It’s Time to Save Silicon Valley From Itself
Alex Komoroske always been at odds with the darker side of Big Tech. Although he cut his product management teeth at Google and Stripe, he was never comfortable with the industry’s growing focus on profits over people. Once, while working at Google, he touted the societal benefits of a project, only to be told, “Oh Alex, you’d already be vice president if you stopped thinking about the implications of your actions.” »
Since that episode in the 2010s, the tech sector’s revenues and valuations have soared, as has the gleeful contempt for users. “It’s disgusting to see the industry the way it is now,” Komoroske says.
Now he’s doing something. Today, Komoroske and a group of concerned technologists are releasing The Resonant Computing Manifesto, a set of idealistic principles that attempt to refocus Silicon Valley around the values that have been lost in the race to hyperscale and maximizing shareholder value. Komoroske and his co-authors invite anyone who, uh, resonates with this jeremiad to sign it and proselytize these values in the products they create. The manifesto is accompanied by a shared document on the “theses of resonant computing” in which the community itself can contribute on shared principles. (Think: Martin Luther with a Google Workspace account.)
“Many of us remember a Silicon Valley, a world of innovation, where we felt good,” Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, co-author of the manifesto, said at WIRED’s Big Interview event Thursday during a panel announcing the manifesto. “Many of us have noticed that we no longer have that feeling.”
Komoroske went on to say that the manifesto is a response to cynicism and that the values contained in it are ideals that people in the Valley want to follow, even if it may not seem like that at first glance.
The idea for the manifesto came from an informal “think tank,” as Komoroske calls it, made up of technologists concerned about the state of Silicon Valley. They started a group chat, met in person every two weeks, and about once a year rented an Airbnb in the woods and planned for the future.
“The second year we did it, we did generative AI, two weeks before ChatGPT came out,” Komoroske says. When he saw OpenAI’s chatbot shortly after, “I thought, ‘Oh shit, LLMs are going to be as big as printing, electricity and the Internet,'” Komoroske says. He is fascinated by technology, but he also understood then and now that LLMs can be incredibly destructive, simply because they are part of the Internet’s “engagement maximizing machine.”
By 2025, it was clear to Komoroske and his acolytes that the tech giants had strayed from their idealistic first principles. As Silicon Valley began to become more aligned with political interests, the idea emerged within the group to chart a different course, and a chance suggestion led to a process in which some members of the group began drafting what became the current manifesto. They chose the word “resonant” to describe their vision primarily because of its positive connotations. As the document explains: “It is the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deepest values. »
