Dear Silicon Valley, Move Fast But Don’t Break Things
Move fast and break things. Here concludeth the Silicon Valley sermon (and Facebook’s — sorry, Meta’s — internal motto until 2014). If you want to make a difference, change the world, and gain an edge, you have to move fast. Get your product/software market-ready as quickly as possible, and screw the consequences. If current systems and structures can’t adapt, screw them too, break ‘em. Interestingly, in 2014 Facebook changed its motto to ‘move fast with stable infrastructure’. Actual insight or saving face? I’ll leave that up to you. A few weeks ago, a Business Insider article by Isobel Asher Hamilton argues that Facebook’s — sorry, Meta’s — actions don’t necessarily match its words and that the ‘move fast, break things’ motto is still alive and kicking behind the scenes. Another buzzword that embodies the same idea is disruption. What exactly do you think you’re disrupting? A stable structure that works? Note also that the term is now often used to actually say ‘here’s this thing that is a lot like another thing, but slightly better.’ The opposite of what it’s supposed to mean. True disruptors don’t (need to) announce themselves. For example, here’s a (redacted) sentence I read a while ago: The coming of X technology will disrupt your industry. Even if we set aside the deliberate vagueness of your industry, why not ‘improve’, or ‘change’, or ‘expand’? I suspect it’s not only because disruption is the word all the cool kids use. It also sounds more intentional, more impactful, more hands-on. “We’re here to shake things up,” disruption says, “and if we shake hard enough, we might even break a thing or two.”
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