the resonant computing manifesto
(if you haven't seen it, count yourself lucky.)
The people who build these products aren't bad or evil. Most of us got into tech with an earnest desire to leave the world better than we found it.
background: the resonant computing manifesto counts among its drafters at least three xooglers with at least a decade of tenure each1; three venture capitalists, one of whom is a general partner at a firm on Sand Hill Road; two employees of github's "let's replace programmers with an LLM" skunkworks; a guy who sold two AI startups and worked for the first Trump administration's Defense Department drafting its AI policy; an employee at one of the Revolutionary AI Art Startups that lost the race for mindshare a couple years ago; and the CEO of techdirt-cum-board member of Bluesky PBLLC, the "decentralized" social media startup funded by Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and crypto VCs2.
many of them are independently wealthy from building past iterations of the Torment Nexus, don't have to work another day in their life, and are waving off their former (and current) colleagues before they do something that shoulders them with an irrevocable burden of cognitive dissonance about whether their comfortable house was purchased with blood money.
With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise. It could just as easily pour gasoline on existing problems. If we continue to sleepwalk down the path of hyper-scale and centralization, future generations are sure to inherit a world far more dystopian than our own. [...] This is where AI provides a missing puzzle piece. Software can now respond fluidly to the context and particularity of each humanāat scale.
it is, despite everything, still possible to do your own user -- sorry, "the word user carries heavy connotations of addiction"3 -- person research and manually build a piece of software that provides the person with clean, responsive, well-marked buttons to do a cross-section of tasks that are important to them, instead of using a 42U rack full of graphics cards and a petabyte-scale archive of the collected written works of all of humanity to determine whether the person wants to put an appointment on their calendar with 70% accuracy.
there's just no money in it, and that's why the demand is for a decentralized AI future, one which will be monetized through decentralized AI apps, which will definitely not be built by the engineers who drafted this manifesto, underwritten by the venture capitalists who drafted this manifesto (who are not in the business of giving away money for free), and eventually "exit" into a form that funnels money upward to the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley in a decentralized fashion.
this manifesto demands little, will deliver even less, and I hope the people who contributed are proud of it. the signatories include such luminaries of Conscious Computing™ as -- choosing three at random -- the virulently transphobic CEO of Automattic and Tumblr who has spent the past six months bolstering his reputation as the inventor of Wordpress by trying to destroy one of his largest customers; the "head of community" at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most flagrantly destructive entities ever to exist in the history of the world, which provided startup funding for Facebook, OpenAI, xAI, and a hundred other AI companies which are fighting over their place in the landscape of enclosing and monetizing the sum total of human creativity; and The Guy Who Invented NFTs But You Gotta Believe Me They Were Cool When I Invented Them, who is just kind of tacky.
if you'll excuse me I have to get some sleep; I have to work tomorrow, my manifesto barely paid my rent for five years and cost me nine months of job searching without unemployment insurance.
one of them now runs the Center for Humane Technology, which was founded by another high-ranking xoogler between 2013 and 2018 amid the first wave of Skinner boxification of technology, and now gets dripfed about $4 million a year by a bunch of civil society organizations and family foundations to be influencers. their "Impact" section on Wikipedia implies that their impact is mostly that Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook according to their teachings since 2018 (until he got way into Rome, I guess), they have a podcast, they appeared on a Netflix documentary once, and they gave a SXSW talk.↩
which, I am obligated to remind everyone at every opportunity, started out being a sad, irrelevant by-invitation-only platform developed by a bunch of Jack Dorsey's cryptocurrency engineers for an audience of cryptocurrency dorks until one of them screwed up the invite system and let the punks in; the punks overran a dead mall and made it look countercultural; and VC money, the site staff, and the center-left political class desperate to find a new place where they can reclaim the vibes of Hamilton Twitter since they realized Elon was a fascist (mid-2024) have been trying to kick the punks back off of this ādecentralizedā platform ever since.↩
the drafters, in a poorly-considered attempt to (I'm sure they would tell themselves) avoid stigmatizing people with substance abuse disorders, decided to edit the word "user" out of the descriptions of the AI systems they wanted to build, ignoring the fact that their manifesto describes a world they want to build -- and thus, the fundamental goal they achieved by doing this was to avoid an unflattering association of their ideal world with the stigma of substance abuse, which still rings clear as a bell in their heads.↩