We talked yesterday about how newborn vaccinations for hepatitis B were on the agenda for this latest meeting at ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. You likely know all this already, but RFK Jr. fired all ACIP panel members earlier this year, replacing them with hand-picked anti-vaxxer quack-jobs who are aligned with Kennedy’s anti-medicine, anti-science stances on vaccines. No matter the nonsense you hear out of Kennedy’s grumbly mouth, these are deeply unserious people that have been given an enormous responsibility that they are in no way qualified to have. ACIP recommendations are really important, with its guidance driving everything from what private insurers will or are mandated to cover, guiding medical professionals on how to advise their patients, and guiding the public on the types of immunization decisions they ought to be making.
ACIP just told all of those groups that whether or not newborns catch hep B and/or ultimately reach an untimely and painful death is a personal choice they should discuss with their doctors. Doctors that may now advise against vaccination within 24 hours of birth.
On Friday morning, the ACIP voted 8-3 to remove its previous recommendation that all children in the U.S. be vaccinated against hepatitis B starting at birth. In its place, the panel is endorsing “individual-based decision-making” for determining when most children should get their first hepatitis B shot. Many outside groups and experts have sharply criticized the ACIP’s about-face, noting that scant credible data was presented to justify such a dramatic reversal.
“If that recommendation goes forward, it will be without evidence and will ignore over 30 years of existing evidence and gambles with the safety of children,” James Campbell, vice chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics, told Gizmodo.
CDC staff and outside experts tried. They really did. They explained what this disease is, what is does, how infectious it is, and how the mass immunization program starting in the early 90s saved thousands of children from infection, from long term complications, and an ultimately early death for some. Here is one simple chart that CDC staff presented to ACIP earlier this year on the matter.
How in the actual hell do you look at that chart and decide vaccinations have to go? Like measles, this is another disease for which we were on the cusp of achieving elimination status. 90% of infections in children become chronic infections. Something like 25% of those infected as children will develop liver cancer or cirrhosis. The fatality rate for both is enormous, even as deaths during the acute phase of the disease are low. In other words, this is a disease that rips years of life away from those infected long after their initial symptoms disappear. Worse, most infections are asymptomatic during the acute infection stage, meaning many of the infected don’t even know it until they get cancer or cirrhosis.
And ACIP has decided we need more of this.
For children born to mothers who test negative for antibodies to hepatitis B, the ACIP is now pushing for an individualized approach, one where “parents should consult with health care providers and decide when or if their child will begin the HBV vaccine series.” And for families who choose not to start vaccination at birth, the ACIP recommended that vaccination not start any earlier than two months (the ACIP offered no clear rationale or evidence for this specific cut-off).
This is incredibly stupid. Even if the CDC adopts the recommendation, I am sure most doctors will still recommend vaccination at birth, since they can read the damned chart above as well or better than I can. But it won’t be all doctors. What insurance companies do as a result of this change is anyone’s guess. Some states are already stating that they’ll go against ACIP’s change and follow the old guidance.
But again, it won’t be all of them. I am confident that a non-zero number of children will get infected with hepatitis B and die an early death as a result of this. I’m confident that some newborns will suffer chronically from the disease as a result of this.
RFK Jr. is harming the health of American newborns. Full stop. Period, paragraph. Hey, Bill Cassidy: anytime you want to do something about this, feel free.
So Netflix has announced that it’s buying Warner Brothers Discovery (including HBO) for a whopping $82.7 billion. As we’ve well covered, it’s the latest in a long series of pointless Warner mergers stretching back to the 2001 AOL acquisition, which all resulted in oodles of chaos, price hikes, layoffs, and generally a steady erosion in product quality.
Netflix’s deal includes a $5.8 billion breakup fee and promises to maintain Warner Bros. current operations, “including theatrical releases.” The deal doesn’t include Warner Bros Discovery’s struggling linear networks business (CNN, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+) which Netflix wisely wanted nothing to do with. Those are scheduled to be spun out next year into their own sagging sub-company.
“Netflix also made its pitch to filmmakers and creatives, writing that “by uniting Netflix’s member experience and global reach with Warner Bros.’ renowned franchises and extensive library, the Company will create greater value for talent — offering more opportunities to work with beloved intellectual property, tell new stories and connect with a wider audience than ever before.”
But as we’ve seen the last three or four times Warner Brothers has been acquired, pre-merger promises mean absolutely nothing. The massive debt created by these acquisitions inevitably results in panicked cost cutting, which usually involves mass layoffs, (even bigger) price hikes, and a general cannibalization of brand and product quality. It happens over and over again.
Of the suitors that could have bought Warner Brothers Discovery (Comcast/NBC and Larry Ellison/CBS/Paramount), Netflix is probably the “best” option. They are (for now) the least up Trump’s ass of the three bidders; and generally may retain more of the core Warner Brothers Discovery infrastructure and staff due to fewer existing redundancies.
That’s not to say the deal will be good, necessarily. If we lived in a non-corrupt country with functioning regulators, the government likely wouldn’t allow any additional consolidation in mainstream corporate media, as the results to date have been nothing but harmful for labor, consumers, and markets. These companies’ journalism arms, if you haven’t noticed, like to downplay or ignore this fact in coverage.
Play a little game with me at home: if you’re reading a story about this deal, stop and notice if the journalist and outlet, at any point, mentions the fact that the decades’ worth of past variants of Warner deals were utterly disastrous for labor, consumers, creativity, and healthy markets. Because that’s kind of important context if your job is informing the public of the truth!
The bungled AT&T acquisition of Warner and DirecTV alone resulted in a massive layoff spree including 50,000 people. But when the consolidated corporate press covers the latest merger, that’s not mentioned. Why is that choice made editorially, do you wager?
The Trump administration couldn’t give any less of a shit about antitrust or consolidated corporate power; they just want leverage over Netflix and/or to make sure their friend Larry Ellison can acquire HBO and CNN. And they’re mad at Netflix because they put some gay people in shows about the military. The Ellisons may acquire the spun off TV assets, but they may also still want to leverage Trump to get much more.
So I would not be surprised that if in a few weeks or so you see Trump’s FCC lackey Brendan Carr launch some kind of fake inquiry into “irregularities in the bidding process,” where he talks a lot about Netflix’s consolidated power “not being in the public interest.” The goal will be twofold: to force ownership over to Ellison, or at least to (as we’ve seen with CBS mergers) force Netflix to kiss Donald’s ass.
If you recall, the first Trump administration sued to stop the AT&T Time Warner deal. That was heralded as a rare example of the administration actually caring about consolidated corporate power by the press; but it turned out it was mostly because Rupert Murdoch had his own acquisition offer for CNN rejected and wanted to scuttle the deal.
Keep your eyes peeled for regulatory shenanigans. Even if the Trump administration doesn’t abuse FCC and DOJ power to help Ellison, they’ll certainly abuse regulatory merger approval power to try and force Netflix to kiss their asses in new and problematic ways (see: CBS, Verizon). And Netflix, no stranger to throwing ethics under the bridge when convenient, will very likely be happy to oblige.
A cofounder of a Bay Area “Stop AI” activist group abandoned its commitment to nonviolence, assaulted another member, and made statements that left the group worried he might obtain a weapon to use against AI researchers. The threats prompted OpenAI to lock down its San Francisco offices a few weeks ago. In researching this movement, I came across statements that he made about how almost any actions he took were justifiable, since he believed OpenAI was going to “kill everyone and every living thing on earth.” Those are detailed below.
I think it’s worth exploring the radicalization process and the broader context of AI Doomerism. We need to confront the social dynamics that turn abstract fears of technology into real-world threats against the people building it.
OpenAI’s San Francisco Offices Lockdown
On November 21, 2025, Wired reported that OpenAI’s San Francisco offices went into lockdown after an internal alert about a “Stop AI” activist. The activist allegedly expressed interest in “causing physical harm to OpenAI employees” and may have tried to acquire weapons.
The article did not mention his name but hinted that, before his disappearance, he had stated he was “no longer part of Stop AI.”1 On November 22, 2025, the activist group’s Twitter account posted that it was Sam Kirchner, the cofounder of “Stop AI.”
According to Wired’s reporting
A high-ranking member of the global security team said [in OpenAI Slack] “At this time, there is no indication of active threat activity, the situation remains ongoing and we’re taking measured precautions as the assessment continues.” Employees were told to remove their badges when exiting the building and to avoid wearing clothing items with the OpenAI logo.
“Stop AI” provided more details on the events leading to OpenAI’s lockdown:
Earlier this week, one of our members, Sam Kirchner, betrayed our core values by assaulting another member who refused to give him access to funds. His volatile, erratic behavior and statements he made renouncing nonviolence caused the victim of his assault to fear that he might procure a weapon that he could use against employees of companies pursuing artificial superintelligence.
We prevented him from accessing the funds, informed the police about our concerns regarding the potential danger to AI developers, and expelled him from Stop AI. We disavow his actions in the strongest possible terms.
Later in the day of the assault, we met with Sam; he accepted responsibility and agreed to publicly acknowledge his actions. We were in contact with him as recently as the evening of Thursday Nov 20th. We did not believe he posed an immediate threat, or that he possessed a weapon or the means to acquire one.
However, on the morning of Friday Nov 21st, we found his residence in West Oakland unlocked and no sign of him. His current whereabouts and intentions are unknown to us; however, we are concerned Sam Kirchner may be a danger to himself or others. We are unaware of any specific threat that has been issued.
We have taken steps to notify security at the major US corporations developing artificial superintelligence. We are issuing this public statement to inform any other potentially affected parties.”
A “Stop AI” activist named Remmelt Ellen wrote that Sam Kirchner “left both his laptop and phone behind and the door unlocked.” “I hope he’s alive,” he added.
Early December, the SF Standardreported that the “cops [are] still searching for ‘volatile’ activist whose death threats shut down OpenAI office.” Per this coverage, the San Francisco police are warning that he could be armed and dangerous. “He threatened to go to several OpenAI offices in San Francisco to ‘murder people,’ according to callers who notified police that day.”
A Bench Warrant for Kirchner’s Arrest
When I searched for any information that had not been reported before, I found a revealing press release. It invited the press to a press conference on the morning of Kirchner’s disappearance:
“Stop AI Defendants Speak Out Prior to Their Trial for Blocking Doors of Open AI.”
When: November 21, 2025, 8:00 AM.
Where: Steps in front of the courthouse (San Francisco Superior Court).
Who: Stop AI defendants (Sam Kirchner, Wynd Kaufmyn, and Guido Reichstadter), their lawyers, and AI experts.
Sam Kirchner is quoted as saying, “We are acting on our legal and moral obligation to stop OpenAI from developing Artificial Superintelligence, which is equivalent to allowing the murder [of] people I love as well as everyone else on earth.”
Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned. That Friday morning, Sam Kirchner went missing, triggering the OpenAI lockdown.
Later, the SF Standard confirmed the trial angle of this story: “Kirchner was not present for a Nov. 21 court hearing, and a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.”
“Stop AI” – a Bay Area-Centered “Civil Resistance” Group
“Stop AI” calls itself a “non-violent civil resistance group” or a “non-violent activist organization.” The group’s focus is on stopping AI development, especially the race to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and “Superintelligence.” Their worldview is extremely doom-heavy, and their slogans include: “AI Will Kill Us All,” “Stop AI or We’re All Gonna Die,” and “Close OpenAI or We’re All Gonna Die!”
According to a “Why Stop AI is barricading OpenAI” post on the LessWrong forum from October 2024, the group is inspired by climate groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, but focused on “AI extinction risk,” or in their words, “risk of extinction.” Sam Kirchner explained in an interview: “Our primary concern is extinction. It’s the primary emotional thing driving us: preventing our loved ones, and all of humanity, from dying.”
Unlike the rest of the “AI existential risk” ecosystem, which is often well-funded by effective altruism billionaires such as Dustin Moskovitz (Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy) and Jaan Tallinn (Survival and Flourishing Fund), this specific group is not a formal nonprofit or funded NGO, but rather a loosely organized grassroots group of volunteer-run activism. They made their financial situation pretty clear when the “Stop AI” Twitter account replied to a question with: “We are fucking poor, you dumb bitch.”2
According to The Register, “STOP AI has four full-time members at the moment (in Oakland) and about 15 or so volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area who help out part-time.”
Since its inception, “Stop AI” has had two central organizers: Guido Reichstadter and Sam Kirchner (the current fugitive). According to The Register and the Bay Area Current, Guido Reichstadter has worked as a jeweler for 20 years. He has an undergraduate degree in physics and math. Reichstadter’s prior actions include climate change and abortion-rights activism.
In June 2022, Reichstadter climbed the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., to protest the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Per the news coverage, he said, “It’s time to stop the machine.” “Reichstadter hopes the stunt will inspire civil disobedience nationwide in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
Reichstadter moved to the Bay Area from Florida around 2024 explicitly to organize civil disobedience against AGI development via “Stop AI.” Recently, he undertook a hunger strike outside Anthropic’s San Francisco office for 30 days.
Sam Kirchner worked as a DoorDash driver and, before that, as an electrical technician. He has a background in mechanical and electrical engineering. He moved to San Francisco from Seattle, cofounded “Stop AI,” and “stayed in a homeless shelter for four months.”
AI Doomerism’s Rhetoric
The group’s rationale included this claim (published on their account on August 29, 2025): “Humanity is walking off a cliff,” with AGI leading to “ASI covering the earth in datacenters.”
As 1a3orn pointed out, the original “Stop AI” website said we risked “recursive self-improvement” and doom from any AI models trained with more than 10^23 FLOPs. (The group dropped this prediction at some point) Later, in a (now deleted) “Stop AI Proposal,” the group asked to “Permanently ban ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) on any computer above 10^25 FLOPS. Violations of the immediate 10^25 ANN FLOPS cap will be punishable by life in prison.”
To be clear, tens of current AI models were trained with over 10^25 FLOPs.
In a “For Humanity” podcast episode with Sam Kirchner, “Go to Jail to Stop AI” (episode #49, October 14, 2024), he said: “We don’t really care about our criminal records because if we’re going to be dead here pretty soon or if we hand over control which will ensure our future extinction here in a few years, your criminal record doesn’t matter.”
The podcast promoted this episode in a (now deleted) tweet, quoting Kirchner: “I’m willing to DIE for this.” “I want to find an aggressive prosecutor out there who wants to charge OpenAI executives with attempted murder of eight billion people. Yes. Literally, why not? Yeah, straight up. Straight up. What I want to do is get on the news.”
After Kirchner’s disappearance, the podcast host and founder of “GuardRailNow” and the “AI Risk Network,” John Sherman, deleted this episode from podcast platforms (Apple, Spotify) and YouTube. Prior to its removal, I downloaded the video (length 01:14:14).
Sherman also produced an emotional documentary with “Stop AI” titled “Near Midnight in Suicide City” (December 5, 2024, episode #55. See its trailer and promotion on the Effective Altruism Forum). It’s now removed from podcast platforms and YouTube, though I have a copy in my archive (length 1:29:51). It gathered 60k views before its removal.
The group’s radical rhetoric was out in the open. “If AGI developers were treated with reasonable precaution proportional to the danger they are cognizantly placing humanity in by their venal and reckless actions, many would have a bullet put through their head,” wrote Guido Reichstadter in September 2024.
The above screenshot appeared in a Techdirt piece, “2024: AI Panic Flooded the Zone Leading to a Backlash.” The warning signs were there:
Also, like in other doomsday cults, the stress of believing an apocalypse is imminent wears down the ability to cope with anything else. Some are getting radicalized to a dangerous level, playing with the idea of killing AI developers (if that’s what it takes to “save humanity” from extinction).
Both PauseAI and StopAI stated that they are non-violent movements that do not permit “even joking about violence.” That’s a necessary clarification for their various followers. There is, however, a need for stronger condemnation. The murder of the UHC CEO showed us that it only takes one brainwashed individual to cross the line.
In early December 2024, I expressed my concern on Twitter: “Is the StopAI movement creating the next Unabomber?” The screenshot of “Getting arrested is nothing if we’re all gonna die” was taken from Sam Kirchner.
Targeting OpenAI
The main target of their civil-disobedience-style actions was OpenAI. The group explained that their “actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on earth.” In a tweet promoting the October blockade, Guido Reichstadter claimed about OpenAI: “These people want to see you dead.”
“My co-organizers Sam and Guido are willing to put their body on the line by getting arrested repeatedly,” said Remmelt Ellen. “We are that serious about stopping AI development.”
The “Stop AI” event page on Luma list further protests in front of OpenAI: on January 10, 2025; April 18, 2025; May 23, 2025 (coverage); July 25, 2025; and October 24, 2025. On March 2, 2025, they had a protest against Waymo.
On February 22, 2025, three “Stop AI” protesters were arrested for trespassing after barricading the doors to the OpenAI offices and allegedly refusing to leave the company’s property. It was covered by a local TV station. Golden Gate Xpress documented the activists detained in the police van: Jacob Freeman, Derek Allen, and Guido Reichstadter. Officers pulled out bolt cutters and cut the lock and chains on the front doors. In a Bay Area Current article, “Why Bay Area Group Stop AI Thinks Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Us All,” Kirchner is quoted as saying, “The work of the scientists present” is “putting my family at risk.”
October 20, 2025 was the first day of the jury trial of Sam Kirchner, Guido Reichstadter, Derek Allen, and Wynd Kaufmyn.
On November 3, 2025, “Stop AI”’s public defender served OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with a subpoena at a speaking event at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. The group claimed responsibility for the onstage interruption, saying the goal was to prompt the jury to ask Altman “about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”
Public Messages to Sam Kirchner
“Stop AI” stated it is “deeply committed to nonviolence“ and “We wish no harm on anyone, including the people developing artificial superintelligence.” In a separate tweet, “Stop AI” wrote to Sam: “Please let us know you’re okay. As far as we know, you haven’t yet crossed a line you can’t come back from.”
John Sherman, the “AI Risk Network” CEO, pleaded, “Sam, do not do anything violent. Please. You know this is not the way […] Please do not, for any reason, try to use violence to try to make the world safer from AI risk. It would fail miserably, with terrible consequences for the movement.”
Rhetoric’s Ramifications
Taken together, the “imminent doom” rhetoric fosters conditions in which vulnerable individuals could be dangerously radicalized, echoing the dynamics seen in past apocalyptic movements.
In “A Cofounder’s Disappearance—and the Warning Signs of Radicalization”, City Journal summarized: “We should stay alert to the warning signs of radicalization: a disaffected young person, consumed by abstract risks, convinced of his own righteousness, and embedded in a community that keeps ratcheting up the moral stakes.”
“The Rationality Trap – Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?” described this exact radicalization process, noting how the more extreme figures (e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky)3 set the stakes and tone: “Apocalyptic consequentialism, pushing the community to adopt AI Doomerism as the baseline, and perceived urgency as the lever. The world-ending stakes accelerated the ‘ends-justify-the-means’ reasoning.”
We already have a Doomers “murder cult” called the Zizians and their story is way more bizarre than anything you’ve read here. Like, awfully more extreme. And, hopefully, such things should remain rare.
What we should discuss is the dangers of such an extreme (and misleading) AI discourse. If human extinction from AI is just around the corner, based on the Doomers’ logic, all their suggestions are “extremely small sacrifices to make.” Unfortunately, the situation we’re in is: “Imagined dystopian fears have turned into real dystopian ‘solutions.’”
This is still an evolving situation. As of this writing, Kirchner’s whereabouts remain unknown.
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Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, Ph.D. (@DrTechlash), is a communication researcher and author of “The TECHLASH and Tech Crisis Communication” book and the “AI Panic” newsletter.
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Endnotes
Don’t mix StopAI with other activist groups, such as PauseAI or ControlAI. Please see this brief guide on the Transformer Substack. ↩︎
This type of rhetoric wasn’t a one-off. Stop AI’s account also wrote, “Fuck CAIS and @DrTechlash” (CAIS is the Center for AI Safety, and @DrTechlash is, well, yours truly). Another target was Oliver Habryka, the CEO at Lightcone Infrastructure/LessWrong, whom they told, “Eat a pile of shit, you pro-extinction murderer.” ↩︎
Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), recently published a book titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.” It had heavy promotion, but you can read here “Why The ‘Doom Bible’ Left Many Reviewers Unconvinced.” ↩︎
The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it’s willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulingsagainst the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence.
Like it or not, MAGA faithful, immigrants have rights. They have the rights natural born citizens have access to, which is certainly something the Trump administration doesn’t think is true, even though it is.
The administration got a big win from the Supreme Court in terms of violating Fourth Amendment rights. In a solo concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh made it clear the majority believed there is nothing wrong with rounding up people simply because they look a bit more brown than white on the outside.
Meanwhile, ICE pretends it’s still targeting criminals, even when all data says otherwise. It continues to claim it’s going after known criminals but its paperwork doesn’t match its public statements. If it was really going after criminals, it should be able to obtain arrest warrants. The fact that it rarely has anything more than administrative warrants (self-issued warrants without judicial backing) in its possession at any given time contradicts its assertions about its alleged “targeted” enforcement efforts.
The Trump administration continues to get railed on the regular by federal courts. The latest is no exception:
A federal judge in Denver on Tuesday ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant, unless the detainee posed a flight risk, the latest in a string of lower-court decisions rebuking President Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics.
[…]
In Colorado, Judge Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that immigration agents had acted unlawfully by arresting and detaining immigrants — some for as long as 100 days — without showing the required probable cause that they posed a threat of fleeing.
This decision aligns itself with several others. Unfortunately, the body of judicial work ruling against Trump’s anti-immigration programs hasn’t really changed anything. Many rulings have been appealed. What has yet to be heard by the Supreme Court has often been given a pass by appellate judges.
And even if a court rules definitively against Trump, there’s no reason to believe this administration will act in accordance with the ruling. Emil Bove — the former DOJ lawyer who told prosecutors to tell the courts to fuck themselves if they opposed Trump — is now sitting on the Third Circuit. Other rulings delivered by federal courts have been immediately stayed by appellate courts who normally would have allowed things to play out at the lower level before undercutting their findings.
What’s happening here affects a lot of rights beyond the immediate recognition of Fourth Amendment incursion. These warrantless arrests are often followed by indefinite detentions that involve violations of Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
This government is plain nasty. It has zero interest in the rule of law. It wants to be the bully on the block at all times. If the system of checks and balances rears it head, the administration will either ignore the concerns raised or engage in unprecedented attacks on the judiciary itself. Pointing out the incompetency of Trump administration thugs is about as useless as criticizing the GPA of the person beating your skull to pulp with a baseball bat. The end result is the same. Any legitimate points raised mid-beating won’t do anything to reduce the CTE trauma. It’s best to assume bad faith from the beginning because this is the administration’s sole operating speed.
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Everyone’s pissed at the tech industry. And for good reason. The term enshittification is super popular for many valid reasons. Companies that used to provide real value, are now focused on extracting more value from users, rather than improving their products and services. People used to be excited by new innovations. There was a time when many people felt more fulfilled after using new innovations that helped them do new things, communicate with new people, create new wonderful creations.
That feels like an unfortunately rare experience, so much so that some have forgotten about it entirely.
Remember when you’d use something new and feel… good? Empowered, even? When tech made you feel like you could do more, create more, connect more meaningfully?
Yeah, that’s mostly gone. We’ve replaced it with engagement metrics, growth hacks, and AI slop. The tech industry spent the last decade optimizing for shareholder value and calling it innovation.
But, it doesn’t need to be that way.
We can live in a world where technology works for us, not against us. Where we get value from it, rather than having it extract value from us.
So a group of us—organized by entrepreneur Alex Komoroske, who wrote for us this summer about why centralized AI isn’t inevitable—decided to articulate what the alternative actually looks like. Not just “tech should be better” hand-waving that we sometimes see, but actual principles for building technology that works for people instead of extracting from them.
We call this quality resonance. It’s the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deeper values. It’s a spark of recognition, a sense that we’re being invited to lean in, to participate. Unlike the digital junk food of the day, the more we engage with what resonates, the more we’re left feeling nourished, grateful, alive. As individuals, following the breadcrumbs of resonance helps us build meaningful lives. As communities, companies, and societies, cultivating shared resonance helps us break away from perverse incentives, and play positive-sum infinite games together.
For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you had to build for the average user, sanding away the edge cases. In many ways, this is why our digital world has come to resemble the sterile, deadening architecture that Alexander spent his career pushing back against.
That word—resonance—is doing real work here. It’s the opposite of what we’ve got now: software that leaves you feeling depleted, manipulated, or just vaguely dirty. Resonant computing is technology that makes you feel more capable, more connected, more like yourself.
This matters because the current narrative is stuck between two equally bankrupt positions: either all tech is inevitably corrupting, or we should just accelerate harder into whatever the VCs are funding this quarter. Both are bullshit. Tech can be good. It requires building for people rather than metrics. And to get there, we need to call it out and demand it.
I know that some of the more cynical among you will say that techies have always cloaked their efforts in the language of “empowering people” and “changing the world.” We don’t deny that. But we’d like to make it real, and to be able to use this conversation to remind everyone that technology can be good. If it follows certain principles.
So what does that actually mean? The manifesto lays out five principles:
Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it’s used.
Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.
Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants.
Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it.
Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.
Notice what’s not in there: no handing over all your data to billionaires, no single solution from a centralized provider, no tech bro buzzwords. What we have here are requirements that take us away from the current ecosystem. Privacy doesn’t mean Mark Zuckerberg has to better protect your data. It means systems where you control your own data. Plural means more than “sprinkle in a few more competitors,” it’s about interoperability and the ability to actually leave with ease.
The “dedicated” principle is particularly important in the age of AI. Your AI tools shouldn’t have dual loyalty to you and to a giant company. It should work for you, period. That seems obvious, but look around: how many products actually meet that bar?
This is also why we’re not just throwing this out there and walking away. Unlike the endless parade of “ethics frameworks” that companies sign onto and promptly ignore, this is meant to be a starting point. It’s kicking off a conversation as well as guidelines for building actual systems. There’s a collaborative doc where people can contribute ideas, and we’ll be talking through what this looks like in practice.
We launched this manifesto yesterday afternoon at Wired’s Big Interview event in San Francisco, and Steven Levy wrote a lovely profile about it, which we spoke about on stage:
Humanity is the glue of the five principles of resonant computing listed in the document. It politely demands that users have control of their tech tools, which should promote social value and true connection. It is, natch, resonant of the idealism that once oozed from every pore of the creators of the early microcomputer revolution and the internet boom, when what was good for the world seemed more important than building scale and maximizing the stock price. “I certainly subscribe to the principles,” says Tim O’Reilly, an early signer who has been urging those same values for years.
Komoroske and his coauthors know that their campaign is only a tiny step toward actually fixing Silicon Valley. “I am under no illusion that some manifesto will magically solve this at all,” he says. (Komoroske himself has cofounded a startup called Common Tools, still in stealth, which presumably will be resonant AF.) Instead, the authors’ goal is to energize and support a new generation of tech professionals who want to be proud of their creations. “When they’re building things, they might start taking these ideas into account,” says Masnick. “And it becomes a tool for people within companies to push back on some of the incentives.”
If nothing else, a few thousand signers would indicate to the idealists that they’re not alone—and some of them might willingly pass on opportunities to make VP and instead make the software that they’d want to use themselves.
There’s the ability to sign onto the manifesto if you’d like. We’ve been thrilled to have folks like Tim O’Reilly, Bruce Schneier, Kevin Kelly and many, many others already sign on. The reaction at the Wired event yesterday from many enthusiastic folks suggested that many more would like to sign on as well.
I’ll have Alex on the Techdirt podcast later today to dig into what this looks like in practice—how you actually build systems that meet these principles, what the tradeoffs are, and why we think this is both necessary and possible.
This was a true group effort, and I want to credit everyone who contributed: Maggie Appleton, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel Barcay, Rob Hardy, Aishwarya Khanduja, Geoffrey Litt, Brendan McCord, Bernhard Seefeld, Ivan Vendrov, Amelia Wattenberger, Zoe Weinberg, and Simon Willison. Our regular meetings brainstorming and discussing all this have been a highlight of this year.
Look, I know manifestos are cheap. They seem to come out every few months. But here’s the thing: we’re at a genuinely weird moment where the biggest players in tech have decided that user empowerment was actually the problem all along. That’s not inevitable. It’s a choice. And we can make different choices.
This feeling has “resonated” with many of the people we’ve shared it with so far, and we hope that it resonates with you as well.
Resonant computing is possible—we’ve experienced it before. The question is whether we’re willing to build it, and whether users will demand it. That’s what this is about: creating a shared language and vision for what better looks like, so we can actually build toward it instead of just complaining about enshittification.
If that resonates with you, and you think that matters, sign the manifesto. Join the conversation. Build a better, more resonant, world.
Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from UPenn media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading:
But Oliver also walked the talk. Oliver and his staff subsequently held an auction for all sorts of notable items from the show’s history, including a Bob Ross painting, a prop replica of former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai’s goofy giant coffee mug, Russell Crowe’s jock strap, a bidet signed by a member of GWAR, and a giant gold-plated re-creation of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s balls:
“All told, the auction raised nearly $1.54 million for the Public Media Bridge Fund, which is assisting local public broadcasters in temporarily finding new funds in the wake of the CPB closure.”
As we’ve noted previously, authoritarians loathe journalism. But they really loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.
A corporate media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible corruption and bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and countless others). A media that has increasingly stopped serving the public interest in loyal dedication to our increasingly unhinged extraction class.
One of the real harms of the cuts has been to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.
U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media often provides a challenge to their well-funded war on informed consensus, as Pickard has long explained.
DC lawmakers and regulators (including Democrats) have been an absolute embarrassment on building and maintaining any sort of coherent media reform strategy. The evidence of that apathy has never been less subtle. So a hearty thank you to John Oliver for giving a shit.
