(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 each; 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 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 VCs.

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 human—at scale.

it is, despite everything, still possible to do your own user -- sorry, "the word user carries heavy connotations of addiction"¹ -- 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, I remind you, 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 signatories (who include such greatest hits of Conscious Computing as the former executive editor of Wired; The Guy Who Invented NFTs But You Gotta Believe Me They Were Cool When I Invented Them; and the "head of community" at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most wildly destructive entities ever to exist in the history of the world) are proud of it.

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.