
White House Echoes Tech: ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ - fabrice_d
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/business/how-trump-became-the-first-silicon-valley-president.html
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tptacek
I cannot fathom how Sam Altman thought that it would be a good idea to be a
source for this article, let alone provide the specific quotes that he did.
How does YC benefit from this? How does public policy benefit from it? "The
Silicon Valley President in every way except the ideology is flipped"? "He did
everything we tell our startups to do"?

You're the CEO of Y Combinator. When you tell a New York Times reporter that
Donald Trump is "the Silicon Valley President", you're speaking for all of YC
--- even if you don't want to be. What the hell is the matter with you?

~~~
jfaucett
> You're the CEO of Y Combinator. When you tell a New York Times reporter that
> Donald Trump is "the Silicon Valley President",

> What the hell is the matter with you?

You're completely overreacting to this and misrepresenting Sam's quote, which
is this:

"Trump is the Silicon Valley candidate in every way except that the ideology
is flipped,"

"He’s an outsider. He took on a system he thought was broken and then
disregarded the rules, he got to know his users well and tested his product
early and iterated rapidly. That’s the start-up playbook. That’s exactly what
we tell our start-ups to do"

This seems like a pretty accurate assessment of events to me.

~~~
ksk
>This seems like a pretty accurate assessment of events to me.

So where exactly does pandering to racists, fear mongering against the
"other", and demonizing the powerless, feature in the SV analogy? Is that
"disregarding the rules"? Rules meaning, being civil, ethical and sane. I
suppose under a certain Machiavellian light, slavery could also be considered
as "disregarding the rules".

Maybe SV should start adopting political tactics too. Robocalls that ask you
how you would feel if you knew that Google employees were "perhaps" looking at
your teenage daughters pictures. Demonize php developers while lying to win32
developers about bringing their jobs back, etc.. :)

~~~
davidw
Not to mention he doesn't really know WTF his product is, or outright lied
about it ("our health care thing will cover everyone" to paraphrase).

Silicon Valley has a lot of really competent people.

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suprgeek
When governments "break things" they are usually life or death things - Like
Healthcare, Environment, Clean Water, Nuclear Weapons, etc.

The Trump WH could be spun as some well thought out scrappy disruption of
Politics as usual, which it is not.

It very much is a chaotic mess led by a massively narcissistic man-child and
the cynical and dangerous people he seeks advice from. I am amazed at Sam
Altman for providing anodyne quotes which almost seems like he admires the
chaos that Trump is causing. The disruption is causing massive REAL damage to
the US and its allies - exactly unlike a start-up that improves choices for
customers - not destroys the market itself.

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michaelchisari
While that may work for Facebook, we're seeing what happens when applied to
national security and good governance.

Also, there seems to be this revisionism towards the Trump Campaign as
something of a savvy, hidden genius operation. But this election was not won
by Trump as much as it was lost by Hillary. There is nothing particularly
remarkable about Trump's win as a Republican candidate.

~~~
dragonwriter
> But this election was not won by Trump as much as it was lost by Hillary.

But both Trump partisans (who want the credit) and Clinton partisans (who
don't want the blame) have an interest in the Trump team's unusually tactical
genius being seen as the cause of the outcome.

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abraae
A good philosophy for businesses that deliberately take on risk to maximise
reward, and where the worst case outcome of "breaking things" is insolvency
and loss of jobs and investor's money.

~~~
ionwake
I've always taken that phrase to mean , be more productive. I've never been in
an environment where I have heard that phrase and they were cool with the live
site going down. Does anyone echo my opinion ? Or am I wrong ?

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leggomylibro
I might be more inclined to go for a startup-style government if startups had
a better success rate. Sure there are a few great success stories, like
Theranos or Uber, but...oh, hm.

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rm_-rf_slash
Irresponsible.

The difference between breaking things in the private sector and the public is
that in the latter you don't have the luxury of declaring company bankruptcy
and going home safe-and-sound to your penthouse.

When states break things, people can suffer and die.

~~~
Danihan
You don't think there are lives (and suffering) at stake when private
companies mess up? Medical equipment... airlines... toxic waste dumps..

Please reconsider.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-
critical_system#Examples_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-
critical_system#Examples_of_safety-critical_systems)

Ironically, rarely are there examples from private industry who screw up as
much as governments tend to, especially in safety-critical missions.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> Ironically, rarely are there examples from private industry who screw up as
> much as governments tend to, especially in safety-critical missions.

Governments have the power to compel individuals under threat of violence.
Private industry does not.

People can choose not to do business with a company, limiting the impact of
that company's actions on their lives and the lives of others. Individuals
have no choice in government.

~~~
yellowapple
"People can choose not to do business with a company, limiting the impact of
that company's actions on their lives and the lives of others."

That's not always true. See also: pharmaceuticals, utilities, various other
markets susceptible to monopolies/oligopolies.

I mean sure, you can choose not to take your prescribed medications, but it's
probably not going to end well for you.

~~~
LyndsySimon
In which case, you are no worse off for choosing not to do business with them
than you would be if they did not exist.

Pharmaceutical companies often have monopolies because of patents - but then,
you're back to a government intervention again.

Also note that I said "limiting the impact", because it's possible for a third
party to impact you without your entering into a voluntary contract with them.
For instance: if there is a river running through your property, if someone
upstream diverts the river that is going to reduce the value of your property.
If you were using that river to power something that enables you to fulfill a
pre-existing contract then the common law concept of "tortious interference"
comes into play.

Life is complicated :)

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Upvoter33
Please do not try to connect the shitstorm that is the White House these days
to something that is actually functional (Silicon Valley). ugh.

------
dredmorbius
As I noted shortly after the election, "move fast and break things" is a
fundamentally fascist philosophy.

Nov 23, 2016

I've been reading Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" which has been circulating
of late, as well as definitions of demagoguery, among them the idea that the
demagogue is a leader who is relentlessly advocating action -- usually
immediate, violent, and without deliberation.

Having just run across that at Wikipedia, I turned to Eco's essay and found
his comment on futurism and fascism -- a possibly unlikely pairing as one of
the "weak arts":

 _Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of
entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the
early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation
in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence,
and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of
youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered
rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than
the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was
nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated
moonlight with great respect._

It's helpful to realise that Futurism here refers to the Italian artistic
movement,[1] not the general concept of future-directed optimism. Though with
the strongly similar features of both, this also raises some interesting
concerns over techno-optimists, generally.

With Facebook's decision to provide censorship services to the Chinese
government, having so ably demonstrated its capacity to influence and control
political movements within the US, UK, and Arab worlds, I realised that this
celebration of speed, violence, and risk was precisely embodied in Facebook's
motto, "move fast and break things".

That is, Facebook's core design philosophy is fundamentally aligned with
fascism.

Food for thought.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. See:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism)

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-
fascism/﻿](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/﻿)

Originally:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/KoWPUnb2...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/KoWPUnb24pZ)

~~~
michaelchisari
I absolutely agree, but only in so far as it applies to politics or the public
sphere. When it comes to code, I have a hard time correlating it much with
fascist dynamism.

~~~
dredmorbius
If your code doesn't affect others, then moving fast and breaking things is
fine.

More generally: if you've created a sandbox or playground where you can move
fast, break things, _and not screw with others around you_ , that's a Good
Thing.

Moving fast and breaking things in the context of an active government, with
livelihoods and souls at stake, is another matter entirely.

As is the rather common practice of pushing out code on live projects and
screwing with it in prod. The better firms (Google comes to mind) are pretty
good at avoiding this, at least for technical issues. Rather less so for
UI/UX.

