Bullshit and buzzwords go together like pick-up lines and Jagermeister. And the bullshit buzzword of our times it seems is disruption. Being disruptive used to get your mom called into school for a conference with the teacher; but ever since Clay Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1989, we’ve been fascinated by the disruptive kids, especially the ones who play with tech toys — even when they fail. In fact, as Jill Lapore points out in this piece in The New Yorker, Christensen’s study of disruption (and she points to some flaws in his work) is a study of business failure. In her summary, Lapore writes, “Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.”
The first thing to hate (or at least distrust) about buzzwords is that their meanings are diluted because they are buzzwords. I remember when MTV’s reality programming was a relatively new thing and video producers working in New York would ask a shooter or an editor to make something edgy. But if every project is edgy, then we lose any context for what edgy actually means, and so it means whatever edginess looks like to whoever is in charge. Cameramen and editors would smile and nod, thinking, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you’re happy, and I get paid, we’re good.”
The word disruptive has produced an aroma of ambiguity to say the least. In fact, I’d say the term is getting rather gamey the more it is applied to just about any proposal (i.e. tech startup) that breaks convention, even if we maybe don’t want the convention broken. For instance, we probably do not hope to foster a culture in which, say, armed robbery is reframed as “disruptive finance.” Admittedly, Kickstarter is a virtuous example of disruptive finance, although it may be too soon to say for sure that crowd-funding is here to stay. As Jaron Lanier points out in Who Owns the Future, “Kickstarter continues to produce some wonderful success stories and a huge ocean of doomed or befuddled proposals. Maybe the site will enter into an endless game with scammers and the clueless, as it scales up, and render itself irrelevant.” And as if on cue, I see in my news feed that a young man has raised about ten thousand dollars on Kickstarter to make potato salad. Not life-saving potato salad. Just potato salad.
In truth, I’m not picking on Kickstarter; I hope the site continues to evolve as a positive force, and so does Lanier. But I am also by nature skeptical of religion, even apparently secular religions that see magic in technology and the social engineering promoted by its entrepreneurs. And in the words of the silicon prophets, we will one day all be entrepreneurs. And it will be good. A new venture in robotics may one day disrupt truck drivers out of their jobs, but not to worry because other disruptive innovations like Uber and Lyft offer a new way to make a living in transportation, right? In reality, only sort of, and for a select few individuals in certain markets. And these few are likely making supplementary rather than primary income. Meanwhile, as we cheer for disruption sector by sector, and get a little buzz off the initial cool factor and implicit independence of an entrepreneurial society, we overlook the fact that we’re disrupting accountability, liability, and a network of social safety nets that were largely constructed in the late 20th century. These include everything from insurance and pension funds to environmental regulations.
If you think you’re angry that certain investment bankers didn’t go to prison after the housing crisis, stand by. It can get worse in a market that disrupts thousands or millions of jobs into obsolescence with the false promise that we can all be networked entrepreneurs. And again, as Lanier points out, many of these disruptive innovations built on networked systems he calls Siren Servers rely on making the servers unaccountable. So, when we consider the larger implications of unregulated taxi services, for instance, it isn’t as simple as labeling such caution mere stodginess begging for unfettered disruption.
It is tempting these days to get high on the narcotic of tearing down systems and apparent empowerment of taking what feels like control via networked servers. We forget, however, that these networked servers are not necessarily designed with said empowerment in mind despite what the marketing messages say. They are designed to make money right now for the relatively small number of individuals whom we revere for being disruptive innovators. But networked systems want efficiency, while democratic societies that support the well being of a majority of its population are notoriously inefficient. And that’s not always a bad thing.
