move fast and break things

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pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Understanding how Facebook was a hacker company helped shape the four values that they ultimately presented to Zuckerberg. It was like showing him a mirror. Focus on Impact. Be Bold. Move Fast and Break Things. Be Open. Zuckerberg liked those but insisted on a fifth: Build Social Value. While the first four were internal guidelines, this fifth value emphasized Facebook’s impact on the outside world, which Zuckerberg believed was overwhelmingly positive. (He still does.) Of those values, one stood out as uniquely Facebook, uniquely Zuckerberg. “Move Fast and Break Things” was, in a sense, already synonymous with the company. No one is sure where those exact words first appeared, but it may well have been in an all-hands meeting at the Hamilton Street office in Palo Alto, at a time when Facebook had hired its first wave of managers, after becoming too big for all the individual contributors to report to D’Angelo or another executive.

Contents Also by Steven Levy Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction PART ONE 1. ZuckNet 2. Ad-Boarded 3. Thefacebook 4. Casa Facebook 5. Moral Dilemma 6. The Book of Change PART TWO 7. Platform 8. Pandemic 9. Sheryl World 10. Growth! 11. Move Fast and Break Things 12. Paradigm Shift 13. Buying the Future PART THREE 14. Election 15. P for Propaganda 16. Clown Show 17. The Ugly 18. Integrity 19. The Next Facebook Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Introduction HI, I’M MARK!”

It was then that Zuckerberg learned that the SpaceX rocket, the one carrying the satellite he had been gleefully touting as an Internet savior for the struggling continent, had blown up on the launchpad, a day before the scheduled blastoff. Facebook’s satellite had been in place during the test—a time-saving measure—and was lost in the conflagration. Zuckerberg was furious with Musk. (Facebook’s own motto, “Move fast and break things,” does not apply to space launches.) He turned to a natural outlet for his anger, a medium that by his own hand he had made available to a sizable plurality of the human race: Facebook. Overruling the advice of his PR people, he rage-posted a story that would wind up in the news feeds of many of his 118 million followers: As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Big Pharma.” 18. Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things outlines this issue in depth. 19. Levy, In the Plex, chapter 7, section 3, covers the book-scanning project. 20. Ibid., 273. 21. Ibid., 350. 22. Ibid., 359. 23. Ibid., 362–63. 24. Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things, 260. 25. Per interview with Google executive on background in 2017. 26. Author interview with Taplin in 2017. 27. Author interview with Taplin in 2017; see also Move Fast and Break Things. 28. Levy, In the Plex, 251. 29. Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things, 127–28. 30. Wikipedia, s.v.

The implications are myriad, and I will track many of them, often via the Google narrative, which has been the marker for larger industry-wide shifts. Google has, after all, been the pioneer of big data, targeted advertising, and the type of surveillance capitalism that this book will cover. It was following the “move fast and break things” ethos long before Facebook.2 I’ve been following the company for over twenty years, and I first encountered the celebrated Google founders, Page and Brin, not in the Valley, but in Davos, the Swiss gathering spot of the global power elite, where they’d taken over a small chalet to meet with a select group of media.3 The year was 2007.

“Larry and Sergey believe that if you try to get everyone on board it will prevent things from happening,” said Terry Winograd, a professor of computer science at Stanford and Page’s former thesis adviser, in an article in 2008. “If you just do it, others will come around to realize they were attached to old ways that were not as good….No one has proven them wrong—yet.”16 This became the Google way. As Jonathan Taplin wrote in his book, Move Fast and Break Things, when Google released the first version of Gmail, Page refused to allow engineers to include a delete button “because Google’s ability to profile you by preserving your correspondence was more important than your ability to eliminate embarrassing parts of your past.” Likewise, customers were never asked if Google Street View cameras could take pictures of their front yards and match them to addresses in order to sell more ads.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Users either did not know or did not care about the loss of privacy, enabling Facebook to join the list of most valuable companies on earth. Facebook’s motto, “Move fast and break things,” reflects the company’s strengths and weaknesses. Facebook constantly experiments, tinkers, and pushes envelopes in the pursuit of growth. Many experiments fail or work imperfectly, necessitating an apology and another experiment aimed at doing better. In my experience, there have been few, if any, companies that have executed a growth plan—moving fast, if you will—as effectively as Facebook. When moving fast leads to breaking things, and to mistakes, Facebook has been brilliant in its ability to recover from them.

—Albert Einstein Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress. —Jenna Wortham CONTENTS Also by Roger McNamee Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue 1 The Strangest Meeting Ever 2 Silicon Valley Before Facebook 3 Move Fast and Break Things 4 The Children of Fogg 5 Mr. Harris and Mr. McNamee Go to Washington 6 Congress Gets Serious 7 The Facebook Way 8 Facebook Digs in Its Heels 9 The Pollster 10 Cambridge Analytica Changes Everything 11 Days of Reckoning 12 Success? 13 The Future of Society 14 The Future of You Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix 1: Memo to Zuck and Sheryl: Draft Op-Ed for Recode Appendix 2: George Soros’s Davos Remarks: “The Current Moment in History” Bibliographic Essay Index About the Author Prologue Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.

If the product found a market, the founders had alternatives. They could raise venture capital on favorable terms, hire a bigger team, improve the product, and spend to acquire more users. Or they could do what the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp would eventually do: sell out for billions with only a handful of employees. Facebook’s motto—“Move fast and break things”—embodies the lean startup philosophy. Forget strategy. Pull together a few friends, make a product you like, and try it in the market. Make mistakes, fix them, repeat. For venture investors, the lean startup model was a godsend. It allowed venture capitalists to identify losers and kill them before they burned through much cash.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The focus on progress, at light speed, also birthed a slogan that has since become a Silicon Valley mantra. In an interview with Business Insider in October 2009, Zuckerberg said that his primary instruction to developers was to “move fast and break things.” “Unless you are breaking stuff,” Zuckerberg told the interviewer, “you are not moving fast enough.” “Move fast and break things” was soon printed on posters pasted around the office as a daily reminder that velocity mattered.20 The emphasis on speed led to a dizzying array of changes to the site. Some were superficial: in 2005, the company replaced the Peter Wolf image with a clean blue ribbon copied from the website of private equity firm the Carlyle Group.

And in 2016, the platform became a target for election interference, as Russian military intelligence agencies and extremist groups spread false, hateful, and polarizing information to voters. The move-fast-and-break-things culture of the start-up corporation may have made sense when Facebook was operating off a laptop in a college dorm room, but it had dangerous ramifications when Facebook matured into a global network serving billions of people. Unlike with the previous ages of the corporation, we still live in this one. We have yet to sort out its repercussions. Society is still grappling with how to respond. This brings us to the eighth rule of the invisible hand: don’t move too fast or break too many things. Corporations must not use the shield of limited liability as an excuse for reckless behavior.

It has tended to make business leaders less reflective about society’s great problems and more intensely focused on extracting profit. It has contributed to the growth of financial capitalism, a species of corporate activity devoted to financial engineering rather than material production. It has also promoted the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley, which values rapid technological growth over responsible behavior. And while corporate leaders occasionally pay lip service to their role as guardians of the public interest, with a few notable exceptions they appear less and less convinced of it. We are now witnessing a moment when corporations and the titans who run them wield an unimaginable amount of wealth and power—more than would have been conceivable at the time of the East India Company.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

This kind of knowledge can upend many assumptions in tech design and planning. 4 Move Fast and Break Things In order to upend design assumptions, can’t we just move fast and break things? This way we’ll learn from our mistakes, and eventually we’ll correct any starting biases. Moving fast and breaking things works if we have enough privilege and safety not to be affected by the loss of the things we break, and enough certainty in our goals that we do not have to stop and worry whether we are going in the right direction. We move fast when we think we know where we are going. Things break easily when they are brittle. “Move fast and break things” is not a good slogan for the serious firefighter, the rigorous traveler among disciplines.

Our critiques are made in bad faith, moreover, as we are so often spotted using in our classrooms, our essays, and our books the very systems, platforms, and devices that we lament. The profound self-confidence and self-assurance of these same technologists are on daily display as well. Their “bias toward action” is considered refreshing; their predilection to “move fast and break things” is celebrated. Even when systems fail in spectacular fashion, a seemingly endless supply of assuring words are at the ready to defuse or deflect. Technology firms selling bleeding-edge surveillance systems to authoritarian regimes at home and abroad? Bad actors. Latest-generation web cameras incapable of recognizing the faces of African-American users (yet functioning flawlessly with Caucasian users)?

This is the process we have been witnessing since the first internet bubble of the late 1990s: a programmer or set of programmers hacking together an imperfect prototype, then unleashing it on the world with the help of venture capitalists whose only objective is maximum profit, and seeing where the chips fall. “Move fast and break things” ran the motto of these self-styled disruptors, because when you are rich enough, and privileged enough, it might seem like all the breaking you’re doing doesn’t have negative consequences. This is especially the case when the people you’re hurting don’t have a seat at the table and aren’t the sort of people you would tend to include on your programming team, in your boardrooms, or in your shareholders meetings.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

On the technology side, one of the philosophies that helped Facebook become successful was its famous motto “Move fast and break things.” This emphasis on speed, which came directly from Mark Zuckerberg, allowed Facebook to achieve rapid product development and continuous product improvement. Even today, every new software engineer who joins Facebook is asked to make a revision to the Facebook codebase (potentially affecting millions or even billions of users) on his or her first day of work. However, as Facebook’s user base and engineering team grew to a massive size, Mark had to change the philosophy to “Move fast and break things with stable infrastructure.” While this new motto might seem self-contradictory, Mark explains that it focuses on a higher-level goal.

It’s extremely difficult for later entrants to compete directly with a blitzscaling company that has first-scaler advantage. Unless these players find a different game in which they can capture this advantage, they’ll simply become irrelevant. 3. DESPITE ITS INCREDIBLE ADVANTAGES AND POTENTIAL PAYOFFS, BLITZSCALING ALSO COMES WITH MASSIVE RISKS. Until recently, “Move fast and break things” was Facebook’s famous motto. Yet rapid growth can cause nearly as many problems as it solves. As Mark Zuckerberg told me in an interview for my Masters of Scale podcast, “We got to a point where it was taking us more time to go back and fix the bugs and issues that we’re creating than the speed that we were gaining by going faster.”

Eventually Captain Jack Sparrow has to grow up and start acting more like the sober and responsible Captain Picard. This transition can be challenging. Founders and early employees often resist changing their approach; after all, didn’t it bring about their initial success? Plus, entrepreneurs tend to have a rebellious streak; natural-born rule followers don’t always fare so well in a chaotic, “move fast and break things” start-up environment. But failing to make the transition from pirate to navy can lead to disaster. A Note on Ethical Piracy Before we go further, we need to spend at least a little time on dispelling some of the connotations of the word “pirate.” In print and on-screen, pirates are portrayed in one of two ways: (1) lovable rogues and (2) sociopathic criminals.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In a world of digital devices, people are learning to cancel, mute, or avoid advertisements that they do not want to see. As soon as the next generation of innovators creates a new payment and security model, this trend will accelerate. While I was researching the economic effects of Google’s preoccupation with “free” goods, Jonathan Taplin revealed in Move Fast and Break Things that Google owns five of the top six multibillion-user Web platforms and thirteen of the top fourteen commercial functions of the Net, and yet it collects less than 5 percent of its revenue from final customers.5 Beyond the suppliers of ads that no one wishes to see, Google’s main role is intermediator.

BAT intends to empower the very users and publishers that are receiving less than they should.” Regardless of what Google does, says Eich, the current system is unsustainable. It frustrates users with slow loads, wastes bandwidth on unwanted ads, and wipes out publishers’ profits—and it’s not even secure. As Jonathan Taplan documents relentlessly in Move Fast and Break Things, the Google regime of aggregate and advertise is drastically reducing the income of musicians, journalists, and other producers of the content that Google seeks to monetize with ads and search. The torrent of advertising has provoked some 87.5 million Americans to resort to ad-blockers, which may ultimately bring down the whole kit and caboodle, including Google.

Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016). For the speech at Google, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-iDUcETjvo 4. Edwards, xi, Introduction. 5. Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2017), 126 and passim. 6. Daniel Colin James, “This Is How Google Collapsed”, Hacker Noon: Where hackers start their afternoons, April 27, 2017. https://hackernoon.com/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee 7. 


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

To start a company was no longer to help people reach their true potential; it was to flaunt norms, then change them, and, in changing them, set yourself up to get rich off the new order. Facebook would develop a monopoly on social media and use that monopoly to crush competitors, charging progressively higher fees to advertisers—while telling the world that this predatory behavior was a social good. Tech would “move fast and break things,” as the Facebook motto put it, and entrepreneurs would be told it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. The industry would be defined by these clichés, convincing itself that “disruption”—that favored TED talker buzzword—wasn’t just an unfortunate consequence of innovation but an end in itself.

When cities complained that Uber was breaking the law, Kalanick replaced his Twitter avatar with a picture of an Ayn Rand cover, and, as I reported in Businessweek, employees at the company’s driverless car division distributed stickers that proudly proclaimed, “Safety Third.” This was all, in a way, an extension of PayPal. “The PayPal Mafia philosophy became the founding principle for an entire generation of tech companies,” said McNamee. * * * — even so, in late 2000, Thiel wasn’t thinking about moving fast and breaking things. The tech crash was well underway, and he was thinking about surviving. If Thiel wanted to avoid the fate of companies like Pets.com, he desperately needed to reduce PayPal’s losses, which meant dealing with fraud. Criminals had begun to notice that the company’s growth hacks—one of which was its decision not to verify users’ identities when they opened an account—had made it an ideal place to launder money stolen from victims of identity theft.

This had not been part of the original assignment, which involved analyzing trading patterns, not collecting intelligence—and it also struck him as a potential violation of privacy, since Palantir’s software made it easy to snoop on personal matters, like who at the bank was sleeping with whom—but the client liked it. “We were trying to do anything and everything,” he recalled. Palantir won the business, its first big deal in Europe. Chmieliauskas was, in other words, moving fast and breaking things—bigger things than he could’ve imagined. Because of Palantir’s association with the CIA, clients often assumed that the company specialized in counterintelligence, and Palantir was happy to at least try to oblige them if there was business to be won. “I’d worked on much shadier deals before Cambridge Analytica,” he said.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

If somebody appeared who had the talent, the magic touch, they would fit in.” The TMRC and Minsky’s lab were later immortalized in Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab and Steven Levy’s Hackers: The Heroes of the Computer Revolution, in addition to many other publications.6 The hacker ethic is also what inspired Mark Zuckerberg’s first Facebook motto: “Move fast and break things.” Minsky was part of Zuckerberg’s curriculum at Harvard. Minsky and a collaborator, John McCarthy, organized the very first conference on artificial intelligence, at the Dartmouth Math Department in 1956. The two went on to found the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, which evolved into the MIT Media Lab, which remains a global epicenter for creative uses of technology and has generated ideas for everyone from George Lucas to Steve Jobs to Alan Alda to Penn and Teller.

Like Barlow, Thiel conceives of cyberspace as a stateless country: “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.”22 Thiel was a supporter of and advisor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and funded a lawsuit that took down Gawker. In the book Move Fast and Break Things, Annenberg Innovation Lab director emeritus Jonathan Taplin explores the way that Thiel’s influence has spread throughout Silicon Valley via his “Paypal Mafia,” other venture capitalists and executives who have adopted his anarcho-capitalist philosophy.23 The question of why wealthy people like Thiel are taken seriously about seasteading or aliens has been addressed by cognitive scientists.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation, “Official Alcor Statement Concerning Marvin Minsky.” 16. Brand, “We Are As Gods.” 17. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 18. Brand, “We Are As Gods.” 19. Hafner, The Well. 20. Borsook, Cyberselfish, 15. 21. Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 22. Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian.” 23. Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things. 24. Slovic, The Perception of Risk; Slovic and Slovic, Numbers and Nerves; Kahan et al., “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition.” 25. Leslie et al., “Expectations of Brilliance Underlie Gender Distributions across Academic Disciplines,” 262. 26. Bench et al., “Gender Gaps in Overestimation of Math Performance,” 158.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Like the Oakland-based tech activist, he too is a veteran of the Vietnam War protests and civil rights struggles of the sixties and seventies. In contrast, however, with Kapor Klein’s goal of building an alternative investment ecosystem to Silicon Valley, Taplin’s focus is more directly political. His 2017 book, Move Fast and Break Things, borrows its title from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s notorious mantra to disrupt as much as possible without taking responsibility for any of the resulting damage. Taplin reserves his sharpest critique for Silicon Valley’s libertarian ideology, with its fetishization of free market forces, which has enabled this new economy to so radically disrupt old business models and economic practices.

Just as the prohibition of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933 triggered a massive increase in organized crime, so the DMCA has led, Naughton says, to an “astonishing rise in hate speech, harassment, bullying, revenge porn, fake news and other abuses of digital technology.”5 Yes, move fast and break things, the DMCA is saying. Yes, profit from all the content posted on your network. But no, don’t worry about the consequences of this content, because you aren’t accountable for any of it under the law. Principal among those “other abuses” Naughton describes are the posting and exchange of illegal, mostly pirated content.

According to Gartner, 86.2% of global smartphone purchases in the second quarter of 2016 were for phones operating on the Android platform. See: Natasha Lomas, “Android’s Smartphone Marketshare Hit 86.2% in Q2,” Techcrunch, August 18, 2016. 20. Jerry Brotton, The History of the World in 12 Maps (Viking Penguin, 2012), 431–32. 21. Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (Little Brown, 2017), 4. 22. John Gapper, “YouTube Is Big Enough to Take Responsibility for Piracy,” Financial Times, May 19, 2016. 23. Emily Bell, “Facebook Is Eating the World,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 7, 2016. 24.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 2012, Uber started letting almost anyone sign up to drive on the app with their own vehicle to provide its lower cost UberX service. As part of that effort, Uber unleashed an extensive lobbying operation to rewrite laws in jurisdictions that required longer, more intense fingerprint-based background checks for drivers. In typical “move fast and break things” fashion, it did not ensure it had the proper licensing or regulations from local governments. It just set the service loose regardless of the consequences—and there were plenty. Kalanick made many bold claims about the benefits that Uber could bring to cities, but they were as naïve or deceptive as his argument that jitneys could have fundamentally altered the direction of urban mobility.

Google also acquired 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, and structured the deal so Levandowski earned a significant payout because Page knew getting rich was one of his driving motivations. But being rewarded for his actions only intensified Levandowski’s worst qualities. In the early 2010s, as Brin was making the rounds talking up the wonderful future that autonomous vehicles would enable, Levandowski was on the development side and the approach he took embodied the “move fast and break things” mentality that considered safety a secondary goal to hitting the market before competitors. The software that the vehicles were using was limited to particular routes that the team believed it would be safe to operate on, but Google executive Isaac Taylor discovered that while he was on parental leave in 2011, Levandowski had disabled the safety protocol so he could use the vehicle wherever he wanted.

While the NTSB placed secondary blame on Uber for its lack of safety and driver monitoring, as well as on Herzberg herself for being impaired, and on the Arizona Department of Transportation for its ineffective oversight of autonomous vehicles, it is clear that the company wanted to avoid a precedent-setting judgment that could have left the developers of autonomous vehicles with liability when they get into accidents. The agency’s decision was not a surprise, but placing blame on an individual misses the bigger picture, both in a technological sense and an urban planning sense. The actions of Uber executives and engineers are in line with the “move fast and break things” culture that is promoted in Silicon Valley, one which is motivated first and foremost by beating competitors to market by launching a minimum viable product and capturing market share as quickly as possible in the pursuit of monopoly. Not only did Uber’s hardware and software decisions not properly consider the safety of pedestrians, but the area where the crash took place was hostile to pedestrians—as are so many areas in North American cities.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

The deal, which had sailed through approvals in six months without much conflict or delay, would weaken Twitter’s promise while affording Instagram all the competitive advantages of the biggest network in the world. And it would eventually ensure that the main alternative to Facebook was a product also owned by Facebook. MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS “I hate when people discount us. I hate when people tell us we’re not going to be something, that because we’ve sold, it’s all over. Looking from the outside, I get their perspective. I just wanted to prove them wrong.” —KEVIN SYSTROM, ON THE TIM FERRISS SHOW IN 2019 The Monday after the deal was finalized, Instagram employees hopped on their Wi-Fi-equipped Facebook buses in a forced embrace of their new one-hour commute.

But for now, with the stock down in an era before the public reckoning, Facebook was singularly focused on demonstrating that it could create a viable long-term business, even on mobile phones, proving all the haters wrong. “This Journey Is Only 1% Finished,” the posters around campus declared. “The Riskiest Thing Is to Take No Risks.” “Done Is Better than Perfect.” “Move Fast and Break Things.” Employees rarely challenged these assumptions. They provided a comforting clarity about what success looked like, all outlined in that helpful little book from employee orientation. “It would be easy to get complacent and think we’ve won every time we bring ourselves to a new level, but all that does is just decrease the chance we’ll get to the next level after that,” Zuckerberg wrote in an email in 2009, which is memorialized in the handbook.

Too many notifications would violate that principle. Then there was “simplicity matters,” meaning that before any new products could roll out, engineers had to think about whether they were solving a specific user problem, and whether making a change was even necessary, or might overcomplicate the app. It was the opposite of Facebook’s “move fast and break things,” where building for growth was valued over usefulness or trust. There was also “inspire creativity,” which meant Instagram was going to try to frame the app as an artistic outlet, training its own users and highlighting the best of them through an editorial strategy, focusing on content that was genuine and meaningful.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

So they’d push the code out at midnight and then hold their breath to see whether it crashed Facebook or not. If everything worked, they’d leave; if it caused a catastrophe, they’d frantically try to fix it, often toiling until the early morning, or sometimes just “reverting” back to the old code when they simply couldn’t get the new feature working. As Zuckerberg’s oft-quoted motto went, “Move fast and break things.” Sanghvi loved it. “It was different, it was vibrant, it was alive,” she says. “People there were like humming along, everyone was really busy, everyone was really into what they were doing . . . the energy was just so tangible.” And as it turns out, Facebook was desperately seeking more coders.

“Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation,” he wrote. That’s a curiously cautious mission statement: While mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness. It’s certainly a more measured rallying cry than “Move fast and break things.” You could read it, perhaps, as a quiet admission that some things ought to be left unbroken. “Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food.

The expressway quickly attracted so much loud, pollution-belching trucking traffic that it destroyed the property value of any houses nearby, making hundreds of mostly African American families abruptly less wealthy, and living in a much less pleasant neighborhood. (Moses, it seems, also liked to move fast and break things.) If we want to understand how today’s world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people who are building today’s world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? How does their work affect us? And perhaps most interestingly, what does it do to them?


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

As I noted in chapter 2, drivers assess this job in comparison to their available alternatives. Evaluating Uber’s impact on society, however, is always complicated by the mixed benefits it delivers to drivers, passengers, and other stakeholders, and by the divisions it sows in the process. GRATITUDE LOGIC: MOVE FAST, BREAK THINGS, CITE TECHNOLOGY CONTRIBUTIONS LATER In its initial rise, from 2009 to 2014 or so, Uber came to represent the sharing economy and was widely celebrated in forums on the future of work, in the media, and across academic and policy circles. Sharing-economy companies argued that they should not be put in the same categories as their industry competitors.

When law enforcement goes easy on tech entrepreneurs breaking the law but cracks down on racial minorities peacefully living quiet lives, the cultural-privilege dynamics that Uber benefits from become plainly obvious. What happens to Uber tells us a lot about who may break the law under the guise of innovative disruption with less severe consequences. For some critics, the disruption ethos of technology—often summarized as “move fast, break things” and “don’t ask permission; ask forgiveness later”—eerily echoes rape culture, where entitlement and privilege supersede consent.20 Many advocates for labor and civil society have begun to push back against Uber and companies like it. Beneath the heady haze of debates over whether governments should be innovative and run society like tech start-ups, worker advocates and class-action lawyers have mounted cases accusing Uber—as well as other sharing economy companies, like Handy,21 HomeJoy,22 Lyft,23 and others—of violating labor law meant to protect their workers.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

The most comprehensive reporting on Microsoft’s court saga was written by my now-deceased mentor Joel Brinkley. I pulled the Bill Gates quote—“How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?”—from Brinkley’s 1998 article, “As Microsoft Trial Gets Started, Gates’s Credibility is Questioned.” Mark Zuckerberg relayed his early “Move Fast and Break Things” mantra to Henry Blodget in an October 2009 interview. The full quote was: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” I relied on Jane Perrone’s Guardian article “Code Red Worm” for the reference to the computer worm. Scientific American provided a more comprehensive account in its October 28, 2002 article: “Code Red: Worm Assault on the Web.”

He was firing off emails to AOL executives, demanding to know: “How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?” In the rush to best Netscape, speed, not security, was the name of the game. More than a decade later, Mark Zuckerberg would coin a name for this approach at Facebook with his motto “Move fast and break things.” Just as soon as these products hit the market, hackers began unspooling them with glee. They wanted to see how far the bugs in their new internet toys could take them—which, as it turned out, was quite far. Hackers found they could tunnel through Microsoft’s systems to customers all over the web.

Part of the problem is the economy still rewards the first to market. Whoever gets their widget to market with the most features before the competition wins. But speed has always been the natural enemy of good security design. Our current model penalizes products with the most secure, fully vetted software. And yet, the “move fast and break things” mantra Mark Zuckerberg pushed in Facebook’s earliest days has failed us time and time again. The annual cost from cyber losses now eclipses those from terrorism. In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Contents Author’s Note Dedication Prologue: The Garden of Forking Paths PART ONE: Disturbing the Peace The Undertakers of Capitalism The Human Attention Exchange Knowing How to Swim Abandoning the Shipwreck PART TWO: Pseudorandomness Let Me See Your War Face Like Marriage, but without the Fucking Speed Is a Feature D-Day A Conclave of Angels The Hill of Sand Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre ¡No Pasarán! The Dog Shit Sandwich Victory Launching! Dates @Twitter Acquisition Chicken Getting Liked Getting Poked The Various Futures of the Forking Paths Retweets Are Not Endorsements The Dotted Line Endgame PART THREE: Move Fast and Break Things Boot Camp Product Masseur Google Delenda Est Leaping Headlong One Shot, One Kill Twice Bitten, Thrice Shy Ads Five-Oh The Narcissism of Privacy Are We Savages or What? O Death The Barbaric Yawn Going Public When the Flying Saucers Fail to Appear Monetizing the Tumor The Great Awakening Barbarians at the Gates IPA > IPO Initial Public Offering: A Reevaluation Flash Boys Full Frontal Facebook Microsoft Shrugged Ad Majorem Facebook Gloriam Adiós, Facebook Pandemonium Lost Epilogue: Man Plans and God Laughs Acknowledgments Index About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher Prologue: The Garden of Forking Paths Had I had been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

Had I executed the optimal strategy, my return on AdGrok would likely have been hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars more than it eventually was. Plus, the additional cash or Twitter stock would have served as a hedge to my all-in position in Facebook. Morality, such as it exists in the tech whorehouse, is an expensive hobby indeed. Part Three Move Fast and Break Things Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc. IPO documents (2012) Boot Camp Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.

When Facebook arrived, instead of replacing the original sign, management had simply flipped it around, and intentionally neglected to paint or cover the back. It read SUN MICROSYSTEMS, along with the quadrangular logo made of S figures that used to appear at the top of every Web page you loaded. This too shall pass. What befell Sun could befall us too, so MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS! Zuck was saying by implication. Perhaps even the mighty Facebook Like button would one day be looked upon like the inscription on the fragment of Ozymandias’s statue in Shelley’s rumination on the transience of human ambition: an arrogant spasm of striving, forgotten and abandoned. Every morning I bicycled the six miles from my sailboat docked in Redwood City to the new campus, which sat on an artificial spit of land poking into the tidal marshes that formed the San Francisco Bay’s boggy southern tip.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Hassabis is one of a growing number of scientists who say the artificial general intelligence we were promised so long ago is finally within reach. This core belief in the power of technology and data is part of a broader worldview encapsulated in popular Silicon Valley sayings such as “Move fast and break things” and the abbreviated “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” Google never asked permission to photograph the front of everyone’s home, link it to a physical address, and put it on the web. Nor did the company ask permission for its Google Earth cars, kitted up with special equipment, to vacuum up unencrypted Wi-Fi traffic (usernames, passwords, emails, photos, videos) as they drove around taking photographs.

Sainato, “‘We Are Not Robots.’” 49. Bruder, Nomadland, 62. 50. Lee et al., “Working with Machines.” 51. O’Connor, “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm.” 52. JC, “Ridester’s 2018 Independent Driver Earnings Survey,” Ridester, March 29, 2019, www.ridester.com/2018-survey. 53. For a discussion, see Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things. 54. Friedman, The World Is Flat. 55. Waddell, “Why Bosses Can Track Their Employees 24/7.” 56. Levin, “Sexual Harassment and the Sharing Economy.” 57. See Laufer, “Social Accountability and Corporate Greenwashing.” 58. Amazon.com, “2017 Amazon Holiday Commercial,” video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Sundararajan, Arun. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Sunstein, Cass R. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, Kindle edition. Taplin, Jonathan. Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Boston: Little, Brown, 2017. ———. “Google’s Disturbing Influence over Think Tanks.” New York Times, August 30, 2017. Taylor, Astra. The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. New York: Picador, 2014.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The guy, who might have been outfitted to hang out at the Battery, was wielding a sledgehammer with which he was energetically smashing some plastic objects into smithereens. REALLY CREATIVE DESTRUCTION, the magazine’s headline screamed in letters as black as the dude’s goatee and glasses.8 One doesn’t need to be a semiotician to grasp the significance of seeing this picture—with its “move fast and break things” message—in Rochester, of all places. Much of Rochester’s industrial economy had itself been smashed into smithereens over the last twenty-five years by a Schumpeterian hurricane of creative destruction. The significance of that magazine cover was, therefore, hard to miss: the sledgehammer mirrored the destructive might of the digital revolution; while the plastic objects being destroyed represented the broken city itself.

As critics like Tim Wu have argued, the answer lies in our new digital elite becoming accountable for the most traumatic socioeconomic disruption since the industrial revolution. Rather than thinking differently, the ethic of this new elite should be to think traditionally. Rather than seceding to Burning Man or Mars, this plutocracy must be beamed back down to earth. “Move fast and break things” was the old hacker ethic; “you break it, you own it” should be the new one. Rather than an Internet Bill of Rights, what we really need is an informal Bill of Responsibilities that establishes a new social contract for every member of networked society. Silicon Valley has fetishized the ideals of collaboration and conversation.

The young entrepreneur featured on the cover was Ben Milne, the founder and CEO of a digital payments startup called Dwolla, who, the magazine claimed, was seeking to “demolish” the finance industry. Milne seems to think of himself as a big-time demolisher. On his own Instagram page, for example, he posted an image saying: “MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS.” instagram.com/p/epyqnEHQwg. 9 David Wills, Hollywood in Kodachrome (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), p. xiii. 10 Ibid. Kodachrome film was also used to make eighty Oscar winners of the Best Picture award. See Rupert Neate, “Kodak Falls in the Creative Destruction of the Digital Age,” Guardian, January 19, 2013, theguardian.com/business/2012/jan/19/kodak-bankruptcy-protection. 11 Ellen Gamerman, “I Snap Therefore I Am,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2013. 12 Ibid. 13 John Naughton, “Could Kodak’s Demise Have Been Averted?


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Understanding the value of Agile, as well as how your teams have implemented it, will help make sense of the sometimes counterintuitive, and often frustrating answers you get when you seek certainty from your product teams. Chapter 11 Invest in Infrastructure Move fast and break things. —Mark Zuckerberg, 2009 Move fast with stable infra. —Mark Zuckerberg, 2014 Mark Zuckerberg’s famous tagline “Move fast and break things” was brilliant, but ultimately insincere. So it was unsurprising that he ended up changing it in 2014 to the far less memorable “Move fast with stable infra[structure].” The tension between those two statements is what this chapter is about.

Executives say they want innovation, but then unwittingly punish people for its natural consequences. And because human beings are good at pain avoidance, the desire to avoid punishment pretty quickly overrides the innovation directive. The result is an organization that moves slowly, is risk averse, and lacks accountability. That’s the brilliance of Zuckerberg’s original motto: “Move fast and break things.” He acknowledges that moving fast incurs a cost—things won’t be perfect—and he’s okay with that. If you break something, I have your back as long as you were pushing the envelope to invent something for our customers. By doing this, he ensures that the innovation directive will prevail.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Westwood (2014), ‘Selective exposure in the age of social media: Endorsements trump partisan source affiliation when selecting news online’. Communication Research, 41(8), 1042–1063. E. Bakshy, S. Messing and L.A. Adamic (2015), ‘Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook’, Science, 348 (6239), 1130–1132. 8 Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things (Macmillan, 2017). 9 Lee Drutman, ‘We need political parties. But their rabid partisanship could destroy American democracy’, www.vox.com, 5 September 2017. 10 Joel Busher, ‘Understanding the English Defence League: living on the front line of a “clash of civilisations”’, 2 December 2017, www.blogs.lse.ac.uk.

Data Protection Act 1998, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/contents 16 Jim Waterson, ‘Here’s How Labour Ran An Under-The-Radar Dark Ads Campaign During The General Election’, www.buzzfeed.com, 6 June 2017. 17 Ibid. 18 Heather Stewart, ‘Labour takes to the streets and social media to reach voters’, www.theguardian.com, 21 April 2017. 19 Cited in Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things. 20 E. Goodman, S. Labo, M. Moore and D. Tambini, (2017), ‘The new political campaigning’, LSE Media Policy Project Series. This is something Facebook itself boasts about of course. It claims to have reached over 80% of Facebook users in marginal seats in the UK election: ‘Using Facebook’s targeting tools, the [Conservative] party was able to reach 80.65% of Facebook users in the key marginal seats.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

America is now living in the aftermath of the first scaled deployment of a psychological weapon of mass destruction. As one of the creators of Cambridge Analytica, I share responsibility for what happened, and I know that I have a profound obligation to right the wrongs of my past. Like so many people in technology, I stupidly fell for the hubristic allure of Facebook’s call to “move fast and break things.” I’ve never regretted something so much. I moved fast, I built things of immense power, and I never fully appreciated what I was breaking until it was too late. * * * — AS I MADE MY WAY to the secure facility deep under the Capitol that day in the early summer of 2018, I felt numbed to what was happening around me.

When Facebook goes on yet another apology tour, loudly professing that “we will try harder,” its empty rhetoric is nothing more than the thoughts and prayers of a technology company content to profit from a status quo of inaction. For Facebook, the lives of victims have become an externality of their continued quest to move fast and break things. When I came out as a whistleblower, the alt-right’s digital rage machine turned its sights to me. In London, enraged Brexiteers pushed me into oncoming traffic. I was followed around by alt-right stalkers and had photos of me at clubs with my friends published on alt-right websites with information about where to find me.

When you buy food in the grocery store or visit your doctor or step onto an airplane and hurtle thousands of feet in the air, do you feel safe? Most would say yes. Do you ever feel like you need to think about the chemistry or engineering of any of it? Probably not. Tech companies should not be allowed to move fast and break things. Roads have speed limits for a reason: to slow things down for the safety of people. A pharmaceutical lab or an aerospace company cannot bring new innovations to market without first passing safety and efficacy standards, so why should digital systems be released without any scrutiny? Why should we allow Big Tech to conduct scaled human experiments, only to realize that they become too big a problem to manage?


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

It built Internet technology for the here and now, not “artificial general intelligence” or any other technology unlikely to reach the real world for years to come. The company motto was “Move Fast and Break Things,” a slogan repeated almost endlessly on small silk-screened signs spread across the walls of its corporate campus. Facebook ran a social network spanning more than a billion people across the globe, and the company was geared toward expanding and amplifying this service as quickly as possible. It did not do the kind of research DeepMind aimed to do, which was more about exploring new frontiers than moving fast and breaking things. But now, after growing into one of the world’s most powerful companies, Zuckerberg was intent on racing the others—Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon—to the Next Big Thing.

In the years that followed, this became a key part of the way Zuckerberg and Schroepfer pushed the company into new technological areas, from deep learning to virtual reality. Each new group sat beside the boss. In the beginning, this rubbed some at the company the wrong way. The rest of the Facebook brain trust felt that a long-term research lab planted next to Zuckerberg would clash with the company’s move-fast-and-break-things culture and spread resentment among the rank and file. But at Facebook, Zuckerberg held sway. He was the founder and CEO, and unlike most chief executives, he controlled a majority of the voting shares on the board of directors. A month later, Zuckerberg phoned Yann LeCun. He explained what the company was doing and asked for help.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

One of the first such awards was to a team of ten engineers who had worked on the company’s early ad-targeting system. The award, presented at a company all-hands meeting, led to audible gasps when the prize amount was revealed: $10 million to be split among the team. The marriage of technology and capital has come to define the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley. The countercultural notion of a free and uncontrolled cyberspace has given way to the new mantra of “blitzscaling,” where companies grow as quickly as possible to grab a dominant market position, demonstrate hockey-stick growth to their investors, and lock in any potential network effects before competitors can respond.

And with billions of dollars available for investment—the amount of money managed by VC firms grew from roughly $170 billion in 2005 to $444 billion in 2019—it’s no wonder that the emphasis on speed of execution, metrics to measure results, and ultimately returns for investors leads to a cycle where “moving fast and breaking things” can be adopted with little reflection until it’s too late. It’s also worth noting that while funding in the VC world continues to grow, how that money is distributed often reflects a narrow view of what a successful entrepreneur looks like. John Doerr, speaking at the National Venture Capital Association in 2008, famously described how being a male nerd “correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs.

If the decisions we confront in regulating technology do not have obvious answers—and most do not, for reasonable people can disagree how much free speech is good and what decisions should be kept out of the hands of robots—the idea that we will build some sort of shared and definitive view about how all good things and competing values can be reconciled is fanciful, especially in a world in which new technologies are coming online so quickly. So why should we continue to look to elected politicians to regulate technology, given their track record? Part of the answer hinges on just how concerned you are about the consequences of the hands-off approach to new technologies. Silicon Valley’s attachment to the motto “Move fast and break things” has generated real effects on how much privacy we enjoy, the nature of work, and what we are exposed to in the digital public sphere. We have called these effects externalities—the by-products of technological change and innovation—and it falls to government, if it can get its act together, to deal with the consequences.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible Facebook citizen—a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism. Zuckerberg claimed to have distilled that hacker spirit into a motivational motto: “Move Fast and Break Things.” Indeed, Facebook has excelled at that. The truth is, Facebook moved faster than Zuckerberg could ever have imagined. He hadn’t really intended his creation. His company was, as we all know, a dorm room lark, a thing he ginned up in a Red Bull–induced fit of sleeplessness. As his creation grew, it needed to justify its new scale to its investors, to its users, to the world.

“One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog: Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Anchor Books, 2009), 49. “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture”: Levy, Hackers, 475. “just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype”: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stumbles: ‘There’s always a next move,’” Today, February 4, 2014. “Move Fast and Break Things”: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way,’” Wired, February 1, 2012. “It was always very important for our brand”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 144. “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”: Kirkpatrick, 209. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends”: Kirkpatrick, 199.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

abstract_id=2437678. 33Fast-forward another half decade: Kim Zetter (31 Jul 2010), “Hacker spoofs cell phone tower to intercept calls,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/2010/07/intercepting-cellphone-calls. 33The result is passwords: My essay about how to choose a secure password: Bruce Schneier (25 Feb 2014), “Choosing a secure password,” Boing Boing, https://boingboing.net/2014/02/25/choosing-a-secure-password.html. 33In the 1970s, IBM mathematicians: Don Coppersmith (May 1994), “The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and its strength against attacks,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 38, no. 3, http://simson.net/ref/1994/coppersmith94.pdf. 33The NSA classified IBM’s discovery: Eli Biham and Adi Shamir (1990), “Differential cryptanalysis of DES-like cryptosystems,” Journal of Cryptology 4, no. 1, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00630563. 2. PATCHING IS FAILING AS A SECURITY PARADIGM 34“Move fast and break things”: In 2014, Facebook changed its motto. Samantha Murphy (30 Apr 2014), “Facebook changes its ‘Move fast and break things’ motto,” Mashable, http://mashable.com/2014/04/30/facebooks-new-mantra-move-fast-with-stability/#ebhnHppqdPq9. 36“responsible disclosure”: Stephen A. Shepherd (22 Apr 2003), “How do we define responsible disclosure?” SANS Institute, https://www.sans.org/reading-room/white papers/threats/define-responsible-disclosure-932. 36Google has an entire team: Andy Greenberg (16 Jul 2014), “Meet ‘Project Zero,’ Google’s secret team of bug-hunting hackers,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/2014/07/google-project-zero.

And while we can’t eliminate all those risks completely, we can mitigate them by doing a lot of up-front work. The alternative security paradigm comes from the fast-moving, freewheeling, highly complex, and heretofore largely benign world of software. Its motto is “Make sure your security is agile” or, in Facebook lingo, “Move fast and break things.” In this model, we try to make sure we can update our systems quickly when security vulnerabilities are discovered. We try to build systems that are survivable, that can recover from attack, that actually mitigate attacks, and that adapt to changing threats. But mostly we build systems that we can quickly and efficiently patch.


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

When new employees come on board, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. If you don’t think entrepreneurs are more important than venture capitalists, we can’t use you at Andreessen Horowitz. Move fast and break things Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: Move fast and break things. Did the CEO really want us to break things? I mean, he’s telling us to break things! A motto that shocking forces everyone to stop and think. When they think, they realize that if you move fast and innovate, you will break things.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

ICANN and its stakeholders have clearly managed to think up a new and more secure system that would fix at least some of the system’s problems, and they still host regular ceremonies to keep its certificates up to date; but nearly a decade after the system began, it’s still barely used in practice, even if the big players have signed up in theory. ‘Slow and bureaucratic’ are supposedly dead concepts, things of the past when it comes to the ‘move fast and break things’ mantras of the Silicon Valley start-ups – but when it comes to online infrastructure, the analogy seems to be more ‘move fast, grow fast, fix achingly slowly’. The struggles of working out these tensions are more obvious in what – at first at least – seems like one of ICANN’s more trivial functions: deciding what gets to be a web domain, and who gets to administer it if so.

And for a long time, it’s felt safe to only focus on those because the internet was the home of the upstarts and the disruptors; it’s only now, as we start to accept the internet businesses are the incumbents, that the need for more reflection on the business and funding model, and perhaps the need to slow down, becomes clear. It’s a tension Borthwick – whose very studio, betaworks, is built off and named after a culture of experimentation, trying things out (of ‘betas’), and moving fast – does now acknowledge. Times have changed. ‘I think that culture of move fast and break things or fuck it, ship it, and just get it out, has been a large contributor to some of the unintended consequences that we’ve seen today.’ VCs aren’t trusted with so much money and power over the online ecosystem for nothing: they often have an insight into what the internet is doing to the world long ahead of the rest of us – even if their main motivation for looking into it is using that insight to make money.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Filthy air. Life expectancy was around 30 years for the slum-housed factory workers. So much money. So little equality. Folks called Manchester the Golden Sewer. * * * Marx, writing in chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, had this to say, and it sounds eerily like the 21st-century ‘move fast and break things’ (Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook) mentality we associate with Big Tech: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air.

Thompson, 1963 Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, Eric Hobsbawm, 1968 Why the West Rules – For Now, Ian Morris, 2010 Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, 2011 ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (poem), Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1832: ‘Ye are many—they are few’ ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’ (essay), Simon Fairlie, 2009 PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason, 2015 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, 2013 Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon have cornered culture and undermined democracy, Jonathan Taplin, 2017 The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, 1860 From Sci-fi to Wi-fi to My-Wi Rocannon’s World, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1966 The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham, 1957 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932 Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1999 ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (short story), Philip K.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The American view of the internet—and by extension Silicon Valley—performed a 180-degree reversal in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Facebook, Google, and Twitter went from being the nation’s darlings to being castigated as enablers of Russian subversion of American democracy. It is striking that both Franklin Foer in World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) and Jonathan Taplin in Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (2017) open their jeremiads with profiles of Brand as a harbinger of an emergent cyberculture that originally promised digital freedom and instead has brought a post-Orwellian state of soft control and concentration of power.

Brand felt that Huey Johnson had been “shockingly effective” as natural resources secretary for California in the early ’80s, proving “how much lasting good can be accomplished by intelligent and integrated policy at the state level.” Streeter and Turner also ignored the degree to which he felt that his effort in building a workable, not-for-profit digital culture upon the WELL had been a failure. They also failed to make the distinction—made later by Jonathan Taplin in his 2017 book, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy—between Brand’s original technological utopianism and Silicon Valley–centered digital libertarianism that emerged with a group of Stanford-educated young Turks known as the PayPal Mafia during the dot-com era. In Whole Earth Discipline, Brand made a decidedly non-neoliberal argument: “The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green.

., 78–79, 106 Miller, Henry, 35, 50, 71 Mills, Stephanie, 182, 222 SB’s affair with, 203–4, 209, 210, 213–14 Mind and Nature (Bateson), 277 Minsky, Marvin, 277, 278, 289, 324 Mirene (SB’s houseboat), 46–47, 249, 256, 271, 282, 302, 307, 334, 338, 343 MIT, 135 Artificial Intelligence Lab of, 266–67, 272 Building 20 at, 290–91, 307 Media Lab at, see Media Lab Mogar, Robert, 78, 103 Monbiot, George, 354 Monitor, 296 “monkey wrenching” (sabotage), 181 Moore, Fred, 196–97, 198 Moore, Gordon, 152 Moore’s law, 152 Morley, AJ, 8–9 Morley, Ed, 29 Morley, Ralph Chase (grandfather), 8–9, 16 Morley Brothers wholesalers, 8, 157 Morley family, 7–9 Mornell, Pierre, 194, 202, 213 Morningstar commune, 140 Morris, Robert Tappan, 293 Morrison, Philip, 172, 281 Moss Tents, 175 Mountain Girl (Carolyn Adams), 125, 128, 131 Mount Analogue (Daumal), 186 Move Fast and Break Things (Taplin), 5–6, 10, 348 Muir, John, 340 multimedia, 106, 137, 306 see also specific events and exhibitions Mumford, Lewis, 162 Murphy, Dennis, 35 Murphy, Michael, 40, 71, 76, 83, 84–85, 97, 101, 211 Mutiny on the Bounty (film), 233 Myhrvold, Nathan, 328, 331 N Naisbitt, John, 262 NASA, 135, 191 National Book Awards Ceremony, SB at, 200–201 National Congress of American Indians, 1964 convention of, 107, 110–11 National Park Service, 237 Native American Church, 100, 112 “Native American Church Meeting, The” (Brand), 109 Native Americans, see American Indians nature: humans as morally responsible for care of, 42, 347, 349, 360, 361 SB’s childhood immersion in, 10–11 Navajo Mountain, 117 Negroponte, Nicholas, 262, 272, 279, 281, 287, 289, 290, 292 Nelson, Ted, 230, 292, 293, 294 Network Technologies International (NETI), 263 Neuwirth, Robert, 341 New Age Journal, 255 New Age movements, 35, 41, 225 New Games, 210, 211, 217, 220, 221, 236–37 New Jersey Institute of Technology, 240 New Left, 143, 225 SB’s antipathy for, 4, 142, 145, 341, 347 Newton, Huey, 229 New Urbanism, 129, 246, 307 New Yorker, 190, 219, 311 New York Times, 259, 265, 280, 314, 341–42 SB profile in, 344–45 New York Times Magazine, 45, 46 Next Whole Earth Catalog, The, 240, 241–42 Nin, Anaïs, 50 nitrous oxide, 163 Nixon, Cynthia, 142, 144, 145, 152 Nixon, James, 142–45, 150, 151–52 Nixon, Richard, 225 “No Frames, No Boundaries” (Schweickart talk), 224–25 No More Secondhand God (Fuller), 162 Nordhaus, Ted, 340 Norman, Gurney, 146, 183, 193, 223 North Beach (San Francisco neighborhood), 50, 99 Beat culture of, 3, 34, 35, 37, 47–49 SB’s apartment in, 1, 74–75, 83, 89–90, 98, 134 Nuclear Energy Institute, 342 nuclear power, 2 SB’s defense of, 2, 5, 337, 338, 339, 341–42, 344, 351, 353–54, 356 Schwartz’s endorsement of, 339–40 nuclear war-gaming, 273 nuclear waste storage, 335–36 nuclear weapons, US-Soviet standoff over, 31 O Office of Naval Research, 111 Ogilvy, Jay, 295 “Ohio” (song), 190 Oliveros, Pauline, 94 Omidyar, Pierre, 336 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 87–88 O’Neill, Gerard K., 231–32 oNLine System (NLS), 151, 156, 197, 212 On the Road (Kerouac), 69, 126 Onslow Ford, Gordon, 50 Oppenheimer, Frank, 194 Oppenheimer, Robert, 17–18 Oraibi, Ariz., 116 Oregon State University, 355 Orlovsky, Peter, 237 Osborn, Fairfield, 28 Osborne, Dan, 114, 117 Osborne I computer, 251, 267 Ostwind, Dorothy, 88, 97, 98 Other One, The (film), 126 Our Mr.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Staff invented a new category (“borderline fetish”) and wrote policies for moderators and machines to detect videos that fell into it. YouTube made another label for footage that mixed children’s characters with “adult themes”—the screwy Peppa Pig fare and legions of Spider-Man–Elsa mash-ups. They moved cautiously. While YouTube staff envied Facebook, they liked to say they didn’t “move fast and break things”—Facebook’s old motto. In the wake of Trump’s election, that motto was synonymous with the social network’s careless wreckage of democratic norms. When YouTube decided to ban videos giving firearm instructions or selling guns, the company took six months to write rules, stress test them, and develop enforcement protocols.

See also Zappin, Danny Dickson, Marion, 10 Digg, 95 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998), 35, 36, 37, 61, 99 Disney content on YouTube, 242–43 and Frozen (film), 241–42 Maker Studios acquired by, 219, 242 and PewDiePie/Kjellberg, 219, 278 and success of YouTube model, 210 YouTube’s attempt to partner with, 130 and Zappin, 107 DisneyCollectorBR, 171–73, 174, 239, 242 DistBelief, 232 diversity, 301, 302, 344 do-it-yourself crafting, 57 dollar-sign indicators for creators, 268 domain for YouTube.com, 16 Donahue, Kevin, 28–29, 66–67, 168–69 Donaldson, Jimmy, 353 Donovan Data Systems, 74 Donovan, Lisa, 106–7, 186 Dorsey, Jack, 397 DoubleClick Incorporated, 70–71, 75, 197, 198, 257, 284 Douek, Evelyn, 398 Downs, Juniper, 281 doxing problem at YouTube, 262–63 DreamWorks, 210 Drudge Report, 270 Drummond, David, 215, 216 Ducard, Malik, 378 Dynamic Ad Loads (Dallas), 191–92, 194 E eBaum’s World, 21 eBay, 52 echo chambers of YouTube, 265–66, 299 edgelords, 275–76, 383 EduTubers, 170, 245, 246 egalitarianism prioritized at YouTube, 164, 180, 194 Egypt, 137–38, 141–42, 143 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 37, 215 Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain, 92, 126 Elsa, people dressed as, 305–7, 309, 312 Elsagate, 314, 321 employees of YouTube contract employees, 317–20, 327, 349 diversity hiring in, 301 as parents, 174 and perks at YouTube offices, 148 poached from Yahoo, 52 and Wojcicki, 211–13 engagement of users emphasis placed on, 154, 158–59 (see also watch time of audience) and machine learning applied to advertising, 191 payments based on (Moneyball proposal), 337–38, 341 strain related to goals for, 203 See also comments and comment section; likes Equals Three (=3) production company, 120 Europe, 340, 365, 371 European Parliament, 215–16 EvanTubeHD, 237–38 Ezarik, Justine (iJustine), 40, 78, 95, 110, 119, 392 F Facebook advertising on, 252, 284 and Arab Spring, 142 boycotts of, 382 Cambridge Analytica scandal, 341 Chen’s employment with, 24 competition of YouTube with, 264–65 and COVID-19 misinformation, 397, 398 criticisms of, 366 engagement of users, 154 as global public square, 142 growth/popularity of, 93, 138, 146, 284 “Like” button, 138 as media company, 285–86 “move fast and break things” motto of, 309 and New Zealand terrorist attack, 10, 358, 359 political quagmires of, 340, 391, 397 recruitment of creators, 390 and Russian agents, 326–27, 340 Russia’s blocking of, 397 and Sandberg, 195 screeners at, 319 and Stapleton, 81 Steyer’s distrust in, 402 struggles for relevancy, 6 and Trump, 370 users leaving platform, 394 and video, 210, 251, 264–65 YouTube clips shared on, 251 faceless channels, 171–72 “fake news,” 399 fakes on YouTube, 144–45 “false flags,” 326 fashion industry, 189 Fast Company, 299–300 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 168, 224 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 168, 243, 368, 394 “Feet for Hands” (Smosh), 67 feminism, 223, 224, 225 fetish, borderline, 309, 310 Figglehorn, Fred (Cruikshank), 65–66, 69, 77–78, 131, 169 financials of YouTube crossing $1 billion in revenue, 126 and expectation of profitability, 93–94 and first profit of YouTube, 50 funding from Sequoia Capital, 29–30, 50 and Google’s priorities for YouTube, 68 impact of changed algorithm on, 159 and monetization of YouTube, 66–67, 93–94, 96 money lost by YouTube, 93 and PewDiePie, 8–9 revenue goals of Wojcicki, 252, 382 and videos eligible for advertising, 110 “Finger Family” videos, 239–40, 312 Finland, mass shooting in (2007), 64 flagged content, 165 Flannery, Michele, 94, 95, 101 Flash, 21, 24 flat-earth videos, 299, 328 Flickr, 17, 18 Flinders, Mesh, 41–42 Floyd, George, 378, 384 Foley, James, decapitation of, 213, 215 Forbes, 29 founders of YouTube, 26.

218 voice of, 276 YouTube’s hands-off approach to, 280–81 See also Kjellberg, Felix Phan, Michelle, 78 PhoneDog.com, 78 Pichai, Sundar congressional testimony of, 345–47 and criticisms of Wall Street Journal, 325 and Damore memo, 301 and engagement-based payments (Moneyball proposal), 338, 341 and “next billion users,” 341, 342 Page’s transfer of power to, 203, 230, 257 at post-election staff meeting, 272 on Rubin’s sexual misconduct, 348 and shooting at San Bruno offices, 337 on utility of Google, 401 and walkout (2017), 350 Pichette, Patrick, 97 Pickett, Tom, 87–88 playground equipment at offices, 148 PocketWatch, 395 politics charges of political bias, 269, 273, 340, 342, 345, 367 and congressional testimony of Pichai, 345–47 fringe/dangerous political content, 270, 343 Google/YouTube’s avoidance of, 63, 269, 340 and government takedown requests, 399 on home page of YouTube, 58 and rise of the alt-right, 275 and Trump’s bans, 397–98 pop-up ads, 68, 73 Porat, Ruth, 350 pornography, 32, 86, 168 Poulson, Jack, 234, 315 Power, DeStorm, 39–40, 95, 115, 159–60 power of YouTube, 391 Pozner, Leonard, 327 PragerU, 268–69 pranksters trend on YouTube, 307, 324 premium content, YouTube’s ambition to offer, 73–75, 126–27, 210, 391 presidential campaign/election of 2016 and accusations of bias in search results, 269 and algorithms of YouTube, 272, 326 alt-right’s attacks on Clinton, 269–70 and Cambridge Analytica scandal, 341 common searches about candidates, 270 and election night party, 271 and Facebook’s “move fast and break things” motto, 309 Hughes’s reaction to outcome, 294 and postmortem at YouTube and Google, 272–73 and recommendation engine of YouTube, 267 and Russia’s election meddling, 340, 345 and Trump fans on YouTube, 260, 264 See also Trump, Donald presidential campaign/election of 2020, 386–88 Pritchard, Marc, 283–84, 285, 287 problematic/troubling content advertising on, 285–87, 296 bad actors behind, 308, 316, 329 banning of harmful videos, 299–300 and borderline footage, 32, 309, 310, 368, 398 burying of, 296 child exploitation, 311–16 deletion of (Elsagate), 314 echo chambers of, 299 and intelligence desk, 356–57, 376 labeling/tracking borderline clips, 180 Paul’s video of suicide victim, 321–24 penalty box for troublesome creators, 235, 292, 296, 327, 346 proactive searches thwarted, 342 public promises of YouTube on, 316 removal of ads from, 324 removal of inflammatory accounts, 379 re-uploads of, 323, 360, 361 targeted at kids, 305–11 and user satisfaction ratings, 296 product placements, 67, 110–11 Project Beane, 258 Project MASA (Make Ads Safe Again), 296, 313, 381 purpose of YouTube, 22–23 Putin, Vladimir, 266 Q QAnon, 346, 396 Qu, Hong, 95, 356 Quagliarello, Mia, 56, 57 quality of content, 175 R radicalism, addressing, 235 Rajaraman, Shiva, 47–48, 51, 70 Ramaswamy, Sridhar, 199–200, 203, 313–14 Ranta, Phil, 306–7, 314 Raskin, Jamie, 346 rating system on YouTube, 95, 296, 369–70 Ratliff, Keith, 182 reality TV, 23–24 recommendation engine of YouTube algorithms behind, 100, 135 and changes to algorithm, 156, 157 and children, 236, 241 and conspiracies/untruths, 325–29, 346 and debatable content, 180 echo chambers in, 265–66, 299 and election misinformation of 2020, 388 neural networks in, 233–35 as new feature, 23 Reinforce program behind, 298 and right-wing content, 223, 224, 227 and watch time, 154, 155 See also algorithms of YouTube re-creation aesthetic, 27 Reddit, 218, 270 Redstone, Sumner, 60, 62, 76, 253–54 refugees, 264 Reinforce program, 298 related videos sidebar, 23, 57, 100–101, 120, 156, 173, 239.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

We’re all certainly better off with the sole decision-maker of a three-billion-member social network modeling himself after Augustus Caesar than, say, his eventual successor, Caligula. But Zuckerberg’s acceptance of Augustus’s “really harsh approach” as the price we pay for the eventual stability of his empire may be too expensive. Zuckerberg’s famous exhortation to his company to “move fast and break things” has won him monopolies, but has also had a disastrous impact on internet innovation, the social landscape, mental health, and the viability of democracy itself. That’s what happens when you are a definite optimist, driving toward a single goal, with billions of dollars and petabytes of RAM at your disposal.

Without these technologies, we might never have made any of the magnificent progress in medicine, architecture, transportation, fabrication, manufacturing, agriculture, and more, about which our civilization can be both rightly proud yet also penitent for the many unintended consequences. Until now, the mere effort of striving and forward motion has been enough to help many of the world’s most aggressive conquerors and capitalists avoid the negative effects of their own activities. They “move fast” when they “break things” so they’re not hit by the falling debris. Similarly, the real race to space, wealth, and whatever the tech titans think they mean by “sovereignty” is less a running toward some vision of techno-utopia than a running away from all the damage and resentment they’re trying to leave behind.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The spurious notion that there was some discernible Law of Business Administration to be found within such miscellaneous instances of human behavioral change dated to 1997, when a Harvard Business School professor published his theory of “disruptive innovation.” Another Harvardite, Mark Zuckerberg, enshrined disruption as the operating principle of Facebook, commanding employees to “move fast and break things.” Later techie manifestos boiled the scholarly pretense down to its vulgar essence: “Break shit.” I needed to look like someone who was ready to break shit. I procured a bright yellow T-shirt that proclaimed, in big block letters, IT’S TIME FOR PLAN ฿—Bitcoin, of course. I wanted disruptive business cards, but I was on a budget.

“permanent revolution” Nevil Gibson, “In the Trenches of Silicon Valley,” April 29, 2014, Stuff.co.nz. “A revolution is not a dinner party” Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. The spurious notion Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine,” New Yorker, June 23, 2014; Samantha Murphy, “Facebook Changes Its ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Motto,” April 30, 2014, mashable.com; Katy Waldman, “Let’s Break Shit: A Short History of Silicon Valley’s Favorite Phrase,” December 5, 2014, slate.com. No More Woof Marc Lallanilla, “Speak, Fido: Device Promises Dog Translations,” January 3, 2014, livescience.com. Here again Uber pointed the way Erica Fink, “Uber’s Dirty Tricks Quantified: Rival Counts 5,560 Canceled Rides,” August 12, 2014, cnn.com.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Chapter 6 Double-Edged Swords Harness Platform Power, but Don’t Abuse It The Mood Change Don’t Be a Bully Anticipate Antitrust and Competition Concerns Balance Openness with Trust Privacy, Fairness, and Fraud The Workforce Not Everyone Should Be a Contractor Self-Regulate Work with Regulators Before They Pounce Key Takeaways for Managers and Entrepreneurs Quotes from Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Facebook: 2009: “Move fast and break things.”1 2018: “We did not take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.”2 Successful platforms inevitably acquire power. Platform power, like corporate power more generally, can take on different forms—economic but also social and political. How platform companies exercise that power reflects their position toward another crucial aspect of the business: platform governance. In the early stages, it may be desirable for start-ups to “move fast and break things,” as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg declared in 2009.


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966; John Bellamy Foster, ‘Monopoly-Finance Capital’, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 7, December 2006. 5 Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hofmann, ‘The rise of zombie firms: causes and consequences’, Bank for International Settlements Quarterly Review, September 2018. 6 Michalis Nikiforos, ‘When Two Minskyan Processes Meet a Large Shock: The Economic Implications of the Pandemic’, Levy Economics Institute, Policy Note 2020/1 (March 2020). 7 Martin Arnold and Brendan Greeley, ‘Central Banks Stimulus Is Distorting Financial Markets, BIS Finds’, Financial Times, 7 October 2019. 8 Jesse Colombo, ‘The US Is Experiencing a Dangerous Corporate Debt Bubble’, Forbes, 29 August 2018; Phillip Inman, ‘Corporate Debt Could Be the Next Sub-Prime Crisis, Warns Banking Body’, Guardian, 30 June 2019. 9 Matthew Watson, ‘Re-establishing What Went Wrong Before: The Greenspan Put as Macroeconomic Modellers’ New Normal’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, no. 7 (2014): 80–101. 10 Alfie Stirling, Just about Managing Demand: Reforming the UK’s Macroeconomic Policy Framework, London: Institute for Public Policy Research [IPPR], 2018. 11 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 929. 12 Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, New York: Currency/Random House, 2019. 13 See, e.g., Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, New York: Little, Brown, 2017, in which the author makes the now well-known claim that ‘Data is … the new oil’. 14 Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil; Martin Wolf, ‘Why Rigged Capitalism Is Damaging Liberal Democracy’, Financial Times, 18 September 2019. 15 Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil. 16 Matt Phillips, ‘Investors Bet Giant Companies Will Dominate After Crisis’, New York Times, 28 April 2020. 17 Matthew Vincent, ‘Loss-Making Tech Companies Are Floating Like It’s 1999’, Financial Times, 16 June 2019. 18 Martin Wolf, ‘Corporate Savings Are Contributing to the Savings Glut’, Financial Times, 17 November 2015; Peter Chen, Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, ‘The Global Corporate Saving Glut: Long-Term Evidence’, VoxEU, CEPR Policy Portal, 5 April 2017. 19 Rana Forooha, ‘Tech Companies Are the New Investment Banks’, Financial Times, 11 February 2018. 20 Andres Diaz, ‘I’m a Small Business Owner.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

This possibility is increasingly reality, welcomed by many but feared by some of those who know most about the potential for misuse and abuse. Growing concerns are now being expressed about the potential unintended consequences—and ethics—of this emerging set of industrial revolutions. The prevailing “move fast and break things” philosophy in Silicon Valley has proved problematic as new technologies undermine fundamental things like democracy. The shuttering of Google’s much-vaunted Advanced Technology External Advisory Council almost as soon as it was formed was a worrying sign that such companies cannot be trusted to do this coherently on their own.2 This is a real problem, given that facial recognition is an object lesson both in how rapidly new technologies can sweep through our societies and how, in the process, they create consequences unforeseen by those who spawned them.

When I Googled unintended consequences, for example, I stumbled across an organization based in our own building, London’s Somerset House.22 Doteveryone notes that “technology has introduced us to new knowledge, wonder and ingenuity. It has made our lives easier, faster, and more fun.” Then came the but. “But at the same time, many of the social harms of digital technologies built with a move fast and break things ethos—from its impact on social interactions to the results of national elections and large-scale hacks—are now becoming apparent.” Then a more positive but. “But there are a lot of exciting opportunities to do better.” Doteveryone has developed an event format that allows innovators to think about impact and potential unintended consequences, early and often.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Funds that were received through illegal or unethical business transactions are disgorged, or paid back, to those affected by the action. 10 TOR stands for The Onion Router, so-named because the IP packets are wrapped in several layers of encryption that are removed one by one by the routers it passes through, making traffic virtually untraceable to the computer doing the browsing. Websites accessible through the TOR protocol carry the ‘.onion’ extension instead of .com, .org and so on. 23. BigTech and banks enter the fray If you’ve always believed that the world’s monetary system should sit in the hands of a thirty-something billionaire who likes moving fast and breaking things, give lots of ‘likes’ () to Facebook’s foray into crypto. In June 2019, Facebook announced plans to issue its own cryptocurrency, the Libra. Garnering front-page headlines in all the business dailies, Libra’s mission statement was a bold one: ‘A simple global currency and financial infrastructure that would empower billions of people, reinvent money and transform the global economy so that people everywhere can live better lives.’

The initial euphoria surrounding Libra didn’t last long: whether due to public sector pressure or common sense, none of the three blue-chip payment companies (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal) actually signed up as founding members. For a good while the project seemed to be dormant, boasting little more than a snazzy website and a cast of founding members dominated by venture capitalists and blockchainers. Then – far from moving fast and breaking things – Libra started to rein in its ambitions (it preferred to use the term ‘augmenting’). In April 2020 it announced that, instead of tying Libra to a basket of currencies, it would offer digital versions of single currencies, such as Libra dollars and Libra euros. This would certainly be easier for consumers: we wouldn’t need to convert prices into and out of a new unit of account every time we bought a pair of socks.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

To state the obvious, there’s a vast difference between an “experiment” where some colleagues try out open-office seating in the Melbourne library and an “experiment” where scientists tinker with a species using gene-editing tools. Please do not mistake this chapter’s emphasis on experimentation for the ethos of “move fast and break things.” Upstream work hinges on humility. Because complexity can mount quickly even in simple interventions. Let’s take a final example that should be an easy one: trying to cut back on single-use plastic bags. Environmentalists consider these bags a leverage point, because even though they make up only a tiny fraction of the overall waste stream, they do disproportionate harm.

., 227 Hawken, Paul, 40, 48, 51 Hazleton Middle School, 149, 150 health, health care, 10–14, 89, 113, 127–33, 189–92, 201–4 Accountable Care Organization, 201–2, 204 ambulances, 137–40, 142, 162 Building Healthy Communities, 110–13 cancer and, see cancer capitation payment model in, 203 C-sections, 33–38 doctor training and, 130 diabetes and, 192, 201–4, 240–41 domestic violence and, 83–86, 88 Emergency Medical Services, 137–40 emergency rooms, 126–37, 161–62 fee-for-service model in, 129, 192 hospital deaths, 124 infectious diseases, 191–92 intensive care, 145–46 life expectancy, 98–102, 113–14, 190–91 mastectomies, 180–81 Medicaid, 180, 196, 240 Medicare, 113, 180, 201, 240 MRI scans, 192, 203 Nurse-Family Partnership, 194–99, 237–38 nursing homes, see nursing homes prevention in, 189–92 and saving money, 127 social determinants of health, 128 social side of medicine, 132 vaccines, see vaccines Health Initiative, The, 11 heart attacks, 138–40, 142 Hendrix, Daniel, 48, 50 hepatitis, 187 Here & Now, 124–25 Herndon, Sally, 234–35 heroism, 62–63, 182, 243–44 Hockley, Dylan, 151 Hockley, Jake, 150–51 Hockley, Nicole, 146–47, 150–51 Hodel, Donald, 69–70 Holmes, Nick, 176–77 HomeAdvisor, 200–201 homelessness, 10, 16, 90–96, 108, 128, 208, 234, 236, 239 coordinated entry and, 92–93 evictions and, 96, 108, 234 functional zero and, 95 housing first and, 92 home service industry, 200–201 homicide, 83–85, 87, 88, 116–17, 121, 126, 162, 236 Homonoff, Tatiana, 187 Hood, Christopher, 161 horses, 32–33 hospitals, 201 deaths at, 124 Emergency Medical Services, 137–40 emergency rooms, 126–37, 161–62 intensive care units, 145–46 see also health, health care “hot tub” conversations, 233 household repairs, 199–200 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), 91–93 Hug-a-Hero Dolls, 229–31, 233 Human Dimension, 130 humility, 185 hurricanes, 9–10, 223 Hurricane Ivan, 218–19 Hurricane Katrina, 213–20 Hurricane Pam simulation, 214–20 Hynd, Noel, 100 IBM, 140–42 Iceland, 75–81, 125, 231, 239 ICUs (intensive care units), 145–46 “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, 142 Imber, Amantha, 177–79 immigrants, 112 impulsivity, and violence, 117, 120–21, 123 inattentional blindness, 30 India, 177 injuries: athletic, 21–23, 29 from falling branches, 175–76 from lifting and transferring patients in nursing homes, 193–94 playground, 175 Innovative Emergency Management (IEM), 213–14, 220 Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 37, 234 insulin, 192 Intel, 168 Interface, 39–40, 48–53 internet, see computers and internet Internet of Things, 142 invasive species, 171–74, 176–77, 180 Inventium, 177–78 Inventology (Kennedy), 232 Island Conservation, 176, 184 Iton, Anthony, 97–102, 110 Jaeger, Jennifer, 91–96 Japan, 211 earthquakes in, 140 Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, 83, 84n, 85 Jordan, Michael, 183 Kahneman, Daniel, 158–59 Kaiser Permanente (KP), 203 Kay, Allen, 142 Kennedy, Pagan, 232 Kenwood Academy High School, 24 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 3 Kirby, Elizabeth, 23–24 Kleffman, Sandy, 98 Koskinen, John, 208–11 laptop power cord, 58, 231–32 Las Vegas, 127n lawsuit data patterns, 175, 184 lazy bureaucrats, 166, 169 Lederberg, Joshua, 227, 231 legitimacy, 43 Less Medicine, More Health (Welch), 143 leverage, 115–33 life expectancy, 98–102, 113–14, 190–91 life preservers, 6–7 light switch, 57–58 Lilly, Jonathan, 202 LinkedIn, 135–37 Loblaw, David Robert, 212 Los Angeles Dodgers, 100–101 Los Angeles Times, 64 Lowlevel Windshear Alert Systems (LLWAS), 211 Luca, Michael, 159–60 Ludwig, Jens, 116, 154, 250 Maalin, Ali Maow, 15 Macleod, John, 141–42 Macquarie Island, 171–74, 176, 177n macro and micro, 236–37 macro trends, 154, 161, 162, 167 Marisa, Rich, 57–58 mastectomies, 180–81 Mayor’s Challenge, 90 McCannon, Joe, 89, 163, 238 McCutchen, Aamirah, 130–31 Meadows, Donella, 174–76, 179, 187, 188 Medicaid, 180, 196, 240 Medicare, 113, 180, 201, 240 medicine, see health, health care meetings, 183–84 Mehrotra, Vikas, 177 Meltzer, Michael, 227 Mexico City, 15 mice and rats, on Macquarie Island, 171–74, 176 Milkman, Harvey, 79 Miller, Dale, 42–43 misalignment, 161, 68–69 Molina, Mario, 65–67 Montreal Protocol, 66, 69 Moodey, Tucker, 2–3 Moon landing, 226–28 Morrissey, Larry, 90–91, 94 Mostashari, Farzad, 202 mothers: Nurse-Family Partnership and, 194–99, 237–38 parental leave for, 13 “move fast and break things” ethos, 185 “move your chair” moments, 41, 49, 53 MRI scans, 192, 203 Mullainathan, Sendhil, 59–60 NASA, 226–28 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 47 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 70 National Office Management Association, 31 natural disasters, see disasters and disaster preparedness Nature, 8, 66, 68 Nautilus, 227 navigation analogy, 179–80 negative unintended consequences, 169, 171–88, 204 neighborhoods, 97–102, 106, 110–13 Network for College Success, 25 New England Patriots, 21–22 New Orleans, La.: Hurricane Ivan and, 218–19 Hurricane Katrina and, 213–20 New York, N.Y.: crime in, 162–66 falling branches in, 175–76 lawsuit data patterns in, 175, 184 New York City Police Department (NYPD), 162–66, 168 New Yorker, 83, 84n New York Times, 32, 48, 142 New York University (NYU), 133 Nike, 204 Nimoy, Leonard, 207–8, 225–26 9/11 attacks, 142, 213 911 calls, 83, 137–40 normalization, 30–31, 32 Northwell Health, 137–40 Norway, 13–14 nuclear weapons, 225, 227 Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), 194–99, 237–38 nurses, 60–62, 63 nursing homes, 138, 139 lifting and transferring patients in, 193–94 Okerstrom, Mark, 4–5, 63 Olds, David, 194–95 O’Neill, Ryan, 1–3 Onie, Rebecca, 11 On the Media, 31 open-office plans, 177–80, 185 ownership, 38, 39–55, 70 Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet, 66 ozone layer, 65–70 P3, 22 paired metrics, 168, 203 parental leave, 13 Parker, Janet, 16n parking place, 232, 233 parks, 110–11, 112 tree pruning in, 175–76 Parto do Princípio, 35–36 patience and impatience, 234–35 Pavlin, Julie, 191–92 pediatricians, and automobile safety, 44–47 Pediatrics, 44, 46, 47, 48 peripheral vision, 30 Perla, Rocco, 11 Permanente Medical Group, 124 pest control, household, 199 phishing emails, 220–22 phobias, 30–31, 32 Pickering, Roscoe, 46–47 Pill Model, 237–39 Pina, Frank, 156 plastic bags, 185–88 police, 5–6, 8, 122n, 154 car accidents and, 6, 16 data and, 122n, 162–63 domestic violence and, 83, 86–88 New York City Police Department, 162–66, 168 Nurse-Family Partnership and, 196 polio vaccine, 45 Pollack Harold, 116, 117, 121, 123 Ponder, Paige, 25, 27–28, 88 Poppy + Rose, 193 poverty, 59, 97, 106 see also food assistance; homelessness Pratt, Lisa, 228 pre-gaming, 168–69 prevention, see upstream actions Princeton University, 43–44 proactive efforts, see upstream actions problem(s): addressing the wrong ones, 32–33 bandwidth and, 58–60 big and little, 58–59 blindness to, 21–38, 42, 70, 76, 128, 147, 232 designating something as, 32 early warning of, 135–51 longevity of, 233 ownership of, 38, 39–55, 70 slack and, 63, 67 Project ASSIST, 234 Project Parto Adequado, 37 prophet’s dilemma, 226 proximity, 133, 236 psychological standing, 43–44 quantity—and quality-based measures, 168 rabbits, on Macquarie Island, 171–74 Rad, Bex, 104 radiologists, 29–30 Ramirez-Di Vittorio, Anthony (Tony D), 117–20, 122, 249 RAND Corporation, 12, 180 randomized control trial (RCT), 121, 237 rape, 164–66 date rape on campus, 42–43 Ratner, Rebecca, 43 rats and mice, on Macquarie Island, 171–74, 176 reaction, see downstream actions Reagan, Ronald, 70 Reply All, 163–64 restoration, 10, 153 Reyes, Sarah, 112 Reykjavík, Iceland, 75–81, 125, 231, 239 Ridenour, Brandon, 200–201 Ringelestein, Don, 221–23 ripple effects, 169, 174, 197 a rising tide lifts all boats, 154, 161, 162, 168 Rocchetti, Carmela, 128–33 Rockford, Ill., 90–96, 108, 236, 239 ROI (return on investment), 127 Romania, 81 ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation), 139 Rowland, F.


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App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

It was about the tenth time she’d high-fived someone while we’d been walking around, and I finally had to ask what was up. Emily pointed to a giant LCD screen in the middle of the courtyard where we were standing: “#HighFiveFriday” scrolled across in neon letters. Ohhh. “I want to work here full-time,” I whispered to my mom. I’d always followed Facebook in the news and I knew a bit about the “Move fast and break things” company culture, but until that day, I’d never realized it would be so…happy-shiny! It was definitely where I belonged. I’d had a queasy stomach all day, wondering when I’d get to meet Mark Zuckerberg. Finally, when the campus had mostly emptied out—it was Friday, and people apparently left early for the weekend—Emily got a message on her phone.

But the way most of us saw it from the inside, I think, was: Hey, when you have 1.23 billion customers (as Facebook did at the time—they’ve now surpassed 2.8 billion), not all of them can be happy customers. It was easier, then, to dismiss Facebook’s missteps as unfortunate by-products of the company’s “Move Fast and Break Things” ethos. With that caveat, I want to take a moment to talk about why Facebook was, and probably still is, a great place to work. If you’ve heard of Moore’s Law, you know that computer processing speeds have doubled every two years for about half a century now (though that will probably end soon).


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

Unlike the other three, Rappler went all in, deciding to place all our stories on Instant Articles, rather than our website, to give us clear metrics—before and after. But Instant Articles failed miserably, and we soon stopped. Facebook acknowledged that it had a lot of work to do for news companies. Its “Move fast, break things” mindset meant that it asked companies and people to join new projects before thinking them through. Mark’s pitch for Internet.org and its supposed advantages for developing countries used the same tactic he still uses today: the parsing of information in supposedly independent studies that would sway public opinion.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

The team of founders – typically two or three people at the outset – sell a small percentage of their business to the program in return for a small amount of cash plus the intense mentoring, coaching, resources, access to investors and relevant industry experts and potential customers. “Fail harder” urges a poster tacked to one wall. Others ask of you: “Move Fast and Break Things” and “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?”. In start-up-land, failure has become a component of the methodology for success. The Lean Startup, a book that codifies the start-up business approach, has become the management textbook for building success on failure. “You need to create a discipline to enable you to fail and learn fast,” said its author, Eric Ries.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Artificial intelligence has the mind of its tribe, prioritizing its creators’ values, ideals, and worldviews. But it is also starting to develop a mind of its own. The Tribe Leaders AI’s tribe has a familiar, catchy rallying cry: fail fast and fail often. In fact, a version of it—“move fast and break things”—was Facebook’s official company motto until recently. The idea of making mistakes and accepting failures is in stark contrast to America’s enormous corporations, which avoid risk and move at a snail’s pace, and it’s a laudable aim. Complicated technology like AI demands experimentation and the opportunity to fail over and over in pursuit of getting things right.

See also Turing, Alan ET City Brain, 69 Ethics: AI company culture and, 255; Baidu focus on, 129; IBM articles regarding, 129; integrating into non-ethics university courses, 256; screening for in G-MAFIA future hiring practices, 255; university courses, 61, 63 Euclid, first algorithm and, 18 Evolutionary algorithms, 144, 164–165; Darwinian natural selection and, 144, 145 Facebook, 3, 70, 85, 96, 154; adult users, 87; advertising revenue, 71; in catastrophic scenario of future, 209, 216, 223; Chinese ban, 76; core values, 100; data policies, 94; exclusion of conservative news on, 57; Intel partnership, 92; “move fast and break things” original motto, 53; number of users, 71; in optimistic scenario of future, 159, 171; Portal, 54; post-Cambridge Analytica debacle apology, 54, 94; post-Cambridge Analytica scandal ethics team, 129; in pragmatic scenario of future, 186, 187, 188, 193, 201–202; psychological experimentation on users, 138; RNC bias accusations against, 56–57; senior leadership, 56; 2016 Presidential election and, 138; Website logins and, 88 Fake news, proliferation of in pragmatic scenario of future, 198 Fan Hui, 43–44, 45; versus DeepMind, 43–44 Fifth Generation, 38 Filmmaking, optimistic scenario of future and, 165–166 Future and AI, catastrophic scenario of, 151–152, 207–229; AGI system lockouts, 224; AI totalitarianism, 223; Amazon-hosted Food Stamp Program, 218; Amazon households, 216, 217–218, 219, 224, 225; Amazon Housing/Homes, 217–218, 219; Americans geographically locked in by China, 227; Apple households, 216, 218, 219, 224, 225; Apple PDRs, 216; blue-collar job glut, 221; blurring of work and personal data, 208; Chief AI Officers, 226; Chinese hackers, 215; climate change consequences, 228–229; corporate ownership of PDRs, 209; crime, 222; digital caste system, 209, 218; economic chimera of humans, 225; education and Salesforce core values, 221–222; extermination of U.S. and allied populations by Chinese ASI, 229; G-MAFIA and preservation of democratic ideals, 211; G-MAFIA diversity mantra, 208; G-MAFIA nonexistent inclusion efforts, 208; G-MAFIA shrinkage to GAA, 223; G-MAFIA sole owners of PDRs, 208, 216; G-MAFIA transactional relationship with U.S. government, 212; GAA-U.S.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

These facts also tell us that those exponential entrepreneurs with “fail forward” as their de facto motto have an incredible advantage. If people don’t have the space to fail, then they don’t have the ability to take risks. At Facebook, there is a sign hanging in the main stairwell that reads: “Move fast, break things.” This kind of attitude is critical. If you’re not incentivizing risk, you’re denying access to flow—which is the only way to keep pace in a breakneck world. Rich environment, the next environmental trigger, is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

At their peril, agencies forget that Silicon Valley companies like Facebook take pride in being disrupters, in reducing costs and better serving customers by offering less “friction” and shoving aside what they see as superfluous middlemen. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous corporate mantra at Facebook used to be “Move fast and break things.” (In 2014, Facebook changed it to “Move fast with stable infra,” which doesn’t have quite the same edge to it, no doubt deliberately.) Unlike most agencies, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy says, Facebook takes “the Wayne Gretzky approach to business.

New York: Basic Books, 2004. Stengel, Jim. Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies. New York: Crown, 2011. Steyer, James P. Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age. New York: Scribner, 2012. Taplin, Jonathan. Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Tungate, Mark. Adland: A Global History of Advertising. London: Kogan Page Limited, 2007. Wakeman, Frederic. The Hucksters. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1946. Wind, Yoram (Jerry), and Catharine Findiesen Hays.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Most fundamentally, he believed, Big Tech lacked the core values so crucial to an earlier generation of businesses such as Mærsk in Europe, or earlier entrepreneurs in the Bay Area like his father, who ran a clothing store chain called Stuart's. For companies like these, trust, reputation, and reliability were hardly marketing buzzwords. They were central to the functioning of their business. For a new generation of tech companies, which were a product of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the mantras were “move fast and break things”17 and “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.”18 Traditional values seemed pointless and outdated, when in the new world of business everything was malleable, mutable, and re-makeable. As a business leader with roots in both his city and his industry, Benioff realized this was a problem, since from a company's values, everything else followed.

Notes 1 “Mærsk Hails Growth in Global Trade,” Financial Times, November 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/35b9748e-4c55-11e3-923d-00144feabdc0. 2  “Emission Reduction Targets for International Aviation and Shipping,” Director General for Internal Studies, European Parliament, November 2015, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/569964/IPOL_STU(2015)569964_EN.pdf. 3 Interview with Jim Snabe by Peter Vanham, August 2019. 4 Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change, Marc Benioff, Random House, October 2019, p. 12. 5  “Dreams and Details”, Jim Snabe and Mikael Trolle, Spintype, 2018, p. 128. 6  Dreams and Details, Jim Snabe and Mikael Trolle, Spintype, 2018, pp. 128–129. 7 Interview with Jim Snabe by Peter Vanham,  August 2019. 8 “SAP's Global Revenue from 2001 to 2018,” Statista, March 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263838/saps-global-revenue-since-2001/. 9 “SAP Integrated Report: 2020 Targets Met Early,” SAP, March 2018, https://news.sap.com/2018/03/sap-integrated-report-2020-targets-met-early/. 10 “The Values Are Constant in a Complex World,” Mærsk, June 2019, https://www.Mærsk.com/news/articles/2018/06/29/the-values-are-constant-in-a-complex-world. 11 “Tax Principles,” Mærsk, https://www.maersk.com/about/tax-principles. 12  “A New Bar for Responsible Tax,” The B Team, https://bteam.org/assets/reports/A-New-Bar-for-Responsible-Tax.pdf. 13 Sustainability Report 2019, Maersk, https://www.maersk.com/about/sustainability/reports 14 2017: Sale of Mærsk Tankers, 2018: Sale of Mærsk Oil, 2019: Mærsk Drilling listed on the Copenhagen stock exchange, https://www.Mærsk.com/about/our-history/explore-our-history. 15 Interview with Jim Snabe by Peter Vanham, August 2019. 16 A.P. Moller – Mærsk, Sustainability Report 2018, February 2019, pp.18–19. 17 “Facebook Strategy Revealed: Move Fast And Break Things!”, Henry Blodget, Business Insider, March 2010, https://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-innovation-highlights-2010-2?r=US&IR=T 18 “Want to Succeed in Life? Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission”, Bill Murphy, Inc. January 2016, https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/9-words-to-live-by-its-always-better-to-beg-forgiveness-than-ask-permission.html 19 “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, September 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 20 “Antitrust Procedures in Abuse of Dominance,” European Commission, August 2013, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/procedures_102_en.html. 21 “If You Want to Know What a US Tech Crackdown May Look Like, Check Out What Europe Did,” Elizabeth Schulze, CNBC, June 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/how-google-facebook-amazon-and-apple-faced-eu-tech-antitrust-rules.html. 22 “Why San Francisco's Homeless Population Keeps Increasing,” Associated Press, May 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-homeless-population-in-san-francisco-is-skyrocketing-2019-05-17. 23 “A Decade of Homelessness: Thousands in S.F.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Most fundamentally, he believed, Big Tech lacked the core values so crucial to an earlier generation of businesses such as Mærsk in Europe, or earlier entrepreneurs in the Bay Area like his father, who ran a clothing store chain called Stuart's. For companies like these, trust, reputation, and reliability were hardly marketing buzzwords. They were central to the functioning of their business. For a new generation of tech companies, which were a product of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the mantras were “move fast and break things”17 and “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.”18 Traditional values seemed pointless and outdated, when in the new world of business everything was malleable, mutable, and re-makeable. As a business leader with roots in both his city and his industry, Benioff realized this was a problem, since from a company's values, everything else followed.

Notes 1 “Mærsk Hails Growth in Global Trade,” Financial Times, November 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/35b9748e-4c55-11e3-923d-00144feabdc0. 2  “Emission Reduction Targets for International Aviation and Shipping,” Director General for Internal Studies, European Parliament, November 2015, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/569964/IPOL_STU(2015)569964_EN.pdf. 3 Interview with Jim Snabe by Peter Vanham, August 2019. 4 Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change, Marc Benioff, Random House, October 2019, p. 12. 5  “Dreams and Details”, Jim Snabe and Mikael Trolle, Spintype, 2018, p. 128. 6  Dreams and Details, Jim Snabe and Mikael Trolle, Spintype, 2018, pp. 128–129. 7 Interview with Jim Snabe by Peter Vanham,  August 2019. 8 “SAP's Global Revenue from 2001 to 2018,” Statista, March 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263838/saps-global-revenue-since-2001/. 9 “SAP Integrated Report: 2020 Targets Met Early,” SAP, March 2018, https://news.sap.com/2018/03/sap-integrated-report-2020-targets-met-early/. 10 “The Values Are Constant in a Complex World,” Mærsk, June 2019, https://www.Mærsk.com/news/articles/2018/06/29/the-values-are-constant-in-a-complex-world. 11 “Tax Principles,” Mærsk, https://www.maersk.com/about/tax-principles. 12  “A New Bar for Responsible Tax,” The B Team, https://bteam.org/assets/reports/A-New-Bar-for-Responsible-Tax.pdf. 13 Sustainability Report 2019, Maersk, https://www.maersk.com/about/sustainability/reports 14 2017: Sale of Mærsk Tankers, 2018: Sale of Mærsk Oil, 2019: Mærsk Drilling listed on the Copenhagen stock exchange, https://www.Mærsk.com/about/our-history/explore-our-history. 15 Interview with Jim Snabe by Peter Vanham, August 2019. 16 A.P. Moller – Mærsk, Sustainability Report 2018, February 2019, pp.18–19. 17 “Facebook Strategy Revealed: Move Fast And Break Things!”, Henry Blodget, Business Insider, March 2010, https://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-innovation-highlights-2010-2?r=US&IR=T 18 “Want to Succeed in Life? Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission”, Bill Murphy, Inc. January 2016, https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/9-words-to-live-by-its-always-better-to-beg-forgiveness-than-ask-permission.html 19 “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, September 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 20 “Antitrust Procedures in Abuse of Dominance,” European Commission, August 2013, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/procedures_102_en.html. 21 “If You Want to Know What a US Tech Crackdown May Look Like, Check Out What Europe Did,” Elizabeth Schulze, CNBC, June 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/how-google-facebook-amazon-and-apple-faced-eu-tech-antitrust-rules.html. 22 “Why San Francisco's Homeless Population Keeps Increasing,” Associated Press, May 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-homeless-population-in-san-francisco-is-skyrocketing-2019-05-17. 23 “A Decade of Homelessness: Thousands in S.F.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Meanwhile, antiauthoritarianism morphed into a fascination with “disruption,” meaning that disrupting existing practices and livelihoods was welcome or even encouraged. The precise words differed, but the underlying thinking was reminiscent of British entrepreneurs in the early 1800s, who felt fully justified in ignoring any collateral damage they created along their path, especially on workers. Later, Mark Zuckerberg would make “Move fast and break things” a mantra for Facebook. An elitist approach came to dominate almost the entire industry. Software and programming were things in which very talented people excelled, and the less able were of limited use. Journalist Gregory Ferenstein interviewed dozens of tech start-up founders and leaders who expressed these opinions.

This was essentially the same approach advocated by Mark Zuckerberg when he told Time magazine, “Whenever any technology or innovation comes along and it changes the nature of something, there are always people who lament the change and wish to go back to the previous time. But, I mean, I think that it’s so clearly positive for people in terms of their ability to stay connected to folks.” Another aspect of the AI illusion, the elevation of disruption as a virtue encapsulated by “move fast and break things,” has accelerated this antidemocratic turn. Disruption came to mean any negative effects on others, including workers, civil society organizations, traditional media, or even democracy. It was all fair game, in fact encouraged, so long as it was a consequence of exciting new technologies and consistent with bigger market share and moneymaking.

Effective taxes on equipment, software, and other capital, as well as on labor, are estimated in Acemoglu, Manera, and Restrepo (2020), and the numbers we report are from their paper. On the evolution of US federal support for research, see Gruber and Johnson (2019). Digital Utopia. “Show me a problem…” is from Gates (2021, 14). Zuckerberg’s early motto, “Move fast and break things,” is reported in Blodget (2009). A detailed discussion of the attitudes we summarize is in Ferenstein (2017), which also reports the statements “very few are…” and “I’ve become an expert.…” Not in the Productivity Statistics. On innovation slowing down, see Gordon (2016) and Gruber and Johnson (2019).


pages: 128 words: 38,847

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

The chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. If anything, it seemed that being big, like being old, was just a disadvantage. Being big meant being hierarchical, industrial, dinosaurlike in an age of fleet-footed mammals. Better maybe to stay small and stay young, to move fast and break things. All this suggested that in cyberspace, there could be no such thing as a lasting monopoly. The internet would never stand for it. Business was now moving at internet speed: A three-year-old firm was middle-aged; a five-year-old firm almost certainly near death. “Barriers to entry” was a twentieth century concept.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

If you’re able to just try things rather than spend time thinking about them, you rapidly learn if they work or not and can course-correct. But for all the benefits of rapidly testing ideas, iterating quickly, and optimizing for efficiency, sometimes you need to force yourself to slow down. The creative aspects of some projects are best cooked slowly. Facebook’s infamous “move fast and break things” mantra, which graces everything from posters to coasters around Facebook’s campus, establishes a mind-set in technology and start-ups that the best path forward is always the fastest one, even when it’s reckless. This line of thought has inspired countless practices for how to manage projects, conduct meetings, and develop new products.

Chefs will tell you that the secret behind many of the greatest dishes is patience. When you cook something slowly at a lower heat for a longer time, the flavors and textures that marinate yield culinary masterpieces. Your own creations aren’t much different. At the opposite end of the spectrum from “moving fast and breaking things,” your creative endeavors need moments of your deep attention and patience. While we intuitively know that great accomplishments take time, we’re always anxious when the end is out of sight and the path of progress feels out of our control. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, argues that human brains are adapted to respond more to some threats than to others.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Venture Tourism and Thin Peanut Butter If anyone can be blamed for this state of affairs it is Silicon Valley. And if we reserve a special place in cybersecurity hell for the enablers of vice, then Sand Hill Road should burn. The tech start-up battle cry of “Move fast and break things,” originally coined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushed by the venture capitalists of the Valley in an effort to build large, monolithic monopolies at the expense of consumers, regulations, ethics, and cybersecurity. And move fast and break things they did, from the now antiquated concept of stable employment to a free press to U.S. elections. All the while, the push to get products out the door and fix security later has led us to our current predicament.


pages: 151 words: 39,757

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

Is it because they are being pressured or because they feel that it’s the right thing to do? Probably a little of both. The companies are changing policies, hiring humans to monitor what’s going on, and hiring data scientists to come up with algorithms to avoid the worst failings. Facebook’s old mantra was “Move fast and break things,”3 and now they’re coming up with better mantras and picking up a few pieces from a shattered world and gluing them together. This book will argue that the companies on their own can’t do enough to glue the world back together. Because people in Silicon Valley are expressing regrets, you might think that now you just need to wait for us to fix the problem.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

So they flit from thing to thing, often with little opportunity to focus, or to do one job correctly.” In the IT industry, for example, “Ship product now” is more than a slogan, it’s key to the sector’s culture, trumpeted prominently in the media and in in-house newsletters urging employees to “move fast and break things.” This “Code wins arguments” ethic may seem to put power into the hands of the doers, at least temporarily, but it does little to help employees make meaning of their work. Some employees enjoy the intensity of such environments, and some are even captivated by it, but when asked, not many can quite put a finger on what, exactly, all this Sturm und Drang really adds up to, or even means.

The video follows one employee as he leaves the gym, exits company headquarters, mounts a bike, and pedals off to his actual home for an early dinner with his actual family. Quite a contrast from companies that use gyms and other perks to tie workers to the workplace. And I learned that Snellman goes beyond “skills training” to offer on-site college-level courses in languages and law. Far from urging employees to “move fast and break things,” the company encourages them to move cautiously and invest in themselves. The message seems to be not “Give us your all and our company will make meaning for you,” but rather “Our company will provide the income, support, and stability to allow you to make meaning for yourself.” “This company understands people,” Pohjakallio told me.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

Within a few short years of its launch in 2006, the service was already a billion-dollar business.2 In short, small teams can run fast and innovate because of their size and the fact that they’re not reliant on the technology from other teams. Move Fast and Break Things Facebook created a culture of agility, promoting a philosophy to ‘move fast and break things’.3 Mark Zuckerberg explained the company’s ‘hacker way’ in a letter to investors:4 Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once … We have the words ‘Done is better than perfect’ painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

But the sense of awe at the power in her hands was the same, at least before Losse’s eventual disillusionment and break with Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The work that Losse did—customer service work—was devalued from the very start by Zuckerberg, who fetishized hackers and Ivy Leaguers who he imagined were crafted in his own image. “Move fast and break things,” was his motto, and moving fast and breaking things were things that boys did. Losse nevertheless worked her way in, figuring, “You can’t run a successful company with boys alone.” 29 Losse befriended the “hacker boys,” including one particular teenager who was hired after he hacked Facebook itself. She joined them on trips to a Lake Tahoe house that Zuckerberg rented for his employees, as well as to Las Vegas and the Coachella festival.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Still, even if millennials are better at metabolizing online information than their parents, the spread and weaponization of misleading information will likely be a permanent feature of millennial political life. The demise of the old gatekeepers led to the rise of a new kind of archetype: the disrupter. The infinite new opportunities in the digital space and the thrilling freedom of a vast, unregulated digital ecosystem gave young upstarts the courage to, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “move fast and break things.” Why should they respect the old ways when this was a whole new world? The future, they thought, belonged to the innovator, the coder, the breaker of rules, not the cog in some outdated machine. So it’s probably not a coincidence that individualistic millennials raised in this bold new world had little reverence for the institutions of the old one: they became more skeptical than older Americans of organized religion, political parties, corporations, and labor unions.

Michael recognized that the slow pace of government could be difficult for millennials who grew up accustomed to the instant gratification that comes with a computer in their pocket. “Government is not designed to move fast,” he said. “For young people who want to be disruptive, government will be very frustrating.” Tech entrepreneurs could “move fast and break things” because the stakes were lower. “If you prototype something and it fails, it’s just an internal conversation in your office,” he said. “If I prototype water delivery or trash, it touches everyone, especially the most vulnerable. So there has to be some caution.” * * * Eric Lesser was familiar with just how slow government could go.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Indeed it appears that some of the world’s tech leaders have accepted that a certain volume of complaints, a certain level of fines, maybe even a certain number of deaths, is something they can tolerate when the prize is so big and so many billions of dollars in annual profits are at stake.113 In the same way that Big Tobacco determined it was acceptable to peddle a harmful product because the profits were so large, it seems that the social media giants have determined that the collateral damage they cause is an acceptable by-product of their business model. As Professor Zaki observed, ‘Mark Zuckerberg famously exhorted his employees to “move fast and break things”. By now, it’s clear they’ve broken quite a lot.’114 Leaving it to the platforms to self-regulate toxic content clearly hasn’t worked, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has now acknowledged.115 We need regulation with teeth to compel Big Tech to reform. The penalties handed out to date for failing to immediately remove unambiguously hateful content have been so low as to be meaningless in the context of Big Tech’s gargantuan, record-breaking profits.

Karen Heisler and co-owner Krystin Rubin opened Mission Pie in 2007 with the belief that a values-driven small business could contribute to community and environmental health.27 They sourced their ingredients from California farms, rotating their fruit seasonally to ensure that the peaches, strawberries and apples they used were at their freshest – and tastiest – and kept working with some of the same producers throughout the café’s twelve years of existence. They offered job training and internships to young people in the community. They paid their employees well above minimum wage and offered benefits.28 If the tech economy was being built on the infamous slogan ‘move fast and break things’, Mission Pie grew on the idea of move slow and build things. In the process, they created a community that became almost like a second family for people like former regular Kimberly Sikora, a 34-year-old artist and teacher who moved to the neighbourhood in 2009 from Brooklyn. Mission Pie was one of the first places she stopped at when she arrived at the city – two of her friends lived in the apartment upstairs.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

“If I had to guess why sites like Facebook are so popular, I would say it doesn’t have anything to do with networking at all,” his friend Duncan Watts told the New Yorker in 2006. “It’s voyeurism and exhibitionism.” This skepticism was coming from the sociologist and scientist widely regarded as the preeminent expert on social networks. But it soon became apparent that Facebook’s motto—“Move fast and break things”—was more than just bluster with a ring to it. Facebook wasn’t just breaking the rule of six degrees but shattering it. Five years after its public launch, researchers at Cornell University and in Milan analyzed connections among Facebook’s 700 million active users and calculated that each person was separated from every other by an average of merely 3.74 degrees.

Which is what the company did: Will Oremus, “Who Controls Your Facebook Feed,” Slate, January 3, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html. By the time Facebook unveiled: Cheng Zhang, “Using Qualitative Feedback to Show Relevant Stories,” Facebook Newsroom, February 1, 2016, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/news-feed-fyi-using-qualitative-feedback-to-show-relevant-stories/. The cascade of advances: Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us (Boston: Little, Brown, 2017), 143. In 2010 opponents of a Florida: “Case Study: Reaching Voters with Facebook Ads (Vote No on 8),” Facebook, August 16, 2011, https://www.facebook.com/notes/us-politics-on-facebook/case-study-reaching-voters-with-facebook-ads-vote-no-on-8/10150257619200882.

New York: The New York Times Company, 2011. Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013. Talese, Gay. The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World. New York: Random House, 2007. Taplin, Jonathan. Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Tifft, Susan E., and Alex S. Jones. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999. Zittrain, Jonathan.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

The story may not even be true, but if it can gin up a scandal—if the credibility of the story itself becomes the story, or the poorly sourced story is deemed to have raised questions—then that’s enough. Attention is the most sought-after commodity, and the motto of its purveyors might as well be, “Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission” (which is not unlike Facebook’s “Move Fast and Break Things”). Here’s how the churnalistic cycle usually goes. On July 29, 2013, the Daily Beast tweeted what it claimed was a “scoop”: Cory Booker, Newark’s mayor at the time, would be visiting Iowa in the next month, presumably to lay the groundwork for a 2016 presidential campaign. Their source was a calendar on the University of Iowa’s Web site, though the university “did not return a call asking for comment,” a euphemism which, in such cases, often means that the call was placed shortly before the story was set to run.

All this might sound a little Soviet—only art sanctioned by the state, in the appropriate styles, may be displayed—but that’s essentially the case. Social media is the staid, whitewalled showroom. You may only hang your paintings in the designated areas, and please don’t touch the exhibits. Facebook’s mantras of “Move Fast and Break Things” and “The Hacker Way” apply only to its engineers, not to Facebook’s users. In the summer of 2013, a Palestinian hacker named Khalil Shreateh tried to report a security hole on Facebook that would allow someone with the proper knowledge to post on anyone’s wall. Because Facebook, like many tech companies, offers cash bounties to white-hat hackers who alert them to security issues, Shreateh submitted a report.


pages: 211 words: 58,677

Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

cognitive load, conceptual framework, fault tolerance, functional programming, iterative process, move fast and break things, MVC pattern, revision control, Silicon Valley

If your code base is a wreck, word will get out, and this will make it harder for you to recruit. As a result, you are likely to end up with mediocre engineers. This will increase your future costs and probably cause the system structure to degrade even more. Facebook is an example of a startup that encouraged tactical programming. For many years the company’s motto was “Move fast and break things.” New engineers fresh out of college were encouraged to dive immediately into the company’s code base; it was normal for engineers to push commits into production in their first week on the job. On the positive side, Facebook developed a reputation as a company that empowered its employees.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

By 1870, scarcely twenty years since the initial rush, California’s settlers had destroyed 80 percent of the California Indians by one estimate, bringing the population from 150,000 down to 30,000—“quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all time,” in the words of historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.8 Commenting on the public abuse of one young Indian farm laborer who was dragged behind a horse in Mendocino County in 1865, a Sacramento reporter scoffed about the supposed ban on forced labor: “So much for slavery in California.”9 Move Fast and Break Things As Albert Hurtado notes, California Indians were not alone in being pushed off their land into a harsh new historical epoch in the second half of the nineteenth century. Settler colonialists seized and enclosed agricultural lands around the world, forcing peasant and indigenous communities into capitalist work, whether waged, enslaved, or (most prevalent) somewhere desperate in between.

Despite his public-minded motivations, federal prosecutors refused any plea deal that didn’t involve prison, and the brilliant Swartz ended his own life at age twenty-six rather than surrender his freedom. Tickets.com, yes; Napster, no. Google, yes; Facemash, no. Acxiom, yes; Aaron Swartz, no; Facebook, yes. The most aggressive of these models raced ahead of their creators, “moving fast and breaking things,” as Facebook’s motto said. Some incumbents, like Ticketmaster and the RIAA, were strong and centralized enough to negotiate compromises, but a number of firms—industries, even—were not so lucky, and they got scraped away. John Ashcroft’s free-market authoritarianism structured the bargain between scrapers and the state regulators tasked with protecting people’s rights: The feds gave the data brokers a boost up and over the law, and the data brokers pulled the state up behind them.

The support we need to do the long-haul work is being torn apart.”36 As it had 50 years earlier, San Francisco’s redevelopment hit the city’s left particularly hard. Meanwhile, more bad news about the tech monopolists came out every week, all the way to Facebook’s role in enabling an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. At its worst, “move fast and break things” broke whole societies. And yet no agent at the global, national, or local level could effectively manage the behavior of these companies once they were let loose. When Zuckerberg testified in front of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee—and Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committees—answering questions about Facebook’s repeated data privacy failures, the country’s highest legislative body seemed lost.


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Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

In fact, if you ask Mark Zuckerberg, they’re the core of the company, and always have been. Back when Facebook filed for IPO, in 2012, he lauded those values in a letter to investors: “As most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly,” he wrote. “We have a saying: ‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.” 50 Zuckerberg famously calls this approach “the Hacker Way”: build something quickly, release it to the world, see what happens, and then make adjustments. The idea is so ingrained in Facebook’s culture—so core to the way it sees the world—that One Hacker Way is even the official address of the company’s fancy Menlo Park headquarters.


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The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

Part 3 The Good Old Days Chapter 22 Move Slow and Build Things (Aka Facebook 2.0) April 4, 2013 SINCE THE DAWN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY—SINCE THE INTERNET WENT viral, tech turned sexy, and Silicon Valley became Mecca for a new breed of American dreamers—nobody had been more successful than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In less than eight years, powered by the mantra “move fast and break things,” he had managed to turn a dorm-room project into a global social network that, as of last count, boasted about 1.2 billion users. That said, even a digital tycoon like Zuckerberg had regrets. And stepping onstage to address a mix of reporters and employees, he hoped to address one of his biggest regrets with an exciting announcement.

Apple had been doing it since the late ’70s. Google was already dominating the mobile market. Even Amazon, whom nobody thought of as a “hardware company,” now had years of experience after successfully producing Kindle e-readers since 2007. In order to compete, Facebook would need to move beyond their “move fast and break things” model. This was the beginning of a new Facebook, a new post-IPO Facebook; and to best position themselves for the challenges ahead, they would need to move slow and build things. “So we need you,” Zuckerberg told Kalinowski. “We need you to come here and help teach us.” After highlighting the features of Facebook Home to the excitable attendees, he announced that the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer HTC would soon begin producing a line of phones called the HTC First that would come preloaded with Facebook Home.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

BI Intelligence,‘Amazon Accounts for 43% of US Online Retail Sales’, Business Insider E-Commerce Briefing, 3 February 2017 <http://uk. businessinsider.com/amazon-accounts-for-43-of-us-online-retailsales-2017-2?r=US&IR=T> (accessed 9 December 2017). 22. Young, ‘How to Break Up Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook’. 23. Dwyer, ‘Should America’s Tech Giants be Broken Up?’ 24. Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), 8. 25. Connie Chan, cited in Frank Pasquale, ‘Will Amazon Take Over the World?’ Boston Review, 20 July 2017 <https://bostonreview.net/ class-inequality/frank-pasquale-will-amazon-take-over-world> (accessed 8 December 2017). 26.

‘DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification’. 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014 <https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ranzato/ publications/taigman_cvpr14.pdf> (accessed 11 Dec. 2017). Takahashi, Dean. ‘Magic Leap Sheds Light on its Retina-based Augmented Reality 3D Displays’. VentureBeat, 20 Feb. 2015 <http://venturebeat.com/ 2015/02/20/magic-leap-sheds-light-on-its-retina-based-augmentedreality-3d-displays/> (accessed 30 Nov. 2017). Taplin, Jonathan. Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 484 Bibliography Tapscott, Don and Alex Tapscott. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

ISBN 978-0-316-27574-3 E3-20170222-JV-PC Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Chapter One: The Great Disruption Chapter Two: Levon’s Story Chapter Three: Tech’s Counterculture Roots Chapter Four: The Libertarian Counterinsurgency Chapter Five: Digital Destruction Chapter Six: Monopoly in the Digital Age Chapter Seven: Google’s Regulatory Capture Chapter Eight: The Social Media Revolution Chapter Nine: Pirates of the Internet Chapter Ten: Libertarians and the 1 Percent Chapter Eleven: What It Means to Be Human Chapter Twelve: The Digital Renaissance Afterword Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Jonathan Taplin Notes Newsletters For Maggie Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you aren’t moving fast enough. —Mark Zuckerberg Introduction I thought I was going to write the story of a culture war. On one side were a few libertarian Internet billionaires—the people who brought you Google, Amazon, and Facebook—and on the other side were the musicians, journalists, photographers, authors, and filmmakers who were trying to figure out how to continue to make a living in the digital age.


Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

Some of the smaller start-up firms don’t even have in-house IT functions; they outsource business IT. Some of the big data lessons from start-up and online firms are derived from and are similar to other general IT and entrepreneurship lessons from Silicon Valley firms. They include the injunction, popularized by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to “move fast and break things,” and not worry too much about making mistakes. Another is to have bold and audacious goals that involve objectives other than simply making a lot of money. Facebook hopes to “make the world more open and connected.” Google’s well-publicized mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Any short description will undoubtedly be an oversimplification, and of course there are disagreements and disputes among its adherents, but a coherent Internet culture does exist. It embraces values of rebellion, drawing from a loose set of attitudes sometimes called the hacker ethic. Facebook’s headquarters are at “One Hacker Way” and it has the word HACK laid out in 12-meter letters in the stone. The company’s mantra until last year was “move fast and break things,” and Mark Zuckerberg recently explained to potential investors: “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.” Internet culture also believes that the Internet itself is a key to building a better world.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Ecstatic, he told his friends, “Can you believe how cheap it is? It’s never going to be this price again.” 5 Hard Times Fred and Brian’s philosophy of running through brick walls had served the company well, inspiring employees to pull off near-impossible feats in the name of growth. But like Face-book, whose early motto was “move fast and break things,” Coinbase would pay a price for its run-and-gun approach. Running through brick walls is a killer tactic—when it works. When it doesn’t, you end up on your ass—with a bloody nose. Coinbase’s earlier bid to outwit Apple, for instance, had been clever. It let the startup flout Apple’s rules by letting customers buy and sell bitcoin directly in its app, all the while keeping the iPhone maker in the dark by disabling the buy-sell feature in the city of Cupertino, where the app was vetted.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

Execs hoped that it would attract $100 billion in investment16—despite it being what Bloomberg Technology described as “a serially unprofitable business.”17 Eliminating drivers from its business model was considered one of the few avenues to profitability for Uber ahead of its much-anticipated stock market debut.18 “A lot of that is the Silicon Valley move-fast-and-break-things attitude,” said auto writer Dan Albert. “[But] when you’re not talking about just apps . . . the things you break are actual people.”19 Uber was not only rushing to stem billions in annual losses, but it was also vying with companies like Waymo, Ford, and others to bring self-driving car technology to market.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In a speech to the Anti-Defamation League in November 2019, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen pointed out the inherent risks of the so-called “Silicon Six”—“Zuckerberg at Facebook; Sundar Pichai at Google; at Google’s parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube; and Jack Dorsey at Twitter”—being totally responsible for, and unconstrained in, making such momentous decisions as whether Holocaust denial and antiblack hate speech have a role in public discourse. Silicon Valley has long operated on a libertarian, reckless, “move fast and break things” ethos that is far more conservative about reining in hate speech than allowing it to reverberate in the public consciousness unchecked. Consider the sheer dollars generated from people like Sargon of Akkad and Soph. And the human price of such unchecked hate, which was immeasurable. The results of this laissez-faire attitude from Silicon Valley are self-evident in the exponential growth of white-nationalist movements around the world, fueled by reactionary impulses that gather in strength until they have turned into the full and vitriolic force of hate.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Coined by Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist at Greylock and before that the founder of LinkedIn, the term referred originally to an obligation more than a choice: in network industries, winner-takes-all logic obliges startups to race for scale before competitors achieve it.[28] But, in the hands of less thoughtful investors, “blitzscaling” has come to mean little more than “get rich quick,” a phrase to be filed alongside other notorious war cries, from Masayoshi Son’s injunction to be “crazier, faster, bigger” to Mark Zuckerberg’s call to “move fast and break things.” Even the recipients of blitzscaling war chests have started to call foul. In 2019, the entrepreneur Jason Fried declared that venture capital “kills more businesses than it helps,” because large VC war chests create pressure to spend before managers know how to spend wisely. “You plant a seed, it needs some water, but if you just pour a whole fucking bucket of water on it’s going to kill it,” Fried said bluntly.[29] Noting the multitude of VC-backed companies that fail, the entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly offers a provocative idea.

See also Yahoo Google and, 181 Moritz and Sequoia Capital, 150–54, 156, 157–58, 181, 292, 313 Son and, 155–60 Y Combinator, 8, 217–21, 300, 315, 318, 378, 416n Younger, Bill, 96–97 youth revolt, 194–97, 272, 303 YouTube, 10, 12 Sequoia Capital’s investment, 306–7, 309–10, 313 Yozma Group, 396 Yu, Gideon, 273–74 Z Zenefits, 341–42 Zhang Fan, 238–41 Zhang Tao, 244, 246 Zhang Ying, 227–28 Zilog, 432n Zimride, 357 Zingale, Tony, 313 Zoom, 330, 333 Zuckerberg, Mark. See also Facebook Accel and Efrusy, 195, 256–61, 264 Milner and, 274–77 “move fast and break things,” 385 pajama prank at Sequoia, 194–96, 207, 258, 444n Parker and, 196–98, 254, 256, 257–61 Stanford event, 219 Wang compared with, 243 Zynga, 288–89, 298, 443n, 453n A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Arthur Rock kick-started the modern venture-capital industry, backing early hits such as Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and improvising an investment style that ignored the standard rules of finance.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

While an “arms race” does not accurately describe the state of competition today, military competition in AI does pose risks. In a desire to field AI systems ahead of others, nations could succumb to a “race to the bottom” on AI safety and field insecure, unreliable systems. Government bureaucracies are not known to “Move fast and break things” (Facebook’s old motto). Despite the cumbersome pace of DoD’s AI adoption—or perhaps because of it—AI entrepreneurs inside the bureaucracy push hard to move faster. “We are under so much pressure to go fast,” Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan said. Yet with that pressure to move quickly comes the risk that militaries take shortcuts in the wrong places, shortchanging test and evaluation for new technologies.

Norton, April 24, 2018), 137–145. 31. RACE TO THE BOTTOM 254“race to the bottom”: Portions of this chapter are adapted, with permission, from Paul Scharre, “Debunking the AI Arms Race Theory,” Texas National Security Review 4, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 121–132, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/13985. 254“move fast and break things”: Steven Levy, “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Future, from Virtual Reality to Anonymity,” Wired, April 30, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/04/zuckerberg-f8-interview/. 254“We are under so much pressure”: Jack Shanahan, interview by author, April 1, 2020. 254twenty-five years from initial concept: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program (Congressional Research Service, updated May 27, 2020) https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL30563.pdf; The Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program, which later became the Joint Strike Fighter program, was created in 1993.


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

Some people relish this, of course. Like surfers, they enjoy riding the wave. They are unsympathetic to the simplifiers’ tendency to look backward, and they find the ideal of a slower, more stable—they might say “static”—world rather boring. This is the mind-set behind Facebook’s cheerful mantra, “Move fast and break things.” But for many the rate of change creates all sorts of problems and anxieties. Traditional ways have to be abandoned; cherished communities disintegrate; once-valued skills become useless; secure jobs are outsourced or lost to machines. Often those who suffer most are at the bottom of the socioeconomic order, the people who lack the sort of education and information-related skills that are particularly prized in today’s economy.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

In the second dotcom boom that doctrine has been pushed to new extremes by companies that have adopted a grow-at-all-costs, investors-take-all business model. It has been great for VCs and oligarchs, but everyone else gets shortchanged: CUSTOMERS get “minimum viable products” (translation: shoddy stuff) from companies whose mantra is “move fast and break things.” Internet companies spy on customers, invade their privacy, and sell their data. For companies like Facebook, the users are the product. We exist only to be packaged up and sold to advertisers. COMMUNITIES should benefit when they are home to the headquarters of wealthy corporations, but instead communities get shortchanged as tech giants dodge taxes, finding ways to stash their enormous profits overseas in offshore accounts.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

And yet, as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon pointed out, we learn most from a technology when it breaks down.31 It is breakdown that stimulates scientific research and new knowledge. And the platforms have induced a crisis in an older machinery of governance and control. The Washington establishment, in its globalizing zeal and technological modernization drive, didn’t quite anticipate what it was embracing. Whether it is Facebook’s notorious motto ‘Move Fast and Break Things’, or Google’s practice of never asking for permission, this was a force that could and would disturb the old, embedded alliances of state and media. That meant it could and would disrupt Washington’s power. VI. Did Twitter make the ‘Twitter revolutions’, or did they make Twitter?


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

On the basis of that promise, it raises billions upon billions of dollars across its ten-year rise, during which time it becomes as big as promised in Western markets, a byword for Internet-era success, cited by boosters and competitors alike as the model for how to disrupt an industry, how to “move fast and break things” as the Silicon Valley mantra has it. By the time it goes public in 2019, it has $11 billion in annual revenue—real money, exchanged for real services, nothing fraudulent about it. Yet this amazing success story isn’t actually making any sort of profit, even at such scale; instead, it’s losing billions upon billions of dollars, including $5 billion in one particuarly costly quarter.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

The platform was ideal for users because of its surface-level technical achievement and reliability (it had none of the lag problems that Friendster had with its servers, and none of Myspace’s general cruddiness), but its proficiency didn’t inspire equanimity. Rather, its frictionless interface was part of people’s sense of unease about it. The better it worked, the more users wondered what was happening to their data to make it work so well. Facebook pushed ahead no matter what, with its company watchword “move fast and break things” epitomizing its personal-boundary-breaking ethos. This is why Leach believes her Shiny Shiny posts about Facebook resonated with readers back in 2010. Whenever Facebook redesigned its interface, and provided no explanation to its users, the changes felt akin to noticing that someone had rummaged through their personal belongings.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

This has largely worked, simply because the amount of damage a bad hack could cause was contained. Today, due to both the power of technology and the global nature of our economies, that’s no longer true. An economic system based on greed and self-interest only works when those properties can’t destroy the underlying system. And “Move fast and break things”—Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto for Facebook—is only okay when it’s your own things you’re putting at risk. When someone else’s things are involved, then maybe you should think twice—or be forced to fix what you’ve broken. 23 “Too Big to Fail” The phrase “too big to fail” captures a critical vulnerability in our market economy.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

This is not to say that we all need to be saints, but rather that it helps us to see our late-bloomer goals as connected to the broader world. Finally, there’s patience. One of my favorite Silicon Valley late bloomers, and an exemplar of patience in a business culture that exhorts us to “move fast and break things,” is Diane Greene. She grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, with a love for the ocean. As a girl, she learned to catch crabs and sell them for five dollars apiece. In college, she majored in engineering but also took up windsurfing—at nineteen she started a world windsurfing competition—as well as competitive sailing.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

When we look back on the period following the Great Recession, it will be remembered not as a time of great innovation, but of great exploitation, when tech companies reached “unicorn” status (valued over $1 billion) on the backs of employees they refused to even deign to label, let alone respect, as such. * * * The dynamics and overarching philosophy of Silicon Valley create the perfect conditions for fissured workplaces. Silicon Valley thinks the “old” way of work is broken. It loves overwork. Its ideology of “disruption”—to “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously put it—is contingent on a willingness to destroy any semblance of a stable workplace. In the startup world, the ultimate goal is “going public”: creating a high enough stock valuation, and, afterward, unmitigated growth, no matter the human cost. That’s how these companies pay back the venture capital firms that invested in them—and that’s how they make their founders, boards, and early employees very rich.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

“Ultimately, any market that doesn’t have a leader in simplicity soon will. And if your company doesn’t play that role, another will lead the charge.”[9] But being effective is one thing and being good for the customer is quite another. When it comes to grabbing our attention and profiting from it, unleashing Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” philosophy on trillions of dollars of personal savings was bound to create some problems. What it mainly did was to make some long-standing ones impossible to ignore. “Anyone Can Do It!” Discount brokers seem to offer an undifferentiated product these days—pay nothing and invest in any of these hundreds of thousands of stocks, bonds, funds, or options contracts.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

He had figured out how to gain power and influence in the field of biotechnology. CRISPR became a tool for extending this power as he imagined the future and worked to bring his dreams into contact with reality. As he embarked on the risky venture, he was following another Silicon Valley motto: “Move fast and break things.” This American ideal resonated in Shenzhen, a city that has long celebrated its own brand of hustle. * * * The idea of “Shenzhen speed” was born in the early 1980s as skyscrapers began sprouting in the landscape, going up faster than anywhere else in the world. Workers who aspired to better futures flocked to Shenzhen from rural parts of China.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

You can read more about this topic in Blitzscaling, where “Launch a Product That Embarrasses You” is #4 on my list of Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling. * * * — One of the biggest champions of experimentation in Silicon Valley has been Mark Zuckerberg, whose early mantra—“Move fast and break things”—was a foundation for Facebook’s success. And the company continues to experiment constantly today, even at its current size—though its mantra now is “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” As Mark says, “At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running—there are probably ten thousand.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

It was like winning the lottery a hundred times over. Lex had taken to calling Greensill a fintech too. In reality, it was nothing like that, culturally or in a business sense. In contrast to the uber-casual tech scene, Greensill’s senior executives were buttoned-up and formally dressed. And while the company shared much of the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos of big tech companies, it had little in the way of actual new or proprietary technology. But that didn’t really matter. If Lex said the business was a fintech enough times, others would repeat it, and the money flowed in. There was another term frequently applied to Greensill: ‘shadow bank’.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

We should care about what happens online the way we care about what happens elsewhere. Because when we care about what happens around us, when we are attentive to our lives instead of “safe” in withdrawal, life comes to have more meaning. Rather than stepping back or following Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s edict to “move fast and break things,” we should care about the things and people in our lives and treat them with care. Understand them not as expendable and replaceable but rather as things that could break—and that could break us if we lose them, like when the rabbit loses his boy, or when I lost my friend Alex. This is how we begin to feel real.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Culture is the institutional muscle memory, based not on how the organization aspires to operate but on how it really has in the past. You cannot change culture by simply putting up posters that exhort employees to “Be more innovative!” or “Think outside the box!” Not even Facebook’s famous “Move fast and break things!” spray-painted on your walls will have any effect. Culture is formed over time, the residue leftover from the process and accountability choices of the company’s past. Every culture attracts certain kinds of PEOPLE: the ultimate corporate resource. A toxic or old-fashioned culture repels innovative talent.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

We cannot point to naive imprudence or delusional exuberance as explanations for these collapses in the same way we might for more recent failures like the blood-testing company Theranos or the e-commerce startup Fab. Bear Stearns was not a young, overzealous giant like the modern-day tech unicorns that operate with mantras such as “Move fast and break things.” Bear Stearns was founded in 1923. Lehman Brothers had been around in some form for more than 150 years. In many ways, you could argue that they helped finance the building of America into the strongest, wealthiest nation the world has ever known, that there was a real purpose behind the services they offered.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Social media platforms are in a race to accumulate profits, corner market share, ship products and services before their competitors, and extract data from as many users as possible. Ensuring the security of their users, and of their users’ data, is largely an afterthought. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s flippant mantra “move fast and break things” fully embodies this negligence. To be sure, data security is not entirely ignored. But security is prioritized only to the extent that it makes sense from a business perspective, that it helps mitigate some kind of liability. Fortunately for many digital companies, liabilities are light and entirely manageable relative to the monumental revenues.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Sometimes apps fail to perform basic therapeutic duties. Journalists discovered that one AI therapist failed to alert authorities when a test subject wrote that she was a child suffering sexual abuse at home.48 Qualified domain experts know about mandatory reporting laws, while technologists trained to “move fast and break things” may have no idea they exist. Unvetted and even dangerous apps proliferate, risking the health of those in need of more competent care.49 Data-sharing policies of such apps are often incomplete or one sided, risking breaches of confidentiality that a therapist is duty-bound to keep.50 The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has shirked its duties in this space, barely regulating such apps after repeated warnings from members of Congress that agency funding might be slashed if they interfered with innovation.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

13 We discourage curiosity also because it requires an admission of ignorance. Asking a question or posing a thought experiment means that we don’t know the answer, and that’s an admission that few of us are willing to make. For fear of sounding stupid, we assume most questions are too basic to ask, so we don’t ask them. What’s more, in this era of “move fast and break things,” curiosity can seem like an unnecessary luxury. With an inbox-zero ethos and an unyielding focus on hustle and execution, answers appear efficient. They illuminate the path forward and give us that life hack so we can move on to the next thing on our to-do list. Questions, on the other hand, are exceedingly inefficient.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Yale Journal on Regulation 32, no. 2 (2015): 413–50. Sweeney, Latanya. “Health Data Flows.” Paper presented at seminar at the Federal Trade Commission, Washington, DC, May 7, 2014. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/195411/consumer-health-data-webcast-slides.pdf. Taplin, Jonathan. Move Fast and Break Things. New York: Little Brown, 2017. Tashea, Jason. “Should the Public Have Access to Data Police Acquire through Private Companies?” ABA Journal, December 2016. http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/public_access_police_data_private_company. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

Footnotes [81] http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html [82] http://www.arin.net Copyright © 2018, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Chapter 16 Adaptation Change is guaranteed. Survival is not. You’ve heard the Silicon Valley mantras: “Software is eating the world.” “You’re either disrupting the market or you’re going to be disrupted.” “Move fast and break things.” What do they all have in common? A total focus on change, either on the ability to withstand change or, better yet, the ability to create change. The agile development movement embraced change in response to business conditions. These days, however, the arrow is just as likely to point in the other direction.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

That’s required taking some risks and being committed to repairing harm I cause, so we can move forward together. But it also requires having the restraint to not charge ahead from a place of ignorance. I’ve learned that it’s better to build together slowly than to follow Mark Zuckerberg’s “Move fast and break things.” (To his credit, Zuckerberg eventually decided to discard this core value at Facebook.) Writer, activist, and facilitator adrienne maree brown describes this approach as “emergent strategy,” which refers to “building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions.”2 Instead of embarking on a grand plan to fix everything that is wrong in the world, brown recommends starting with small experiments.


pages: 960 words: 125,049

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

air gap, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, continuous integration, cryptocurrency, Debian, digital divide, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, litecoin, machine readable, move fast and break things, node package manager, non-fungible token, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, sealed-bid auction, sharing economy, side project, smart contracts, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vickrey auction, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket

For the most part, changes are only implemented if they are backward compatible. Existing clients are allowed to opt-in, but will continue to operate if they decide not to upgrade. In Ethereum, by comparison, the community’s development culture is focused on the future rather than the past. The (not entirely serious) mantra is “move fast and break things.” If a change is needed, it is implemented, even if that means invalidating prior assumptions, breaking compatibility, or forcing clients to update. Ethereum’s development culture is characterized by rapid innovation, rapid evolution, and a willingness to deploy forward-looking improvements, even if this is at the expense of some backward compatibility.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

“It turns out, the personality of the car is something you have to program.”15 Cars are just one example of the general truth that there’s a culture to the way everything around us behaves. This insight offers two forking choices. We can ignore it at our peril, as Tesla repeatedly seemed to. But while the ethos of moving fast and breaking things means it’s easier to make technical progress, that progress is illusory, as it’s human nature to avoid something that didn’t work the first time. On the other hand, we can recognize that the key to making us comfortable with the future lies in mapping all the contextual nuances that we use without thinking—in realizing, for example, that the way a car pulls up to a curb is an interface all its own.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Eventually, the Toledo Blade trumpeted the multimillion-dollar success the firm had become under the headline “Barber, Dentist, Builder Combine, Prosper In Real Estate Ventures.”3 In the article, my grandfather was called by his preferred nickname—Sam “the Poor Barber” Helberg. * * * Years before I’d hear Silicon Valley slogans like “Fail fast, fail often” or “Move fast and break things,” it was my family of striving underdogs who taught me resilience and hard work. We lived by the motto “Win or lose, always get caught trying.” My father, a psychiatrist able to prescribe himself pills, struggled with addiction but never stopped trying to get clean. My mother waitressed to pay the bills while she trained for an entirely new career, sleeping on a pull-out couch in the living room until we could get back on our feet after she left my father.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

It’s less of a title than a statement. “I made this,” the founder proclaims. “I invented it out of nothing. I conjured it into being.” Travis Kalanick frequently compared building a startup to parenting a young child. A good founder lives and breathes the startup. As Mark Zuckerberg said, a founder moves fast and breaks things. The founder embraces the spirit of “the hacker way”; he is captain of the pirate ship. A good founder will work harder tomorrow than he did today. A good founder will sleep when he is dead (or after returning from a week at Burning Man). Like Kalanick at Red Swoosh, a good founder shepherds his company through difficult funding environments, but chooses his benefactors wisely.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Facebook takes the relationship between art and innovation seriously. It’s even got an artist-in-residence program that brings in its artists to cover the walls and hallways of its Menlo Park campus with creative and meaningful murals. The art, in some sense, reflects Facebook’s culture, for better or worse. There’s a famous stencil poster that reads “Move Fast and Break Things.” When Mark Zuckerberg first coined the phrase, it was heralded as the creative mentality driving Facebook’s innovation. Today it represents the careless mindset that missed the fake news crisis and Russia’s intervention in American democracy. In some ways, the art in Facebook’s offices reflects the culture and societal implications of the platform.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Our most widely accessible definition of the word is dismissive and derisive—Luddites, we are told, smashed machines because they were afraid and angry at them, because they were short-sighted. Now think of every Silicon Valley philosophy that’s been blasted into the mainstream—about moving fast and breaking things, about regulation as the enemy of invention, about the gospel of “disruption” at any cost—and consider that these axioms are now so deeply ingrained in our lives and our politics that they have taken on the air of common sense. Think of all the critiques, qualms, and challenges to technology that have been waved away with a derogatory “Don’t be a Luddite.”


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Amazon asks those tasked with doing the work to imagine the intended user experience, not to specify all of the implementation details in advance. As they build the actual product or service, they continue to learn and refine their ideas.) Now, to be fair, many (though far from all) of the things that government regulates have far higher stakes than a consumer app. “Move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerberg’s famous admonition to his developers at Facebook, hardly applies to the design of bridges, air traffic control, the safety of the food supply, or many of the other things that government regulates. Government also must be inclusive, serving all residents of the country, not just a highly targeted set of users.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

No testing—they would just ship it. Ezra Callahan: Most websites have these very robust testing platforms so that they can test changes. That’s not how we did it. Ruchi Sanghvi: With the push of a button you could push out code to the live site, because we truly believed in this philosophy of “move fast and break things.” So you shouldn’t have to wait to do it once a week, and you shouldn’t have to wait to do it once a day. If your code was ready you should be able to push it out live to users. And that was obviously a nightmare. Katie Geminder: Can our servers stand up to something? Or security: How about testing a feature for security holes?


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

But for me, making progress on the ideas was very rewarding in itself at the time, even though they would have made the worst party conversation topics ever. Eventually, decades after, they generated more social accolades than I now know what to do with. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? The Silicon Valley mantra “move fast and break things” is very bad advice when one is dealing with sizable sums of money! If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? “Trusted third parties are security holes.” What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Killer Apps: Bad Software and Its Consequences Every time you get a security update … whatever is getting updated has been broken, lying there vulnerable, for who-knows-how-long. Sometimes days, sometimes years. QUINN NORTON Facebook’s software developers have long lived by the mantra “Move fast and break things.” The saying, which was emblazoned on the walls across the company’s headquarters, reflected Facebook’s hacker ethos, which dictated that even if new software tools or features were not perfect, speed of code creation was key, even if it caused problems or security issues along the way.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

An expansionist, earnest, set-the-defaults-to-public spirit reverberated through the campus. By connecting the world through software, and doing so at massive scale, the company was accomplishing something the Valley had been trying to do for generations. Posters emblazoned with the company’s de facto motto adorned the walls surrounding Facebook’s expansive open-plan bullpen: “Move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg remained in charge, owning over 24 percent of the company and controlling three of its five board seats. The Valley’s Internet-era inner circle had become funders and close advisors. Peter Thiel had given Facebook its first big investment back in 2004 and was a board member.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Meanwhile, working groups inside Amazon were broken into small versatile units, called two-pizza teams (because they were small enough to be fed with two pizzas), and were ordered to move quickly, often in competition with one another. This unusual and decentralized corporate culture hammered into employees that there was no trade-off between speed and accuracy. They were supposed to move fast and never break things. Goals, accountability, and deadlines were pushed down into the organization, while metrics were fed upward, via weekly and quarterly business reports and biannual companywide reviews, called OP1 (for operating plan, in the late summer) and OP2 (after the holidays). The performance of each team was evaluated by Bezos’s hallowed leadership council of like-minded math whizzes: the S-team (for senior team).