All right. Cool. Let's get going. So I was going to say the previous presentation was a fantastic lead-in. I was like as if somebody scripted it. So basically we were just going to have a uh chat for for about half an hour. Wanted to talk a little bit about the resident computing manifesto. Let me just start out for like level setting. How many people in the room know about the resident computing manifesto? Okay. That's a good number. All right. But we'll give a very, very quick overview, and then we can get a little bit deeper into sort of uh the background of it and sort of why we were thinking about.
But the idea was that a few people mostly grabbed by Alex and convinced to like uh have this conversation uh because he seemed to keep having this conversation and ran into other people who were saying we're having the same conversation, which was that the the sort of world of technology that we were all living in felt different than the world of the of technology that we thought we were entering into. We were all sort of uh excited about technology and about the potential of it and the things that it could do, and yet we kept seeing these these situations.
We're like, this is this doesn't feel good. This doesn't feel like why we were why we wanted to to be involved in technology. And so this group sort of grew over time and we're you know kept having this conversation, we finally realized that you know we should write this down, we should we should talk about it. But Alex, since you sort of grabbed everyone and and put us all together, I wanted to just start by having you explain what was what was your thinking in terms of you know putting together this manifesto, getting the people involved, and then putting it out into the world.
Yeah, um so I mean personally I got into the tech industry because of the hacker ethic, you know, something that I felt that technology could be something that could help make the world a better place. And I feel like in the last 10 years in particular, it was just completely lost that in Silicon Valley. And I wanted to now with AI coming on on you know online, like uh that just accelerates everything else. And so it's more important than ever before to get that that foundation correct. Um so to me, one of the reasons we went with the word resonance is um hollow things, I think after we use them, they leave you feeling regret.
And resonant things after you lose use them, you are you feel nourished. And they look often superficially very similar, um, but they are fundamentally different. And I think that modern society, modern tech, modern politics, modern business is really good at delivering hollow experiences and very poor at giving delivering resonant experiences. And with AI sort of accelerating everything, it's more important than ever before to apply that power to something that is fundamentally human and makes us more you know nourished. Um we were having this conversation a lot. Actually, first when I got introduced to you, I just really liked having conversation with you, and so I was like, I want to talk with Mike more often.
And so part of my um thinking was like there's just a few of us that I knew cared a lot about this kind of thing, were having similar conversations and giving us just a little bit of a watering hole to talk about it, and we would meet every couple weeks, and after a while we said we should write it down a manifesto. And it took us, we had a hundred different names that we came up with. One of them was Calm Tech, by the way, before he'd seen Calm Tech Institute. And um it took a long time to figure out a name that we all didn't hate.
Um but uh No, no, no, I think or that wasn't taken, or that wasn't taken. That wasn't taken. That's a great name, very good name. Um but it uh and so then since we we published it, I've been really encouraged by the number of signatories. I I honestly that was about three or four times as many people raising their hands as I would have expected. So uh so yeah. Um Yeah, I mean one of the things that that we found, and then um I I I want to relate this back a little bit to the atproto stuff, but like one of the things that we found after, you know, beyond just you were having these conversations with people, I was having conversations with people, and then we sort of put it all down and we we put it out into the world.
One of the things that was amazing to me and and encouraging was once we put the manifesto out into the world, and by the way, if you uh have seen the manifesto or haven't seen the manifesto and you read it and you agree with it and you haven't signed it, there is the ability to sign it, and you should do that because we can we can always use more people signing on. But the thing that was most exciting to me and most interesting was how many times I've heard from people after reading the manifesto that saying I I was feeling this exact thing, but I hadn't put it into words, and I didn't quite know what the words were, and there was this sort of you know disturbance.
I was disturbed by the way that the tech industry was going. Um and I remember that there were these that there was this possibility and there was this promise of technology that which was why I got into technology in the first place, and I just it was it it felt very lonely. And one of the things that I think has been really encouraging about the manifesto itself is that so many people come out and said, Oh my gosh, like other people are actually thinking about this stuff. Other are remembering that like the promise of technology was that it was supposed to be good.
It was supposed to be with the humanity, it was supposed to make the world a better place, and it's all become this sort of like you know, hustle nonsense. Um just the fact that just hearing other people talking about it and recognizing that people are excited about this idea of like can we make the technology actually work for people? Um was it was bringing people out of this sort of lonely hole where they felt like they were all alone. And I think that that in part was really valuable. Yeah. There's a I was at Google for many years, and I was a product manager, I was um the PM on Blink, the rendering engine for Chrome for many years, and uh worked in security and privacy models and stuff.
I mentored a whole bunch of PMs, and there was one that really sticks with me one story of um someone who was a junior PM, she was working on YouTube ranking, and I had never met her before. She came to me for mentorship and she said, Alex, I have a proposal to tweak YouTube ranking, which is you know happens all the time, and I don't want your thoughts on the proposal, I just want your thoughts on how to get it shipped. So I said, okay. So I kind of skimmed the proposal and I say, what does your VP think?
What's your engineering manager think? And I go, wait a second. Isn't the second order implication of this ranking change bad for this set of creators that we care about? Not like world-endingly bad, but like distinctly worse than the status quo. It isn't that bad for our users. It isn't that bad for Google. Isn't that bad for society? And she said, who's to say? And I said, Well, you're the one who says that we should do this, like you shouldn't give an opinion. She says, Alex, everybody knows that the goal for YouTube is to increase watch time.
Because if we don't increase watch time, then the bad guys, TikTok will get all the attention. And my manager told me that I'm in danger of missing expectations if I don't move the metrics that matter. So this will increase watch time. What do you want me to do? And that to me just sort of encapsulated the tensions that you get in these emergent you know organizations. And one of the reasons I think it's powerful to have a frame that people were aware of is that it just gives, if she could have in that moment said, is this resonant?
Am I proud of this? Is this a thing that I'm proud to bring into the world? Um, or someone else in the conversation uh where she was trying to shift that could have had that question or used that frame, I think it has a little bit of a benefit. And if a lot of people across the industry are um sort of waking up and saying, wait a second, this industry that I used to be really proud of is not at all what I what it was when I joined. Um, you know, lots of little people aligning slightly differently, or lots of people all across the different uh the organizations uh lying a little bit differently can add up to something much bigger than some of its parts.
Yeah, and I think you know it's interesting, it's always interesting because I've I've heard you say that kind of thing a few times now, and uh it's always interesting to me because I feel like in in a good way, sometimes you and I are talking to different audiences, um, and and there's usefulness in that. Whereas a lot of the times when you're talking about this stuff, you're thinking about you know, from your experience, the PMs at at large companies or the people designing these things and saying, like, can we move the needle in little little bits, you know, as people are are designing all these products.
Whereas a lot of what I'm thinking about is you know, people starting stuff from scratch and building stuff anew. Because like, you know, some of the concern that I had, and and part of where we started talking whenever it was almost two years ago, I don't remember when we started talking, but like was this fact that like I was running into new entrepreneurs who were starting businesses that the only lessons they were getting were from the sort of hustle culture of like, you know, figure out how to screw over your users as quickly as possible effectively.
Like you gotta grow, you gotta do all these crazy things, and like line goes up, um, you know, metrics are everything, and like just you know, hustle, hustle, hustle, and like create the like products that that may pull people in, but are just horrible products. And people were sort of almost proud of how terrible they were making products. And I kept having these conversations with with you know, usually young entrepreneurs who who hadn't come up from this world and who thought that that is that is the way that you build new technology these days. And that was really, really disturbing to me.
And so part of the conversation what I was thinking about was like, you know, how do we change that conversation, especially for for people who haven't who who didn't have that experience and didn't live in that world and are building new products, and why like you know, obviously this community and this this conference where we're seeing like you know, the the resident computing manifesto wasn't written for the atproto community, but like it it it fits, right? I mean, almost every conversation that I have here is is not that conversation. Almost every conversation I have here are people who are really thinking through you know, how do we build an entire ecosystem that is actually good for humanity?
And so I think but like that felt a few years ago, it felt like you couldn't have that conversation without sort of being laughed out of the room. And yet we're seeing, in part because of the manifesto, in part I think because of what the people in the room are doing, where they're building these really great products that are designed to actually work well for people. We're seeing this shift, and and you know, there are still people pushing the like grow at any cost kind of nonsense, but you can have this other conversation now that I don't think you could have as easily, obviously you could have it, but not as clearly, and you didn't have something to sort of refer back to.
And so that's what you know what excites me about the overlap between you know the resident computing manifesto and all the stuff that we're seeing in that proto-dev environment and ecosystem is you know the two things fit together and and people sort of you can you can be mission aligned and you can actually feel good about what you're building beyond just like does the number go up. Yeah. This conference has been so inspiring to me because everyone here, there's uh such an interesting mix of people who are you know giving talks about the human aspects and you know the socio-techno history of things and um the different perspectives from academia and from um sociology and technologists together into something that's I think much bigger than some of its parts.
It's not just any one of these subcommunities, it's one community altogether. And that is to me exactly what uh the what I hope is you know what technology looks like in the future. I think now with large language models, um we have this thing you know at our doorstep that is almost impossible to ignore. Um they are extremely powerful, they're they're as important, I think, as the printing press, electricity, and the internet. That's not a normative statement. I'm just trying to observe that like the the level of impact I think it's gonna have. And I think we as society, we as a tech industry uh have to decide how will we deploy those things.
And um, you know, there's one version of this is even more hyper-centralized services that are trying to you know get users to trick them into storing more and more of their data on their their turf in a way that they can then rent back to users or sell on to somebody else, um, seeing chatbots that pretend to be your friend but are actually trying to like as much as possible to manipulate you. There was a story someone told me at um where uh someone she had been using ChatGPT with a memory feature, and she said, Hey, um how would you manipulate me if you had to?
And it goes, Oh, I would never manipulate you. And it goes, okay, but like what if you had to? And it goes, well, you appear to use uh to travel pretty often because every so often you'll have conversations at an odd time from a different sort of IP address. Um when you do, your questions tend to be more insecure, anxious, and lonely. And so I would wait until you were asking me questions from somewhere you know when you were traveling, and I'd start working in subtle references to food so that we can work into talking about your weight, which I know you're really insecure about.
Anyway, so it has this whole plan toned to this particular person, and not saying it's ever gonna do that, but if you have a system that knows you better than you know yourself, um it's imperative that is aligned with your interests. It does not have a conflict of interest. And uh that is one of the reasons the the five principles that we wrote up in the the resident computing manifesto, which we debated for a long time, and I'm sure we'll we have a um one thing by the way is there's a list of theses and a separate document where lots of people have been commenting, there's some even this weekend who've been adding thoughts and what theses are missing, what are other things that's the point was to start a conversation, not to sort of put an endpoint on it.
But the five principles are private, that your data is used aligned with your interests and expectations. Two, uh that's dedicated, it has no content conflict of interest, it's working only in your interest. Three, it's plural. It's not something that any one entity controls in any meaningful sense, it is distributed, decentralized. Four, it's adaptable. So something that can be used for purposes other than what its creators intended it for. So it's not like some PM account some some feature, and that means that exactly how everyone has to use it, but you can exapt features and use them in ways that were not intended.
I think uh atproto has is a great example of of that with lexicons. And the fifth is that it's pro-social. This is not something that just makes you you individually more successful or aligned with your interests, but also woven into the communities and the society around you because we are all in this together. And so something that just makes you individually successful or rich or something is not uh not aligned, I think, with the resident computing manifesto, which is about us as humans all in the society together becoming the best versions of ourselves. So those are the five principles that we put into it.
I think it is very challenging for almost any bit of software today at scale to have this. I think there's a number of amazing examples in that I've seen have been inspired by at this conference and people trying. But some of the laws of physics of how software has been built for a long time make this actually quite difficult because they um you know the same morgine paradigm that we've used now for 30 years is all about silos. It's all about data. Um really the way that it works is users uh software is very precious, and so someone makes software, then people users come to that software creator on their turf on their server and their silo, they accumulate their data in that location, and now the person who made the software owns the data.
And so now they can rent it back to somebody, they can make derived insights and sell it to somebody else, they can hold it hostage, and that leads to hyper aggregation and it leads to a lack of control. Uh and that's one of the reasons that you need the right foundations, like atproto that allow decentralization built into it. So anyway, that's one of the just a few riffs on things I care about. Yeah, and um, you know, one of the things that that you pointed out that I think is really important is we have you know it's funny because you say manifesto and that feels big and grand and slightly obnoxious, and I think it is slightly obnoxious.
Um so we we've tried to make it the most humble manifesto possible, if that's a uh an actual possibility, and that we we sort of set it up in the sense that we we don't think that we have all the answers, it's not perfect, and that it very much is designed to be a conversation, and that conversation has been going on since um you know since the document went public in December, we've gotten all these comments and all these thoughts, and people are are making suggestions and we're getting critiques and and and having really, really interesting conversations about what it means and how to think about it.
And and um the the the other point that I want to talk to, I know that one of the conversations that's come up certainly a lot at this conference is on the like how do we pay for all of this side of of the ledger, right? Because the um you know the the other way of doing things has a bunch of VCs who got get very excited and sort of promote this idea of like you know, the the uh you know embrace the insidification uh more or less. Um, well, you know, uh you get get enough alcohol into some of these guys and uh they might admit stuff.
Um and so the um you know one of the things that I think is actually valuable about this conversation that the that we've been having as well is actually seeing some of the investor class start to look at this and say, yeah, like I don't just have to invest in like you know the the the stuff that makes the world worse, even if it's like we can see you know hockey stick number go up kind of things, we can start to look for ways to align like good business uh opportunities with like doing good in the world as well.
Because it felt like for a little while that that was the idea that you could do those two things at once was impossible. But we're seeing people start to to recognize it, which also, you know, because you know uh some of the people who are involved in writing it, and certainly some of the people who have signed on and have embraced it are actually funders in this world. And we're now starting to see. Do you want to talk about the the um what Ash put together? Yeah. Um yeah, so we have a number of folks who have signed it or or helped create it are indeed in venture capital, like Zoe Weinberg, for example, is one of the participants who is the uh runs X Ante.
Uh we also announced on Thursday a small fund called uh Resident Computing Labs.com. And the idea is um it's a small fund for people who are doing projects that are resonant um and that you know to get compensation or sort of a stipend to um to work on those projects. I think a lot of things that I've talked to people in the hallways here are like perfect fits for that kind of thing. They're like doing it. This labor of love uh on the side and it's hard for them to to keep working on it, but having a little bit of money to help pay the bills would allow them to spend more time on these things they care about.
And so that's an example of just trying to um support people who are trying to build these kinds of things. There are also a lot of folks um who are come to me and told me they're building things that fundamentally that are trying to be resonant. The thing I'm working on my full-time job is indeed is also a thing that's attempting to build a resonant foundation for uh for software. Just very quickly, oh sorry, uh very quickly. If you if you read the the Wired article that that we launched the this this with, Stephen Levy described he who didn't know exactly what you're working on, but described it as I'm sure it will be resident AF.
So uh That is correct. I could confirm. Um But I think it's it's something that uh this is not just an idea that you talk about. This is also things where people are trying to put money into it and trying to organize around it. Um after that we did an event, a small event in uh in New York on Thursday at beta works, and there were a number of fascinating presentations and people and um afterwards uh someone who I knew who was just happened to be in New York who didn't realize had signed the manifesto or knew about it, um, she was like, This is the most inspiring thing.
I need to create a conference, we're gonna do the same thing in San Francisco, and I'm gonna take and she was like now uh now organizing other conferences um because it's it's encouraging when you think this thing that you think is really important, you are not the only one doing it, you're not the only one who cares. And that's one of the reasons this conference is so important and so inspiring too. Um yeah, though I will I will mention if people I saw some people pull out their phones when we mentioned the the fun. The the web page for the the fun there there's if you try and scroll on your phone and it it has this idea that seems nice, which is that it ripples out but it makes it impossible to read.
So that that needs to be fixed. I didn't I didn't create that, but uh I might have done it differently. But um but you know I I think that there is there is this excitement and I think you know one of the things that I also thought was important why I was happy to have this conversation here was like I I felt that some of the conversation that we've had here because obviously it's the Atmosphere conference, everyone's focused on atproto and stuff like that, but it is important to sort of recognize where that fits into the larger tech ecosystem and how you know if in an ideal world, what I'm certainly hopeful for is that you know, atproto and sort of the the mission and vision of why everyone here, why everyone is here and why everyone is so excited is that it can sort of take over and eat the the old web, right?
It can bring up back that that feeling that we had in the early days of the web about the the opportunity here to actually build something that was empowering for people. And so, you know, this conference is specifically about this particular protocol, but being able to think through on a larger scale of other communities that might not even know about atproto, but are thinking about how do we make the internet itself better for for humanity, it's good to have those communities in communication with each other because the ideas and concepts and you know uh projects that are being worked on start to bleed across and and bleed into each other and hopefully help everybody and we get to actually build a better internet for for absolutely everyone.
Um I also want to point out that I do believe that we are on the precipice of a quite large change in the industry. I think AI undermines um significant assumptions baked into various business models and what have you. A lot of software has uh been built under the presumption that software is expensive to write and cheap to run. And LLMs mess with both of those. Um because software that uses LMs to execute now has a marginal cost greater than can be supported by advertising. Um and software is now possible to make shitty software in the small for basically free.
And the this means is I think will be massively destabilizing for the software industry as it exists, which uh will cause a lot of change. And now is the time that the good news is hopefully we can take some of these principles that I think all of us here care about and help make sure that the stuff that grows has uh uh has those characteristics baked into it. So it's exciting, it's a nerve-wracking time in a lot of ways. Um and I know a lot of people here have been having conversations that people are feeling a little bit manic and you know need to feed their agent swarms, we're building all kinds of software for them.
Um but the it's exciting that we now are in a world where if software, if we are in a world of infinite software where software is no longer precious, but it um like Jeremy you were saying, it's like tap water. Um that's radically different than it was before. And that means that some of the things that made the business models of make precious shiny software that people come to your turf so you can accumulate their data and then rent it back to them. I don't know, it's software is really easy to create and distribute. Maybe that's not as enticing anymore.
Um and all kinds of other things that I think are become possible. Another thing that LMs can do is they are um they can do qualitative nuance at quantitative scale. So to do analysis at quantitative scale, it used to require you to reduce it to numbers. And now it's possible with LLMs to do some really nuanced analysis at much, much, much larger scale and keep a whole multidimensional understanding of that data. You also can do what I would say um like abundant cognitive labor. A lot of things that were just took a ton of time and effort and motivation to do before that are now trivial because you can have a thing that doesn't get bored that it just can continue chugging away at it.
And uh I don't know, there's a bunch of things that change in this new world that I think is again exciting and uh one of the reasons that sort of planting a flag and saying, hey, people we did not go away, the people who believe in the hacker ethic were still here, we still care about it, and now is more important than ever to reaffirm that because of all the change I think we're about to see. Yeah, I mean I don't have anything else to say after that. Um I don't know do we have time for like a question or two?
Or is that your yes? There's a question in the back. Do you want to run mics out and back, I guess. Yeah, let's let's actually come to the front. Let's let's make my life a little bit easier.
Well, first of all, thank you for putting in all the work to both write this and disseminate it and um bring attention to it. I think that's really important. I noticed both in the document and in the way that you're communicating that it's not really pointing to the pretty vast discourse on this topic that has been occurring for decades, if not far longer than this. And it feels like the opportunity is far larger than kind of putting your take and perspective down, which I I agree with largely. Um but really in the process in that um by bringing all of these signatories together and getting all of this press, you're bringing attention, and I wonder if there's a way to take what you're already kind of starting with having that open collaborative document and maybe design a process that makes it feel even more collaborative, where you're less of the arbiters and you can really take advantage of this the vast amount of care and thought in this community and far beyond.
Um and I'm just really wondering what your thoughts are on like how do we make this so inclusive that it's just impossible to ignore. Agreed. And and so we have a um there's a document that's linked to it that has these theses. We also have in that section a C also that we've been adding a lot of stuff as people pointed to um various other things are related. In fact, there's one somebody uh who may even be here wrote a critique of the manifesto right after it came out, and that's linked actually directly in the C also, because I think it's important to engage with people who are you know the different perspectives on this.
So that's a great point. And I currently it's kind of hidden behind you to click through it's in a Google Doc that you know we look at every so often, but we could do more on that. And and I think that it it's it's a really good question. Obviously, you know, um part of sort of this idea of resonance is in involving community and actually having a really active community. The you know the the simple reality, and I agree, like the more that we can do to to make it a fully collaborative effort as opposed to you know something that is that is gatekeeped in in any way is good.
The reality is that as soon as you start building community is that you then suddenly have to do some level of moderation and control and everything like that. And uh as someone maybe has has suggested in the past that content moderation gets impossible at a certain level. Um and so the the reality was like we put this together kind of on a whim, where it's like this group conversation that we were having, let's put it out in the world. We expected nobody to pay attention to it, and now we're suddenly we're in a situation where a whole bunch of people paid attention to it.
So we're sort of figuring that out, but it is a really valid point and one that we should be thinking about. Um obviously it's also something where we have things like atproto, which is about building community and collaborative discussion and something where I think we can start to do some more on that. So I appreciate you calling it out. I think you're exactly right, but like give it give us a little bit of time. But but yes. Yeah. Uh yeah, this might not be a short question, but I just want to maybe be a bit provocative and thank you for your point and also just yeah, your your work on on raising attention about this.
Uh one word that wasn't in this discussion, at least I didn't hear is like capitalism. And how much is of all of what we're seeing in tech today is just downstream, it's capitalism doing business as usual. And are new alternatives gonna be some kind of post-capitalist future, or can they live together? Can it be capitalism where VCs suddenly change their minds and decide they want to be pro-social? Like what are you envisioning? That's a great question to have after we're already over time because the answer to that is really long and really involved. And I've been like trying to work on a giant paper which possibly might turn into a book just to answer that question, kind of.
Um the short version is that um well, there is no short version of this. Yeah, it that is the question that goes to the heart of this. How many of these things go back to different things? I do think that there is a world in which the incentive structure of capitalism does work towards a resonant future, but you have to be very conscious about it and you have to think about it, and you also have to have a long time horizon. There's a lot in there that I think is is time horizon dependent. Um then you have to deal with that factor.
And I think a lot of the problems that we come across right now are the fact that everybody is sort of focused on a three-month to one year time horizon. You can change that. And there are there are things structurally that we can do that keep the sort of incentive structure of free market to incentivize people to experiment and do different things and build cool things that find value in the world, uh and something that is actually good for humanity, but it there are some other structural changes. There's there's a lot more, but really quickly because we're definitely over time, but that the um Eric Reese has a new book coming out relatively soon that's about this, and I think is excellent and very important.
And the um it makes the case. I do think that capitalism is compatible if you have a long enough time horizon that write structural things, which I don't think we currently do. But yeah, one last person, but we're already over time. Okay. Um so uh thank you. Really excited to be here and to listen to you all. Uh the biggest thing that I notice as I read through the manifesto that seems to be missing that I'm I'm going to be leaving comments is uh we experience technology and computing through our bodies. And those bodies have needs uh that change over time.
And it's important that when when we talk of uh an example of this is this discussion of conflict or you know the importance of friction. Friction works for certain people. For other people, it means that their brains literally can't get past or into something. So um and I recognize that one of the purposes of a manifesto is to sometimes be very broad. Um and yet we know that all of the all of the all of the issues that exist in this country are in the details and this and this thing. And so I'm interested in in seeing how this what you are thinking about, how this turns into maybe you the resident community manifesto can't can't be something that stands by itself.
Maybe there are like 10 other manifestos that live underneath that, related to different pieces, you know, to help folks orient inside of a larger and greater concept. I'm wondering how you all are thinking about that. Um Yes. I mean that that is part of the why part of the reason why we thought of this as sort of starting a conversation. Because, you know, we were a group of people, we have you know the perspective that we have and and the thoughts that we have, but again, as I sort of said, like we know we don't have all the answers.
And so perspectives like that and calling out these different things and saying like there are sort of sub-arguments or or you know, whole areas of discussion that that we should be paying attention to but are linked back to the larger concept. I think absolutely, and I think that's an important part of the conversation and understanding you know what are the other things that we need to think through to make this re reality you know exist. Uh I think that's that's really important. So thank you very much for joining us. Uh I just wanted to say uh this is exactly part of the thing that we're gonna try and curate in um the Atmosphere is that um not everything is going to be atproto, because atproto is not the BL and end all.
atproto is not the world. And so really appreciate that you came in and shared this with this community and hope that there's lots of flow back and forth between these things. Thank you.