Move Slowly And Mend Things
Reading this Kimberly Hirsh post I became interested to see if it were possible to discern the origins of the phrase: move slowly and mend things. As near as we can tell from search engines the earliest evident use is a speech given by high school teacher Rebecca Hong for the 2013 commencement at Lick-Wilmerding High School.
Down in Palo Alto, the framed motto, “Move fast and break things” is hung on the walls all over the hallways of the Facebook headquarters. CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained this philosophy more fully when he took the company public: “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not moving fast enough.”
Let me say before I explain further that I like the motto—it sounds do-y and proactive and energetic and anti-establishmentarian. I like stuff like that, as many of you know. But if I stop to think about the unintended consequences that have come from all of us getting wired up and creating our communities online, I start to ask a whole series of questions:
Why do we want to move so fast? Where are we going, and what are we leaving? What, exactly, is it that has to happen so quickly? What happens to history when we move fast, does it become obsolete? What, or who, might we miss or pass by as we zoom along? What about social norms, structures of oppression, traditions, backs and hearts and mindsare we really okay with breaking all of those things?
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Asking you, on the other hand, to consider the consequences of your actions as you act in the world is fundamentally about asking you to focus on your impact on other people. Make your consequences, both large-scale and small, to the best of your ability, intentional and good.
So let me propose another motto—and this is the real message I want to pass along today: Move slowly, and mend things.
I dont just mean remembering to smell the flowers, nor am I dissing productive and ambitious lives. I am, rather, proposing that you make sure to live a reflective life of historical awareness.
Sounds pretty sexy, doesn’t it? A reflective life of historical awareness with consideration of your impact. So this leads me to another question: how do we mend things that we didnt make, and maybe didn’t even break?
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You can refuse to perpetuate whats wrong about the world, and act in ways that are intentional and right. Move slowly, and mend things. Not to induce paralysis or stimulate fear, but rather to make it habit that you consider your impact on other people. The hard truth is, the consequences of so many who came before you, intended or not, already make up your reality, and those consequences, ultimately, are part of your responsibility to address.
Move slowly and mend things, because there is much in the world that is worth noticing, and worth keeping, and worth fixing.
(There also are several speeches and blog posts of move slow and mend things and move slow and fix things, but I couldn’t find any of these usages prior to 2017, four years after Hong, and always only about software development, not life. Several usages of the fix things variant appear in passing on Twitter going back to 2009.)
The slowly here really has more to do with care than necessarily with pace; to mirror and challenge the ethos of Silicon Valley required of Hong a bit of allowable poetic license.
Right now, for example, right here, we’re clearly living through a rare moment of racial clarity that’s somehow managed to extend beyond just a moment—or is trying to, through the work and the noise and the movement of so many black lives—and I think few but the cautionary centrist anymore would suggest that we move slowly to mend these particular “consequences of so many who came before”.
The slowly isn’t about pace but about deliberation. One can think slow thoughts yet act quickly — because the speed of thought doesn’t obey the physics of the world they are about—and still be living Hong’s proffered counter-motto.
There are lots of ways we could talk about this counter-ethos: move slowly and mend things. Hirsh started us off; I’ve said a bit of my own.
Who’s next?