by
Adrian Daub
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The rhetoric of disruption frequently creates solidity, stability, and uniformity where they didn’t exist. Just as kvetching over political correctness often requires the invention of the restrictions and pieties which it sees itself as engaged in a titanic struggle against, so the disrupter portrays even the most staid cottage industry as a Death Star against which its plucky rebels have to do battle. Misperceiving, misunderstanding, or simply ignoring the industry one is seeking to disrupt seems, if not necessary, then at least no impediment to disrupting it. The world is out there, stupid and driven by habits. You just graduated from college and have had a credit card for three years. You’re still on your parents’ car insurance. Would the world in that situation not seem like one large opportunity for disruption?
Disruption depends on regarding people as participating in the business cycle who insist that they’re doing no such thing—another aspect of creative destruction that actually retains a lot of the idea’s Marxist DNA. And it depends on an extension of the sense in which the terms “monopoly” or “oligopoly” can be applied. Did big taxi companies once dominate personal transportation, or did thousands of individual cabbies who were barely making ends meet? Did Yelp disrupt the oligopoly of people having an opinion? The term “disruption” makes a monolith of the particulars of the everyday, a leviathan out of structures and organizations that are old, have grown up organically, and are therefore pretty scattered and decentralized.