Seriously, I like these ideas a lot. But/and also, the GNU Manifesto strikes me as ultimately "extremely similar but perhaps clearer," with the added bonus of having arguable "real life teeth," given that it was the inspiration for the GPL.
Cue somewhat understandable, yet still perhaps annoying, discussions of "Stallman the person."
Stallman has always been right. Took me many years to understand just how far he saw into the future. It's mind boggling just how right he was about everything.
The current status quo is corporations and governments are locking the hardware down, rendering free software irrelevant. Sure, you can hack your computer, but if you do it fails remote attestation and is marked as untrustworthy by other computers on the internet. "Tampered with" your machine? Can't access bank account, can't message others, can't stream content, can't even play video games, maybe one day we won't even be able to connect to an ISP. Hackers in control of their systems are marginalized, ostracized second class citizens now. Only corporate and government owned devices can participate in the wider ecosystem now. If you own your machine you're banned from everything.
And it's only going to get worse. Stallman is losing this war. Computing freedom is being destroyed and there's little that can be done about it. We do not have the power. Our values are irrelevant to the wider population. It's a damn shame.
> Our values are irrelevant to the wider population.
This is the saddest part. Things are getting worse for everyone and most people just don't care. They are either ignorant or accept it as inevitable.
I see 2 issues:
1) People don't have real power. There's too many steps between an issue you care about and a solution which requires changing laws. I don't see a solution other than people voting on laws directly and possibly votes weighted by how much they actually know about the stuff. How to implement it at reasonable cost is a very difficult question.
2) You can't make people care. People only start caring once they personally get hurt. Theoretical downsides don't interest most of the population. Freedom of speech is something they've learned at school about and they know they are supposed to cheer for it but when a platform requires spelling fuck as f*ck, that's OK with them - it might be the canary in the coal mine before more sophisticated censorship (analysis of sentiment/meaning, shadow bans) is rolled out but that's a theoretical concern, if they are able to comprehend it at all. And even when they get hurt, they often don't learn from it. I've seen plenty of people lose accounts on various platforms but all they do is switch to another proprietary platform, without looking for real alternatives.
unless the general population somehow freaks into privacy and anonymity and independency, it seems slowly losing (i don't hold my breath, seen enough "freebies" that later turn into highly-paid and noone bothering). Or said in another way, it seems like.. irrelevant?
But you never know. May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe". Or whatever. When things get hot..
> May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe".
I've been posting this idea for a while. We need a way to manufacture free computers at home, just like we can write free software at home. That's the only way we'll have a chance at winning the war on general purpose computing. Semiconductor fabs cost billions of dollars, they are single points of failure, easily controlled by governments and industry interests. We'll never be free as long as we depend on them for our machines.
If this continues, one day we'll not even be able to buy general purpose computers anymore. Computers are too subversive, too powerful for "mere citizens" to have access to. Give people free computers and they can make a mockery of things like copyright, they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy. Give people free computers and they have access to encryption which is capable of defeating police, judges, spies, militaries. They don't want us having unrestricted access to this powerful stuff. This is similar to the right to bear arms in the USA.
Normal people? They'll surrender all their power and freedom no questions asked. They'll give it all up with literally zero resistance. Corporations tell them they need to own their computers. They need it to stop malware, to stop cheating in video games, whatever. And they believe it. They believe it so much when you try to make a stand for freedom they come and they argue with you about it. They trade freedom for security and convenience every single time. It's so sad.
One sort of "big-picture" idea that I've seen that I think is generally useful is kind of like this: For a VERY long time, Linux was kind of a joke for most.
But I realized that, it being 1% of desktops was still VITALLY IMPORTANT, even when it was never huge -- it provided enough "background pressure" for mainstream things to not screw up overly badly.
I see e.g. "homelabs" and "self-hosting" as doing that right now. And, again, given that Linux won :) -- we will see.
Not only did it provide that background pressure, but desktop software is a complex domain. So it often pushes the bounds of Linux software overall. Systemd is the example I have in mind here, but I’m sure there are others too that I’m not thinking of.
YUP. Old timer here. I remember like having e.g. my Apple II, and somewhat later Stallman saying, e.g. "they're going to be able to reach into your device and burn your ebooks."
And I distinctly remember thinking how absolutely out of his mind PARANOID this man was. Because, you know, books and all are just files. And in what possible universe could you and would you build in the possibility of some other remote person having the ability to hack into the device that's IN YOUR HANDS and do something crazy like that?
By focusing strictly on software, we can argue that Stallman mostly won, and I think the mistake would be conflating software freedom with freedom freedom.
Freedom freedom will ALWAYS be hard, no matter what. People who want to take it away will use whatever tools are there to do it. Stallman et al saw that it was special to put guardrails around the very specific notion of "we have general purpose machines that can run any software, the ability to run ANY software must be protected."
And that, today, is overwhelmingly more true than false. You, or groups, can get a computer, hook it to the internet, and run whatever you want. Like "Linux," that doesn't GUARANTEE perfection, but it's an essential step.
AKA, I shudder to think what would have happened if Microsoft had developed AI in house.
It's a lovely idea, but so far all software personalization I can think of (in the sense of software adapting to the individual, rather than the individual adapting their software à la malleable software) has been weaponized against the user rather than used to support them. Occasional attempts in the other direction like adaptive user interfaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface) tend to fail because they break habit formation (c.f. Raskin)
I think you shouldn’t optimize for metrics and behavior without understanding all that you can empathetically about the user, to know when you are causing more harm than good.
This is why Atlassian’s dogfooding approach has consistently been practical.
Right, I definitely think collecting user telemetry as source data for features is helpful, though users can be understandably wary about it. I just haven't seen any beneficial examples of _automatically_ acting on that data per user.
My understanding was that Christopher Alexander called the quality without a name "wholeness" later in their life. Does it mean a different thing than the "resonance" in this article?
Something has to change from the advertising centric, attention hijacking drain that current technology is circling. I agree with one of the other posts here that some examples of software that adhere to these principles would be a welcome addition. I think that list would include a lot of open source software and not a lot of social media software.
Our tools are an extension of us as humans. When someone else is in control of those tools, it is alienating.
Modern software is built to make us not masters of our own tools. Like your hand sometimes works for a corporation against your will. I guess that same pattern is also called a job. But the worst kind of job. The one you do without choice.
A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods. That's software with the user's choice at the center and independent work that connects us to eachother by being in genuine service to one another.
I think this manifesto is getting to this idea but from a different angle.
It's the extractive rent seeking monopoly playbook that seeks to undermine it. Only in captive, monopolized markets are companies able to force the use of tools we don't control.
> A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods.
People should own the product of their work and owning companies should be illegal.
Every good product starts as somebody's weekend project or and experiment with a buddy in the garage. Then they start getting users and making money. And then they sell it and the new owner ruins is.
Molecules form cells, cells form humans, humans form organizations. Slavery is illegal, yet it's legal to own a group of humans, replace parts against the group's will and order the group to do something against their will. Owning companies is just an abstraction built to replace slavery with enough indirection that people don't object.
This seems a tad ambiguous and fails to touch upon some key issues. What does it mean for software to "respond fluidly". What does "technology that adapts itself" mean?. This manifesto paints a negative picture of the current "software environment" or "technological landscape", clearly with social media in mind, but then attempts to solve the situation with "ai will solve it bro, dont worry about it, just as long as theres rainbows and we all care for each other maaaan" :)
Yeah, that's roughly my take as well. The AI bit is especially jarring, given the supposed goal of being "resonant", when in fact AI is the most powerful force right now towards making things that are functional without being resonant. As in, things that work superficially but just feel... off. (And upon closer inspection, they don't quite work as fully as you'd thought.)
Like, AI is certainly powerful and can do a lot, but this "resonance" is its weakness, not its strength.
The author's context of technology seems to be limited to the idea of software and screens.
Let's take a wider view. A pencil is a technology to someone from the 1500s.
A watch is a technology to someone from the 1700s.
The network (web) has already integrated into our lives. The screen is the point of distraction and there are many people actively finding ways to move away from that.
When I look at the proposed principles, I don't see how that makes computing any more "resonant".
Computing will continue to meld into our lives and will continue to be more and more basic. Children today don't think about "going online" like those of us around the birth of the internet did. Those born today won't think twice about an AI assistant that is ever present.
I feel like the goals of this manifesto may be orthogonal to their stated aims. Or maybe I completely miss the point.
I like the idea, but as others have said, I don't see any meat behind it. Is just words on a page, a concept at best and no vision or direction on how to get there. I signed because Im interested in supporting people and places to be more humanistic, but yeah I need to know who you are and what your history is before I sign on to anything. The world is full of two faced well-meaning / hostile to free societies right now. And if you really want to make difference in this department, in this climate, transparency is your friend.
I think manifestos are useless without a concrete, real-world example for people to follow and add on to. It's easy to wish for puppies and rainbows, but trying to deliver is hard.
For example, Linear has a useful manifesto (https://linear.app/method) because they have a product that attempts to follows it. I have much more respect for a manifesto that is informed by contact with reality.
I agree, but I always assume manifestos are distillations from experience.
Is it that you want to be able to inspect the experience that informs it side-by-side, in case-studies or product or something?
I take it for granted that you're not sceptical of the authors experience, because lord knows there's some experience behind the contributors and signatories :)
Maggie Appleton
Samuel Arbesman
Daniel Barcay
Rob Hardy
Aishwarya Khanduja
Alex Komoroske
Geoffrey Litt
Michael Masnick
Brendan McCord
Bernhard Seefeld
Ivan Vendrov
Amelia Wattenberger
Zoe Weinberg
Simon Willison
I'm used to manifestos being a call to action or, at least, an explanation of intentions. But if the signers are intent on changing the world, I don't have a concrete view of what world they plan on creating.
"people must serve as primary stewards of their own context": What does this mean? People must be able to change the system prompt whenever they want? Or does "their own context" just mean "their own prompt" but not the system prompt? Does this mean everyone needs to run a local model?
"You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.": Any transaction has conflicting interests. I want to pay as little as possible for software, but I want my salary as a software engineer to be as high as possible. How are they planning on eliminating that conflict?
"No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit.": What do they mean by a "digital space"? Do they mean the Internet? If so, then this is already true: no single entity controls the internet. Do they mean any web app that I might use? If I put up a personal blog can I be the only one who controls it? What if my blog gets really popular?
"Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it." Also, it should take 0 time to manage, solve any problem I might have, and be absolutely free.
"Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off." This was literally the original dream of the internet. We thought a global network that connected everyone would lead to peace and prosperity. We all agree that it hasn't. No one has any idea how to achieve this other than banning it.
I'm sure we can come up with answers to each one of these questions. But my point is that the manifesto doesn't tell us. We don't know what they have in mind, which makes me suspicious that either (a) they don't know either, or (b) I might not like the answer.
> because they have a product that attempts to follows it.
I had no idea what linear.app was. Then I followed your link.
Then I had no idea what linear.app was. Then I went to their front page.
Then I had no idea what linear.app was.
Manifestos are fine. My personal one is that, if I can't tell immediately from your front page what the fuck it is that you do, then we aren't compatible.
I'm sure the authors believe they are saying something important, but there is absolutely nothing concrete referenced by this "manifesto". No prior art, no examples, nothing actually specific to "computing".
I'm not trying to be harsh - I do agree with their five bullet points - but as written it's all romanticism and no practicality.
For comparison, here's a bullet point I'd put on my own "manifesto":
----------
Feeds must be finite, relevant, and consumable.
A "feed" - a regularly updated list of content that the user is interested in - is in principle a great way to spread information and connect people to authors and creators.
As they are currently implemented though, they are biased towards maximizing "addiction" instead of productivity. Endless feeds that mix slop and advertising along with the occasional nugget of relevance encourage only endless scrolling in the hope that there will be another hit of dopamine on the next page.
Ethical feeds should follow a few main guidelines:
1. The number of items in the feed should match the number of items generated by the feed's sources. No inserting "You might be interested in..." articles between feed items. No inline sponsored advertisements. No random unrelated news clippings selected for maximum engagement. No clickbait short videos or misleading "one weird tricks" allowed. The feed must be allowed to run dry.
2. All feed items must be viewable in chronological order with no duplications or omissions. If my feed is backed by 50 sources, then my viewing tool must fetch the latest items from all sources and sort them by date. Omitting or reordering "small" items like "We just had a baby!" because some algorithm predicts that they would be less impactful than "Apple releases new MacOS27" is forbidden.
3. All feed items must be easily "consumable". If I mark an item as "read", it must never show up in my feed again. If I save it to some collection of important notes, it should never show up in my feed again . I must always be able to get to the feed equivalent of "inbox zero" without doing anything other than starting at the top and scrolling to the bottom. I should never have to chase my feed across multiple pages or tabs to read it completely.
----------
The above is an actionable, opinionated definition of how feeds "should work", and the requirements are sufficiently clear to determine whether any particular piece of software obeys these rules.
That, to me, is a useful manifesto. Perhaps too far on the practical side, but I'm an inherently practical dude.
Stallman was right?
Seriously, I like these ideas a lot. But/and also, the GNU Manifesto strikes me as ultimately "extremely similar but perhaps clearer," with the added bonus of having arguable "real life teeth," given that it was the inspiration for the GPL.
Cue somewhat understandable, yet still perhaps annoying, discussions of "Stallman the person."
Stallman has always been right. Took me many years to understand just how far he saw into the future. It's mind boggling just how right he was about everything.
The current status quo is corporations and governments are locking the hardware down, rendering free software irrelevant. Sure, you can hack your computer, but if you do it fails remote attestation and is marked as untrustworthy by other computers on the internet. "Tampered with" your machine? Can't access bank account, can't message others, can't stream content, can't even play video games, maybe one day we won't even be able to connect to an ISP. Hackers in control of their systems are marginalized, ostracized second class citizens now. Only corporate and government owned devices can participate in the wider ecosystem now. If you own your machine you're banned from everything.
And it's only going to get worse. Stallman is losing this war. Computing freedom is being destroyed and there's little that can be done about it. We do not have the power. Our values are irrelevant to the wider population. It's a damn shame.
> Our values are irrelevant to the wider population.
This is the saddest part. Things are getting worse for everyone and most people just don't care. They are either ignorant or accept it as inevitable.
I see 2 issues:
1) People don't have real power. There's too many steps between an issue you care about and a solution which requires changing laws. I don't see a solution other than people voting on laws directly and possibly votes weighted by how much they actually know about the stuff. How to implement it at reasonable cost is a very difficult question.
2) You can't make people care. People only start caring once they personally get hurt. Theoretical downsides don't interest most of the population. Freedom of speech is something they've learned at school about and they know they are supposed to cheer for it but when a platform requires spelling fuck as f*ck, that's OK with them - it might be the canary in the coal mine before more sophisticated censorship (analysis of sentiment/meaning, shadow bans) is rolled out but that's a theoretical concern, if they are able to comprehend it at all. And even when they get hurt, they often don't learn from it. I've seen plenty of people lose accounts on various platforms but all they do is switch to another proprietary platform, without looking for real alternatives.
Doctorow's "civil war over general computing" comes to mind..
https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
unless the general population somehow freaks into privacy and anonymity and independency, it seems slowly losing (i don't hold my breath, seen enough "freebies" that later turn into highly-paid and noone bothering). Or said in another way, it seems like.. irrelevant?
But you never know. May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe". Or whatever. When things get hot..
> May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe".
I've been posting this idea for a while. We need a way to manufacture free computers at home, just like we can write free software at home. That's the only way we'll have a chance at winning the war on general purpose computing. Semiconductor fabs cost billions of dollars, they are single points of failure, easily controlled by governments and industry interests. We'll never be free as long as we depend on them for our machines.
If this continues, one day we'll not even be able to buy general purpose computers anymore. Computers are too subversive, too powerful for "mere citizens" to have access to. Give people free computers and they can make a mockery of things like copyright, they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy. Give people free computers and they have access to encryption which is capable of defeating police, judges, spies, militaries. They don't want us having unrestricted access to this powerful stuff. This is similar to the right to bear arms in the USA.
Normal people? They'll surrender all their power and freedom no questions asked. They'll give it all up with literally zero resistance. Corporations tell them they need to own their computers. They need it to stop malware, to stop cheating in video games, whatever. And they believe it. They believe it so much when you try to make a stand for freedom they come and they argue with you about it. They trade freedom for security and convenience every single time. It's so sad.
I'm optimistic, actually.
One sort of "big-picture" idea that I've seen that I think is generally useful is kind of like this: For a VERY long time, Linux was kind of a joke for most.
But I realized that, it being 1% of desktops was still VITALLY IMPORTANT, even when it was never huge -- it provided enough "background pressure" for mainstream things to not screw up overly badly.
I see e.g. "homelabs" and "self-hosting" as doing that right now. And, again, given that Linux won :) -- we will see.
Not only did it provide that background pressure, but desktop software is a complex domain. So it often pushes the bounds of Linux software overall. Systemd is the example I have in mind here, but I’m sure there are others too that I’m not thinking of.
YUP. Old timer here. I remember like having e.g. my Apple II, and somewhat later Stallman saying, e.g. "they're going to be able to reach into your device and burn your ebooks."
And I distinctly remember thinking how absolutely out of his mind PARANOID this man was. Because, you know, books and all are just files. And in what possible universe could you and would you build in the possibility of some other remote person having the ability to hack into the device that's IN YOUR HANDS and do something crazy like that?
oh.
Weirdly, I couldn't disagree more.
By focusing strictly on software, we can argue that Stallman mostly won, and I think the mistake would be conflating software freedom with freedom freedom.
Freedom freedom will ALWAYS be hard, no matter what. People who want to take it away will use whatever tools are there to do it. Stallman et al saw that it was special to put guardrails around the very specific notion of "we have general purpose machines that can run any software, the ability to run ANY software must be protected."
And that, today, is overwhelmingly more true than false. You, or groups, can get a computer, hook it to the internet, and run whatever you want. Like "Linux," that doesn't GUARANTEE perfection, but it's an essential step.
AKA, I shudder to think what would have happened if Microsoft had developed AI in house.
> Cue somewhat understandable, yet still perhaps annoying, discussions of "Stallman the person."
Arseholes can be correct, even if they're still an arsehole.
Would I want my teenage daughter using software developed using Stallman's ideology? Well, yes, obviously.
Would I want her anywhere within 100 metres of Stallman without a weapon? No.
It's a lovely idea, but so far all software personalization I can think of (in the sense of software adapting to the individual, rather than the individual adapting their software à la malleable software) has been weaponized against the user rather than used to support them. Occasional attempts in the other direction like adaptive user interfaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface) tend to fail because they break habit formation (c.f. Raskin)
I think you shouldn’t optimize for metrics and behavior without understanding all that you can empathetically about the user, to know when you are causing more harm than good.
This is why Atlassian’s dogfooding approach has consistently been practical.
Right, I definitely think collecting user telemetry as source data for features is helpful, though users can be understandably wary about it. I just haven't seen any beneficial examples of _automatically_ acting on that data per user.
My understanding was that Christopher Alexander called the quality without a name "wholeness" later in their life. Does it mean a different thing than the "resonance" in this article?
Conceptually nice, but I don't know what this looks like in practice. An "examples" section is sorely needed.
Glad to see this getting another round of discussion. It was barely discussed when it was released ~2+ months ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163347
Simon Willison is a cosigner, and posted on his blog the day it was released:
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/5/resonant-computing/
Something has to change from the advertising centric, attention hijacking drain that current technology is circling. I agree with one of the other posts here that some examples of software that adhere to these principles would be a welcome addition. I think that list would include a lot of open source software and not a lot of social media software.
The link to Google Doc is the funniest punchline they could have come up with.
It's about control.
Our tools are an extension of us as humans. When someone else is in control of those tools, it is alienating.
Modern software is built to make us not masters of our own tools. Like your hand sometimes works for a corporation against your will. I guess that same pattern is also called a job. But the worst kind of job. The one you do without choice.
A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods. That's software with the user's choice at the center and independent work that connects us to eachother by being in genuine service to one another.
I think this manifesto is getting to this idea but from a different angle.
It's the extractive rent seeking monopoly playbook that seeks to undermine it. Only in captive, monopolized markets are companies able to force the use of tools we don't control.
> A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods.
People should own the product of their work and owning companies should be illegal.
Every good product starts as somebody's weekend project or and experiment with a buddy in the garage. Then they start getting users and making money. And then they sell it and the new owner ruins is.
Molecules form cells, cells form humans, humans form organizations. Slavery is illegal, yet it's legal to own a group of humans, replace parts against the group's will and order the group to do something against their will. Owning companies is just an abstraction built to replace slavery with enough indirection that people don't object.
I’m a fan of the goal here, would be interested to see what initiatives folks are envisioning to get us there, as it were
This seems a tad ambiguous and fails to touch upon some key issues. What does it mean for software to "respond fluidly". What does "technology that adapts itself" mean?. This manifesto paints a negative picture of the current "software environment" or "technological landscape", clearly with social media in mind, but then attempts to solve the situation with "ai will solve it bro, dont worry about it, just as long as theres rainbows and we all care for each other maaaan" :)
Yeah, that's roughly my take as well. The AI bit is especially jarring, given the supposed goal of being "resonant", when in fact AI is the most powerful force right now towards making things that are functional without being resonant. As in, things that work superficially but just feel... off. (And upon closer inspection, they don't quite work as fully as you'd thought.)
Like, AI is certainly powerful and can do a lot, but this "resonance" is its weakness, not its strength.
The author's context of technology seems to be limited to the idea of software and screens.
Let's take a wider view. A pencil is a technology to someone from the 1500s. A watch is a technology to someone from the 1700s.
The network (web) has already integrated into our lives. The screen is the point of distraction and there are many people actively finding ways to move away from that.
When I look at the proposed principles, I don't see how that makes computing any more "resonant".
Computing will continue to meld into our lives and will continue to be more and more basic. Children today don't think about "going online" like those of us around the birth of the internet did. Those born today won't think twice about an AI assistant that is ever present.
I feel like the goals of this manifesto may be orthogonal to their stated aims. Or maybe I completely miss the point.
I like the idea, but as others have said, I don't see any meat behind it. Is just words on a page, a concept at best and no vision or direction on how to get there. I signed because Im interested in supporting people and places to be more humanistic, but yeah I need to know who you are and what your history is before I sign on to anything. The world is full of two faced well-meaning / hostile to free societies right now. And if you really want to make difference in this department, in this climate, transparency is your friend.
I think manifestos are useless without a concrete, real-world example for people to follow and add on to. It's easy to wish for puppies and rainbows, but trying to deliver is hard.
For example, Linear has a useful manifesto (https://linear.app/method) because they have a product that attempts to follows it. I have much more respect for a manifesto that is informed by contact with reality.
I agree, but I always assume manifestos are distillations from experience.
Is it that you want to be able to inspect the experience that informs it side-by-side, in case-studies or product or something?
I take it for granted that you're not sceptical of the authors experience, because lord knows there's some experience behind the contributors and signatories :)
Maggie Appleton Samuel Arbesman Daniel Barcay Rob Hardy Aishwarya Khanduja Alex Komoroske Geoffrey Litt Michael Masnick Brendan McCord Bernhard Seefeld Ivan Vendrov Amelia Wattenberger Zoe Weinberg Simon Willison
I'm used to manifestos being a call to action or, at least, an explanation of intentions. But if the signers are intent on changing the world, I don't have a concrete view of what world they plan on creating.
"people must serve as primary stewards of their own context": What does this mean? People must be able to change the system prompt whenever they want? Or does "their own context" just mean "their own prompt" but not the system prompt? Does this mean everyone needs to run a local model?
"You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.": Any transaction has conflicting interests. I want to pay as little as possible for software, but I want my salary as a software engineer to be as high as possible. How are they planning on eliminating that conflict?
"No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit.": What do they mean by a "digital space"? Do they mean the Internet? If so, then this is already true: no single entity controls the internet. Do they mean any web app that I might use? If I put up a personal blog can I be the only one who controls it? What if my blog gets really popular?
"Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it." Also, it should take 0 time to manage, solve any problem I might have, and be absolutely free.
"Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off." This was literally the original dream of the internet. We thought a global network that connected everyone would lead to peace and prosperity. We all agree that it hasn't. No one has any idea how to achieve this other than banning it.
I'm sure we can come up with answers to each one of these questions. But my point is that the manifesto doesn't tell us. We don't know what they have in mind, which makes me suspicious that either (a) they don't know either, or (b) I might not like the answer.
Some people looked at some of the authors background:
https://gameboat.bearblog.dev/the-resonant-computing-manifes...
There are actually things to be very skeptical about.
> because they have a product that attempts to follows it.
I had no idea what linear.app was. Then I followed your link.
Then I had no idea what linear.app was. Then I went to their front page.
Then I had no idea what linear.app was.
Manifestos are fine. My personal one is that, if I can't tell immediately from your front page what the fuck it is that you do, then we aren't compatible.
Linear is the latest trendy issue tracker. A to-do list, basically.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/12/17/the-resonant-computing-ma...
I'm sure the authors believe they are saying something important, but there is absolutely nothing concrete referenced by this "manifesto". No prior art, no examples, nothing actually specific to "computing".
I'm not trying to be harsh - I do agree with their five bullet points - but as written it's all romanticism and no practicality.
For comparison, here's a bullet point I'd put on my own "manifesto":
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Feeds must be finite, relevant, and consumable.
A "feed" - a regularly updated list of content that the user is interested in - is in principle a great way to spread information and connect people to authors and creators.
As they are currently implemented though, they are biased towards maximizing "addiction" instead of productivity. Endless feeds that mix slop and advertising along with the occasional nugget of relevance encourage only endless scrolling in the hope that there will be another hit of dopamine on the next page.
Ethical feeds should follow a few main guidelines:
1. The number of items in the feed should match the number of items generated by the feed's sources. No inserting "You might be interested in..." articles between feed items. No inline sponsored advertisements. No random unrelated news clippings selected for maximum engagement. No clickbait short videos or misleading "one weird tricks" allowed. The feed must be allowed to run dry.
2. All feed items must be viewable in chronological order with no duplications or omissions. If my feed is backed by 50 sources, then my viewing tool must fetch the latest items from all sources and sort them by date. Omitting or reordering "small" items like "We just had a baby!" because some algorithm predicts that they would be less impactful than "Apple releases new MacOS27" is forbidden.
3. All feed items must be easily "consumable". If I mark an item as "read", it must never show up in my feed again. If I save it to some collection of important notes, it should never show up in my feed again . I must always be able to get to the feed equivalent of "inbox zero" without doing anything other than starting at the top and scrolling to the bottom. I should never have to chase my feed across multiple pages or tabs to read it completely.
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The above is an actionable, opinionated definition of how feeds "should work", and the requirements are sufficiently clear to determine whether any particular piece of software obeys these rules.
That, to me, is a useful manifesto. Perhaps too far on the practical side, but I'm an inherently practical dude.