Resonant Computing

Resonant Computing is a 2025 declaration and emerging movement arguing for technology designed to "speak to our deeper values" rather than to exploit attention. The statement sets out five principles — private, dedicated, plural, adaptable, prosocial — and positions personal-scale AI as the missing ingredient for software that can adapt to the individual without standardising the individual to fit it.

The declaration was drafted by Maggie Appleton, Geoffrey Litt, Alex Komoroske, Daniel Barcay, Samuel Arbesman, Rob Hardy, and others, and released in November 2025. Its philosophical reference is architect Christopher Alexander's notion of "quality without a name" — environments that feel inherently alive — extended into the design of software. Among the several hundred signatories are Bruce Schneier, Lawrence Lessig, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Kelly, and Alan Kay, representing a convergence of free-software, indie-web, and AI-research lineages around a shared critique of platform scale.

Resonant Computing is the latest articulation of a long line of arguments that runs through Illich's convivial tools, the cypherpunk manifesto tradition, and the free-software movement: tools should expand the agency of the person using them, not the agency of the company providing them. Its specific addition is to frame the question for the AI moment — what does software look like when personalisation can be cheap and yet not require centralisation? The risk it shares with its predecessors is that "values-aligned" labels become marketing while the underlying business incentives stay unchanged.