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.
Tim O'Reilly, the tech publishing pioneer who's championed similar values for decades, signed on early. "I certainly subscribe to the principles," he told supporters.
The manifesto comes as Silicon Valley faces mounting criticism for everything from addictive social media algorithms to AI systems that could reshape society without democratic input. Meta, Google, and other giants have faced increasing regulatory pressure as lawmakers grapple with platforms that "routinely drain the depth and warmth from everything they touch," as the manifesto puts it.
But Komoroske and his co-authors aren't naive about their chances of reforming an industry worth trillions. "I am under no illusion that some manifesto will magically solve this at all," he admits. His own startup, Common Tools, remains in stealth mode but presumably will embody these resonant principles.
Instead, the real goal is energizing a new generation of builders who want to feel proud of their creations. "When they're building things, they might start taking these ideas into account," Masnick hopes. "And it becomes a tool for people within companies to push back on some of the incentives."
The manifesto includes a collaborative document where the broader tech community can contribute to the principles - think Martin Luther with a Google Workspace account, as one observer put it. This crowdsourced approach reflects the democratic ideals the authors want to see more of in tech development.
For Komoroske, the manifesto represents a personal journey back to why he got into tech in the first place. He recalls being told at Google that he'd "be a VP by now" if he just stopped thinking through the societal implications of his work. It's exactly that kind of willful blindness that the manifesto hopes to cure.
Whether a few thousand signatures can actually shift an industry built on exponential growth and network effects remains to be seen. But for technologists feeling isolated in companies that prioritize engagement metrics over human flourishing, the manifesto offers something increasingly rare in Silicon Valley: hope that things can be different.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto won't single-handedly fix Silicon Valley's ethical crisis, but it offers something the industry desperately needs: a roadmap back to building technology that serves humanity rather than exploiting it. Whether enough technologists will choose principle over promotion remains the trillion-dollar question.
