A World Without Wonder?
Control, Resonance, and the Illusion of the Quantified World
Control, Resonance, and the Illusion of the Quantified World
In Southern Arizona, where I’m based, the climate is changing at a rate outside historical norms. It’s something we share with communities all over the globe. Taking lunch on the patio in mid-February, a light wind brushes 80-degree heat against my skin; “This is lovely,” I think, followed by a long exhale tinged with a not-so-subtle tenor of terror. Are we still in control here? This growing background anxiety, pressing in tighter every year, makes me want to escape. So, we — the family and I — took the 30-mile trip to a cabin 8,000 feet up, surrounded by snow and wildlife, where I had time to think in the cool mountain air.
The idea of uncontrollability — a word often seen negatively in Western culture — has a fascinating dimension. In German, there is a word, Unverfügbarkeit, which does not have a one-to-one translation to English. It is the title of a book by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa I read on this this family trip. Rosa writes in the English translation of “Unverfügbarkeit’’ that over the last few decades he has used the english words — elusiveness, unavailability, unpredictability, after a talk at the London School of Economics, it was suggested he use non-engineerability — which seems very German like. But none of those seemed just right until he finally he settled on the english word uncontrollability. However, Rosa doesn’t use this word in the negative way most of us steeped in a Western mindset might understand it.
Around the 14th-15th centuries, a subtle change took place in Western culture. Slowly at first, then all at once, we embarked on a new project of explication. This project was fundamentally tied to a growing logic of control. Previously the background milieu through which pre-modern cultures existed was taken for granted, as in, it did not need to be explicitly stated. The world of narratives, myths, theology, traditions, a cosmic order — it simply existed, and one’s place within it was taken as a given. Inherent in this order, was the idea of order! There was no unpredictability per say, and because of that, no reason to explicitly question why things were the way they are.
Of course you, a modern subject reading this right now, would likely look at that world and think how archaic, primitive, and restrictive. And this makes sense given that you are a product of several hundreds of years of ‘Enlightened’ discourse which fundamentally changed the epistemological and ontological makeup of our world. To be modern, is to see this pre-modern world of myths, theology, and cryptic traditions as essentially incoherent. Yet, the very notion of incoherence implies its opposite. Today, we exist in an age of predictability, undergirded by the rational scientific method and a drive to make the once unquestioned background explicit.
But as I have mentioned in other recent essays, I liken this explication process to the poking of a hole, from the inside, of a snow globe. The in-rushing and out-rushing of what was once a static, taken-for-granted background means we moderns must constantly explicate ever more efficiently, effectively, and technically. This in-rushing and out-rushing set society off like a spinning top, where its balance can only be maintained through the dynamic stabilization of our culture through constant change.
Crucially, this dynamically-stabilizing ontology, which Rosa highlights in an earlier book ‘Social Acceleration’ requires that we always accelerate across three principal modes of acceleration: (1) technological acceleration, which pertains to the rapid advancements in the means of production and communication; (2) acceleration of social change, encompassing the rapid transformation of institutional structures, laws, and societal norms; and the (3) acceleration of the pace of life, underscores the intensified demand on individuals to increase the quantity of activities and experiences within shrinking units of time. Failure to do so and we will topple over. This is the cost of an age of explication.
When I was walking on this trail 8,000 feet above a balmy February-Tucson, I had this thought that AI is intimately tied to this logic of explication and social acceleration. AI, in all its varied forms, represents not just another tool in this grand project of explication, but a qualitative change in the nature of this centuries long project. I wrote a piece a month ago about the emerging field of Planetary Sapience, the idea that planetary-scale computation is deeply integrated into, not separate from, the ecological logic of our world. We have entered an age where the Earth and human technology meld to create a sensing, calculating, datified object. We are transitioning into a phase where the comprehensive explication, and complete control of our lifeworld is not just imminent but manifesting.
Exciting? Terrifying? Logical?
All of the above?
Rosa outlines four dimensions of controllability: (1) Visible — making things known, figuring out what’s out there; (2) Accessible or Reachable — like learning to ride a bike or building a rocket, where each achievement expands our reach; (3) Manageable — bringing the world under control through technological innovations; (4) Useful — where we instrumentalize the world to serve purposes beyond our immediate needs. Think of a politician promising better jobs, affordable housing, or a fat pension — they’re selling themselves as “useful” to fulfill your desires.
But there is a paradoxical darker side to this ontological orientation. This disposition — remember this is a modern disposition, specifically a Western disposition that was constructed in the 14th-15th centuries — places us, you and me, and all those people around you, into an active points of aggression towards the world. We are, as Rosa puts it:
‘Structurally compelled (from without ) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things — segments of word — within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliable controllable.’
And crucially, the cost of this ontology is an ever-diminishing capacity for resonance with our world.
It’s this kind of wonderful weirdness — Brad Mehldau
Back in Tucson, I was eating lunch and I opened up YouTube to watch an interview with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau. In this discussion, around the 25 minute mark, they talk about a Beatles song ‘I Am the Walrus’
Rick Beato: …also when he plays the melody, he goes from F-Major to B-Major and he’s doing the sharp four to the third …That tritone movement is so odd…but it’s so natural. I always think to myself, ‘How do you come up with this stuff?!’ You start the song, B-A-G-F-E, and then D, and then the verse starts saying A, it’s like ‘What?!’
Brad Mehldau: Yeah, to me it’s why the Beatles…to talk about just art, more general, it’s this kind of wonderful weirdness. There’s a weirdness that makes it unusual, but that’s actually what makes it timeless is that it’s unusual and then that weirdness mixes with the thing that then we come to know it as familiar. It’s kind of weird and home base at the same time…
The exchange between Mehldau and Beato reveals the paradox at the heart of resonance. According to Rosa, things that are completely controlled lose their ability to resonate with us — to spark surprise, wonder, or a deeper emotional connection. They lose their resonant quality, and therefore resonance implies “semicontrollability” — a balance between control and its lack. In a way, “It’s kind of weird and home base at the same time.”
In this exchange we see the entirety of modernity and its inherent contradictions. Tonality, is a system of rational control, that emerged at the same time as the rise of early modernity. The logics of modernity — the Enlightenment and the rationalization of our life world, paralleled the switch from modal music to tonality. This parallel movement is laid out by the musicologist Susan McClary across multiple books¹²³. The problem is, the logics of tonality seek to contain the ineffable ‘wonderful weirdness’ of the human spirit, that spark of resonance — a tension at the heart of what makes us feel truly alive.
The reason Rick Beato points out that all the chords in the song ‘I am The Walrus’ are major, and that the progression the song takes, along with the melody is “is so odd,” is because it breaks all the ‘rules’ of tonality. Yet! And I must emphasize again — YET! — Rick Beato immediately follows this ‘so odd’ comment with “but it’s so natural!”
The space between the logic of explication and the embodied human process of sitting at a keyboard, in a historical contextual point of engagement with an instrument adaptively transforming that moment into an object — a song, in this case — that speaks with us, and calls to us, across a vast temporal expanse. That kind of magic can only manifest in a world of semicontrollability.
Rick Beato and Brad Mehldau feel as if the song speaks to them, conveying a relationship, a matter of concern, and a sense of unfolding mystery. This transformative connection is sparked and maintained because they don’t fully understand (control) it. There is a productive tension in which this vibrating resonant wire is maintained, a tension that requires accepting a degree of unpredictability.
But this unpredictability, is the enemy of modernity. There is a big difference between a relational ontology in which our relationship to the world is based on what Rosa calls a ‘dynamic openness between subject and world,’ and one obsessed with control and the elimination of uncertainty, which is often labeled as risk. This paradox — the desire for control versus the acceptance of the unknown — is sharply reflected in the global derivatives market, a realm driven by the ambition to fully explain and eliminate contingency.
The design of a derivative contract thus has no necessity; for it arbitrarily pairs and temporally brackets two arbitrarily selected aspects of capital to create a relationship. The derivative thus has no intrinsic value other than as an instrument that interconnects with parallax derivatives to generate a globally fluid market for capital, as a (re)source for collateralizing parallel wagers and thus for amplifying leverage, and as an instrument whose forecast of the future helps create the future it forecasts. — Edward LiPuma
Derivatives play an increasingly pervasive role in our lives and across the global social world, influencing even the most remote places on Earth. This vast market, with a staggering $715 trillion in outstanding contracts (BIS, 2023), has its roots in the 16th century around modern-day Netherlands (link to PDF). If you have been following my thread from above of the Age of Explication, the fact that derivatives emerged right then, along with modern tonality, and the age of reason, is not an accident!
In 1973, the derivatives market was further transformed with the establishment of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the Black-Scholes pricing model. This evolution mirrored a broader intellectual shift in Western countries emphasizing quantification and systematic analysis. It perfectly aligned with the rise of neoliberal ideology — a market-driven philosophy that views social and economic life through the lens of competition and efficiency. Proponents framed these financial innovations as logical extensions of the market’s “invisible hand.” Yet this “invisible hand” also acted as a moral arbiter: the market itself became “value-neutral,” “natural,” and the ultimate decider of who deserves wealth — as if spreadsheets reflect some unquestioned divine order.
But at the center of this technology is the idea of control, of bounding the future into a ‘spread’ of potential realities, rather than an unknowable vista. Edward LiPuma in “The Social Life of Financial Derivatives” introduces the the concept of ‘the spread’ as a crucial analytical tool, arguing for an ontological shift in our understanding of what is actually happening in these contracts. LiPuma argues financial derivatives are not simply hedges to offset risks but are instruments that inhere in them the relational dynamics our social system and our modern logos of control. They are in aggregate a socio-economic barometer which directly contradicts the notions of value and price that characterized classical economic thought.
While LiPuma exposes how derivatives embody social systems of control, Hartmut Rosa’s concept of ‘resonance’ highlights the cost of this pursuit: a deep, transformative connection with the world becomes impossible when we seek to manipulate and predict every outcome.
For Rosa the distinction between ‘reachability’ and ‘controllability’ is paramount. Rosa posits that resonance — deeply meaningful and transformative engagement with the world — is only possible when we have access to experiences or entities (such as engaging with texts like a remarkable book or appreciating music) that are, crucially, not fully controllable. Rosa breaks down reachability into three layers: (1) the possibility to make contact, (2) the capacity for self-efficacy in reaching this contact, and (3) a degree of responsiveness in the interplay between the self and the world, where each seems to interact expressively and meaningfully, even if the full significance of this interaction remains elusive.
However, attempts to direct or optimize such interactions towards a predetermined outcome — like through spreads in derivative contracts — mute, if not fully eliminate the potential for resonance. It is the uncontrollable nature of resonance that necessitates surrendering some degree of control, both in what we encounter and in our engagements with it. Resonance thrives on trust in our ability to reach out and establish a responsive rapport without commanding the interaction.
“Thought is the enemy of flow” — Vinnie Colaiuta
Further on in that discussion between Mehldau and Beato, the concept of flow is discussed. Being ‘in the moment,’ completely embedded within the now, something derivatives undo by attempting to pull the future into a controllable now, and something that the logics of quantification seek to completely contain, to explicate, to render lifeless.
As Mehldau explains in the video (36:50), there is an intellectual process central to activating the flow state. This necessitates a specific state of self-efficacy: being able to respond to the contingent moment, feeling both called and capable of responding to that call. Developing this self-efficacy requires both physical and intellectual labor with the medium through which you engage in dialogue. It requires engaging productively with the world.
It is this physical and intellectual labor the opens the space, increases the spread of potential resonances with the world — a spreading out, rather than an instrument to contain the spread of potentially uncontrollable resonances. It is not instrumental, it is spiritual.
As I close this essay sitting in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, a hard rain falls on our adobe roof. A sense of the uncontrollable seeps in — what are we losing in our drive to replace the vibrant unknown, those ineffable, unquantifiable essences, with an artificially fully quantifiable planet? What are we left with when our potential futures collapse into a singular homogenized present, where the only remaining fluidity lies in a commodified, datafied flat screen?
Between this pitter patter of unseasonable raindrops I feel the cries of a society for authentic resonances. We seek this primal desire to experience self-efficacy, to be called and to respond. Yet, this intense simmering desire is misdirected towards objects and commodities — cruises, luxury spa weekends, the perfect Instagrammable moment — which leaves us feeling empty and craving more.
As Mehldau stressed in his talk about flow ‘you can’t will it’ you can’t buy it! Like that moment when you watch a great athlete perform a seemining improbable feat where the entire team all appear to be moving in sync, connected on some other level, pushing right against the boundary of controllability and effortless mastery. The football arcs through the air and connects with the fingertips of an outstretched hand — seemingly effortlessly — as the athlete falls across the goal line, ball tucked against their side. It is like magic, it is the ineffable, the unquantifiable, the space in which we resonate.e.
It's so odd…but it’s so natural…how do you come up with this stuff?!
I don’t know, and that’s what beautiful about it.