White House Echoes Tech: ‘Move Fast and Break Things’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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?
At worst, it confirms many people's fears of how those in Silicon Valley view the world.
(You misleadingly edited your comment after I wrote my response. I would not agree that I have a visceral distaste of anything conservative. In fact, I think that's an accusation more accurately leveled against Donald Trump.)
Then it might be a good idea to cool down before engaging in comment.
Sam is providing a different perspective for looking at Trump's presidency, which he's made it clear he's not happy with.
That to me is an incredibly admirable action, and one which we could all benefit from trying out a little more often.
Doesn't mean anyone is endorsing anything. It's just a different look.
Those quotes might be reasonable on the context of an essay by Sam aimed at providing a "different perspective on Trump's presidency" (though Sam's own comments here suggest to that they wouldn't be much better in that context, but that's another discussion.)
In the actual context they appear, they are normalizing of Trump a d suggest, at best, an extraordinarily naive approach to the media in his position.
Gut feelings are not always the best feelings.
1. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man...
That's an interesting way to spin having your EO struck down as unconstitutional.
Retract and revise to reset that process to square one and avoid a final outcome on the merits is not a parricularly novel legal strategy; it's actually well-known, often abusive approach.
1. Do something on the edge of legality 2. Get called on it 3. Change your actions going forward as little as possible to overcome legal resistance
I'm sorry the truth may put him in a good light on this, but if Sam had lied in his response many people would have lost all trust for him.
It's true in a particularly shallow sense which trivializes significant differences in context and serves to normalize Trump's authoritarianism.
Sounds like he executed well to me..
Are you upset that anyone had anything remotely positive to say about Trump?
Also, in Silicon Valley, there a social convention of saying controversial, potentially wrong ideas for the sake of discussion. Maybe Sam is engaging in this, with caring that he's being interviewed for a major newspaper.
> 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.
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.. :)
Silicon Valley has a lot of really competent people.
Sama realizes full well that he's speaking for all of YC, as a YC founder I'm glad he is. I agree with him here.
They were shallow and normalizing, rather than insightful and far from an endorsement.
I worry about digging too far into this because it's just going to generate a political debate. I just want to be clear about why I think this article and Sam's decision about how to participate in it is so alarming.
I am less disturbed by Trump's Republican supporters, at least the level-headed ones. At least they believe what they're saying. I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration. Why should I have to worry that that's true? What was the upside for YC here?
What is interesting about Trunp's canpaign is that he was able to win while spending significantly less than his opponent[1]. Given this, I would say that sama's on point with his quote.
BTW, calling the Trump administration "crazy" is kind of a lazy ad hominem, don't you think?
[1] - http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spending...
I'm just surprised the first rhetorical tools you decided to use are emotional appeals and being dismissive of anyone who appears like they're remotely not toeing the party line.
Attacking, hypothetically, a president on account of his skin colour is an ad hom. It has no bearing on his governing capability.
Noting that a president is not in full possession of his mental capacities is a statement of fact. It bears directly on his governing ability.
An ad hominem argument is one in which you attempt to dismiss someone else's argument (or their standing to rebut your own argument) based not on any attribute of the argument itself, but on an attribute of the person making the argument.
If we're arguing about whether Donald Trump is crazy, and you say he's not, and I say, "you wouldn't know whether he's crazy or not because you're crazy", that's an ad hominem.
And, if I do happen to be crazy and that's a legitimate basis for my not being able to assess another's insanity, that's a valid impeachment of my credibility.
If I'm not crazy, it's an untruthful assertion on your part.
It's not ad hominem, but it may be missing that much of the apparent craziness of the Administration is deliberate propaganda strategy (even if that strategy has been chosen as a key one for the Trump camp because Trump himself is actually crazy, and so there is an incentive to find an approach that works with that fact rather than foundering on it.)
You're stating you believe Sam is a Trump administration supporter?
"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."
An outsider who disregards the rules is the polar opposite of an authoritarian. Rather, I think he's admiring Trump's bias toward action and disregard for conventional wisdom, as well as for people who have a vested interest in the conventional wisdom.
It might be the case that history's most effective authoritarians are disproportionately likely to be rule-breaking outsiders.
Trump is in a similar position now: he was an outsider during the campaign, but now that he's won, he's the consummate insider. The same phenomena applies to successful Silicon Valley startups: Google, Facebook, and Uber were all scrappy little startups until they became huge, at which point they became giant multinationals which need to be feared and resisted.
This I think illustrates the paradox in Sam's quote: in my read, Altman is referring to candidate Trump, while your outrage is devoted towards President Trump. As Obama said in one of his farewell addresses, "campaigning is very different from governing". Tactics that can be very effective (even necessary) on the campaign trail can become dangerous threats to democracy within the government.
A formal position of authority doesn't stop you from being an outsider in an institution; that's one of the reasons that purges happen: to recast institutions in which the leader is an outsider into ones in which he is not.
What I'm trying to highlight is the distinction between the struggle for power and the exercise of power. Campaigning for election is a struggle for power. So is purging your political opponents within the government. So is founding a startup.
Governing is the exercise of power. Deporting all immigrants and closing the borders is the exercise of power. "Grab 'em by the pussy" is the exercise of power. Leveraging a monopoly is the exercise of power.
Power struggles are usually looked at favorably by those whose interests align with the ascendant power structure, and unfavorably by those whose interests are entrenched. The naked exercise of power is usually looked at with distrust by everyone, on the theory that if they bully someone else, they could bully you next. There's a fairly wide grey area in-between; for example, I've categorized Trump's immigration orders as the exercise of power (which probably both you and tptacek would agree with), but someone who just lost his job to an immigrant would probably categorize it as a power struggle where Trump is fighting the immigrants oppressing him. And similarly, not everyone would buy your claim that a dictator committing a purge is an "outsider" in his government. The key point though is the relative power differential between parties: it's a struggle for power when the active party is the underdog, and the exercise of power when the active party is dominant.
The way I read Altman's quote, he's casting Trump's campaign in the same terms as the struggle for power that all startups have to go through. He's specifically not endorsing what Trump has done with that power once he attained it.
I'm not sure there is the kind of distinction here you are trying to draw; a struggle for (future) power is one context in which (present) power is exercised, they aren't opposing or conflicting concepts.
Revolutionary authoritarians are, almost without exception, outsiders who disregard the pre-existing rules, both formal rules and merely conventional ones. The very few exceptions are insiders who disregard rules in the same way. Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon, among others, were many things, but followers-of-rules-set-by-others wasn't high on the list for any of them.
I think you are confusing being the opposite of a willing subject of authoritarianism with being the opposite of an authoritarian.
> I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration.
Taking the quote at face value, Altman seems to endorsing Trump's approach to governing but not the ideological goals it is directed at; this isn't supporting Trump but in some ways it might be seen as worse—the usual anti-Trump message that unites liberal, moderate, and the notable conservative voices skeptical of the regime is that normal political ideological questions aside, Trump's approach is a danger to the viability of American democracy (obviously, as you move roughly toward the left, that process critique is leavened with increasing opposition to policy goals of the Trump Administration.)
The reason for this is because "crazy" is usually an appellation that the rest of society sticks on you for being "not normal". Silicon Valley is looking for the crazy person whose "normal" will become the normal for the rest of the world. You can't change the world if you think the world is already pretty good as-is.
My concern about Trump (and his few Silicon Valley supporters) is that they're applying ideas outside of the domain where they're sound. Most crazy people are, in fact, crazy, and not great visionaries who will bring the world to a higher level of being. A crazy startup founder will at most hurt himself and his investors if he's completely detached from reality; he requires the consent of his customers to do anything significant. A crazy POTUS could literally destroy humanity, so the stakes are a little bit higher.
It should be comforting, though, that so far they have always turned eventually - as the evidence for Watergate became overwhelming, the public made it clear there were some lines that could not be crossed. I suspect we will see something similar with Trump once it becomes clear that things are not going to get materially better for the people who voted for him, but it may take several years and possibly a second term. In the meantime, those of us see just how shitty & insane the Trump administration is will have to be content to be Cassandra.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vie...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_G._Harding
Nixon did not really do anything that previous presidents hadn't done. Those lines had already been crossed plenty of times. See It Didn't Start With Watergate -- https://archive.org/details/LaskyVictorItDidntStartWithWater... Or read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johson and read about all the blatantly illegal things Johnson did. Also -- the flip side of the Nixon story is that the FBI and perhaps CIA almost certainly got away with breaking the law and illegal wire taps -- https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/death-deep-throat-and-crisis... Should we be comforted if the unelected branches of government can break the law to expose the elected branches?
I don't think we should normalize a President accusing, without any evidence, the previous president of wiretapping him... over Twitter.
That's one example of something that should never be normalized.
Supporting Donald Trump and his policies is normal. You may not agree with the man or his policies and that's perfectly fine - and also normal - but to hold the position that they are not "normal" makes no logical sense.
As for Altman agreeing to even be interviewed: it's clear that he's passionate about civic affairs and is willing to speak out despite possible risk to reputation.
@tptacek follow the money. The key to understanding this [0] is the YC relationship with Thiel. It has long been my opinion that Thiel is a protected species with YC. It was obvious almost 100 days ago on ^Political Detox^ day. (message to HN, 'don't make waves for us when Thiel is meeting president) [1] A key test: Positive political stories like this one are supported, negative ones flagged.
Reference
[0] "Y Combinator has no problem with partner Peter Thiel funding Donald Trump" https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-partn...
[1] "Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
While I agree with the sentiment, the irony of being told to pipe down, discussing a contentious issue related to YC/Whitehouse is not lost on me.
Though also note the final paragraph:
“I think all of this — the current start-up revolution, Trump and lots of other things — is largely a consequence of the internet breaking down traditional barriers,” Mr. Altman, the Y Combinator executive, wrote in an email. “This societal openness has some great consequences in my opinion, like the start-up boom of the last 20 years, and some bad ones, like Trump.”
I think that our side should be ashamed we got beat with out own playbook and not let it happen again.
I also think if we don't realize what happened, we will not win future elections. So I hope we learn this very painful lesson soon.
I could just refuse to comment for these articles, but I'm more interested in us winning elections in the future than not facing criticism. It's important to me to engage and point out what I think is important.
But nobody who reads that article will realize that. They'll imagine instead a dynamo who "seized the playbook" of Silicon Valley and used it to cruise to an Silicon Valley-style 10-bagger victory.
You should refuse to comment on articles like these. You have no special insight into why or how Trump won. You chose to be the CEO of Y Combinator. You can't ask for our sympathy when your words, freely given to the newspaper of record, have an impact you didn't intend.
I don't see sama asking for your sympathy here. He explicitly said he's not particularly interested in avoiding criticism.
This point unfortunately plays into the messaging that you're criticizing sama for. The electoral college was the winner take all victory. They actually call it a genius masterstroke that he "focused" on winning in the most strategic and economical way.
Besides, it's not enough dismiss him or the strategy as having "barely" won. If things had gone the other way in those determining districts then he would have "barely" lost. He lost the popular vote by millions but it was still within ~2%. With a candidate like Trump you need to do better than that by far. He should have been defeated unambiguously, and yet he managed the astonishing feat of just barely eeking out a win.
He didn't have a traditional ground game in states. He didn't spend money on the traditional unit of persuasion, the 30 second ad spot.
He ran a very lean, very virtual campaign. He used guerrilla tactics to get free media, quite masterfully in my opinion.
Compare Trump to Bernie Sanders. Sanders outraised Hillary and spent more on 30 second TV ads. He ran a traditional, better funded campaign and lost.
Trump took on every incumbent and broke every rule and won.
Sam is right here and his comment was insightful.
You sir, are engaging in very reactionary politics, and have no right to tell Sam Altman what he should or should not do.
- tptacek, 2017
Sam Altman single handedly started the tech industry's opposition to Trump with one blog post. And here you are accusing him of being a quiet supporter.
"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Joseph Welch, 1954
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please reconsider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-critical_system#Examples_...
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.
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.
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 :)
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
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Originally:
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/KoWPUnb2...
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.
"Do whatever you want regardless of of the negative ripple effects you cause" isn't exactly an ethical philosophy, but it sure can be effective.