Disruptive Behavior

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.

Your rights are in my freedom.

It’s another Independence Day weekend, and I can’t help but notice that we find ourselves this year grappling with some unfortunate consequences of liberty run amok.  We’ve got open-carry nuts sporting assault rifles in department stores and coffee shops to prove how free they are; and we’ve got the supreme court granting business owners the right to discriminate against employees on the grounds that said discrimination can be considered the free exercise of religion.  These real-life manifestations are borne in the logic of narcissism in which the self-righteous individual believes in liberty that is not bound by the limits imposed by the rights of others. It is the same logic that says legalizing a same-sex marriage is an infringement on religious exercise.  And like it or not it is the same logic that attempts to absolve many sins of the digital age in the name of free expression.

It sounds good on paper, but in reality, freedom without limits isn’t freedom for anyone but the powerful, whether that power is derived by wealth, political influence, technological prowess, or violence.  On July 1, a debate was held at the American Enterprise Institute on the matter of intellectual property rights during which Mark Schultz of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University said the following:

“If our only understanding of liberty is if I get to do whatever I darn well please, it is a five-year-old’s understanding. A grown-up understanding of liberty is ordered liberty, competing claims that need to be reconciled through a system.”

The underlying question in that debate was whether copyrights are a right or a privilege, but it is instructive that even in this academic forum on intellectual property, Schultz feels the need to affirm a definition of liberty that (he’s right) ought to be obvious to any adult. In short, liberty is not all about what we want.  One of the reasons I began writing about digital age issues and intellectual property is that many of the arguments used to rationalize negative social behaviors (e.g. piracy) are First Amendment arguments; and it seemed to me the right of free expression was being stretched beyond reason in ways that mirror the aberration of free religious exercise we saw this past week with the Hobby Lobby case.

Do women have a right to comprehensive health care, including contraception?  Yes, according to federal law, they do; but the supreme court just said they kinda don’t, that this right has been recast as a privilege to be offered at the discretion of an employer based on his personal moral code.  Many of us are hopping mad about this, and we should be, both in practice and in principle.  It is quite simply a grotesque distortion of the free exercise clause that sets a precedent begging for abuse by people in positions of power over individual workers.

But what about my colleague Mark Schultz debating copyrights with academic libertarians like Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who want to recast this longstanding right as a government granted privilege?  Copyright is less emotionally charged (and ultimately less critical) than the health of American women, but the false logic being applied is very similar, as would be the consequence in that the wealthy and powerful would ultimately win another victory over individual workers.

Central to the arguments made to eliminate or severely weaken copyrights is a claim that the rights of individual authors limit the right of free expression.  This is similar backward reasoning to “your right to contraception violates my right of religious expression,” and again it is an idea based in narcissism and backed by corporate interests.  We all are entitled to the right of free expression and the right of intellectual property protection, if we want the latter; so why give up either right when we can have both?  It’s as much a false dichotomy as religious freedom vs birth control.  It’s what happens when we can’t tell the difference between freedom and a free-for-all.  And in a free-for-all, the biggest bullies usually win.

Fish Gotta Sing

If you’re a songwriter frustrated by our music licensing system (which is to say a songwriter), then maybe it’s time to craft a ditty that sounds funny coming out of a fake animal.

In all seriousness, last week saw the passing of Memphis legend Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, guitarist and songwriter, who created several hits in collaboration with singer Al Green.  Among these is “Take Me to the River,” written in 1974 and subsequently covered by many artists including Talking Heads. But from the concluding paragraphs in the Hodges’s obit from The Washington Post, we learn that he only first had publishing rights with this particular song, and that most of the revenue he earned from the hit came from sales of the novelty item Big Mouth Billy Bass — a mounted, mechanical fish that wriggles and sings “Take Me to the River” or “Don’t Worry Be Happy” at the push of a button.  The obituary does not cite how much Hodges’s faux fish fortune was worth, but the singing bass did reportedly sell over 40 million units worldwide; Bill Clinton apparently gave one as a gift to Al Gore; and a February 2014 story in The Wire reports that a motion-activated Billy Bass scared a presumptive robber from a Minnesota bait and tackle shop.

Well, it’s one way to be immortalized.  RIP Mr. Hodges.