Human cultures have always used resonance to coordinate minds. Chant, music, ritual, shared calendars, repeated stories—these are ancient technologies of synchronization. They align attention and emotion across groups. But what’s often missed is that these resonant practices were embedded in thick friction.
Ritual took time. It required presence. It demanded repetition through effort rather than automation. Pilgrimage, fasting, chanting, liturgy—all of these constrained resonance by cost. You could not synchronize instantly, everywhere, without consequence. Friction acted as a regulator. It slowed coordination enough for meaning to remain distributed rather than collapsing into a single dominant signal.
In biological systems, this kind of constraint is not a bug. It’s essential. The brain relies on inhibition, refractory periods, and attentional bottlenecks to prevent runaway synchronization. Without them, neural activity doesn’t become clearer—it becomes pathological. Seizures are not failures of activity, but failures of restraint.
The same logic applies to communication.
Modern media systems have done something historically unprecedented: they have decoupled resonance from friction. We now have repetition without effort, synchronization without proximity, outrage without embodiment, and amplification without delay. Algorithms are designed to remove resistance at every step—minimizing time, cost, and reflection—while maximizing emotional engagement.
The result is high resonance at low cost. And that combination is unstable.
When friction collapses, communication stops functioning as meaning-transfer and becomes entrainment. Messages no longer persuade or inform; they synchronize. They pull large numbers of minds into the same emotional and interpretive phase. Once this happens, disagreement feels not merely wrong but incoherent. Facts don’t fail because they’re false, but because they arrive misaligned with the field.
Friction as I use it here is best understood as slowness, difficulty, scarcity, boundaries of space and time, and accountability to others—conditions which forced individuals and institutions to adapt, reflect, and commit.
This is where the singularity of meaning reappears. In low-friction environments, meaning collapses toward whatever signal has the highest gain. Everything else is treated as noise. The system doesn’t become pluralistic or enlightened; it becomes brittle. Language flattens. Motives are simplified. Moral complexity is experienced as threat.
What’s crucial here is that this is not primarily a failure of individuals. It’s a failure of field design. When the background conditions reward speed over reflection and synchronization over resistance, even good-faith communication degrades. The problem isn’t that people are irrational; it’s that the system is optimized against friction.
This reframes a common mistake. Calls to “improve discourse” by adding more information miss the point. Information is not what’s lacking. Constraint is. Friction is not censorship or inefficiency—it is the condition that makes meaning possible. Without resistance, signals synchronize too easily, and shared understanding collapses into noise disguised as unity.
Ancient cultures knew this intuitively. That’s why silence mattered. That’s why ritual was slow. That’s why resonance was bounded. We have inherited the resonance and discarded the friction.
If meaning is to survive at scale, friction cannot be treated as an obstacle to overcome. It must be treated as a moral and cognitive necessity—the spacing that prevents the singularity from swallowing everything at once.
