Don’t Move Fast And Break Stuff
Move Fast and Understand Stuff
At this point, I believe everyone is familiar with the adage of “Move Fast and Break Stuff”. It, like everything in life, is partially true. It is part of a bigger idea. Until you understand the other half, you don’t understand the saying.
The goal of the quote is to build stuff. Where is the part about construction? If we understand the goal to be construction, then the saying kind of makes sense. Let’s restate the quote like this:
Move Fast And Understand Stuff
Understanding can be gained in multiple ways. Sometimes we understand something by seeing what we can build with it (make stuff). Sometimes we understand something by taking it apart (break stuff).
Innovation is the process of looking at the world and breaking it down and building it back up again in new and interesting ways. I love looking for ways to change the world around me. I have gotten really good at breaking stuff. And every time I have, I have learned a ton about the thing I break.
The key to breaking things is to be deliberate in your actions. Understand that you are breaking something as part of a bigger goal. Only then do your actions lead you to the answers you seek. Be cautious in your breaking; understand the consequences.
One thing I have seen technology do is break people. It broke me for a bit. I am still working on putting myself back together. That is my driving force right now. Once I realized the effects that technology had on me, it was easy to see the effects it has on society as well. We are all affected by it, some more so than others.
I threw myself into technology. I was determined to use technology to fix myself, not realized that technology was what was breaking me. I thought I wanted to become one with technology. But now I understand myself and technology and I know where I want one to stop and the other to begin.
These are the consequences that we don’t consider when we write software. How do our products actually influence the thoughts and behaviors of our customers? We want to make money, so we do what we need to in order to make the sale. The effect on the customer won’t be much, surely.
The problem though, is not one company pushing their products on people. It is thousands and thousands of companies pushing all of their products on people. It is a massive psychic assault whose goals are to break us down until we spend our money the way they want us to.
Look at the psychological tools we use in advertising. We are trying to implant our products in people’s minds. Computers help us do this with frightening efficiency. They help us determine exactly what we need to do to get inside our customers’ heads. We collect their data to understand them so that we can break them and rebuild them in the way we want, with our products in hand.
Society has plenty of problems right now. Let’s try to understand what we are doing to people instead of breaking them. We want to make money as fast as possible, to grow as fast as possible. We just don’t always take the time to consider the long term ramifications of our actions. Trust me, I am the poster child for this. I have done all sorts of things without considering the long term effects, usually on myself. Luckily, I am now in a position to learn from all of them and see where I went wrong.
So I ask of you: Don’t move fast and break stuff, move fast and understand it.