It’s Time to Save Silicon Valley From Itself

Alex Komoroske has always been at odds with Big Tech’s darker side. Th

ough he cut his product-management teeth at Google and Stripe, he was never comfortable with the industry’s increasing prioritization of profits over people. Once

during his time at Google, he extolled the societal benefits of a project only to be met with, “Oh Alex, you'd be a VP by now if you just stopped thinking through the implications of your actions.” Since th

at 2010s episode, the revenues and valuations in tech have skyrocketed, as has the blithe disregard for users. “It’s di

sgusting to see the industry as it currently is,” Komoroske says. Now, he’s doin

g something about it. Today, Komoroske

and a loose group of concerned technologists are releasing The Resonant Computing Manifesto, an idealistic set of principles that attempts to recenter Silicon Valley around the values that have been lost in the scramble to hyperscale and maximize shareholder value. Komoroske and hi

s coauthors are inviting anyone who, um, resonates with this jeremiad to sign it and proselytize those values in the products they create. Accompanying the

manifesto is a shared doc of “the theses of resonant computing” where the community itself can provide input on shared principles. (Think: Martin Luthe

r with a Google Workspace account.) “There are a lot of