I'm sure the authors believe they are saying something important, but there is absolutely nothing concrete referenced by this "manifesto". No prior art, no examples, nothing actually specific to "computing".

I'm not trying to be harsh - I do agree with their five bullet points - but as written it's all romanticism and no practicality.

For comparison, here's a bullet point I'd put on my own "manifesto":

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Feeds must be finite, relevant, and consumable.

A "feed" - a regularly updated list of content that the user is interested in - is in principle a great way to spread information and connect people to authors and creators.

As they are currently implemented though, they are biased towards maximizing "addiction" instead of productivity. Endless feeds that mix slop and advertising along with the occasional nugget of relevance encourage only endless scrolling in the hope that there will be another hit of dopamine on the next page.

Ethical feeds should follow a few main guidelines:

1. The number of items in the feed should match the number of items generated by the feed's sources. No inserting "You might be interested in..." articles between feed items. No inline sponsored advertisements. No random unrelated news clippings selected for maximum engagement. No clickbait short videos or misleading "one weird tricks" allowed. The feed must be allowed to run dry.

2. All feed items must be viewable in chronological order with no duplications or omissions. If my feed is backed by 50 sources, then my viewing tool must fetch the latest items from all sources and sort them by date. Omitting or reordering "small" items like "We just had a baby!" because some algorithm predicts that they would be less impactful than "Apple releases new MacOS27" is forbidden.

3. All feed items must be easily "consumable". If I mark an item as "read", it must never show up in my feed again. If I save it to some collection of important notes, it should never show up in my feed again . I must always be able to get to the feed equivalent of "inbox zero" without doing anything other than starting at the top and scrolling to the bottom. I should never have to chase my feed across multiple pages or tabs to read it completely.

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The above is an actionable, opinionated definition of how feeds "should work", and the requirements are sufficiently clear to determine whether any particular piece of software obeys these rules.

That, to me, is a useful manifesto. Perhaps too far on the practical side, but I'm an inherently practical dude.