Built things must be hollow.
Living things can be resonant.
The only way to make something not hollow is to design for emergence.
That's the only way to get space-filling in linear time.
Construction takes linear time for linear benefit.
With construction, you gain control, but you lose leverage.
AI breaks this analysis a bit.
It's now possible to fill in fractal details with AI automatically.
That allows overstuffed content that feels superficially alive, but the closer you look the less compelling it becomes.
That's why slop is received worse than clearly-artificial content; it first lulls us into assuming it's resonant, and only upon closer inspection do we realize it was dishonest.
The uncanny valley.