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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> [...] but to widespread public concerns about the risks posed by the tech industry at large. Effective accelerationists worry that these concerns have become so entrenched that they threaten to extinguish the light of tech itself.

Those "years of gloom" (which aren't very many years -- has everyone forgotten when the tech industry was widely seen in optimistic terms?) have been brought on by the behavior of the tech industry itself, in large part because of the misapplication of the idea "move fast and break things" (which is, unless I'm misunderstanding, the very essence of e/acc that this article discusses).

Our industry has been breaking a lot of things that people don't want broken, then tends to shame people for being upset about that. The problem isn't some inherent fear of tech itself, it's a (supportable) fear of the tech industry and what other things it may damage as time goes on.

If the industry wants to assuage these fears, the solution isn't to move even faster and break even more things, it's to start demonstrably acting in a way that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear.

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I agree mostly, though I think the "break things" bit got twisted and misunderstood.

We were supposed to break; limits, barriers, status-quos, ossified ideas... Instead we broke; treasured social norms, privacy, mutual respect and dignity. There's a difference between benevolent innovation and reckless iconoclasm. I think it started the day Peter Thiel gave money to Mark Zuckerberg.

I understood it much smaller fwiw. As long as you can add useful features really quickly, it's fine if your website crashes every once in a while.

Yep. It came from Facebook, and it was changed to favor stability while moving fast almost a decade ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History

>> '"On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure".[40][41] The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[42]"'

Last night I changed some solid-js ui code to replace mutating game in ui state with updating ui state with mutated clones (cloning is efficient & shares most data, optimizations made for AI efficiency long ago)

ofc, with these stale game references around, I soon got reports of broken things: targeting was broken, pvp was broken, fade out animations were broken

A few hours later these issues were resolved. The players are used to these things happening sometimes. It's fine since the stakes are low. It's just a game after all. & being free, the active playerbase understands that they're QA

And, crucially, you'd generally be around to help fix the website.

No? You’re projecting what you want it to mean. The “break things” is don’t be afraid to break functionality/features/infrastructure in the process of improving it (new features, new scaling improvements, etc etc). That’s why it was renamed “Move fast with stable infrastructure".

> The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."

It’s about growth at all costs and then once Facebook got big enough they had to balance growth against other factors (+ the things people were doing that were causing breakages weren’t actually helping to grow).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History

Mottos like that live their own life. Take google’s “dont be evil” - people remember that, and see all the evil shit google does now, of course they are going to recall the motto and laugh at the irony. Whatever Sergey meant when he coined the phrase is irrelevant imo.

> You’re projecting what you want it to mean

Maybe true. But then if it's just about development it's a rather mundane old chestnut about reckless engineering versus good software engineering etc. Granted, that's a different discussion and we can see the tide turning now in terms of regulation and mandated software quality.

Sure, the Post-Office/Fujitsu scandal, Boeing etc, show how bad software actually ruins lives, but for the most-part the externality imposed by the reckless software engineer is measured in "hours of minor inconvenience".

That said.. I wonder if you did a ballpark calculation of how much harm lies behind the Google Graveyard [0], whether the cost of what is broken outweighs the benefits of it ever having been made?

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/

Engineering was literally taught to me in a well respected engineering university as making an appropriate cost/reward trade off and being careful in taking that risk. But the economics of the business were important too as it was part of the competition of driving more efficiency into a system. In classical engineering, there can be more risk because you’re dealing with people’s lives and so you have to be more careful and add extra margins of error even if more expensive.

One person’s recklessness is another person’s calculated risk. The consequences of FB engineering mistakes are minimal in both impact to customers and FB’s business. As FB scaled, the impact to individual people is still largely minimal (perhaps even beneficial) but the impact to their own business is larger and same for their customers if their ads aren’t getting eyeballs. So they shifted as big companies do. It’s kind of the best case of thoughtful risk taking - we’re rolling out a new system and we don’t know what could go wrong at scale and we put in monitoring of what we think we need. If there’s problems we’ll catch it with our monitoring/alerting and rollback or fix. You see the outages but not 99% of changes that go in without anything going wrong which lets the business resolve issues quickly and cheaply.

As for Boeing and Fujistsu, I’d say those are very different situations and aren’t an engineering problem nor do they indicate a move fast and break things mentality. As with many things like that, the engineering mistakes are a small detail within the overall larger picture of corruption. Boeing wanted to escape being classified as a new aircraft and met a perfect storm of skimping on hardware and corrupting the FAA through regulatory capture. I don’t fully understand Boeing’s role with the recent failures as a subcontractor is involved, but my hunch is that they’re nominally responsible for that subcontractor anyways. Same goes for Fujitsu - bad SW combined with an overly aggressive prosecution mandate and then cover ups around having made mistakes based on the assumption that the SW was correct rather than assuming new SW that hadn’t run anywhere before may contain bugs (not really sure whether Fujitsu hid the bugs or if politicians did or what happened but certainly the Post Office officials hid the reports of the auditors that found bugs in the sw and continued with prosecutions anyway).

Btw in engineering classes, all the large scale failures we were taught about involved some level of corruption or chain of mistakes. A contractor not conforming to the engineering specs to save on costs (valid optimization but should be done extra carefully), overlooking some kind of physical modeling that wasn’t considered industry standard yet, kickbacks, etc.

We probably had similar rigorous educations at that level. In SE we studied things like the '87 Wall St. crash versus Therac-25. The questions I remember were always around what "could or should" have been known, and crucially... when. Sometimes there's just no basis for making a "calculated risk" within a window.

The difference then, morally, is whether the harms are sudden and catastrophic or accumulating, ongoing, repairable and so on. And what action is taken.

There's a lot about FB you say that I cannot agree with. I think Zuckerberg as a person was and remains naive. To be fair I don't think he ever could have foreseen/calculated the societal impact of social media. But as a company I think FB understood exactly what was happening and had hired minds politically and sociologically smart enough to see the unfolding "catastrophe" (Roger McNamee's words) - but they chose to cover it up and steer the course anyway.

That's the kind of recklessness I am talking about. That's not like Y2K or Mariner-I or any of those very costly outcome could have been prevented by a more thoughtful singular decision early in development.

I’m talking strictly about the day to day engineering of pushing code and accidentally breaking something which is what “move fast and break things” is about and how it was understood by engineers within Facebook.

You now have raised a totally separate issue about the overall strategy and business development of the company which you’d be right about - if it were required to have a PE license to run an engineering company, Zuckerberg would have to have had his PE license revoked and any PEs complicit in what they did with tuning for addictiveness should similarly be punished. But the lack of regulation in any engineering projects that don’t deal directly with human safety and how businesses are allowed to run is a political problem.

I see we agree, and that as far as day-to-day engineering goes I'd probably care very little about whether a bug in Facebook stopped someone seeing a friends kitten pics.

But on the issue I'm really concerned about, do you think "tuning for addictiveness" on a scale of about 3 billion users goes beyond mere recklessness, and what do we do about this "political problem" that such enormous diffuse harms are somehow not considered matters of "human safety" in engineering circles?

Is it time we formalised some broader harms?

I think there are political movements to try to regulate social media. There’s lots of poorly regulated sub industries within the tech field (advertising is another one).

> Sure, the Post-Office/Fujitsu scandal, Boeing etc, show how bad software actually ruins lives, but for the most-part the externality imposed by the reckless software engineer is measured in "hours of minor inconvenience".

I've been deeply critical of the appalling behaviour of the Post Office and Fujitsu in the Horizon scandal but there's a world of difference between this and the impact of Facebook in 2009. One had a foreseeable and foreseen impact on people's lives. The other was a social network competing with MySpace and looking for a way to monetise its popularity.

> there's a world of difference between this and the impact of Facebook in 2009.

You're absolutely right there,

Frances Haugen's leaked internal communications showed incontrovertibly that internal Facebook research had long known teen girls had increased suicidal thoughts and obtained eating disorders. Facebook and Instagram products exploited teens with manipulative algorithms designed to amplify their insecurities, and that was documented. Yet they consistently chose to maximise growth rather than implement safeguards, and to actively bury the truth that their product caused deaths [0]. Similarly the Post Office had mountains of evidence that its software was ruining lives yet engaged in a protracted, active cover-up [1].

So, very similar.

But what's the "world of difference"?

> looking for a way to monetise its popularity.

That's a defence? You know what, that makes it worse. The Post Office were acting out of fear, whereas Facebook acted out of vanity and greed. The Post Office wanted to hide what had happened, whereas Facebook wanted to cloak ongoing misdeeds in order to continue. Simply despicable.

Way I see it - Facebook come out looking much, much worse.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043377310/facebook-whistlebl...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68079300

The NPR link is from 2021, not 2009. It links out to research from 2019, still not 2009. In 2009, Facebook was still branching out among university students.

Picture of two little identical castles, towns, and armies, caption:

Their barbarous "barriers", "status quo", "ossified ideas"

vs.

Our blessed "privacy", "treasured social norms", "dignity"

The alternative to describing the meme here is to call it by name: a Russell conjugation.

Exactly. Words that seem different but mean whatever you want them to mean, including the exact opposite. tools for peace <--> weapons of mass destruction etc.

Ah the good old "there's literally no difference between good things and bad things" argument. Compelling.

Amorality. The refuge of the bewildered.

Source:

https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888/photo...

I always thought move fast and break things used at FB was to empower the ambitious, talented, fresh crop of ivy-college grads with confidence to move forward with poor decisions due to lack of experience.

You’re closer to the truth, but with a bit of a harsh bias. It was simply permission to make mistakes. Sometimes you get it wrong, and it’s better to get more done and risk mistakes instead of moving cautiously.

Facebook was famously unit-test sparse, for example.

Or rather fail fast before we blow all our money only to find out our new product doesn't work

Only the best and brightest inexperienced developers :)

IDK, I think a big part of the "years of gloom" was an official (but secret) NYTimes policy of only publishing negative stories about tech, as confirmed by Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. [1]

1: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

I just wonder if that can be extended to every. single. news. organization.

They all do it. Doom gets more clicks than happy talk.

They wouldn't need a specific policy for tech if that was their general policy

This depends if 'tech' said something like "screw the media, we're going to replace it with media2.0". That could take you from the normal doom and gloom (that can be dispelled with the right ad buys) to a hated enemy that must be destroyed at all costs.

IMO the Verge actually strikes a pretty good balance of writing about tech like the old days of Wired, while still being willing to call out bad behavior when they see it.

I mean we're acting like tech is just a net good with this kind of attitude. Monopolies and surveillance hurt people. Facebook caused a genocide in Myanmar. They wouldn't publish anything if it was all good.

Here’s the real funny bit: the whole “doom gets more clicks” thing is itself a consequence of the ultra-competitive attention marketplace that tech created.

Sure it’s been “if it bleeds it leads” for a long time, but not until digital advertising has it been “if you’re not bleeding profusely 24/7 then you are going bankrupt.”

I'm confused by their idea that insider criticism and self-reflection is a sign of collapse rather than maturity in this case. If professional architects find value in working together to develop and adhere to standards before building a city (which I'd consider "technology") it is not a warning sign that architecture will cease to exist.

Gene drives, nuclear weapons, space organisms getting to earth, self-reflection on potential risks is not a sign of failure unless your only goal is to move. We only get to make some of these choices, as an entire global civilization, once.

AI is not exactly in that category but it's sure not a sign of failure that the people making it are actually considering the results before just making decisions with world-scale impacts. It slows things down but that is important when decisions only get to be made once and cannot be reversed. That was less the case with earlier tech, so I don't understand the surprise at the difference in scrutiny over time.

> self-reflection on potential risks is not a sign of failure unless your only goal is to move.

(my emph)

The root of this is a deflated concept of "progress". Progress is a vector. It has a magnitude and a direction. And it has a context that entirely defines its value. You would not be happy if the doctor told you you have a progressive illness. But "progress" gets used carelessly as a bare noun.

Ultimately it's the purse string holders who want to move fast and break things. Investors are the people who would rather try to shove ten figures into undercutting taxi markets everywhere to try to build a monopoly. Imagine if instead they'd put that into cancer treatments and diagnostics or novel forms of energy generation. Move fast and break things is shit compared to building new things at the centre of human need and at the edge of human understanding.

Uber is a particularly silly example due to the sheer volume of money they burned, but it did prove that the taxi medallion monopolies were suppressing market opportunities. I don’t believe that the founders or VCs really understood the available market potential, but it was 100% a farce that “ride sharing” was a meant for “sharing”.

Taxis (incl Uber) are bigger now than they have ever been. Add in Uber Eats and co., and there’s so much new demand for similar services. Even Amazon flex has shown that car based services have unmet demand and utility.

The taxi industry should have been broken down. It was good for humans to have better access to the market, even if it wasn’t cancer treatment. There’s tons of money going to research cancer. New energy opportunities are a huge source of investment already, let’s not pretend the existence of Uber foreclosed the opportunity to cure cancer.

Mafia with chips extracting maximum value from every vital industry comes to mind..

Tech has shown its cards and people hate it for a reason.

Every time we try to do something somebody is in the way. We can have reasonable conversations with these people but when their arguments deevole to screaming, yelling about Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve or throwing food at paintings you have to ask yourself how long before you push the (metaphoric) peddle to the metal and keep going.

We can’t deal on an adult basis with children, no matter their age, how long do we have to let them stop us?

There is no possible path for advancement that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear. It never worked that way in the past, and it won't now.

Tech is like a fission reactor: powerful, elegant, delivering value through leverage, but requires strong controls and protections (moderators, containment) for humans so it doesn’t ruin us all.

People worry about AI paperclip maximizing, but Tech is already that in some ways (find or build moats, blitz scaling, no concerns for the harm incurred). It’s just fuzzy cohorts of tech workers and management doing the paperclip maximizing, for comp and shareholder value respectively. Not much different than AI reward functions.

Yes, but there's a critical difference now. Now, the tech industry breaks many things at an unprecedented pace, and largely doesn't offer a reasonable replacement for the things that have been broken.

People can only handle a limited amount of loss within a given period of time before they start pushing back hard against further loss and consider those causing them harm to be forces of evil.

There's also another factor that the tech industry is largely blind to: tech people tend to think that "we know best" and that pushing our ideas on the general public against their will is a Good Thing. But it's not a Good Thing, it's a Bad Thing.

Another thing we need to be doing is allying with the general public rather than dictating to them.

Who is pushing anything on the public? The tech industry wouldn't exist in the form that it does now except that it gives people something they want, not the other way around.

Disruption from tech advancement is caused by tech changes displacing existing industries and it hurts the people currently making money from those industries. But to be against that disruption you would have to believe that those people have some sort of right to make that money and continue doing the things that make them those profits when the public wants the more efficient tech. So really it's the anti tech people who are pushing things on the public.

E.g. people often complain about Amazon displacing small retailers, but really it's just that given the choice, most people choose Amazon.

> except that it gives people something they want, not the other way around.

That used to be true. Now, though, a very common thing I've noticed with people is that they use tech not because they want to or because it solves a problem for them, but because they are disadvantaged if they don't.

It's an important difference. If people willingly choose to use a thing, then they'll be inclined to think about it positively. If they use a thing because they feel they have no choice, then that thing is more likely to be viewed as adversarial, because it is.

I think that's largely where the tech industry has arrived at. Further, the tech industry shows little to no empathy to those whose lives are worse because of what it does.

People may feel that way, and I'm sure in some cases they really mean it. But the reason they always give for why they have to use it is some form of "because every one else does." And it had to get to that point because people wanted it in the first place. Otherwise it just wouldn't have sold in the market when it came out.

You're very close to describing the "enshittification" process.

Things start out good quality, high effort. Useful.

Then once they achieve a certain amount of inertia they start cutting stuff out. Adding new tiers of payment plans, or injecting advertising into existing plans. Lowering caps. Whatever else they can get away with to cut costs but keep your money.

But people have invested in them by that point. Invested enough that changing off is painful and potentially expensive. They want to barrier to leave to be high, even as they give you less reason to stay using their product.

Not sure you even need this product cycle to explain the parent poster's observation.

What I see here is your basic Tragedy of the Commons at multiple levels. Consumers adopt the new thing to disadvantage their peers, who then have to do the same, to the detriment of all. And the vendors are doing the same thing.

This whole thread reminds me how much "tech" as a meme has come to conflate technology and business. People don't even seem to recognize that "move fast and break things" expressed a business philosophy, not some fundamental truth of technology, R&D, or science.

You're ignoring the fact that "it" (the tech in question) can change, and that there's a large motivation to monetize/cut dev spending/etc. once users are entrapped via network effects.

Edit: Sibling "enshittification" comment conveyed it better.

The costs of a thing are usually not apparent when it is new. All that's apparent is the benefits. The costs rear their ugly head later.

So yes, often people jump onto a hot new thing because all they can see are the benefits. The "buyer's remorse" doesn't come in until later, when the downsides become apparent. At that point, it's often too late and people are trapped. By design.

The tech industry counts on this effect, and doing that is one of the bad behaviors that encourages people to distrust the industry and become angry at it.

All I'm saying is that people are growing increasingly distrustful of, and angry at, our industry for really solid, rational reasons.

The most charitable interpretation I can think of for why we allow this to be is that the most visible part of our industry has become so insular and divorced from society in general that they can't even understand the anger or why it's rational. The least charitable interpretation I can think of is that they know perfectly well why people are getting mad and just don't care, because not caring increases short to medium term profitability.

> Who is pushing anything on the public?

We are. Constantly. We are, intellectually, in a tiny minority who find these things delightful and empowering. We assume that must also be good for everyone else. I was building electronics as a five year old when the other kids were playing outside and it thrilled me so much I assumed everyone else thought the same. They didn't and they don't. Maybe us nerds "took over the world", but as an adult I find almost everybody else (those we call normies) feel that digital technology is;

- something that happens to them

- is foisted upon them and they have no choice

- something they "have to trust"

> it gives people something they want

Have you considered that you really have no idea "what people want"? Neither do I, but I do know that and feel comfortable saying it. And I have done research and literally gone onto the streets interviewing lots of people to ask them. Most want what they think their friends want. Or the thing they already have with some new features. We tell them and they buy.

> to be against that disruption you would have to believe that those people have some sort of right to make that money and continue doing the things...

In a funny way they kind of do have that right. UDHR includes several aspects that can be taken as a "right to stability".

> it's the anti tech people

I don't encounter any "anti-tech people". Ever. I meet plenty folks who are anti-surveillance, or anti-authoritarian, or anti-asshole - against people forcing their technology on them - but I've never met anyone who thinks it's simply the fault of technology itself. You may be living in a bit of a bubble?

you are mistaken if you believe your knowledge of tech gives you power over it.

> "When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it."

> Who is pushing anything on the public?

Software is pushing updates on us that nobody asked for in the exact moment we need them least, everything between the operating system to websites shove ads in our face, and features & "modern UI" that remove important information and options because designers thought a UI can't be confusing if it barely exists. Privacy violations pushed with countless license agreements and the daily "We value your privacy" popup that explains to you in what ways this sentence is a lie.

> it gives people something they want, not the other way around

I have never heard someone ask for slow and broken software, ads, tracking and other shady practices. They just have to live with it because what are they gonna do, not communicate with friends or file their taxes?

Leaded gasoline is a good example of an advancement where the naysayers were right.

One of the very very very few. Asbestos is another one. Would you be able to provide another example?

How about glyphosate (roundup)?

Also, plastic is looking far worse now than twenty years ago though I think the net is quite complicated and therefore ambiguous at the moment.

There is an ongoing discussion about “forever chemicals” and, again, not unambiguous but the balance seems to be tilting toward them being a bad idea.

I’m not personally seeing much of a dividend from nuclear weapons given how difficult nuclear power turns out to be under capitalism in practice. But I suppose it gets a pass because otherwise my father might have died in a land war.

Remains to be seen what the net will be on oil but I’ll happy speculate that if you consider a sufficiently long timeline that one turns out bad too.

I’m still pretty mad about the “food pyramid” but I can’t offer any particular study that tries to quantify its role in the decline of american health outcomes. Certainly modern food processing techniques look like a slow moving disaster but it’s really hard to sort our cause and effect.

Social media was neat for a few years but I would consider it a net negative.

I guess you’re right.

CFCs, PFAS, BPA, phthalates, thalidomide, leaches, bloodletting, lobotomies, pretty much the entire history of mental health treatment, hydrogen airships, vermillion pigment, mercury felt stabilizer, radium water... If I were feeling particularly spicy I might even suggest things like weapons research, communism, or suburbia.

How bad actually are hydrogen airships? At this point trying to make tiltrotors any safer is not working out, so airships could be better. Though, if you have a real airport, passenger jets are unbeatably safe.

Fair point! Probably should have left them off. Despite the rather famous failing, they've had a lot of utility, and the technology is still in use today. (I think there's at least one YCombinator startup using hydrogen airships.)

"Data is the new oil"

Kinda the point, no? If history shows progress is disruptive, then accelerationism seems likely to accelerate disruptions. Many people can connect these dots, and not everyone sees this as positive.

"Advancement" implies improvement. Just because things are changing does not mean they are improving.

Yeah, it's a misguided and naive way of thinking. Deciding whether a technological development is good (and for whom, and to what extent, and with what trade-offs, and on what time horizons) is a really difficult task. So some folks will replace it with a much easier question: "Is this new?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution

If what people hold dear is controlling the way people live hundreds or thousands of miles away, then you're right.

But that is a deliberately obtuse definition designed to justify any behavior.

If you let people continue their traditions, don't deliberately bankrupt them, and allow them make their own local laws, that's enough for most.

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