On Wednesday, the luminaries of Silicon Valley convened at Trump Tower for the president-elect’s much-anticipated tech summit. The look on their faces suggested nothing short of despondence. To Trump’s right sat Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Sheryl Sandberg. To his left were, among others, Tim Cook and Elon Musk. As a wide cheshire-cat grin expanded across his face, Trump gleefully noted, “This is truly an amazing group of people.” He aptly continued, “There’s nobody like you in the world. There’s nobody like the people in this room.”

The founders and executives present may have looked on in disbelief, but they should not have been entirely surprised by the bizarre turn of events that had led them into that very room. Silicon Valley, after all, inadvertently facilitated Trump’s rise. For years, Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park featured a rectangular sign that reflected the ambition and spirit of Mark Zuckerberg and his legions of dedicated employees. It read, in bold, red lettering, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Twitter had a similar poster that hung in its San Francisco office, noting “Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow.” These mantras aren’t an anomaly in Silicon Valley’s playground-like campuses. Cubicles, hallways, cafeterias, and meeting rooms are festooned with Rockne-esque white-board-style slogans such as “Done Is Better Than Perfect” or “Fortune Favors the Bold,” or “Don’t Bury Your Failures, Let Them Inspire You.”

These maxims have their value, and they have helped inspire a wealth-generation machine unlike any other in human history. But moving too fast can come with consequences, especially when the mantra is heeded by young people who are often still in their 20s and 30s. In fact, the tech industry’s adherence to an ideology of rapid acceleration helps explain why America finds itself in its current predicament, with hackers reportedly involved in swaying our election and a growing acceptance of xenophobia spreading across the nation. Perhaps many of the people who convened at Trump Tower were so focused on those mottos that they did not realize an outcome they might create.

Illustration by Darrow.

In many ways, Silicon Valley is capable of anything. Google is proudly building cars that can drive themselves, and the company is creating artificial intelligence that can translate Ernest Hemingway’s novels from English to Japanese and back again. On its earnings calls, Facebook has bragged for years about the influence of its news feed for marketers. And this may be why recent events are so discouraging. Google, despite these accomplishments, couldn’t spot a phishing scam in Gmail when some Russian hackers sent a fake Google security message to John Podesta. And it wasn’t until after the election that we all learned that the very same Facebook news feed was used to share thousands of pieces of completely fabricated content.

How is it that a company that manages a network of 1.8 billion people, and one that has algorithms that can spot and remove a picture of a nipple amid billions of photos, can’t detect a ludicrous story declaring that Hillary Clinton is running a secret pedophilia ring out of the basement of a pizza joint. (How the newly appointed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has shared similar stories is another matter altogether.) And then there’s Twitter, which has known for the better part of a decade that its platform was becoming a haven for trolls and hate speech. Perhaps growing the monthly active user base seemed more important.

When I ask people who work at these companies why they can’t fix these particular issues, they often say that “these are hard problems to solve.” Yes, they are, indeed. Most of us couldn’t figure out how to keep Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear out of our e-mail, or build A.I. to identify a fake news story in an ocean of chatter. But we weren’t the ones who created the platforms that birthed these problems; it was Silicon Valley. And, let’s be honest: Twitter and Google and Facebook and virtually every other company in the Valley solves similarly difficult technical problems every single day. It’s enough to wonder if these problems weren’t solved because they weren’t taken seriously enough at the time.