Transcending Underpants Gnomes

Slow is smooth, have purpose, and fix things.

“Move fast and break things.” -Mark Zuckerberg

This infamous quote by Zuck has been the philosophy of Silicon Valley for years. Silicon Valley giants also often seem to behave as though “it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” (and just pay a fine.)

With the recent exponential growth of Clubhouse, we are seeing this Silicon Valley phenomenon at work. I’ve heard cybersecurity and software experts describe the application as being “held together with duct tape and bubblegum.”

The Open Clubhouse project shows how easily how data from beta applications can be scraped by researchers or even state actors, which in certain regions, obviously, can put people in risk for simply being in the rooms.

It feels a lot like this:

The Clubhouse team built the entire application with under ten people, and this Korean blog post outlines how simple the architecture is.

Clubhouse architecture

It seems there needs to be more accountability by Silicon Valley for their actions that affect millions of people. Of course, personal digital hygiene is every netizen’s responsbility, but as exponential technology and scale is becoming accessible to small software teams, it seems important to break the cycle of the tech bro billionaire’s boys club.

Google’s ethical AI team has been embroiled with escalating controversy which is leading to a public revealing of the internal politics and problems inside the company. It seems pretty unfortunate that these are the people being counted on to work on “ethical AI.”

It feels like there is a sense of fragility with Big Tech, with governments, the people, and even their employees turning against them. Cryptocurrencies, NLTs, and new models of work are arising from the chaos, and I’m actually excited to see where things will go. It’s time to build a new Internet and the new Open Metaverse.

Slow is smooth, have purpose, and fix things.