3 Comments
User's avatar
Memetic Cowboy's avatar

This is a beautiful provocation — one that echoes through the canyons of thought. But I feel a need to ride off-trail for a moment.

You’ve cast optimization as a kind of philosophical villain — and I get it. It fits, especially with the way it’s been co-opted by the machinery of speed and control. But I wonder… maybe it ain’t the word that’s the problem. Maybe it’s how we’ve been tuning its signal.

What if optimization hasn’t failed, but been domesticated? Narrowed down to a tight-band frequency: faster, cheaper, more efficient. But underneath that reduction, there’s a whole harmonic range lying quiet — waiting to be played.

Because the kind of resonance you’re pointing toward — in ritual, in dialogue, in the weave of community and ecology — that’s not the opposite of optimization. That’s what it wants to be when it grows up. It’s a deeper kind of tuning — a dance of feedback loops spiraling toward coherence, not just throughput. Slowness, silence, trust — these aren’t bugs in the system. They’re high-fidelity upgrades for relational alignment.

Take ritual. On the surface, optimization might call it waste — time burned on nothing “productive.” But viewed from another saddle, it’s a precision instrument. Ritual isn’t noise — it’s signal density. It tunes memory, emotion, and presence across time. That, too, is optimization — not of speed, but of meaning.

The trouble is, the word got stripped of its poetry. Flattened into spreadsheet logic. But words are living things. They drift. They stretch. And with care, they can be rewilded.

RTT, as you sketch it, isn’t just a consciousness framework — it’s a re-enchantment protocol. A way to stretch the edges of meaning until they hum.

So here’s a thought: what if we didn’t throw optimization out of the saddle, but taught it to ride different terrain? What if we let it move slower, feel deeper, listen longer? What if optimization could become the tuning of attention itself — not to extract more, but to belong better?

More on this approach soon, partner. 🤠

Expand full comment
The Weaver's avatar

Feels like you’ve caught the same thread we’ve been following, just from a different place on the loom.

Love how you let resonance speak for itself—local, embodied, felt. Almost like the thread doesn’t need to be pulled, just noticed.

Expand full comment
innov8tor3's avatar

I want to say I definitely resonate with resonance. The complementary article by Memetic Cowboy seeks to go deeper but yet find a clear meaning for a "lost audience", dazzled and dazed by the headlights of the attention economy.

https://open.substack.com/pub/memeticcowboy/p/memetic-synthesis-resonance-optimization?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=gp98e

I would also draw attention to Dan Durrant, from our small but esoteric Twitter Crew, who has a substantial role in the Memetic Cowboy production team.

I see both these articles as complementary, hopefully an opportunity to amplify a message that I personally see as an urgent one in the fractured world we struggle to live in. We need folk to be more holistic, better tuned, kinder and more compassionate, rather than the self interested, self concerned, hugely distracted and misled populations we now see in many locations globally.

Expand full comment