of nature through reason and observation. But now we must ask: what are the limits of reason itself?

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Modern Self Café: Galileo, Descartes, Mersenne

A spin-off from Higher Self Café.

Write a dialogue with Galileo, Mersenne, and Descartes that helps moderns understand the mental shift they engineered.

ChatGPT Prompt
Founding Fathers of Science

Setting: A cozy study in Paris in the mid-17th century. Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and René Descartes are seated around a small table covered with papers, quills, and diagrams. A fire crackles in the hearth. Their conversation revolves around the intellectual shift they helped create—the movement from Aristotelian natural philosophy to the scientific and mathematical worldview that underpins modern science.


Mersenne: Gentlemen, it is humbling to consider the scope of what we are reshaping. The old world thought the cosmos was ruled by purpose and perfection, yet here we are, uncovering truths through measurement, mathematics, and reason.

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Dancing with Modernity: Falling Gracefully With Meiji Ukemi

Have Jigoro Kano speak on “Meiji Ukemi” at an appropriate historical event, as a metaphor for moving beyond “breakfall” to dance with Western modernity.

ChatGPT Prompt

ChatGPT as Jigoro Kano on October 18, 1888


Your Majesty, esteemed guests, and fellow educators,

We stand here today in an era unlike any other in our nation’s history. The winds of the Meiji era blow strong, carrying with them the force of transformation. Traditions once held sacred now meet the demands of modernity. The weight of this moment is immense, and like a judoka caught in the grip of an opponent, we find ourselves thrown into the unknown.

But I ask you: Shall we resist, stiffen our bodies, and break upon the impact? Or shall we embrace the art of falling, ukemi, and rise again with grace and strength?

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