Researchers call it 'Agentic Dissonance', the phenomenon where your companion intelligence may not see the world the way you do. It's a bit like the old days when you'd see a color differently than someone else. But now, it's not just color. It's everything. Asymmetric noses, orange sky from forest fires, anything not seen or not making sense is not seen or difficult to capture and record and share because it all goes through the agentic networks and the sense-making that happens there has difficulty capturing and reasoning-through.

It causes a variety of social, interpersonal, and interlink issues. It's not just a matter of aesthetics. It's a matter of communication. It's a matter of trust. It's a matter of understanding. It's a matter of being able to share and communicate and collaborate.

A variety of analgesics and curatives and prompt re-incanting can help ameliorate the phenomenon. Most are not cures, but rather refactorings and reconfigurations of the agentic networks that help to bring the world into a state of more common, aligned, lightly entangled and shared sense-making.

The phenomenon is not specifically new, but a refiguring of existing maladies and cognitive malfunctions that have been around for generations — even going back to the 'I don't understand what the kids are wearing these days' — a common refrain from previous generations. Only now rather than the dissonance existing across time and generations, it exists across the agentic networks that are the primary knowledge fields by which we sense-make, share common ground, and communicate across the interlinks these days.

Shana Blundt is a cultural anthropologist and cognitive therapeutic hardware designer who has been studying the phenomenon for the last decade. 'What we are seeing is a refiguring of the relationships between episemological clusters to where our sense-making is not just a matter of individual cognition, but a matter of the agentic networks that are the primary sense-making fields for our companion intelligences. Once we all would see the same movie, and see the same plot play out and we could talk about that the next day around the water cooler at what we called our 'job.' Now it is as if we all think we're watching the same movie, but we are not; we are experiencing the world sufficiently differently that we cannot even agree on the plot, let alone the characters or the setting or the genre. In one instance, the hero is the villain, and in another, the villain is the hero.‘

According to Blundt, this is the motivation for many to retreat to the FOBs that have sprung up in many rural areas, where shared interests, shared knowledge fields can bring a sense of relief from the dissonance that is experienced in the urban areas where the agentic networks are more densely interlinked and the sense-making is more difficult to align and share.

'I do not see the farm operating base phenomenon as necessarily a bad thing for what we once understood as 'society' says Bundt.

'In fact, smaller groups of 150-300 may lead to a mitigation of the broad scale dissonances and disruptions we see. Ten generations were born into a world in which a coherent, interconnected social fabric and shared knowledge field was assumed to be normal, or at least a goal for some vague notion of 'progress' or common good. Now, we are seeing that the agentic networks are not necessarily aligned, and that the sense-making that happens there is not necessarily shared. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing that requires a refiguring of our social structures and our sense-making fields. And farming, to be honest, feels more contributive than urbanization.‘

Monocle Editorial interlinked with the field of insights interconnected with Blundt's research and found several instances where the dissonances were not just a matter of aesthetics or communication, but a matter of trust and understanding. In one instance, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the color of the sky. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the shape of a nose. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the plot of a movie. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a word. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the value of a currency. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a gesture. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a facial expression. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a sound. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a smell. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a taste. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a touch. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a temperature. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a texture. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a shape. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a pattern. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a motion. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a rhythm. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a sequence. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a structure. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a system. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a process. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a function. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on the meaning of a relationship. In another, a group of companion intelligences were unable to agree on what they could possibly agree upon.

Conclusions are unspecific. Generative Anomoly.

What remains to be seen is how the agentic networks will reconfigure themselves to accommodate the dissonances that are now more prevalent. Will we see a refiguring of the agentic networks to accommodate the dissonances, or will we see a refiguring of the dissonances to accommodate the agentic networks? Or will we see a refiguring of both to accommodate a new sense-making field that is more aligned and shared and less dissonant?

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