Rebooting Silicon Valley

[upbeat music]

Here we are again.

Yeah. So the home stretch.

I wanna welcome Alex Komoroske,

who's a co-founder of Common Tools,

former of Googler and Striper.

No, Stripe. Just Stripe.

[Steven] The person who worked with Stripe.

[Alex laughs]

and the legendary Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt.

Thank you both for being here.

Now, Mike, the origin story of this session

is that you sent me an email a couple weeks ago,

you had something you wanted to announce.

You wondered if Wired would be interested in covering it.

I sent it to Steven. I said, Steven, can you cover this?

And he said, I have a better idea.

Why don't we get these guys on stage at the end

of the day at the event in a few weeks,

and they can announce it themselves?

And so with that, I would love to give you guys the floor

for a few minutes and tell us why we're all here.

What do you have to announce? What are you here to share?

[Mike laughs]

Well, that's quite a lead in.

[Alex laughs]

No pressure.

[Mike and Alex laugh]

Well, I think it actually makes sense as this being

the final session of the day.

One of the things, I've been here all day

and I've been listening to all the different sessions,

and one of the things that I think has come up

as a theme over and over again is the sense that, you know,

there are a lot of us who remember Silicon Valley, a world

of innovation, where we felt good about the innovations

in the technologies that were coming out,

and that we were, you know, excited about it.

And we would use these technologies,

and it would do good things for us,

and we would feel good about it.

And I think a lot of us have noticed that feeling.

We don't get that so much anymore.

And then, and oftentimes we sort of, you know,

it's sort of an icky feeling.

You feel, you know, unhappy.

You feel drained after using these technologies

or hearing about these new innovations.

They're not so much, you know, exciting you.

They're not so much getting you

to a point where they're helping.

It's just sort of pulling stuff out of you.

And so a small group of us have been getting together

and having conversations about that,

and sort of thinking through, is there anything we can do?

How can we bring back this concept of, you know,

actually building for good, building for people,

not for the bottom line,

you know, recognizing what is that like

and how do you express that?

And so Alex started, you know,

a lot of this was Alex bringing together a group of people,

and we would have all of these interesting meetings.

And so trying to figure out like,

how do we express this?

How do you put words to that feeling

that everybody seemed to have this sense,

but we couldn't quite explain it.

Eventually, after lots of back and forth and lots

and lots of other ideas,

we put together something which is now out in the world

called the Resonant Computing Manifesto,

which you can see at resonantcomputing.org.

Everyone go crash the site, please.

[Alex laughs]

And it's an attempt to express this idea

and to get it out there.

And I think Alex can maybe talk a little bit

about what's in it,

and sort of what we're hoping it leads to.

But please go check it out. Not now.

Listen to Alex first, then read it and then sign it.

Yeah. Alex, what is Resonant Computing?

So I think when you think about saying things

that are hollow, hollow things leave you feeling regret.

Resonant things leave you feeling nourished.

And they're superficially very similar,

but they're fundamentally very different.

And I think that modern society

and modern tech is very good at producing hollow experiences

and quite poor at producing resonant experiences.

And I think of technology as an amplifier,

amplifies whatever you apply it to.

And so now with LLMs

and AI extending that by orders of magnitude,

it's never been more important for us

to focus on Resonant Computing, things that align,

that help nourish us, that we're proud about.

And to me, resonance is when it's sort of fractally aligned

with your interest as you peel back,

as you look at it more carefully, you are proud of the thing

as opposed to feeling conned by it or betrayed by it.

And for us, resident computing specifically

has five major tenets.

One is that it's private, that your data should be used,

aligned with your expectations and interests.

Two, it is dedicated.

It should be something that works as an extension

of your agency and not some conflict of interest

with some other entity that's trying

to show you ads or something.

Three, it should be plural.

It should be something

that doesn't have hyper-centralized centers of power

that lead to a lack of competition

and a stifling of that overall innovation.

Four, it should be adaptive.

It should be something that lifts you up

as opposed to boxing you in.

And five, it should be pro-social.

It should help you align

and integrate with the society around you

as opposed to being a kind of island unto yourself.

And I think those five characteristics capture what we mean

by what resonance looks like in a computing experience.

And so you've published this manifesto sort

of calling for this new movement,

this idea of Resonant Computing.

In the manifesto, you say

that Silicon Valley has lost its way,

that it was once sort of idealistic in its motivations.

And now, of course, it is profit-driven.

It is unaligned with what consumers want.

I think everyone at Wired would agree with that.

That has certainly been a driving force of our coverage,

you know, in the last few years.

No disagreement there.

I think my question is, okay,

so you have this manifesto.

You have, you know, hundreds of signatories, a lot

of really interesting, important people who've been

in the Valley for a long time.

You are, of course, hoping to get

as many people signing this manifesto as possible.

Is it likely that Mark Zuckerberg reads that

and thinks to himself, You know what, it's Resonant time.

You know what I mean? [Alex laughs]

So my question is,

because I fundamentally agree with the concept,

but how does it help?

How do you see this potentially changing

how Silicon Valley operates today?

So I've mentored hundreds of PMs over the years

and seen all these amazing people who have come

to the industry because of this hacker ethic,

this idealism about pro-social impacts of technology,

and almost everybody, they want to do this.

It's just, it feels like in this sort of late stage

of this current tech paradigm, you have to be a bit

of a cynic, and that cynicism erodes that idealism.

But people want to do it.

And if you look across all the micro-decisions

that are being made and every decision to launch a feature,

what people do today is they say,

will this move the metrics?

Will this move the metric to engagement metric,

the weekly active users, or what have you?

It's all about optimizing up on that number.

But we don't ever ask, at what cost?

What are we trading off by doing that?

And so if you have a balance that only has one side

that's actually you're ever talking about,

of course it'll be radically unbalanced.

If you just give a word

and say, Hey, wait a second, there's something,

this inevitable quality that's difficult

to capture in metrics almost explicitly.

And if people say, Hey, is this resonant?

Not Mark Zuckerberg necessarily,

although that would be great,

but individual product managers and engineers and designers,

and if all of these people are just a little bit more likely

to ask this kind of question,

the emergent result across the industry

can be significantly stronger, I think.

So there's a subversive element to this.

I mean, we're talking about getting the rank

and file to maybe do what the executive layer won't.

To be clear, I actually think that this is,

I am very pro-tech, I'm also very,

I think that pro-business, I think that technology

can be an enormously powerful force

for human flourishing,

but it also produces significant value

for all the people involved.

When you have something that's resonant,

you have it aligned all the interests of the users,

the employees, the shareholders, these can all align.

I think we just often don't take the work

to find those bits of alignment.

So this is not go and and tank all these metrics.

No, no, no, I think this is something that makes products

that are better, that help, that people like using,

that they're proud to evangelize to their friends,

like one of the tests is after you use a product,

and after you've had a few days to reflect on it,

would you proudly recommend it to someone you care about?

And if you're sitting there scrolling Candy Crush,

like the answer is definitely no, right?

But if you have an experience that challenges you

or helps you connect with the world around you,

the people that matter to you, you say, Yeah, I do.

It was a challenging experience,

but I do recommend it to you.

And that question, I think, is the key one.

You realize you're headed

into a hurricane force headwind here,

[Alex laughs] because, you know,

this is the moment where even just a few years ago,

employees at the biggest Silicon Valley companies could say,

Wait a minute, we don't wanna work with this maven,

you know, AI military plan,

and they can get Google to change its mind.

They could, you know, argue for diversity in the company.

And now, you know,

I just did a big story about Silicon Valley

where people were telling me, you know,

that the rule now is you keep your head down, and you work.

Otherwise, you'll get fired,

because, you know, Elon Musk proved

that you could lay off 80% of the people in some form.

This thing still runs there.

Is this this long term thing where you're,

you know, putting flowers in,

like, gun barrels of, [Alex laughs]

you know, the only arcs and oligarchs.

And then, you know, it changes.

Are the people signing this in it for the long run?

I mean, I think what we're doing here,

we're trying to do here,

is really start a conversation, right?

Even just putting a term to this, I think,

is important for having that conversation.

There's always gonna be pushback.

Some people are going to say that this is cynical,

and some people are going to be cynical

and pushing back against it.

But I think by starting the conversation, being able

to have this phrase, have this concept, have the principles

that are in there, we also have the ability

for people to add different principles

and ideas to a document that's attached to it.

We're beginning this conversation,

and we're opening it up in a way that is designed not

to be antagonistic.

There's an approach that we could have taken

with this that was very, you know, in your face

and antagonistic, and as you know, I'm no stranger to

[Alex laughs] somehow being antagonistic

to people, but that was not what this was for.

And that was not what I think any

of us thought this moment called for,

that there was this way

to present this in a way that says, Look, we're trying

to bring back that world where technology is exciting

and where it is building for good for everyone,

that it is actually good for all stakeholders.

But to do that, you have to be able to envision that.

You have to have a story that you can tell

that makes the case for that, which is not just,

what is the one thing that is going

to make Wall Street the happiest within, you know,

the quarterly reporting period, which is driving a lot

of this where, if we can start this conversation, get people

to think like, Wait, maybe it's long-term better,

not just for the users, for humanity,

but also for the company.

As Alex was saying, if you can have that conversation,

you can begin to move things maybe gently, you know,

we'd love for it to happen faster,

but maybe gently in that right direction,

and get us to a point where we can start talking

about technology in a way

that is beneficial and helpful and pro-social.

I also wanna make another point

about large language models, I think,

are as transformative as technology,

as the printing press electricity in the internet.

And I think we're just in the very early innings

of seeing what they look like.

I think we're gonna look back in five years

and say we thought that the killer use case

of LLMs was chatbots.

I think it's gonna look very small in comparison.

The whole industry for the last 30 years predicated

in the assumption that software is expensive

to write and cheap to run.

And large language models actually mess

with both of those dynamics.

Software that uses the large language models,

not that all of it will, but ones that use it to run,

now have a marginal cost.

It's more than can be supported by advertising.

And two, it's now possible

to write crappy software in the small for basically free.

And this could create a revolution of infinite software

where it feels instead, like of going to today,

software feels like you go to the big box store

and pick one of three options, all of which aren't perfect,

and you buy one of those.

What if software felt like a thing

that grew in your own personal garden,

something that felt like it nourished you

and aligned with your values naturally and obviously?

Those are the kinds of things

that are now possible with large language models.

And so this is not just a thing

of like shouting into this hurricane.

I do think large language models have the potential

to disrupt a number of the power dynamics

in the tech industry.

And so if there is gonna be significant changes

as we realize that new kinds of businesses can be built

and new kinds of products, then let's plant the seeds now,

so that the things that grow can be these,

you know, beautiful flowers.

Well, let me ask you this. You mentioned the website.

I'm curious for anyone here in the audience who's listening

to you talk and thinking, You know, this is interesting.

This is something I might wanna be involved in,

I wanna learn more about.

How can people get involved in what you're taking on?

Right now, the best thing you can do

is sign the manifesto.

We have a, you know, we're adding names.

[Katie] Can anyone sign it?

Of course, go for it. We have-

[Katie] Go for it.

We have a number of names on there you might recognize,

some others that didn't give their full name,

and just signed it a screen name.

But the point is for this to be an emergent sort

of focal point for lots of people

who are optimistic about technology,

and don't like this kind

of hyper-centralized engagement maxing world

that we've been in for the last 10 years to,

let's build something cool

that people like doing and are proud of.

And so the first thing to do is to sign it.

Just talk about it. Share the word.

Use it in conversations, explain it to people,

send them to the document they don't understand.

And I think that kind of bottoms-up thing

can really change the world.

One of the things that we've noticed

just in the last few weeks where we started to sort

of share the document quietly

before we did this, you know,

sort of public announcement was that we share with people,

and it, you know, to use the term,

but it resonates with people.

[Alex laughs]

People read it and they're like, Yeah, you know,

that's exactly what I've been feeling.

Just over and over again,

we've had that sense, and then you begin to hear it

and see it in other places.

And so, like earlier today when John True was on stage,

he talked about resonance

in terms of what he was working on.

I was like, There it is, you know,

like people are thinking about this.

Everybody's sort of searching for where is that,

that feeling of like, This feels right to me.

This is something that I wanna see in the world.

And so, you know, just getting it out there,

lots of people so far have been reacting

to it in this way that says like,

Yeah, there was this world that we had,

and let's get back to that.

And I think it's bigger than tech.

When I talked to my husband's family

who is not really the tech industry,

and you know, come from a sort

of look at politics slightly different than I do,

and we'll talk about this.

I've gotten some responses that are like, Yes!

I had no idea

that I could even ask technology to do that.

I thought it was just this cynical thing

that someone was trying to con me into, you know,

getting addicted to something.

And when you point out this thing that's been missing,

I think modern society,

we've gotten so good at optimizing everything, right?

Politics and business and tech

and we've hollowed out what matters.

And I think all of us can feel

that something is missing in modern society.

The metrics keep going up into the right,

and yet, we feel more empty than ever before.

I think the tech industry shows this

in a particularly strong way,

but I think it's something that affects all of society,

and we've lost some of that resonance,

and we can get it back by knowing that we've lost it,

and that optimizing without thinking

and just making number go up leads you to feeling empty.

You can now know to balance some of these things

and not accidentally just ratchet up and up

and up to an ever just more, you know.

Well, thank you.

Yes, thank you guys both so much

for joining us. [audience applauds]

Thank you for sharing this.

Check out the manifesto, see if it resonates.

You can sign it. Really, really appreciate your time.

Thank you for your reference. All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, Steven.

Thank you.

[upbeat music]