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."
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
This is why Atlassian’s dogfooding approach has consistently been practical.
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.
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.
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.
Like, AI is certainly powerful and can do a lot, but this "resonance" is its weakness, not its strength.
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.
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.
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
"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.
https://gameboat.bearblog.dev/the-resonant-computing-manifes...
There are actually things to be very skeptical about.
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 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.
