Move fast and break things

In an interview in 2009, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously declared that his developers needed to “move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough”. Implicit in Zuckerberg’s slogan is the assumption that change and progress are synonymous: in other words, that even if a few things get broken along the way – say, democracy or privacy or the ability to develop a healthy sense of self and community free from the predations of corporate advertising – it’s all worth it because the mere fact of change is so overwhelmingly positive.

Though Zuckerberg, like any wunderkind, probably thinks of himself as a ‘thought leader’ –