It’s time to save Silicon Valley from itself

Alex Komoroski has He has always been at odds with Big Tech’s dark side. Although he cut his teeth in product management Google and tapeHe was never comfortable with the increasing priority given to profits in industry over people. Once during his time at Google, he extolled the societal benefits of a project, but was met with, “Oh Alex, you’d be vice president right now if you stopped thinking about the implications of your actions.”

Since that incident in the 2000s, revenues and valuations in the technology space have skyrocketed, as has the benign disregard for users. “It’s disgusting to see the industry the way it currently is,” Komoroski says.

Now, he’s doing something about it. Today, Komoroski and a loose group of concerned technicians go free Resonant Computing Manifestoan exemplary set of principles that attempts to recenter Silicon Valley around the values ​​that were lost in the scramble to scale big and maximize shareholder value. Komoroski and his colleagues invite anyone who resonates with this jeremiad to sign it and spread those values ​​in the products they make. The statement is accompanied by a shared document on “Resonant Computing Theses” where the community itself can provide input on shared principles. (Think: Martin Luther having a Google Workspace account.)

“There are a lot of us who remember Silicon Valley, the world of innovation, where we felt good,” Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, one of the authors of the statement, said during WIRED’s big interview event on Thursday during a panel announcing the statement. “A lot of us have noticed that we don’t feel that way anymore.”

Komoroski followed up by saying that the statement is a response to cynicism, and that the values ​​contained in it are ideals that people in the valley want to follow, even if they don’t seem that way on the surface.

The idea for the statement emerged from an informal “think tank,” as Komoroski calls it, made up of technology experts interested in the state of Silicon Valley. They started a group chat, met in person every two weeks, rented an Airbnb in the woods about once a year and planned for the future.

“The second year we did this, we created AI, two weeks before ChatGPT came out,” Komoroski says. When he saw OpenAI’s chatbot shortly afterward, Komoroski said, “I said, ‘Oh my God, master’s degrees in law are going to be as important as the printing press, electricity, and the Internet.'” He was fascinated by technology, but he also realized then, and now, that LLMs could be incredibly disruptive, simply because they existed in the Internet’s “participation-maximizing machine.”

By 2025, it was clear to Komoroski and his group that Big Tech had strayed far from their early ideals. As Silicon Valley began to align itself more forcefully with political interests, an idea emerged within the group to set a different course, and an informal suggestion led to a process in which some in the group began drafting what became today’s statement. They chose the word “resonant” to describe their vision mainly because of its positive connotations. As the document explains, “It is the experience of confronting something that speaks to our deepest values.”