Why I Didn’t Sign the Resonant Computing Manifesto: The Foundations Need Work

A Design Justice-Informed Critique of the Resonant Computing Manifesto

I appreciate the intention behind the Resonant Computing Manifesto. It names many harms perpetuated in today’s digital landscape and gestures toward a more humane, life-giving approach to building technology. My decision not to sign is not a rejection of its aspirations. It comes from wanting the manifesto to live up to its own promise and facilitate the kinds of change its writers and signatories aspire to.

In its current form, the manifesto doesn't offer clear actions in service of the principles it defines. While they are evocative, the document doesn't yet specify pathways for practice, governance, or accountability. More importantly, the document doesn't meaningfully foreground marginalized people or communities. Plurality without intersectional awareness risks being hollow at best and self-undermining at worst. And the manifesto never names power or what redistribution of power would be required for ‘resonance’ to be possible. For these reasons, I found reading the Resonant Computing Manifesto to be somewhat dissonant.

These were my initial reactions, before I did any deeper analysis. What follows is a critique informed by the principles of design justice, a framework that centers those most harmed as decision-makers, to speak to how the manifesto could be a more accountable and capable framework for shifting how computing is practiced.

Harms are named, power differentials are not

The manifesto critiques alienation, attention hijacking, and loss of meaning. These are real harms, but they don't arise spontaneously. They emerge from ownership structures, incentive systems, surveillance economies, and institutional practices that concentrate power and unevenly distribute risk and harms onto affected people and communities, workers, and environments.

By treating harm as a generalized human condition, the manifesto sidesteps the central questions: Who holds decision-making, ownership, and governance power? How are these forms of power exercised through infrastructure, capital, and policy? And what redistribution of power is required for this vision of “resonant computing” to become possible?

Without this analysis, the manifesto’s principles risk being absorbed into the same systems they aim to challenge. Terms like ‘private,’ ‘dedicated,’ and ‘prosocial’ can be deployed to legitimize enclosure, concentration of control, and unaccountable personalization by organizations whose underlying structures remain extractive. A manifesto that wants to reshape computing must speak directly to the power arrangements that define computing today. This abstraction of harm from its political and economic causes is reinforced by the manifesto’s focus on AI as a locus of change rather than on the political economy of data itself.

Plurality without intersectionality collapses into universalism

The manifesto relies on a universal “we,” describing shared human needs and shared digital experience at some points, and at others, the writers and signatories of the manifesto. This erases the disproportionate harms imposed on specific communities through surveillance, labor exploitation, inaccessibility, predatory moderation, data extraction, algorithmic governance, and environmental extraction. Without naming race, gender, disability, class, migration, queerness, or coloniality, the document treats plurality as a stylistic commitment rather than a structural one.

Plurality that does not engage intersectionality is not plurality. It's a softened universalism that re-centers those already most empowered to design and benefit from “resonant” systems. If the aim is to create digital environments that genuinely sustain life, the manifesto needs to specify whose safety and agency anchor its commitments. Otherwise the “plural” principle risks reinforcing existing hierarchies under the guise of inclusion. This is a common pattern in technology ethics discourse that treats inclusion as representation while questions of power, governance, and material impact remain unaddressed.

An agency-grounded and justice-informed revision would name the communities most targeted by current harms in computing and require that their safety thresholds, refusal rights, and governance participation constrain what qualifies as ‘resonant’ design.

Agency is assigned to designers, not communities

This abstraction carries through into how responsibility and agency are assigned. Although the manifesto foregrounds “people” and “communities,” the only clearly defined subject is the designer, founder, or developer who chooses to align with these principles. The communities who are most affected by computing’s harms appear as rhetorical referents rather than decision-making agents. In practice, personalized computing tends to happen TO people or FOR people rather than with them.

The document does not describe:

• How marginalized communities lead, govern, inform, or veto design decisions.
• What forms of accountability designers owe to affected stakeholder groups.
• What refusal, exit, or non-participation rights communities retain when systems claim to serve them, and how those rights are enforced in practice.
• How communal ownership, participatory governance, or co-creation are enacted as architectural priorities.

Justice-oriented design requires that those most impacted by systems have real power in shaping them. Without explicit mechanisms, the manifesto implicitly preserves the same designer-centric orientation it critiques in the broader tech industry.

Principles without commitments are functionally symbolic

The call to sign the manifesto is not coupled with any explicit commitments beyond calls to cocreate "Resonant Computing Theses". The principles themselves don't directly translate into actions, governance decisions, participation expectations, or accountability structures. Adaptability without governance avoids the necessary work of deciding whose needs set boundaries and how harms are weighed against each other and addressed. At minimum, an actionable commitment would specify what signers agree to do before deployment, what they will keep doing while systems evolve in the world, and what they owe affected communities when harms occur. Without these, signing becomes a symbolic affinity gesture rather than a meaningful shift in practice.

To become actionable, the manifesto would need to:

• Translate principles into concrete behaviors, design approaches, and organizational decision frameworks.
• Identify practices that are incompatible with the principles (e.g., funding structures, data ownership models, "move fast and break things", etc).
• Ask signers to commit to specific forms of alignment, learning, and refusal of activity that go against the principles.
• Offer examples of how teams might implement plural, intersectional, and community-led governance.

Right now there is a mismatch between the scale of the critique offered by the manifesto and the modesty of the invitation to participate. If signing is intended to mean anything, it should mean committing to specific governance and accountability practices, not just endorsing a set of principles.

Principles conflict and responsibility is left undefined

The principles (private, dedicated, plural, adaptable, prosocial) are individually compelling but not always compatible. Privacy protections that limit data sharing can conflict with prosocial goals like moderation, abuse response, and collective safety. Individual tailoring through feeds and recommendation systems can diverge from collective safety. Plurality, without explicit justice constraints, predictably produces outcomes that undermine safety and equity, while failing to specify who is responsible for intervening.

The manifesto presents these principles as harmonious, rendering 'prosocial' aspirational rather than operative. A justice-centered approach requires articulating how conflicts are navigated and whose interests set constraints. For example, when individual preference conflicts with the safety of marginalized groups, who decides how to proceed? Which harms are acted on, which are tolerated, and who makes those calls?

Naming these tensions creates clarity and trust. Ignoring them obscures trade-offs that will inevitably surface.

Without constraints, the manifesto is easy to co-opt

Because the manifesto lacks intersectional grounding, power analysis, and structural commitments, it's easy to adopt as branding. Well-resourced organizations could integrate its language without altering ownership models, labor relations, data practices, or accountability structures.

If the manifesto intends to describe a meaningful alternative to the status quo of computing, it should design for resistance to co-optation. This includes specifying:

• Funding and governance structures aligned with the principles.
• Practices that violate the principles.
• How signers hold each other accountable.
• What refusal looks like in the face of profit pressures, political pressures, or institutional inertia.

Without such boundaries, the manifesto risks becoming a vocabulary for ethics washing and virtue signaling rather than a tool for transformation.

What signing should commit us to

The Resonant Computing Manifesto contains a real desire for computing that supports human flourishing. To reach that aim, it needs to name who is most harmed by existing systems, how power operates, and what concrete changes are required in design, governance, and practice.

These things would expand the manifesto's potency rather than limit its potential. This is the difference between a statement of philosophical alignment and a clear political commitment. It gives signers something to do beyond "figure it out". It creates conditions where plurality has meaning, where communities have agency, and where builders are accountable to more than their own good intentions.

A manifesto that aims to reshape computing should help people shape how they align with each other, act together, and share responsibility. Aligning the document with Design Justice Principles would move it toward that goal and make its aspirations materially achievable.

-Lyre Calliope

Postscript: A final note on AI that didn't fit into the above: This manifesto could easily have been written 15-20 years ago by merely changing every instance of "AI" to read "Big Data". The focus on Artificial Intelligence obscures root causes and narrows the opportunities for expanding collective agency that breaking down Big Data regimes would facilitate. Given the scope this manifesto is meant to speak to and inspire action towards, LLMs are a feature. Big Data is the elephant in the room. Or at least one of them.