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Value Beyond Instrumentalization — Letters to a Young Technologist

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Silicon Valley was founded on an ethic of "move fast and break things" and a boundless techno-solutionism. Although this has been somewhat revised in the techlash post-2016, moving fast is still the imperative, and arguments still abound that technology is value-neutral and that everything and anything profitable should be built. The speed of ethical and regulatory development continues to be outpaced by technological development, incurring massive 'ethical debt'. This glorification of action over thought is reflected in Silicon Valley's culture and canonical texts. Books like Zero to One or essays like It's Time to Build emphasize the urgent need to create, innovate, hack, and iterate on products with vast social consequences, rather than the responsibility of technologists to pause, reflect, and introspect before doing so. To slow down is to end up default dead; the rhythm and pace of how technology is supposed to be built does not allow for consideration of social consequences. The

Value Beyond Instrumentalization — Letters to a Young Technologist Letters to a Young Technologist About → Value Beyond Instrumentalization "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing." Hannah Arendt Silicon Valley was founded on an ethic of "move fast and break things" and a boundless techno-solutionism. Although this has been somewhat revised in the techlash post-2016 , moving fast is still the imperative, and arguments still abound that technology is value-neutral and that everything and anything profitable should be built. The speed of eth

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