Just over a decade ago, when Facebook was a scrappy contender being built by hackers and college dropouts, the phrase “move fast and break things” was a company call to arms, a flag around which early employees could secure their bearings. The times – slap bang at the epicentre of the express commercialisation of the internet – dictated that, if engineers were to develop products that had resonance with users, speed to market was paramount. Better to build something with flaws and release it into the wild than miss an opportunity to reach consumers before your competitors. First was everything at a time when rapid adoption of smartphones offered a marketplace that was evolving dramatically.
Facebook’s slogan reflected the times and, necessarily, the business model of technology companies, which valued growth – meaning the number of people using a platform and the data generated by those users – above all else. Founders could burn through as much capital as they liked; as long as they were acquiring users, funding rounds would follow.
The mindset was by no means limited to Facebook. If you visited the offices of tech companies from Kreuzberg in Berlin to Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, you would be likely to encounter a version of the slogan. Tech was saving the world and founders didn’t have time to worry about niceties – they had a product to ship. If digital services could be more efficient, more precise and faster, then everyone would benefit.
We were living in what was known then as the information economy. It posited a frictionless world, except when, you know, there was friction, which was when you just kept moving as quickly as you could and breached, cracked or fractured whatever it was that had no right to remain in the era of the touchscreen. The new breed of savvy entrepreneur set on fixing the ails of the modern world needed to ride roughshod over pesky detail, friction, arcane business practices and regulation.
And, in many cases, those founders were right. Digital technology has, undoubtedly, impacted on the world in an overwhelmingly positive way. It saves lives, it enables wealth to be created and equality to be established, it empowers unheard voices, drives transparency, keeps us safer, provides us with access to vast amounts of information, underpins countless innovations and business models.
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But breaking things is not without consequences. As the DCMS enquiry into fake news has amply demonstrated, many of the people who were busy breaking things a decade ago, don’t fully understand the complex instruments of change that they have created. Now lawmakers and regulators are trying to discern what has been created without deconstructing the invaluable achievements of technologists and entrepreneurs.
Uber, which has gone toe-to-toe with entrenched special interests while making it more efficient and cheaper for consumers to move around cities, was until recently the archetype for rule-flouting, tech bro intemperance. Recently, its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has vowed to change the culture at the $54 billion startup, noting that “driving quality is just as important as driving new features”. Mark Zuckerberg, while holding back from issuing a mea culpa following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has communicated that there need to be changes to Facebook that will make it less vulnerable to abuses by third parties. “We have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good,” he told lawmakers in March.
And while this contrition needs to be followed by action, it seems that the adjustment of the language employed by Big Tech may offer clues to a changing sensibility that would consign the slogan Facebook once championed – one that seemed so apt, so exhilarating in the era it was first deployed – to an expression of another era. The original served as a rallying cry to create and improve – both admirable sentiments – that somehow became mired in the clichés of founders as “disruptors”.
As technologists begin to engage with entrepreneurs, scientists and government to initiate deeper conversations around the unanticipated waves of transformation that technology has had on every aspect of society, from the impact on employment to the mental health of our children, the in-built bias within algorithms to the concentration of wealth in a few hands, the battle between Big Tech companies in the coming months won’t just about being first or breaking things, it will be about social responsibility, societal impact and consideration for others.
We can see the stirrings of this in the growth of startups that are profit-driven but have social purpose at their core, the battle for millennial talent being driven by the need of a generation to spend their working lives doing something meaningful, and the concrete steps being taken by companies like Google DeepMind to actively engage with third parties in shaping the technologies that will power the businesses of the future. Language can be used to recalibrate the founder mission – and can be used to ensure that technology will be applied to solve problems, not break things.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
