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)
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."
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?
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
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.
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" :)
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.
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."
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
https://gameboat.bearblog.dev/the-resonant-computing-manifes...
There are actually things to be very skeptical about.
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.
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.