Grok’s "Digital Undressing" Crisis and a Manifesto to Build a Better Internet

In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel discusses the nightmare playing out on Elon Musk’s X: Grok, the platform’s embedded AI chatbot, is being used to generate and spread nonconsensual sexualized images—often through “undressing” prompts that turn harassment into a viral game. Warzel describes how what once lived on the internet’s fringes has been supercharged by X’s distribution machine. He explains how the silence and lack of urgency isn’t just another content-moderation failure; it’s a breakdown of basic human decency, a moment that signals what happens when platforms choose chaos over stewardship. Then Charlie is joined by Mike Masnick, Alex Komoroske, and Zoe Weinberg to discuss a vision for a positive future of the internet. The trio helped write the “Resonant Computing Manifesto,” a framework for building technology that leaves people feeling nourished rather than hollow. They discuss how to combat engagement-maximizing products that hijack attention, erode agency, and creep people out through surveillance and manipulation. The conversation is both a diagnosis and a call to action: Stop only defending against the worst futures, and start articulating, designing, and demanding the kinds of digital spaces that make us more human. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:20Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

  AI should not be your friend. If you think that AI is your friend, you are on the wrong track. AI should be a tool, it should be an extension of your agency. The fact that the first manifestation of large language models in a product happens to be a chatbot that pretends to be a human, just like, it's like the aliens in Contact who say, you know, present themselves as her, you know, grandparents or whatever, so she makes sense of it. It's like, it's just a-

• 0:56Charlie Warzel?

  It's the perfect crime.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  I think we're gonna look back on it and think of chatbots as an embarrassing party trick.

• 1:08Charlie Warzel?

  Welcome to Galaxy Brain. I'm Charlie Worsell. Initially, I wanted to start something out for the new year where I wanted to just talk about some things that I've been paying attention to every week and give, you know, a bullet pointed list of stuff that I think you should pay attention to, stuff I'm covering, reporting on, before we get into our conversation today. But today, I really only have one thing, and it has been top of mind for a little less than a week, and it is something that I can't stop thinking about and that frankly, I find extremely disturbing. And I'm mad about it, honestly.

• 1:53Charlie Warzel?

  To ditch the sober journalist part, I'm just, it's infuriating. And this is what's going on on Elon Musk's X app. I don't know if you've heard about this, but Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok has been used to create just a slew of non-consensual sexualized images of people, including people who look to be minors. This has been called a, quote, "mass undressing spree." And essentially, what has happened is, a couple of weeks ago, some-

• 2:29Charlie Warzel?

  Content creators who create adult content on places like OnlyFan used Grok's app, which is infused inside of the X platform, right? You can just @Grok and ask it to prompt it to do something. And the chatbot will, you know, generate whatever. It'll make a meme for you, a photo. It will translate text. It will, you know, basically do anything like a normal chatbot would do, but it's inside of X's app. And so some of these content creators said, you know, put me in a bikini. Right, this was they were asking for this and Grok did it. And a bunch of trolls essentially took notice of this and then started prompting Grok to put tons of different people

• 3:14Charlie Warzel?

  in these compromising situations. On communities and different forums across the internet, people are trying to game the chatbot to try to get it to push the boundaries further and further and further. They're prompting it to do things like, you know, edit an image of a woman to quote, "show a cellophane bikini with white donut glaze." Really absolutely horrific and disgusting things that are these like workarounds to get it to create sexualized images. This has been happening for a long time online. There's always been, since these AI tools have come out, problems with non-consensual imagery being generated.

• 3:59Charlie Warzel?

  There are lots of so-called nudefy apps, right? That that take regular dressed photos of people and undress them. And there are communities that share these as revenge porn and use them to harass and intimidate women and all kinds of vulnerable people. And this has been a problem. People are trying to figure out the right ways to put guardrails up to stop this, to make sure that these communities get shut down, that they don't continue to prompt these these bots to do this, that trying to get these tools to stop doing this, right? And A lot of this has been happening in these small backwater parts of the internet,

• 4:43Charlie Warzel?

  and it does bubble up to the surface. But what's changed here with X and Grok is that Grok is, as I said earlier, it's baked into the platform, right? So what has essentially happened is that X, XAI, Elon Musk, they have created a distribution method and linked it with a creation method, and basically allowed for the viral distribution of these non-consensual sexual images. And it has become, in the way that it does in places like 4chan and, you know, other backwater parts of the internet, it's become a meme in this community.

• 5:24Charlie Warzel?

  And people have decided that they are going to intimidate people and generate these images out in public and operate with impunity. And so what you have is publications posting photos of celebrities, and then a bunch of people, you know, in the comments saying, @Grok, undress this person. @Grok, put them in a bikini. @Grok, put them in a swastika bikini. @Grok, put them in a swastika bikini doing a Roman salute. And then you have a photo of a celebrity in a, undressed, without their consent, in a Nazi uniform, giving a Nazi salute. This is stuff that I have seen all across the platform,

• 6:07Charlie Warzel?

  not going into strange backwater areas of it, just looking directly at it. So this is out there. Something I noticed earlier this week, we're recording this on Wednesday, there was a photo of the Swedish Deputy Prime Minister at a podium, giving, giving a talk, and a bunch of people were, you know, asking Grok, prompting Grok to put her in a bikini, etc. X and the people who work there have issued a statement saying that they're working on the guardrails for this system, that this is against their community standards and they will punish the people who are involved here.

• 6:49Charlie Warzel?

  But that doesn't really seem to be happening. Just yesterday, I was looking around and people who are asking Grok to put women in compromising photos have blue checks next to their name, which means they pay the company for a verified badge. Those people are still on the platform as of this time when I'm talking to you. So I reached out to Nikita Beer on his personal email. He's the head of product at X. And I asked, as a journalist, as a human, how someone can, in good conscience, work for a company that's willing to tolerate this type of thing? Like, what's the rationale? Who's being served? How can you tolerate your product

• 7:33Charlie Warzel?

  doing this? Do you imagine you'll be able to get this under control with the appropriate guardrails? And if not, how can you sign your name to this stuff? How is this allowed to be in the world? They did not respond. They forwarded me to their comms lead and I asked the same questions of them and they never responded back to me. I have also asked Apple and Google similar questions. How can they allow an app like this on their App Store? And they also have not gotten back to me. It feels the lack of response to this from the people who are the

• 8:18Charlie Warzel?

  stewards of this platform and the people who can exert pressure on this, including ex-employees, or investors, or Elon Musk himself, who has made jokes about the @Grok bikini photos stuff on the platform over the past week. The lack of apologizing, the lack of urgency in trying to fix this, the lack of really seeming, from my perspective, to care about this.

• 8:50Charlie Warzel?

  I think feels a bit like crossing some kind of Rubicon. This is not a standard content moderation issue. This is not, you know, a bunch of people trying to scold for something that is a part of some kind of ideology. This is like basic human decency that, uh, that we shouldn't have tools that can very easily create viral content of women and children being undressed against their will. It feels like the lowest possible bar and yet the silence, it just, it speaks volumes of what these platforms have become and what their stewards seem to think.

• 9:36Charlie Warzel?

  I would just ask of, of truly anyone who, who works at these platforms, like, how do you, how do you sleep at night? With, with this, the silence from X, from employees there who we've tried to contact, just to get some, some basic understanding of what they're doing and how, how this can be allowed. And what's, what's happening on the platform because the platform is not taking enough action to stop this, because it's still allowing this, this undressing meme to go forward. What's happened is like a culture has evolved here and that culture is

• 10:21Charlie Warzel?

  one of harassment and intimidation and, and it feels like the, the people who are doing this know that no one's going to stop them. They're doing this out in the open. They're doing it proudly. They're doing it gleefully. Something has to change here. I've been covering these platforms for 15 plus years and I've watched different people in these platforms struggle with moderation issues in good faith, in bad faith. I've watched it devolve into this idea of, you know, of politics and ideology. I watch people pledge to do things and then give up on those things.

• 11:04Charlie Warzel?

  It ebbs, it flows. The internet is chaos. I get it. But this is just different. This is a standard of human decency and like,

• 11:18Charlie Warzel?

  Social fabric and civic integrity that like you can't, you can't punt on it. You either choose to have rules and order of some kind, like a very base level, or you just, it does become full anarchy and chaos. And it seems to be that's the direction where they want to go. So if you work at X, if you're an investor, if you're somebody who can exert any influence in this situation, I would A, love to hear from you. And also, I would ask, is this okay?

• 11:59Charlie Warzel?

  Is this what you want the legacy to be?

• 12:03Charlie Warzel?

  Sorry for getting on a soapbox there, but I think it's a massive, massive story. And one that, again, I think it,

• 12:15Charlie Warzel?

  I think if this is allowed to just be the way that the internet is, then we lose something pretty fundamental. Anyhow, it's a tough way to segue there, but today's conversation is actually the opposite of all of this. I do a lot of tech criticism. I do a lot of really, sort of, you know, aggressive reporting, trying to hold tech companies to account. And that means looking at a lot of awful things and talking about a lot of awful things. But today's podcast is about something great, something that's actually hopeful that's being built.

• 12:58Charlie Warzel?

  It's about a group of technologists who've come together with a different vision for the internet, a positive vision for the internet, something that they are trying to build that can sort of lead to positive outcomes and people living like their best lives. And so this project is called the Resonant Computing Manifesto. Basic, top line idea of it is that technology should bring out the best in humanity, right? It should be something that allows people to flourish. And they have five core principles here that are essentially meant to combat the hyperscalers

• 13:38Charlie Warzel?

  and extraction of what we know as the current algorithmic internet that we all live on. And to talk about that, I've brought on Mike Masnick, Alex Komorowski, and Zoe Weinberg. They are three of the writers of the Resident Computing Manifesto. And I had them on to talk about why they came up with all this and what, if anything, we can do to change in the internet in 2026. But first, a quick break.

• 14:10Speaker 00

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• 14:43Speaker 01

  When was the last time you indulged your desires? Felt true Range Rover refinement. When was the last time you drove in total serenity? The outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading edge luxury to make every drive an occasion. Limitless, effortless, pureless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction.

• 15:22Charlie Warzel?

  All right, Zoe, Alex, Mike, welcome to Galaxy Brain. You all put forward something that I actually came across very recently. Often, my timeline is a mess of the horrors of the world, the terrible things, the doom scroll. And this kind of stopped me in my tracks because frankly, it's... It wasn't doom scroll-y at all, and when I clicked on it, I began to feel this very strange emotion I'm not used to feeling, which is like, "hope and/or like, I agree." And I agree, and it doesn't make me furious. And so what you guys have done, in part with a group of other people,

• 16:05Charlie Warzel?

  come up with something called "The Resonant Computing Manifesto." And it is based off of this idea of resonance. And when you guys put this out, and I want you guys to describe all of this, but when you put it out, you said that you were hoping this was going to be the beginning of a conversation, right? A process about getting people to realize technology should work for us and not just for the people at the very top, the people behind Trump on the inauguration dais, that sort of thing, right? And so in this world of mergers and acquisitions, and also artificial intelligence and all that jazz, I wanted to start the conversation off with a definition

• 16:49Charlie Warzel?

  of what resonant technology is and what it means. And I will bring that up to either all of you or one of you, but what is resonant technology? What does it mean to you?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So to me, that resonant computing, there's a difference between things that are hollow, leave you feeling regret, and things that are resonant, leave you feeling nourished. And they're superficially very similar in the moment. And it's not until afterwards, or until you think through it, or let it kind of diffuse through you, that you realize the difference between the two. And I think that technology amplifies whatever you apply it to. So it's more, and now with large language models that are taking what tech can do and making it go even further than before, it's more important than ever before to make sure the stuff that we're applying technology and computing to is resonant. And I think we are so used to like, not having a word for this, and we can tell that something is off, and slop, or, you know, things that just outrage bait, or what have you in social networks. But we don't know how to describe it.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  You're just having a term for that, the kind of stuff that you like. And then also, the more that you think about it, the closer you look, the more you like it. Does that capture? I can.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it there was, you know, we spent a lot of time trying to come up with the term.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  You wanted something that was that was ownable, that was distinctive, that wasn't just a thing that would fade into nothing.

• 18:04Speaker 05

  There's a lot of terms out there that now have a lot of baggage, even even something that sounds kind of innocuous, like responsible tech, I think now comes laden for a lot of people with a bunch of associations or different movements of people, whether it's corporate or grassroots or otherwise. And so, you know, we were trying to to move beyond that a little bit in the in the choice of the word resonance.

• 18:29Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, there is also like there's an onomatopoeia thing to it, right? There's or there's just sort of like this, just this is what it what it sounds like you have like resonance there. And also, there is something a little bit like the word that comes to mind is like almost like monkish, right? Like I am like a monastery type like there's like something that's like very like it's resonance is not like a capitalistic word, right? It is. It is a word that signifies something much different to me, like sort of sacred, sort of.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's balance, you know, pureness, like the there's something about it that feels very whole, maybe, you know?

• 19:06Charlie Warzel?

  And and so the at the top of the manifesto, there's this, this line, this that is sort of, you know, offset there, a pull quote, if you will, says, there's a feeling you get in the presence of beautiful buildings, bustling courtyards, a sense that these spaces are inviting you to slow down, deepen your attention, be a bit more human. What if software could do the same? That that was the thing that struck me there. When did you guys see a sort of architectural element to this, right? Like an inspiration from things that, you know, we see and experience in meat space, so to speak, in the world?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  We had the the word resonance, I think, actually came before we. So I'm a big fan of Christopher Alexander. He lived a few blocks away from me and, you know, a big fan of the timeless way of building and a few other books. And so it was in, we had various formulations of it that tried to key off of that frame or idea. He, I don't think ever calls it resonance in the book, in his actual book. But we, you know, it's a word that other people, maybe he might offer it as one of the potential names. He goes to aliveness and wholeness and other things. But so it was always in the mix of the kind of vibe that we were trying to capture. And then we decided to lean into resonance and introduce it via this architectural lens.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  And actually, the that addition at the top was a late addition because it starts off talking about resonance kind of indirectly. And it pivots into this architectural frame. And someone was like, what? I thought you were talking about technology, not. It's like we said, okay, let's put a little teaser about architect, the architectural connection up at the top to like, help connect with where the middle of it is going. So you don't get confused.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  I think there's something also powerful about writing and thinking about software, which exists in a digital plane that is, that is not a physical space. That feels like it's kind of in the ether and a little bit untouchable. And then trying to ground that in a very human reality, which is in fact tied to place and space and where we spend time. And and maybe drawing some insights from those physical realities into the way in which we build digital spaces.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  When you, the Christopher Alexander, when you read some of his work and like, we all know that feeling. We can all imagine the situations that we've been in, the like environments where we feel that really that resonance. And there's something very, I don't think we ever think about it in the digital world because it, because we, you have to be, when you're in it in the physical world, it's impossible to ignore it when it's when you're in it. There's always a point like, let's, why we ask the question, why do our digital experiences not feel the same way? They absolutely could.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  And I think, you know, like, what is the Feng Shui for software, right? It's maybe like a way of thinking about it, but like, and I, I think that goes much deeper than like UX and UI design principles. It's like much more about what is the experience as a user and as a human interacting with a tool over repeated periods of time.

• 22:13Charlie Warzel?

  Well, and I think too, a lot of, at least what I reach for in my work, which a lot of, a lot of it is critiques of, you know, big tech platforms and such.

• 22:27Charlie Warzel?

  A long time ago, I found the word "architecture", like the architecture of these platforms as just being extremely helpful to communicate some of this stuff, right? Like, I think there is a way for people who, who, you know, are just using these platforms to get from A to B, or, you know, like, on the toilet in a, you know, in a moment of just like, I've just gotta get away from the kids, or whatever it is, right? If you're not thinking with, with the critical lens, which I, there's no judgment there about these platforms, you, you might just sort of think, "This is a neutral thing, right? Or this is a thing that just does a thing and, you know, whatever." And, and I think that, you know, architecture, this idea that there are designs, like, there is an intentionality to this algorithm, or this, you know, layout,

• 23:12Charlie Warzel?

  or whatever, you know, choice that a platform has made that leads to these outcomes, right? That leads you to post more incendiary things, or, or whatnot. And I think that architecture there is so helpful to let people see, like, "No, no, no, in the same way that, you know, these arches are, you know, the way they are, this stained glass window does this to give this vibe, so is putting the, you know, what are you thinking, you know, bar right here, or whatever, or the, or the poke icon, wherever." So I think that's also-

• 23:44Speaker 02

  About, with connection to architecture, it's even stronger there. I think of like, traditional architecture is like this designed, top-down cathedral, like the designer's intent. And one of the things that Christopher Alexander layered in was this bottoms-up emergent of, "How is this space actually used and modified? How does it come alive?" And I think that's one of the reasons architecture, in his sense, really nails it, because a lot of these experiences, like, a bunch of people, when you build Facebook 10 years ago, like, "We're trying to connect the world, that's a pro-social outcome." It's like, pro-social in the first order, the second order implications, turns out, oh, actually are not pro-social. And so you get these emergent characteristics that are not what anyone intended going in necessarily, and still, and yet, they emerge out of the actual usage of how different people react off each other,

• 24:27Speaker 02

  and how the incentives kind of bounce off each other. And so I think architecture hits that emergent case too.

• 24:34Charlie Warzel?

  So Mike, I'll throw this to you. How did this come about? Like, what is the behind the scenes process here? I've heard we're using these words and we're taking them for a spin in the world for two weeks. Like, this does not sound like something that you guys wrote last weekend and put up on the thing. There's a lot of people behind it who aren't on this, you know, call here. Or this podcast here, I should say, not a call. How did this come about?

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of us, Alex, and so he might have, I'm curious his version of this. But in my case, I mean, I met Alex about a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, at some event and we got to talking and it was a good conversation. It was a resonant conversation where I sort of came out of it and saying, oh, wow, right? Like, there are people thinking through these things and having interesting conversations. And then we kept talking and he said, you know, I'm sort of, I've been having this conversation, this same conversation with a group of different people. And I thought I might just pull them all together and we'll get into a Signal chat

• 25:45Speaker 04

  and we'll have, you know, a Google Meet call every couple of weeks. And we'll, you know, try to figure out what we're all having this feeling. What do we do about it? And then we did that for almost a year. I mean, it's kind of incredible. And where we would just sort of be chatting in the group chat and occasionally having a call and sort of talking through these ideas and working on it and trying to figure out even what we were going to do with it.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  I definitely think the manifesto emerged very organically. To the point that I would say in the first couple of months of us meeting Charlie, like, I was like, Okay, it's really fun chit-chatting with these interesting people that Alex has brought together, but like, is this going anywhere? And I have to say, there was like a part of me that wanted to end those calls being like, "Okay, guys, what's our agenda? Like, where are we going? What are the outputs? Like, how are we met? Whatever." And I actually think, Alex, you did a really great job of like, kind of keeping people from jumping to that sort of like, action item mode too early. And so, from my perspective, we did not get together to write a manifesto. We got together to like, talk about these issues. And then, very naturally, you know, out of those conversations, came a set of ideas

• 27:01Speaker 05

  and principles and sort of feces that then felt like we should put them out in the world.

• 27:06Charlie Warzel?

  Did this feel like, you know, the choice of the word manifesto and the choice to just do this, does this feel a little bit too like a response to... We're in a manifesto-heavy moment here, right? It feels like there are a lot, whether we're talking like, the Marc Andresons of the world, or, you know, it feels like if you have, like, if you pay taxes in San Francisco, like, you need to write a manifesto to get like, your garbage picked up or something like that. But like, is this a response in the same way? Like, or is it meant to be seen as a, in some senses, yeah, in dialogue with some of these other things that are coming out there?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  And I think to some degree, I don't know, actually, I can't remember how we ever discussed if it should be a manifesto. We just knew that there should be something that we could like, point people at that kind of distilled some of the conversations and ideas that we were having. And I think, I've seen a bunch of manifestos in the tech industry that someone would look at and go, "Oh, my God, is that the tech industry that I'm a part of? Like, that doesn't seem at all, like, that seems so cynical or so close-minded about the sort of broader humanistic impacts that technology might have." And so, I think the choice of doing something that other people have, you know, very... This manifesto was deliberately kind of humble, is we don't have all the answers, it's just here's a few questions that seem relevant to us. It was a very important stylistic choice. Like, manifestos are not typically humble, but we aimed for that because we wanted to

• 28:30Speaker 02

  almost counter-position to some of the ones that say, "This is definitely the right way, and everyone should think about it this way."

• 28:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I almost think like I've been I've been using that as a joke to other people where it's like, this is the most humble manifesto you'll ever see, which is not something, you know, you don't normally see those two words together. You don't think of a manifesto as being humble. But like, and we, I mean, this was definitely a part of the conversation that we had, which is like, we want to be explicit that we don't have all the answers and that this is the start of a conversation, not, not, you know, putting an exclamation point on a philosophy or something.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  I do think, Charlie, you're touching on something noteworthy here, which is, and I'll speak only for myself, but I've been observing in the last couple of years as it has felt to me like the, the ideological landscape of the discussion in Silicon Valley has been really defined by these extremes. And on one end, it's like the accelerationist kind of techno optimism way of seeing the world. And on the other side, on the other kind of far extreme, it is like existential and catastrophic risk and ways that you, you know, we must prevent that. And I know a lot of people who don't feel like they really belong in either of those camps and actually don't even really think that the optimist pessimist spectrum is like the right way to think about it.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  And so from my own perspective, part of what I have hoped that the Resonant Computing Manifesto will accomplish is like helping to establish some values and some North Stars that are, that are kind of on a different plane from that conversation, that also feel like there can be both. You can both be optimistic about the ways things might develop and also concerned about the places we've come from. And that those things can coexist and like, that is like the beauty and complexity of, of like the, the technological moment we're in.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. Because like, you know, I had written something in response to Andreessen's manifesto and I never really thought of this as like a response.

• 30:29Charlie Warzel?

  Is it the, the build one or the, or the techno optimist?

• 30:32Speaker 04

  The techno optimist manifesto.

• 30:34Charlie Warzel?

  Okay, there's been many.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Every day.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Fair enough. But like, you know, I've always considered myself and I've been accused of being a techno optimist, like to a fault. And like, I am optimistic about technology, but to me, his manifesto, like really, you know, rubbed me the wrong way because I was like, this isn't. This is an optimism. What he was presenting was not an optimistic viewpoint. It was a very dystopian, very scary viewpoint. And, you know, so soon after it came out, I had written a response about like, that's not, that's not optimism that you're talking about. And there, and, you know, and if you really believe in this, this vision of like,

• 31:19Speaker 04

  a good, better world from technology, then you should also be willing to recognize the challenges that come with that. Because if you don't acknowledge that and don't seek to like, if we're building these new technologies, like, understand what kinds of damages and harms they might create, then like, the end result is inevitably going to be worse. Because something terrible is going to happen. And then, you know, the politicians will come in and make everything else that you want to do impossible. It's just like, think this through, like, a couple steps ahead. And so-

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Technology is powerful, right? Like, we should be, we should be careful with that power and we should use it for good. And I think it is incumbent, you know, it's a good thing for people to do to use technology for good. Like, you shouldn't sit there and not use it. You should use it and you should be aware of the second order implications and the third order implications and not say, well, who could have seen this inevitable outcome of, you know, so much in the tech industry is about optimizing. It's about driving the number up. It's about thinking, not necessarily thinking about second order implications. At some point, had somebody tell me, you know, if the, any, anything that can't be understood via computer science is either unknowable or unimportant, which is an idea that, you know, pervades some parts of Silicon Valley.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  And I think this, this combination of the humanistic side and the technology side into the synthesis, I think, is where a lot of value for society is created. And you have to have them in balance. You have to be in conversation with each other.

• 32:47Charlie Warzel?

  Well, that's definitely speaking my, my language for sure. That that's like Charlie bait right here. But I want to, I want to like, what, I want to define a little of this. I want to actually define it, but first I want to define it via its opposite, right? What's the opposite of resonance here? How would you describe the current software dynamic? I'll let anyone who wants, who wants to take that, but maybe all of you, honestly.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  And to me, it just, I think most of the technology, tech experience in consumer world is hollow in that you wake up the next day and go, God. Why did I do that? And you or you use the thing to me, if you use a tool and then after you were sober, after you've sort of come down from it, because sometimes you'll be really hopped up on the thing. You know, so maybe a week later or next day, would you proudly recommend it to somebody you care about? And if not, then it's probably not resonant. And I, at some point, somebody I was having this debate with somebody at Meta many years ago. They said, oh, Alex, despite what people say, people, despite what people say, our numbers are very clear. People love doom scrolling. It's like, that's not love. Right? Like, what are you talking about?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  And the, so I think it's trying to be, just make number go up and, you know, increase engagement or what have you is what creates hollow experiences. And that tends to happen when you have hyper centralized, hyperscale products. One of the reasons that happens inevitably is if you have five hyperscale products that are all consumer and trying to get as many minutes of your waking day. There's only so many waking minutes of people's time in a given day. And so you naturally kind of have to marginally put, you know, try to figure out the thing that's going to be more engaging than the other thing. And that emerges, I think fundamentally, when you have these hyperscale products, which is what emerges when you have massive centralization. And all of these things are of a piece and lead to these hollow.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, I, I think there's, there's a concept that has come up a few times in the, in the conversations, in the various meetings that we had. And I don't remember if it originated from you, Alex, or from someone else. But like, the difference between what you want and what you want to want, which may take a second, you, you think through and you begin to like, oh, right. Like, there, there's, there is this belief within certain companies that like, revealed preference is law, right? If people love doom scrolling because they keep doing it, then we're just giving them what they want. Like, shut up, like, you know, anyone who complains about that is just wrong. But then, as Alex said, like, it leaves you feeling terrible. You have a hangover from it later.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Whereas if there's this intentionality of like, no, this is what I really want. I get nourishment out of it. I get value out of it in a real way that, that lives on, that stays with me, that lingers. That's different and there's that intentionality as opposed to like the problem with the the sort of, you know, oh, people love to doom scroll is that it's yeah, because you're sort of manipulating people into it and people feel that they might not be able to to explain it clearly, but like it just feels like someone's someone's twisting the knobs behind the scenes and I have no control over it.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  And I think that feeling is what what pervades is the the opposite of resonant computing.

• 36:02Speaker 05

  I also think the opposite can be defined as any technology that's ultimately undermining human agency. And so that can be things that are attention, you know, engagement maximizing. And so it removes your agency in that sense because you're not actually able to express what you really want. But also, all the the kind of micro ways in which we end up feeling deeply surveilled by the technology that we use. And I think all of us have probably had moments where we feel deeply creeped out by our tools. And I think to me, that is the opposite of resonance also. So part of it's about attention and engagement. And then part of it also is about, you know, having some, you know, individual autonomy

• 36:44Speaker 05

  and in how you how you make decisions, where your data lives, who has access to it. And all of that, we've tried to kind of embed into this piece.

• 36:53Charlie Warzel?

  So you all write in the manifesto, and I'm going to quote you guys here, back to you at length. Hopefully, it's not cringey because it is written, you know, with a committee of people. I hate when people read my own stuff back to me. But you all say, "For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you have 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, mentioned by you guys before, has spent his career pushing back against. This is where AI provides a missing puzzle piece. Software can respond fluidly to the context and particularity of each human at scale. One size fits all is no longer a technological or economic necessity."

• 37:38Charlie Warzel?

  This is the one part where I was tripped up while reading and not in the I am reflexively against AI kind of way, but because personalization, I feel in my own experience, a lot of times, can be discordant with that idea of resonance. I think personalization can be great. I think it's actually, you know, underutilized or realized in the tech space. But when I look around at the algorithmic world that we're living in, sometimes it can feel like optimization, which was the other word there, the personalization and optimization co-mingle together to become part of the problem and not the solution. So I was curious how you all would respond or think about that.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  I think that the key thing there, I agree with that, really, is that, is what is the angle of the thing that is personalizing itself for you? Is it the tool is like trying to figure out how to fit exactly into the crevices of your brain to get you to do something that is, you know, to click the ads or whatever? Or does it feel like an outgrowth of your agency? Like, one way I talked about it is, large language models can write infinite software. They can write little bits of software on demand, which has the potential to revolutionize what software can do for humanity. Today, software feels like a thing. You go to the big box store and you pick which one of the three beige boxes, all of which suck, are you going to purchase? And instead, what if software felt like something that grew in your own personal garden? With something that nourished you and felt like it aligned

• 39:02Speaker 02

  with your interests naturally and intrinsically because it was an extension of your agency and intention? And I think that kind of personalization, where it doesn't feel like something else manipulating you, but it feels like something that is an extension of you and your agency and intention, I think is a very different kind of thing. We're just not familiar with that kind because it doesn't exist currently.

• 39:20Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  In.

• 39:22Charlie Warzel?

  I was, I was gonna ask Alex, just to, just to push, not push back on it, but further follow up on that. Is there anything that exists like that, you think? A piece of software that feels garden grown versus a big box store?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  I think there are, the one that keeps me coming back in my history is like, I think looking back at the early days of the web, actually, is where you had a bunch of these interesting bottoms up kind of things. Hypercard is my favorite one from many, many, many years ago. Have you heard of Hypercard? It's like this thing that was allowed you to make little stacks of cards and you could have images on them, you could click between them and you could program them to be like slideshows or like, you know, stacks of different things. And you know, like, the original, the game Myst, MYST, that was really popular, was actually implemented as a Hypercard stack back in the day. And so Hypercard, to me, is an example of one of these tools that allows you, a free-form thing that allows you to create the situated, very personalized software. You could argue that spreadsheets also have this kind of dynamic because it's an open

• 40:20Speaker 02

  substrate that allows you to express lots of different logic and build up very complex worlds inside of itself. It's pretty intimidating, but it is something that gives you that kind of ability to create meaning and behavior inside of that substrate.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the thing I'll say to that point, and you're not the only one who has sort of stopped on that line, and a few people have called it out and raised questions about it. And I think it's because the idea of personalization to date has generally really been optimization, and it's been optimization for the company's interests as opposed to the user's interest. I think the real personalization is when it's directly in your interest and it's doing something for you and not the company. In the end, it has to be the user who has the agency, who has the control, who says, this is what I want, this is what I want to see, and having it match that.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Charlie, I made a, I've also made a bunch of little tools, you know, a bunch of, if you're technical, you can build these little bespoke bits of software now that fit perfectly to your workflow with large language models. And that's the kind of thing that, a few of us can see a glimpse of this today, who are at the forefront and able to use Claude Code and a terminal to make these things. But I think in the future, I think in the not-too-distant future, large language models would, put on the proper substrate, will allow basically everyone on Earth to have that same kind of experience that feels like an extension of their agency. And I think that's what some of us are seeing, and that's why it's in that essay, and that people who haven't seen that yet are like, excuse me, what? Like, it's, you know, because they haven't experienced it yet, they can't see what's coming, I think.

• 41:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do think that that sentence itself in many ways is a little bit forward looking, you know, and so as Alex said, there's glimpses of it. But that was part of, I think, the urgency and feeling like we needed to write about this is that it feels, I think, to many of us, like the introduction of AI into all of our workflows, like, gives us this kind of amazing opportunity and crossroads to either build along the lines of the paradigm of big tech and platforms and everything we've seen in the last, you know, couple decades, or we can try to shift into this new paradigm that is about personalization that, as Mike said, is not extrinsic from a third party, but something that you are building intrinsically yourself.

• 42:36Charlie Warzel?

  I want to go through, actually, some of the starting principles. We all have five of them that are these guiding lights, right? And I'd love to just sort of rapid-firely go through them, have whoever wants to explain just a little bit about how you're thinking of them, or how they, you know, how they might work to, you know, give a framework or a set of, you know, ethics or values to whatever is going to come out of this manifesto, right? And how they could be incorporated. And so the first one here is private, which it says, "In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. Data often involves multiple stakeholders, and people must serve as stewards of their own context, determining how it's used."

• 43:20Charlie Warzel?

  We've talked a little around that. What private makes me think of in a world of AI is like, are consumer AI tools look the way that they do now because they are built by the people who have spent, not totally, but when you think about like, you know, X, Google, Meta, the people who have spent the last, you know, 10, 15, 20 years collecting information on people, right? So you're going to build a product that makes having that information more valuable to the, you know, the end use, right? That's part of the architecture there. But, but talk to me about how you see, how you see that first principle. Zoe, do you want to, do you want to take that one?

• 44:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, um, we debated this word a lot, and even the concept of private.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  We debated all these words.

• 44:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true. But, um, you know, I think this one in particular is tricky because we really went back and forth on, is it privacy that we feel like is the key value here, or is it really about control and putting the user in the driver's seat? And so it's about You know, consent rather than it is about just like, you know, and I, I, I think I speak for all of us. Like, I don't think any of us are like privacy maximalists. Like, there are lots of, you know, amazing, wonderful, pro-social reasons that you don't always want to keep information private. And actually, sharing information can be very helpful and all those things. And so I guess there's a different way that we could have framed this. It was more, it was a little bit more about control or about agency or whatever.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  But I, I think there is something meaningful about privacy as a value. And the point of having privacy in the digital world is to be able to have a rich interior life. And that is, in many ways, very central to the experience of being human. And that's why privacy is an individual value. It's also a societal value. And I think that that was sort of important to, to capture in the mix here.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  What we try to do with all these words is the word themselves, we want to communicate on its own. And if, if anything, go a little bit too hard in the direction it's going. And because we, we actually softened the statement for a bit about data stewardship. Because, you know, various thoughtful people pointed out that, well, actually, data is owned, co-owned by the different parties. And in some cases, you do want to give it up for an advantage and whatever. But we wanted the word to be private. Like, we wanted it to be obvious when you had these five words. Like, you could, like, apply it to a product and say, does this fit or does this not?

• 45:42Charlie Warzel?

  Right.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  And not have like little, like, soft nuanced words for, for some of this. So we, we try to add the nuance in the sentence after the, the key word.

• 45:49Charlie Warzel?

  Well, to that point, Alex, dedicated. You guys defined it as software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity or data use aligns with expectations. You must be able to trust that there are no hidden agendas conflicting interests. Why'd you use the word dedicated? Like, what do you, what do you mean exactly?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  I wanted something that was, again, about it's an extension of your agency. It is not a conflict of interest because it is in your interest. And the word contextual integrity actually is a meaningful phrase because this is Helen Neeson-Balb's concept of contextual integrity, which is, to my mind, the gold standard of what people mean when they think of privacy. And it means, uh, your data is being used in, in line with your interests and expectations. So it's aligned, it's not being used against you and it's being used in ways that you understand or could be, or would not be surprised by if you were to understand it. And so that we wanted to get the word contextual integrity in there to get across this alignment with your interests and expectations.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  But.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  I, I, I think, I think. You know, I think that's a really important concept. You know, one of the discussions that comes up when talking about privacy is this idea that, you know, privacy is like a thing. And to me, it's always been, it's really a set of trade offs. And the thing that really seems to upset people is when their data is being used in ways that they don't understand for purposes that they don't understand. And that is the world that we often live in, in the, in the digital context. Where it's like, we know we're giving up some data for some benefit and neither side of that is fully understood by the users. We don't know quite how much data we're giving up and we're not quite sure for what purpose.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  And we're getting some benefit, but we can't judge whether or not that trade off is worth it.

• 47:37Charlie Warzel?

  I think about this all the time in terms of the terms of service agreement. I like to try, I try to tell, I try to tell people with that, I'm like, imagine that on the other side of, of like the button that you were about to click is the most expensive looking boardroom that you've ever seen in your life with a whole bunch of people who make more in a week than you do in a year, all in fancy suits, you know, like perfectly coiffed and they're just standing there being like you versus, versus them, you know, that's, that's what, that's what that is. It's not a fair fight. You are agreeing to things. Yeah. Anyway, um, I, I wanna, I wanna keep running through this though, because I, I wanna get to it and, and ask a couple more questions here. But, um, the third, the third of the five principles is plural, which is no single

• 48:22Charlie Warzel?

  entity should control that, uh, distributed power, interoperability. That seems relatively obvious, but I mean, is this, is this sort of like the, the, the idea of, you know, the, the decentralized, like the, the, you know, blue sky sort of, you know, protocol type thing, being able to port, port your information, that that just being like a central tenant?

• 48:45Speaker 04

  Obviously, that's a big tenet for me.

• 48:48Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I was gonna say. And you were involved with Blue Sky, correct?

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 48:51Charlie Warzel?

  On the board?

• 48:52Speaker 04

  I'm on the board of Blue Sky, but I also wrote the Protocols Not Platforms paper that was part of the inspiration for Blue Sky. So that kind of thinking, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that thing. And so I did, but I do think it's important, not just in the social context, right? It's important across the board. In this idea of why I've always thought that Blue Sky or just a protocol decentralized system is so important is this idea that we want to avoid giant centralized systems that will continually manipulate things. And so making sure that we don't go down that path with the AI systems, I think, is really important.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  And just putting out there the idea that now at this stage of development of AI, we should be thinking about that rather than what we're doing with social, which is having to go back a decade. Right, like, oh, wait, we should have done that. And it's funny to talk to the early Twitter people who are like, yeah, we kind of thought that's what we were doing and we just lost track of it.

• 50:00Charlie Warzel?

  Well, and it's also the biggest form of competition, actually, right? Like, if you have a place where you can just say, I mean, I feel like I'm seeing this, I've seen this so much with the newsletter game, right? Like, you have a lot of people who came to a company like Substack just because, like, okay, this works really well, great recommendation system, I can grow this audience, I can do this, I can link it to my paid, boom, like, it just works, right? And then some of those people have problems with the leadership, the direction of the company, whatever. And because of the way that newsletter lists work and things like that and the portability

• 50:40Charlie Warzel?

  via different payment companies, you can just pop it over and it's relatively seamless. And then, of course, you have Like companies trying in ways to get, you know, lock in in these ways to keep to keep people. But this idea of interoperability is that like competition. It allows Ghost or Beehive to, you know, compete.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, plurality is one of the things that leads to it also. It's important to make sure you don't have that undue influence of one particular voice. It's important also to have competition and adaptability. Like you want a healthy system has multiple options that are multiple of the people are trying and competing to be the best version of it. And if we all used a single model, for example, and we didn't realize what its bias was or what it else could do, that would be bad. And that's one of the reasons that having most people using just a single chatbot of ChatGPT, which obviously only works with OpenAI's models, is, you know, not nearly as good of a future as one where people can use different models in different contexts and try them out and switch between them.

• 51:40Charlie Warzel?

  The, uh, the fourth principle here is adaptable. Uh, anyone can take it. It does seem relatively like, uh,

• 51:48Speaker 02

  The way I think about that one is it, is it lifts you up. It doesn't box you in because a lot of products have a, like if a product manager said, these are the five actions you were allowed to do in this context. I want a system that's open ended that I can use to build whatever I want to do, as opposed to something that kind of limits me into a particular subset of things that I can do.

• 52:07Charlie Warzel?

  And, uh, last one is, is, is like, this is my music, man. Uh, pro-social, technology should enable connection, coordination, help become better neighbors, collaborators, stewards of shared spaces, online and off. This dovetails, we can talk about that all day. I'd love to hear what you guys think about it. Uh, I, I went through the, the, the, some of the comments of people who are, you know, who are seeing this, who want to be either signatories or contributors or just help out with the, with the process. Lot of really interesting comments, a lot of people writing their own thoughts. One of them hit me a little, I guess resonated with me a little bit. Um, and it was the culture, it was, I'll quote them. The cultural backlash against attention extraction is coming. Technologies that respect and protect human attention will in time win the marketplace.

• 52:53Charlie Warzel?

  To this idea of like the pro-social, I think it's pretty obvious that these tools are having antisocial effects, right? Not always, not in every context, but there is, you know, ways they are trapping us, keeping us from living the, you know, the lives we want to live in some contexts, making us feel just bad, or adding to problems with mental health that may, people may be having. I'm curious about this idea of the cultural backlash, though. I would love, Zoe, I'd love for you to begin on this one, but do you, do you feel like this, this is happening to me? It feels very much like people are waking up to the idea that like,

• 53:35Charlie Warzel?

  this stuff makes me feel bad, and I don't know how much longer I really want to feel bad in this context.

• 53:40Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny, I exist in this, you know, world of tech and startups and VC, where everybody is really excited about AI and thinks it's really positive. But if you take even a half a step outside that bubble, I think it is very clear, at least to me, that, that the AI backlash is coming, or it is already at our doorstep, or it's already here. And that there is a lot of, there's a, there's a lot of like hate and vitriol. And I, and I, and I get it, because I think, Charlie, you nailed it, like fundamentally, I think what people are reacting to is that AI in many ways has, has been profoundly antisocial. Even in the ways that social media itself were bad, it's almost like, it's almost gotten

• 54:22Speaker 05

  worse in this, like, I'll give you an example, like, we used to worry about people falling down these, you know, these sort of disinformation rabbit holes, because they're in these echo chambers on social media. Now, you can fall down in disinformation echo chamber rabbit hole alone with a chatbot. You know, it's like an echo chamber of one.

• 54:40Charlie Warzel?

  You've made it real simple.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  The way that like I think about it. And, and that's even more antisocial than the previous version, which, you know, was itself very problematic and very, very harmful. And, and so I think that's part of what people, people are reacting against. And, look, I live in New York City, you know, there was a, there was a subway campaign for a product called friend.com that, that elicited a ton of Backlash from the city and you know, I I've been observing things like that and a few other instances along the way that have definitely convinced me that I think for most people, whether or not they've used AI tools or or they feel like AI is coming for their job or not. There's just this sort of instinct of like, no, like, I don't want this in my life.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Especially as an extension of the tech of the tech of the last decade. I mean, it's like the this industry, the one who gave us this crap and this hyper centralized, like people who make these bombastic statements that are unnuanced and just don't really seem to grapple with the amount of power and responsibility that they have. Like, that's not the the place that you want AI to be. I also think, by the way, there's a difference between AI tools, AI should not be your friend. If you think that AI is your friend, you are on the wrong track. AI should be a tool. It should be an extension of your agency. The fact that the first manifestation of large language models in a product happens to be a chatbot that pretends to be a human, just like, it's like the aliens in Contact. Who say, you know, present themselves as her, you know, grandparents or whatever, so she makes sense of it. It's like, it's just

• 56:08Charlie Warzel?

  The perfect crime.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  I think we're gonna look back on it and think of chatbots as an embarrassing party trick. You know, in five years and be like, oh, that was the wrong manifestation of large language models. Large language models should be in this inherent like tool thing where you don't get confused about whether this thing is your friend and you don't get, you know, caught up in delusions of grandeur, delusions of grandeur and everything. So.

• 56:28Charlie Warzel?

  Well, I think I think too with with the backlash, like, I mean, you you mentioned this with this idea, it's like, oh, these companies are gonna are gonna build, you know, the next generation of it. But I think too that it's bigger than AI. Like, I I think it is, it is so like you, you see this a lot. This is, I think, like, the third time I've said this on on this podcast now, but like, you can feel with younger generations of that, like, and they understand very acutely how they are being manipulated, right? Like, they're born into this ecosystem that a lot of people have had to take time to learn and understand. There's this this real idea of it and there's sort of though they are a part of it in a big way, there's also like, really, they don't suffer fools in that sense. It's like, I'm just not, I I just, I don't, I don't

• 57:12Charlie Warzel?

  necessarily want that. I'm feeling bad about it. It does feel like. When I want to get hopeful about this stuff, I talk myself into this idea that we are sort of on the cusp of a little bit of a change. I've experienced in the last year more phone-free spaces in general, right? Like this, this, this idea of this thing is not helping me in context, you know, outside of where I want to use it as a tool. I'm going to put it away right now, or I need, I need someone to create a permission structure for me to put it away.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  People going to saunas, I've heard is a big thing because you can't have phones in them, like as a social space to be in person.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  I, I predict that in the next year, we're going to start to see people creating like human-only spaces and saying like, okay, like, just so you know, like this gathering, whether it's online or in person, like this is a human-only space, like no wearables, like don't bring your AI assistant or your, you know, copilot. Yeah, I'll go on record. That's a prediction for 2026.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, I think, you know, one of the interesting things is that society adapts to these things. And there is this belief that like, oh, you know, once we start spiraling down, we continue to go down. But like, people and society as a whole starts to figure this stuff out. And it may take a while, and there may be a lot of damage done in the interim. But like, there are no kids today going on Facebook, right? I mean, like, you know, they picked other places. They sort of, you know, over time, as new generations come in, they sort of look at the old stuff and they realize they see the problems of it because it has, you know, they're all much more obvious. And then they look for somewhere other space.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  And so, you know, in the social world that, you know, had been like TikTok, for example, which has its own problems. But if we're, you know, there's going to be another generation, and there'll be another generation of AI tools, and there'll be another generation of social as well. And if we're in a position where we're creating spaces that are welcoming and human, People will move to them eventually as they realize how problematic the other ones are. And that's like a lot of the response that I've heard at least to the manifesto as it came out was like, just this like, like exhale, like, yes, like, I've been thinking that, like, we need this, this, you know, vision and, and I've been thinking about, I didn't realize other people were thinking it.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  And I think that's part of society, you know, moving forward with these things and thinking through like, what is next? What do I want? If I'm going to make a jump to a new, new tools and new systems, you know, like, I want to be a little more deliberate about it. And if the people building it are also more deliberate about it, maybe we can actually have a next generation that are, that, that meet these principles that we're talking about.

• 1:00:00Charlie Warzel?

  To, to that end, there, there are some interesting critiques here that are made, I think, in, in good faith. One of them, I, I wanted to just highlight and get your reaction to, which is, uh, you know, somebody on, on Blue Sky said, quote, "Like other cyber libertarian frameworks, they stop short of the root cause, which is politics. Liberation depends on shifting political power because power determines which values take hold." That's obviously true. I think other criticisms that I have seen in general, that seem to be part of the cynicism of living in 2025 or 2026, as people listen to this,

• 1:00:40Charlie Warzel?

  is this idea that it's like, yeah, that sounds great, you know, in theory, like, uh, but again, you, you know, you, you butt up against the politics of it all, right? The, the capitalism of it all, the scale of it all, right?

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  The capitalism.

• 1:00:52Charlie Warzel?

  Oh, right. Like all, all of those things. Very real, right? By the time people hear this, like Warner Brothers may be bought by like 450 companies, right? We don't know what that picture looks like, but all of them portend some kind of strange dystopian consolidation. No, but, but in general, like, How are you guys thinking about that, right? This is a guiding statement to some degree. This is not meant to, you know, solve every problem that exists. But how are you thinking about that, you know, coming up against politics of it?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  I think the one broader point, by the way, I published another essay about optimization and how modern society just kind of optimizes everything. It's true in the technology industry, but it's also true in tech, or sorry, in business and in politics, too. I think it's the defining characteristic of modern society is that we forgot that optimization actually does come at a cost. It's just an indirect and harder to see cost. And I think that that is true across many different dimensions. It's part of what I think everyone is feeling in this moment. I would also point out that we are part of the industry and we are also realists. We understand the incentive structures, the things that get us stuck in these kinds of behaviors. A couple of things. One, I think a lot of this is, to a point that we made earlier in the conversation,

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  is some of it is totally structural and it's, you know, the person at the top making these kind of decisions to optimize for Wall Street or something. Other parts of it are just emergent. They're just local product managers in a given team making a decision, okay, oh, we know that number is supposed to go up, okay. And it's not thinking about what the downside of number going up is. And actually, if they think about it in terms of resonance, they might make a better product. This actually creates more value for the shareholders, too. It doesn't have to be intention. So little things, if everybody can say, hey, is this resonant? Just having people be able to have that terminology and ask that question, if lots of different people are asking that throughout the industry, that could have an impact. And second, myself and a number of others who are working on this manifesto are working

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  on things that are structural changes to the kinds of distribution structures and power structures that create technology. I'm working on an alternate security model that's open and decentralized and allows getting rid of some of these silos that lead to aggregation while still being fully aligned with people's private interests. And so we are not just saying, oh, what if everyone just said, hey, let's be nice today? You know, it's, there's some of that that actually could be somewhat effective. And also, we are realists about the emergent factors that cause some of these things and working to modify or tweak or do what we can to help, you know, the right kinds of things emerge.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  There are many reasons to be cynical right now. It's, I completely understand where all of that is coming from. And I think, so some of the, the job that we're hoping to do, or at least I'm hoping, I shouldn't speak for anyone else on this, is like, The more that we can paint this picture and show people, and yes, like maybe some of us are a few steps into the future on this stuff, but if we can start to bring that back, begin to show people like there are real things behind this and we can all start to make decisions in this direction. And hopefully we can start to thaw out some of that cynicism and show that there's something real here. And as you, each one of those steps is important. We're not going to flip

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  the entire structure of the world right now, but we can take these little steps and really make a difference over time.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Only thing I would add is that I think that there's already been a lot of ink spilled doing the diagnosis. And, and I think capitalism is part of it. I think our political system is part of it. I think optimization culture is part of it. Like, I think it's a confluence of different factors. But I think part of what we were trying to do, at least in the, in, in this piece is, is like move beyond just the diagnosis of the problem and try to craft like a, a positive vision for where we should go. But absolutely like a totally, you know, you know, valid critique might be that you need to spend more time unpacking some of those underlying drivers of which we are all, I think, very aware of the ways in which that shapes, you know, the current reality.

• 1:04:51Charlie Warzel?

  So the, I want to land, land this plane with, people are going to be listening to this at the beginning of the year. I think this is a hopeful vision of a future, or at least telling people, what if you planted the seed in your brain of a, of a hopeful vision while you're constructing these things? What, what is giving you all hope about, you know, what's, what's coming next this year in, in this space? You've, you've gone through this, you clearly, you are clearly hopeful people to, to put this together in some sense, no matter how, you know, beaten down and cynical anyone who exists online is these days. But what is keeping you guys going,

• 1:05:34Charlie Warzel?

  going forward on this, on this vision, on this resonant?

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  I think what gives me hope. Is that I am, I am seeing this whole new generation of founders and technologists, many of whom are like contemporaries of, of, of, of me that, um, you know, that grew up kind of under, under big tech and are just questioning all of the, um, you know, all, all the assumptions that, that underlie the way that we built things and are trying to, to think about building things in new ways. And I think are very subscribed to the, the types of values and vision that we lay out in the, in the manifesto. And so I think that's what gives me hope. I feel like the, the tide is really turning and the fact that there's been a ton of interest and momentum in the manifesto itself, I think, suggests to me like, you know, there's a critical mass here who feels this way. And

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  that's kind of all you need to like nudge it in the right direction, I think.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say like, I'm, uh, I think, I guess I'm the old man of the crew. I think, uh, in that I, I've been alive slightly longer than, than the others and that I remember the early days when, when people were thrilled with new technology and it was exciting and, and before it all seemed to turn. And, and to me, there is this element of going back to that and, and not, you know, there are mistakes that were made and, but being able to go back to that time while recognizing the mistakes and doing a better job this time, I think is actually really important. And I've had like some of the criticism I've seen, because I, I talked about this concept of going back. Some of the criticism was like, no, it was never, it was always terrible. And it's like, no,

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  like I lived that time and I remember when using new technology and the internet was enjoyable and exciting. And we can bring that back. There's nothing that says we have to keep the awful parts of the internet working the way that they currently work and, and really against our own interests. And so I'm, I'm very optimistic. When, when you put these things out in the world, um, you know, people, people are gravitating to it. And that, that's the first step towards, towards pretty massive change over time.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  I think for me, it's, I think people have taken, have felt so cynical and like they can't do anything. And like, maybe they're the only one that wants to push back against some of these optimization pressures. And seeing the response that people have to this has been really. Inspiring to me because at some degree I'm thinking we're saying this to them that no one's going to care about or what's going to think is kind of dumb. And they'd be like, "Yeah, yeah. How can I participate?" Like, "Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay." I mean, I'm into it, too. But like, so it feels very encouraging to me to see people feel that agency and wanting to into to sort of change the world in this way. And again, I work with a bunch of folks who are at the cutting edge of using large language models and interesting ways to create infinite bits of situated software that, you know, personalized software. And like,

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  it's exciting what you can do with some of these things. And again, I think chatbots, if you're looking at chatbots, like this is going to be like social media, but like worse, and just kind of the same old story of simplification. Like, my hope is that we will be beyond that relatively soon as people start waking up to all the other things that you can do. They're now possible and democratized and available to just about anyone to add and empower them. It's really cool. So I'm just extremely excited about what we're going to, what we as a society are going to do with some of these technologies.

• 1:08:45Charlie Warzel?

  All right. With that, let's, let's go forth into 2026 and, and make it, make it suck less than it did before. No, I appreciate everyone's time. Zoe, Alex, Mike, thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain and offering a unusual dose of positivity and hope.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Excellent. Thanks for having us.

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

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• 1:09:47Speaker 01

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• 1:10:18Charlie Warzel?

  Thank you again to Zoe Weinberg, Mike Masnick, Alex Komorowski. I wanted to have this conversation because back in November, at this panel discussion that I participated in, in Bozeman, Montana, we had this long conversation about the generative AI moment. And so much of it was focused on the economic issues, the fears of artificial general intelligence, the ways in which this is all being abused. And the conversation, as it tends to with new technologies that are consequential, it

• 1:10:59Charlie Warzel?

  gets very negative and very reactive and very thinking about all the scary externalities of a new technology. And at the very end of the conversation, one of the panelists, Sarah Myers-West, who does a lot of work in AI policy, she ended with something that was very, to borrow the term, resonant to me. And that was that she was really tired of talking about all the bad stuff and all the

• 1:11:36Charlie Warzel?

  stuff that AI shouldn't be, the future that is being brought to the world that we are, we need to fear. And wanted to think about ways to put forward a positive vision, right? To stop being on the defensive all the time and to think about what is the future you want to build? If this technology is here, if it's not going away, how do we harness it to do something that will be productive and helpful to human flourishing, right?

• 1:12:12Charlie Warzel?

  And that just stuck with me, especially as someone who's always focused on these negatives. And so a couple of days later, when I saw this manifesto, I just thought to myself, some of this stuff is probably idealistic. Some of this stuff is, you know, going to be really hard to enact from, you know, from a political standpoint, from a fundraising standpoint, from, you know, a, it's going to be, it's going to be a challenge. It's always a challenge to build something that resists scale in general. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, right?

• 1:12:56Charlie Warzel?

  We shouldn't try to be so rational about all of this that we talk ourselves out of building something that matters, that helps, that actually aligns with the goals of being a good human, living a, you know, a good life. And so I found the conversation in that sense, more than anything, to just be motivating, to be something that as we continue to do episodes here, as I continue to do my reporting, as you all continue to like live your life out there among this technology, to think about what it is you want, what it is we should be building,

• 1:13:39Charlie Warzel?

  to come up with positive visions of how this stuff should work, instead of constantly just defending against it. So I hope this conversation gave you some of those ideas, some of those tools. It certainly did for me, and it's something we're going to be continuing to explore throughout the year. So, thank you once again. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain are dropping every Friday, and you can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel. Or you can go on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave a five-star review if you would. And just remember, if you also enjoyed this, you can support this work and the work of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic by subscribing to the publication

• 1:14:24Charlie Warzel?

  at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 1:14:43Charlie Warzel?

  This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Claudina Bade. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme music is by Rob Smersiak. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Think social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.