Why Planes Should Have Windshields or: How Facebook Broke Our Hearts
“Move fast and break things” isn’t an encouragement to run everywhere wearing porcelain trainers, but rather a guiding philosophy that is widely espoused in Startup-land. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, expands on this — as an entrepreneur looking to build a company, he says, your best bet is to jump off the proverbial cliff and build an aeroplane on the way down. Basically, don’t faff about, just get started, innovate, build something imperfect, and fix it later when it’s clear that people actually want your product.
It’s a pretty successful approach. But as you can imagine, if you have to build an aeroplane whilst hurtling towards the ground, you might not be so concerned about the ‘nice-to-haves’. The extra frills that won’t directly bring you closer to not dying. In the case of a plane, perhaps you’d forego the seating, forget about adding a hold, maybe even ignore installing a windshield. No time, who cares, you’ll handle it in the future if you’re not beetlejuice.
And then by some miracle, your plane works, you pull up on the broom-handle joystick and glide away from the rocks below. It’s all good, you’ve done it. But you forget that the soft sea breeze on your face is a design flaw. That really your cockpit should have a windscreen, and then *sweet Mary Joseph Jesus* a seagull trained in the art of kamikaze greets your face with a smush. Disoriented, discombobulated, and probably even unconscious, you lose control and your eagerly fashioned plane plunges into something which doesn’t feel so good.
“Move fast and break things” is great if you are building something like Angry Birds, an app where a poor design choice might at worst lead to an impossible level, but “move fast and break things” can be dangerous if you are in the business of handling sensitive information. If Visa turned around tomorrow and were like ‘lol we gone and put together a portable bank account bit of bant, probably isn’t really very solid but here ya go’, I’d probably steer clear of it, for fear that someone might steal my student debt. The big story this week: Facebook have been wildly irresponsible with our data and I think we can partly blame the “Move fast and break things” philosophy.
Facebook have been wildly irresponsible with our data — okay let’s start from somewhere vaguely resembling the beginning.
Christopher Wylie, no relation to ‘Wearing My Rolex’ Wiley, left school at the age of 16 without any qualifications. This was no reflection on his intelligence, in fact by 17 he was already working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition. At 18 he took himself off to learn about the wonders of data from Obama’s national director of targeting, bringing this new found superpower back to aid the Liberal Party in Canada. At 19 years old he taught himself how to code, and then hopped on a real plane, one with a windshield, and came over to London at 20 to study Law at LSE. But Christopher is a political creature, and so found his way into helping out the Liberal Democrats whilst studying. He got his law degree, and went on to a PhD in fashion forecasting. He’s a bright guy, well dressed, on trend.
Whilst PhD’ing Wylie came across a paper on how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour. This he found very interesting and presented to the Lib Dems, arguing that they could target those whose personalities were predisposed to liberalism and get them on side. Unfortunately for Wylie they didn’t share the same enthusiasm for his scheme.
Then along came Alexander Nix, CEO of SCL Elections, a company that used something like cyberwarfare to influence the direction of democracy. Nix’s proposition was compelling, come over to us Wylie and you can have total freedom to pursue your ideas. The Canadian fashionista data-nerd politico couldn’t, at that time, see what was to come. He would later open up to a reporter from the Guardian:
“The thing I think about all the time is, what if I’d taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist”.
Cambridge Analytica. These are the bad guys. They are Facebook’s seagull. Cambridge Analytica is the company that SCL Elections effectively transitioned into, the two are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same. CA was founded on the premise that to change politics you need to first change culture. So if you want to convince someone to vote a certain way you must understand their culture and then systematically shift it beneath them.
CA saw Facebook as the best tool for this cultural manipulation and with the backing of uber-wealthy hedge fund manager, and avid Trumper, Robert Mercer, they began siphoning user data from the platform. An academic by the name of Aleksandr Kogan, did this bit for them. He created a personality quiz app on Facebook that asked for users to grant it access to their data, and the data of their friends. By way of this spider network, by which a single user would on average have 160 friends, Kogan quickly gathered some 50 million Facebook user profiles filled to the brim with private data.
As per their agreement Kogan then handed this data over to CA who used it to create “psychographic” profiles of the users. From this the company was able to use Facebook’s advertising network to micro-target these individuals with ads specifically designed to encourage a vote for Trump. It is not melodramatic to say that this was a direct assault on democracy.
CA have been under investigation for years over their tactics, but this week Wylie’s conscience impelled him to blow the whistle on his company’s unethical and illegal actions, whilst also revealing that Facebook had dramatically failed to protect its users’ private data. Alexander Nix was suspended by CA shortly afterwards. But, as Facebook’s stock plummeted, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was nowhere to be found.
The world was in uproar at the Facebook data breach, only it wasn’t really a breach, in fact Facebook had willingly given access to its users’ private data. A design choice rooted in the “move fast and break things” philosophy and wildly irresponsible.
A call to delete Facebook went up around the internet, most notably Elon Musk acquiesced, deleting both the SpaceX and Tesla Facebook pages, but, in truth no significant number took up the cause. People might not like Facebook, nor trust it, but they are all too often hooked. Whether that be your average Joe consumer, or a large multinational using them to advertise, it’s a platform that is difficult to leave. Zuckerberg eventually stepped before the news media and, in a frenzied Wednesday, apologised widely, suggested Facebook should be regulated, said he would go in front of congress to answer questioning, and promised to fix Facebook.
The social network have royally effed up with our private data, but then who can blame them in a culture of “move fast and break things”? Well we can. We can blame Facebook for pursuing profit by prostituting our data. We can blame Facebook for building a platform so open to abuse, for not feeling the need to disclose maleficence when it was discovered.
What is likely to come out of this scandal? Well hopefully the realisation that regulation over data protection is in urgent need. This regulation is likely to come from Europe, which has shown a stronger resolve when it comes to restraining the harmful pursuits of Big Tech. From Trump we won’t see anything meaningful, but that’s no surprise when this very scheme helped him to sit in his current house.
“Move fast and break things” is increasingly looking like the coal that drove the tech industry’s dirty industrial revolution. In the future companies won’t be able to haplessly stoke the fires of innovation without serious thought for safety. You can’t build a plane without a windshield when you’re running a passenger service. No matter how fast you want to move, there are simply some things that are too important to risk breaking. One of them is democracy.
This piece was transcribed from The Zip Files — an irreverent weekly 20–25 minute podcast that I produce to help the busy millennial catch up with all of the week’s most important tech news. Here’s the episode in which this piece was featured:
