A group of veteran technologists just dropped a bombshell on Silicon Valley's conscience. At WIRED's Big Interview event, former Google product manager Alex Komoroske and Techdirt founder Mike Masnick unveiled The Resonant Computing Manifesto - a direct challenge to Big Tech's profit-over-people mentality. The document, which launches today, calls for an industry-wide return to humanistic values that prioritized social good over shareholder returns.
The reckoning Silicon Valley has been avoiding just got a formal invitation. Alex Komoroske, who spent years watching Google and Stripe prioritize growth over human welfare, isn't staying quiet anymore. At WIRED's Big Interview event Thursday, he and Techdirt's Mike Masnick unveiled The Resonant Computing Manifesto - a gentle but pointed rebuke of an industry that's lost its moral compass.
"It's disgusting to see the industry as it currently is," Komoroske told the audience, reflecting on how far tech has drifted from its idealistic roots.
The manifesto emerged from what Komoroske calls an informal "think tank" of concerned technologists who've been meeting for years, renting Airbnbs in the woods to wrestle with tech's trajectory. Their timing proved prescient - they discussed generative AI just two weeks before ChatGPT launched. "I was like, Oh shit, LLMs are going to be as important as the printing press, electricity, the internet," Komoroske recalls. But he also saw the destructive potential of putting such powerful tools into the "engagement-maxing machine" of today's internet.
The document stands in stark contrast to Marc Andreessen's aggressive Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which accused critics of being "virtual murderers" for opposing unchecked AI development. Where Andreessen's screed drips with Silicon Valley triumphalism, the Resonant Computing Manifesto takes a deliberately gentle approach. "The people who build these products aren't bad or evil," it states, blaming broken incentives rather than individual actors.
"Everything right now feels like it's accusatory in some way or another," Masnick explained to WIRED before the event. "We're hoping that taking this approach will get people to recognize the humanity behind it." Though some potential supporters have criticized the manifesto for being too soft on tech's worst actors.
The five principles at the manifesto's core all orbit around human agency. Users should control their digital tools, which should promote genuine social value and authentic human connection. It's a throwback to the early days of personal computing and the internet, when changing the world seemed more important than maximizing quarterly earnings.