Member-only story
Move Slow and Make Things
Repair instead of disrupt
In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg popularized one of the stupidest sentences in human history. “Move fast and break things.”
While finance bros treated this utterance as profound, it was profoundly immature. Zuckerberg didn't invent "move fast and break things"; that phrase had been floating around Silicon Valley circles since the 90s. I remember hearing my dad, an engineer, rant about how stupid that phrase was while growing up in a suburb of San Jose, California. Of course, Zuckerberg, like fellow tech titan Elon Musk, has never created anything profoundly useful.
Zuckerberg just wanted a sound bite for investors when we spoke about breaking things. He was unprepared for the virality of the idea and tried to walk it back in 2014 by replacing “Move fast and break things” with the decidedly less sexy, “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”
The story of Zuckerberg and “Move fast and break things” is a perfect example of how tech oligarchs shape culture and society through money and empty promises instead of well-thought-out ideas and sustainable practices.
Move fast and break things was quickly shortened and memefied into a more concise slogan. Disrupt. Silicon Valley has become a disruption factory.
