I spoke recently on Techtonic with Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn about their book Move Slow and Upgrade, a welcome dose of (uncommon) common-sense thinking about technology. (Listen here.) The book is a direct response to the past decade’s mania for “disruptive innovation,” perhaps best expressed by Mark Zuckerberg’s now-infamous slogan, “move fast and break things.”

Zuck’s approach was effective, in a way. Due to his growth-at-any-cost ethos, lots of changes occurred quickly – and lots of things were broken. The harms of Zuck’s disruptive changes were so egregious, in fact, that Facebook was recently hauled into court for two separate cases – one in New Mexico, and one in California, where Zuck himself was called to testify. He didn’t seem too happy about it, according to this very official photo:

Facebook lost both cases. This is very, very good news. (I explained why in the Dystopia update: good news edition on Techtonic.)

But even with these court wins, Silicon Valley maintains its deeply rooted belief in disruption, and that’s why Selinger and Cahn’s corrective is so important. We would be better off embracing, as the subtitle puts it, “the power of incremental innovation,” rather than racing off to implement each techno-utopian fantasy that the oligarchs spin up.

Remember NFTs? They were the fad of the moment for a year or two – notwithstanding my warning, posted immediately at the beginning of the trend, that they were intrinsically worthless. (Read the column from 2021. Five years later, it hasn’t lost a bit of relevance.)

Remember crypto and the blockchain, and how the two technologies were going to “level the playing field” and bring about a new democratic era in finance? That also didn’t pan out. As Selinger and Cahn put it:

The only question that really matters is: do decentralized record keeping and a fixed number of tokens create something valuable for society? Sadly, the answer is almost always no.

Blockchain can’t be deemed a success, at least not yet, because it hasn’t created “something valuable for society.” Applied to tech generally, that’s more or less what I’ve been trying to say here for nearly 30 years. The central question for any technology is very simple: did it create something good?

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Now in the AI era the oligarchs and their vassals are making the same noises that they made for NFTs and the blockchain. AI – by which they mean text-predicting large language models – will “change everything,” it’s “inevitable,” it will usher in a new era of unbounded wealth and creativity, and so on.

AI, in other words, can do everything, means everything, is everything. Except . . . there’s just one thing it’s not. It’s not a bubble.

Here I’ll ask that we take a music break. Listen to NOT A BUBBLE, an absolute banger of a song just released by SMA. (This is a YouTube video, so watch it in the Duck Duck Go browser to strip out Google surveillance.) I’m hoping to play it on Techtonic soon.

Such hype-driven bubbles are caused by a kind of willful ignorance. As Selinger and Cahn put it:

Many of the worst innovations are designed without the voices of those most impacted by their creation . . . Innovators are quick to tell these individuals what they need to have a better life, but so slow to ask what would actually help.

What’s missing in poorly conceived technology, it turns out, is exactly what is embedded in good tech: an awareness of what users actually want. This is the thesis of my book Customers Included, that we can make better products and services when we listen to the people we’re supposed to be serving. It was gratifying to see how resonant Selinger and Cahn’s book is with that idea.

But we’re a long way from the tech industry adopting “move slow and upgrade” as its mantra. (Or, for that matter, “customers included.”) AI, which the oligarchs assure us is not a bubble, is being pumped up – by a handful of Silicon Valley monopolies – with investments larger than anything in the dotcom bubble, larger than the subprime crisis . . . larger, I suspect, than anything any of us have ever seen. Combined with Silicon Valley’s close association with the current occupant of the White House, the interdependent oligarch/government partnership raises all sorts of dark possibilities if the structure eventually collapses. As Cory Doctorow put it in his April 16 column:

I’m worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it’s in all their bank accounts at once. . . . I’m worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism.

I can only hope, if and when we emerge from this crisis, that whoever is still in the tech industry will look around for new ideas. “Move fast and break things” failed, again and again. It’s well past time that we should embrace, at last, a sensible approach. Move slow, and listen to your customers.

-mark

Projects in the works:

• Major announcement planned for Apr 29

• Site redesign launching soon, TBD

• Iliad column (followup to Plato column a year ago)

• . . . and more: join us to be up-to-date on all Creative Good news

If you missed it:

• My reading of “San Francisco Killed New York Food Delivery” (8 minutes)

• Repair cafe episode on Techtonic, and my essay about the experience

• The actual sound of the Torment Nexus (Bluesky post)

Until next time!

Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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