Alex Komoroske yes has always been at odds with the shadowy side of Massive Tech. Although he sharpened his product management skills at Google and Stripe, he was never comfortable with the industry prioritizing profits over people. Once, while working at Google, he was extolling the social benefits of a project, only to be met with the following words: “Oh, Alex, you’d be a vice president by now if you only stopped thinking about the consequences of your actions.”
Since that 2010 event, revenues and valuations in the tech industry have skyrocketed, as has the negligent disregard for users. “It’s disgusting to see the current industry,” Komoroske says.
Now he’s doing something about it. Today Komoroske and a loose group of interested technologists are releasing Resonance Calculation Manifestoan idealistic set of principles that seeks to rally Silicon Valley around the values lost in the pursuit of hyperscale and maximizing shareholder value. Komoroske and his co-authors invite anyone who, um, resonates with this jeremiad to sign it and promote these values in the products they create. The manifesto is accompanied by a joint document containing “resonant computing theses” where the community itself can provide input on common principles. (Think: Martin Luther with a Google Workspace account).
“Many of us remember Silicon Valley, a world of innovation where we felt comfortable,” Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, co-author of the manifesto, said at WIRED’s Massive Interview event Thursday during the manifesto’s launch panel. “Many of us have noticed that we no longer feel this feeling.”
Komoroske added that the manifesto is a response to cynicism and that the values it contains are ideals that people in the Valley want to strive for, even if it may not seem like it on the surface.
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 few weeks, and about once a year they rented an Airbnb in the woods and planned the game for the future.
“The second year we did this, we did generative AI – two weeks before ChatGPT came out,” Komoroske says. When he saw the OpenAI chatbot shortly thereafter, “I thought: Oh shit, LLMs are going to be as important as the printing press, electricity and the Internet,” Komoroske says. He was fascinated by the technology, but at the same time he understood then and now that LLMs can be incredibly disruptive simply because they are in the “engagement-maximizing machine” of the Internet.
By 2025, it was clear to Komoroske and his colleagues that Massive Tech had moved far from its early idealistic principles. As Silicon Valley became more closely aligned with political interests, the idea of charting a different course emerged within the group, and a chance suggestion led to a process through which some members of the group began drafting what became today’s manifesto. They chose the word “resonant” to describe their vision mainly because of its positive connotations. As the documentary explains: “It is the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deeper values.”