DMB Digest: Middle-Aged Silly-con Valley
Silicon Valley, get off my lawn!
I’m all for thoughtful stupidity. Hmmm. Perhaps I should restate that sentiment as “timely resistance.” I suppose what I mean to say is there is a time to counter common wisdom, because sometimes the things that seem wise to common society are, put simply, dumb.
Sometimes a smaller subset of society is thrust into the spotlight and given the power to run amok with its common wisdom despite the fact this common wisdom wouldn’t be considered common by the majority of society. When this happens, common folk are left scratching their heads and wondering what in the name of Jiminy Cricket is going on.
We are living in this confusion currently. But not only is this particular example of common wisdom dumb, it is also not all that common outside of Silicon Valley. Thus, I’ve selected the focus for this week’s “get off my lawn” missive: American Technocracy*, get off my lawn!
(*I feel it necessary here to address the irony that the burgeoning American Populist movement simultaneously embraces technocratic elites. But what ya’ gonna do? It ain’t what it ain’t.)
Enough of the obfuscation. What pray tell am I talking about? I’m talking about the now-middle-aged-Silicon-Valley’s dumb mantra to “fail fast.” Or as Mark Zuckerberg once put it, “move fast and break things.” To be fair, I’m all for taking chances and not allowing the fear of failure to paralyze our progress in life. Learning to cope with and move on from failure is critical. But when we begin to embrace failure, we’ve gone too far. (And what happens when all these failure-embracing-twenty-year-olds become sixty-year-olds?)
How many of us have become aware of all the stupid things we embrace with gusto these days? Maybe we’ve been guilty of saying something like, “Man, you wouldn’t believe how busy I am!” or “You think you’ve been burning the candle at both ends? I’ve not slept in a fortnight!” (That’s two weeks for all you whippersnappers out there.) (A whippersnapper is a presumptuous young person.)
The point is, we all take things too far sometimes. Then we compete over who has taken it too far the most. Then the winner of that competition is placed in a position of leadership. It’s just how we do things in the USA. It’s especially how we’ve constructed Silicon Valley, which over the last couple of decades has increasingly bled over into Washington DC.
The underlying theology of “fail fast” doctrine is that disruption and chaos will ultimately benefit those generating the chaos while catching the trailing competitors in the wake. Envision, if you will, a speedboat full of rowdy partiers ripping donuts around a small lake. Now imagine yourself attempting to lounge on an inner-tube near the shore. Which party will enjoy the chaos more?
Sure, a few docks might be cast off their moorings. The nesting habits of waterfowl will be disrupted. Perhaps a few docked water craft will be damaged during the fracas. In the end, the speedboat full of drunken revelers might even find itself ejected from the lake and overturned in a nearby stand of cottonwoods. But by golly a handful of people will have had a glorious afternoon in the process. And out of the whole experience, a new policy will come to light. Better moorings will be devised. More stable docks. The people living around the lake will of course build back better.
This is the “wisdom” at the heart of the fail fast doctrine. I suspect we are about to come to a reckoning with the deployment of this doctrine at a federal bureaucratic level. For those of us who have been wishing our government would run more like a corporation, I hope we’ve all found a safe harbor to beach our inner-tubes and watch the show.
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