Move Slow and Mend Things

I have spent the past five days at Electromagnetic Field, learning and relaxing and gaming and raving alongside 4,000 other nerds in a field near Ledbury.

I’m certain I’ll talk about EMF as a whole in plenty of future posts. There are games to talk about, talks to, err, talk about, people to thank, and at least several experiences I need to fully process before committing them to the internet.

But this post, written as I travel home from an incredible few days, is inspired by something I heard as the festival came to a close last night. A fellow festival-goer, giving an impromptu speech, said that everyone, not just billionaires, ought to be able to “move fast and break things”.

They were repeating an idea that has seeped so deeply into technology that it sometimes feels less like a philosophy and more like a law of physics. Move fast. Break things. Disrupt. Scale. Replace. Repeat.

On this point, I firmly disagree.

Not because I dislike technology. I love technology. I am a massive nerd. I am a hacker with twenty years in the tech industry under my non-existent hat. I may spend most of my working life writing books these days, but there is still a part of my brain permanently occupied by strange ideas, interesting systems and the question: what happens if I press this?

This weekend, I built games for hackers. I delivered a talk about treating technology as storytelling. I volunteered to sit in a tent and get vomited on occasionally.

I am very much inside the house. I just think we should stop trying to set fire to it while we’re inside.

Moving Fast Has a Cost

“Move fast and break things” is usually presented as a celebration of experimentation. Don’t get stuck. Don’t wait for perfection. Try something. Learn from it. Keep going.

There is something valuable in that. Hackers have always understood the joy of trying the thing you are not entirely certain will work. Curiosity requires a certain willingness to make mistakes, look foolish and occasionally release some magic smoke from a component you were quite fond of.

But curiosity and carelessness are not the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, moving fast stopped being about experimentation and became an excuse not to think about consequences. Breaking things became acceptable because there would always be another product, another platform, another device, another user, another community or another bit of the planet to consume.

The problem with “move fast and break things” is not that billionaires have been keeping all the fun for themselves.

The problem is that things get broken.

People get broken. Communities get broken. Systems we depend upon are disrupted by people who will never need to depend upon them. The people doing the breaking move on to their next big idea, while everybody else is left trying to put the pieces back together.

We built technology around acceleration. Then we built consumerism around it. Now we seem to be building our entire culture around it.

Everything must be immediate. New. Frictionless. Optimised. Delivered tomorrow by someone whose bladder has been reclassified as an inefficiency.

We are encouraged to replace rather than repair, upgrade rather than understand, and consume rather than create. The future arrives every six months, apparently, and requires a new charging cable.

This is not only a problem with technology. It is a problem with nowism: the idea that faster is inherently better, that waiting is failure, and that anything which cannot demonstrate immediate growth or gratification must be obsolete.

But we do not have to move fast.

Moving slowly is fine.

Moving slowly does not mean refusing to experiment, or waiting until something is perfect before we allow it into the world. Nothing would ever happen. I would still be rewriting the opening sentence of my first book, and someone would have had to forcibly remove me from Green Gathering in 2006.

It means moving deliberately. It means taking enough time to notice what we are changing and who might be affected when we change it. It gives us time to ask what we are making, why we are making it, who it is for, and what story it tells them when they arrive. Hack Things. Mend Things.

For me, hacking has never simply meant breaking into a system. It means understanding one well enough to change it. It means looking at the thing you have been given and wondering whether it could be different. Better. Stranger. Kinder. More fun.

That spirit was everywhere at EMF.

It was there in playful technology made simply because it might bring people delight. It was there in talks about building better systems, sharing knowledge and taking power back from the platforms which have spent years quietly taking it from us. It was there in people opening things, adapting things, repairing things and helping each other understand how things work.

It was also there in the Welfare tent where I volunteered with Paul and a brilliant team of people throughout the weekend.

Welfare was a new addition to EMF this year, and an incredibly important one. It recognised that bringing thousands of people together means building more than power networks, stages, bars and internet infrastructure. You also have to build care.

That, too, is a kind of mending. Notice what people need. Listen to them. Create something which helps. Learn from it. Make it better. EMF is temporary. The tents come down. The cables are rolled away. The field returns to being a field.

But the ethos it inspires lives on far beyond the event itself. It's hard not to feel fundamentally changed by thousands of people having come together to demonstrate that technology does not have to be something done to us. It is ours to hack. To reshape. To use for the greater good. We can use it to play, communicate, care for one another and build experiences which ask nothing from us except that we take part.

Not everything needs to scale. Not everything needs to become a platform. Not every new idea needs to sweep away whatever came before it.

We do not have to move fast and break things.

We can take the time to understand what is already here. We can take things apart without treating them as disposable. We can hack them, repair them, share them and make them more human.

We can move slow and mend them.

Together.