Resonance Against the Machine

We speak of social media as though it were a villain in its own right — the cause of our distraction, division, and decline. But maybe the problem isn’t the tool. Maybe it’s the environment in which we use it, and the values we’ve been taught to bring to it. We live in a culture that treats empathy as weakness and rewards cruelty with visibility. So when we see someone’s joy on a screen and feel a pang of discomfort, maybe it isn’t envy. Maybe it’s the ache of a system that told us our worth was measured in output, attention, and the approval of strangers.

That ache is coherence calling — the quiet recognition that you are not broken, but you are out of tune. That you’ve been turned into a cog inside a machine that doesn’t care if you protest, as long as you keep scrolling.

But here’s the thing: the same tools that distract us can also awaken us. Social media, for all its flaws, has been a tuning fork for connection. I remember when the Arab Spring spread across borders — not through governments, but through timelines. People in Cairo speaking directly to people in Chicago. Organizers in Tunisia finding resonance with strangers half a world away. It wasn’t chaos. It was pattern recognition, amplified in real time.

And that’s when those in power began to worry. The technology they once praised as “democratizing” suddenly became “dangerous.” Not because it was failing, but because it was working — because people had found a way to act together without permission.

So the strategy shifted. The platforms filled with noise, misinformation, and algorithmic walls designed to keep us in smaller, more manageable circles. Misinformation has always existed, but now it had a delivery system with the speed and precision of code.

Now we’re told again to step back. To be silent. To treat the tools themselves as untrustworthy — as if abandoning them will keep us safe. But silence isn’t safety. Silence is simply another signal in the system, one that says, this voice will not resist.

Coherence is not compliance. It doesn’t require that we all speak the same words. It asks that we each bring our voice into alignment with what is true, so that the whole can hold many notes without losing harmony. Sometimes that harmony is quiet; sometimes it is raw and dissonant, but it always matters that each note is there.

So the question becomes — where are you? Watching from the edges while the loudest voices bend the pattern toward fear and control? Or willing to join the sound, even if your voice shakes?

Someone is listening for your note so they can find their own. And when enough of us add ours, the song will change. Not because it drowns out the machine, but because it becomes something the machine cannot play.

Speak. Even softly. Even unsure. The resonance will find you.