Characteristically, both types of claims often unite the gloomiest of doomsayers with the giddiest of cheerleaders. Take, for example, the idea that reading books on e-readers represents a totally different kind of reading. I have a lot of colleagues who are very invested in this idea, and they almost all wield it as a warning: Come back to our kind of reading, they say, put down that Kindle, or else you’ll be stupider than people who just leaf through an object they picked up at Barnes & Noble. However, their central premise agrees with that of Amazon and others: even though you do many of the same things when you pick up a book on your Kindle or a store-bought hardcover, it’s actually totally different. The disruption warning coming from my colleagues is pretty much identical to the tech world’s advertising pitch for the Kindle.
Conversely, the claim that something seemingly disruptive is, in truth, just part of a bigger continuity can itself be either critical or deeply conservative. It comes from an intuition that is shared by those who want to deflate the tech industry’s high-minded blather about itself and those who are paid to argue that Amazon should not be regulated any more than your friendly neighborhood bookseller. To be clear: all of these answers are absolutely right some of the time. Certain things about the tech industry are unprecedented (the tech, for one); others are business as usual (the industry). But how the public, the press, and politicians respond to both the tech and its industry depends on a sense of what our current categories are able to capture, and what they need to be adjusted to be able to capture. Disruption is one way that allows people to do both.
But the concept of disruption also tells a more covert and fundamental story about continuity and discontinuity, and it concerns capitalism. Are the changes the tech industry brings, or claims to bring, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension, perhaps a bit less varnished, of how it has always functioned? You can see why different parties would have a lot at stake in the answer to this question: it determines what regulatory oversight is necessary or desirable, what role the government or unions should play in a new industry like tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed.
I have to include myself in this. I confess to being very leery of claims of disruption, but then again, I’m in a profession that pretty much depends on the idea that the past matters a lot and that messing with it in any meaningful sense entails spending a lot of time studying it. As Mandy Rice-Davies put it when she was told that the politician Lord Astor denied having an affair with her: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” And I would argue that stewardship of the past is more important than riding roughshod over it, wouldn’t I?
At the same time, I think it is also true that some of the rhetoric of disruption depends on actively misunderstanding and misrepresenting the past. We can call this the infomercial effect. You don’t see quite so many of them today, but they were once ubiquitous, and they’d follow the same template: “Don’t you hate it when,” they’d ask, and name an extremely minor problem with some mundane task you honestly couldn’t say you’d ever encountered. Then they’d offer their revolutionary solution to the problem they had just invented. The infomercial deliberately misinterpreted whatever it was seeking to disrupt. One of the internet age’s greatest works of collective satire may be the 5,875 and counting Amazon reviews for the Hutzler 571 banana slicer, which mock the mania for buzzy solutions in search of a problem.
The reason infomercials use this template is that it taps into a pretty pervasive sense of boredom. We get excited when things are shaken up, when the big and powerful are taken down a peg. One testament to this is the notion that the sheer size of an industry makes it ripe for disruption. Not that it is inefficient, or doesn’t do its job well. Just that it is big. The point here is to say that a startup might be able to make a lot of money. But the notion actually has not-so-subtle delegitimizing notes: the very fact that X, Y, or Z is a multibillion-dollar company makes it a little suspicious.
Is it an accident that this formula is frequently deployed when the tech media are at their most credulous? There is joy in seeing “the system” shaken up, old hierarchies upended, Goliaths being felled by Davids. In a long interview with Vanity Fair, the Napster creator and devil on Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulder Sean Parker once described himself as “an archetypal Loki character”—disruption is a prankster god, and who doesn’t love those? Disruption plays to our impatience with structures and situations that seem to coast on habit and inertia, and it plays to the press’s excitement about underdogs, rebels, outsiders. If you look back at coverage of Theranos, up until the fateful John Carreyrou story in The Wall Street Journal that brought the company down, you’ll find that few journalists really bothered to ask whether or not Theranos could do what it claimed to be able to do—they asked instead what would happen if it could. Disruption is high drama. The notion that “things work the way they work because there’s a certain logic to them” is not.
Disruption has become a way to tell a story about the meaning of both discontinuity and continuity. The latter part is often overlooked. Because the way the term is used today really implies that whatever continuity is being disrupted deserved to be disrupted.
