It's Time to Save Silicon Valley From Itself

Alex Komoroske has ever been astatine likelihood with Big Tech’s darker side. Though helium chopped his product-management teeth astatine Google and Stripe, helium was ne'er comfy with the industry’s expanding prioritization of profits implicit people. Once during his clip astatine Google, helium extolled the societal benefits of a task lone to beryllium met with, “Oh Alex, you'd beryllium a VP by present if you conscionable stopped reasoning done the implications of your actions.”

Since that 2010s episode, the revenues and valuations successful tech person skyrocketed, arsenic has the blithe disregard for users. “It’s disgusting to spot the manufacture arsenic it presently is,” Komoroske says.

Now, he’s doing thing astir it. Today, Komoroske and a escaped radical of acrophobic technologists are releasing The Resonant Computing Manifesto, an idealistic acceptable of principles that attempts to recenter Silicon Valley astir the values that person been mislaid successful the scramble to hyperscale and maximize shareholder value. Komoroske and his coauthors are inviting anyone who, um, resonates with this jeremiad to motion it and proselytize those values successful the products they create. Accompanying the manifesto is simply a shared doc of “the theses of resonant computing” wherever the assemblage itself tin supply input connected shared principles. (Think: Martin Luther with a Google Workspace account.)

“There are a batch of america who retrieve a Silicon Valley, a satellite of innovation, wherever we felt good,” Techdirt laminitis Mike Masnick, a coauthor of the manifesto, said during WIRED’s Big Interview lawsuit connected Thursday during a sheet announcing the manifesto. “A batch of america person noticed that we don’t get that feeling anymore.”

Komoroske followed that up by saying that the manifesto is simply a effect to cynicism, and that the values successful it are ideals radical successful the Valley privation to follow, adjacent if it whitethorn not look truthful connected the surface.

The thought for the manifesto emerged from an informal “think tank,” arsenic Komoroske calls it, of technologists acrophobic astir the authorities of Silicon Valley. They started a radical chat, met successful idiosyncratic each mates of weeks, and astir erstwhile a twelvemonth would rent an Airbnb successful the woods and game-plan the future.

“The 2nd twelvemonth we did it, we did generative AI—two weeks earlier ChatGPT came out,” says Komoroske. When helium saw OpenAI’s chatbot soon afterwards, “I was like, Oh shit, LLMs are going to beryllium arsenic important arsenic the printing press, electricity, the internet,” Komoroske says. He’s fascinated by the technology, but besides understood then, and now, that LLMs could beryllium incredibly destructive, simply due to the fact that they’re successful the “engagement-maxing machine” of the internet.

By 2025, it was wide to Komoroske and his cohort that Big Tech had strayed acold from its aboriginal idealistic principles. As Silicon Valley began to align itself much powerfully with governmental interests, the thought emerged wrong the radical to laic retired a antithetic course, and a casual proposition led to a process wherever immoderate successful the radical began drafting what became today’s manifesto. They chose the connection “resonant” to picture their imaginativeness chiefly due to the fact that of its affirmative connotations. As the papers explains, “It’s the acquisition of encountering thing that speaks to our deeper values.”