In a way, the concept of creative destruction sublimates the concept of revolution. Because creative destruction resets the playing field, it forestalls the processes Marx had predicted. Sure, capital tends toward monopolization, but then someone comes in from the outside and pulls the rug out from under the monopolist. On the other hand, for Schumpeter the process Marx had (correctly) forecast resulted in creative destruction rather than revolution. If Marx had been right, and greater and greater monopolization led inevitably to a declining rate of profits and therefore to lower wages, then we would indeed expect capitalism to lead to a revolution. Schumpeter thought Marx was wrong and that creative destruction would forestall both the drive toward monopolization and the declining profit rate. But in the end, creative destruction also makes capitalism unsustainable: gradually and peacefully (through elections and legislative action), capitalism will yield to some form of socialism.
Most of the discourse around disruption clearly draws on the idea of creative destruction, but it shifts it in important respects. Most centrally, it doesn’t seem to suggest that the ever-intensifying rapids of creative destruction will eventually lead to the placid waters of a new stability, that hypercapitalism almost inevitably pushes us toward something beyond capitalism. Instead, disruption seems to suggest that the rapids are all there is and can be—we might as well strap in for the ride. Often enough, talk of disruption is a theodicy of hypercapitalism. Disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness. Revolution for people who don’t stand to gain anything from revolution.
The idea that modern capitalism generates an ever-accelerating rate of transformation, there is no endpoint, and the smartest thing to do is to lean into that rate of transformation, is called accelerationism. As Nick Land—who went from cofounding the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, one of the more ambitious attempts to use French theory to think through the challenges posed by cyberculture, to becoming a fixture of the so-called Dark Enlightenment—framed the problem, “Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through.” Accelerationism advocates a surrender to the forces of acceleration instead, jumping into the river even as we can hear the roar of the waterfall.
The famous futurologist Ray Kurzweil has put forth a similar idea: our predictions about the future are by necessity built out of linear extrapolations from past trends. But exponential change will often appear linear in the short term. The accelerationist humility, which Land adapts from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, is an extreme form of something that is always part of the idea of disruption. We need to surrender to certain transformations; we need to let things die and embrace things that may at first seem uncomfortable or even unpleasant. We need to take a leap of faith, give in to the sense that certain developments are the beginnings of things that our current categories cannot fully map out. Clinging to our established categories, pieties, and preferences will prove counterproductive, perhaps even actively destructive.
Accelerationists largely believe that the processes of creative destruction inherent in the capitalist mode of production will inevitably lead to a transcendence of modern capitalism. But they differ on what that transcendence will look like: Will it mean a withering away of the state as technological and social development finally put the lie to any government attempt to constrain them? Will it mean an implosion of capitalism itself and its replacement by something more humane and less convulsive? Or will it mean an overcoming of the human, as man and machine hurtle toward a point of indistinction—for instance, in what Ray Kurzweil has called the singularity?
There is a weak messianism inherent in this idea. It trembles with the sense that we are accelerating toward a kind of rapture, toward a future that may now be glimpsed through a glass darkly, if at all, but will soon become bright as day. But as messianisms go, it’s usually fairly weak: Kurzweil is one of the few thinkers who commits to the idea that you can’t tell this story without guessing where the story might end. And his idea of the singularity is deliberately monumental: a galaxy-engulfing hive mind that no longer knows the outside, a place where the distinction between humans and the technology they use has completely withered away and we dwell in the synaptic pathways of the universe amid wonder and glory forever.
It’s batshit, but it’s deliberately batshit. Unless you go for broke, Kurzweil thinks, you’re bound to miss the exponential changes imagined by accelerationism. Most advocates of disruption don’t have that forthrightness. Their faith in disruption draws on a similar faith in a future that’s radically different, but they don’t deign to describe it in too much detail. Ironically, as much as disruption functions as a welcome corrective to systems whose legitimacy seems to rely mostly on the lazy halo of long tradition, disruption itself draws its legitimacy from the dim first embers of a never-actually-glimpsed future.
The most obvious shift that has occurred in the use of the term “creative destruction” is that it now has an exculpatory, at times even celebratory, side. The famous mantra “Move fast and break things” goes well beyond a surrender to the inevitability of acceleration, instead making acceleration an ethical imperative. If the Latins said that the world “wants to be deceived,” tech seems to think that it wants to be accelerated. Schumpeter wasn’t altogether horrified by creative destruction, but he thought it was as much of a problem as it was a functional
