In a recent interview
Clayton M. Christensen linked ‘disruptive innovation’
to God’s desire that “all of mankind . . . be
successful. The only way to make this happen is to help individual
people become better people, and innovation is the key to
unlocking evermore opportunities to do that.” But disruption,
according to its Latin origin, signifies rupture, tearing
apart, and violently dissolving continuity. As a metonym for
progress, since the nineties it has spread the illusion that
innovation is always an improvement regardless of its social
consequences. Its association with Silicon Valley and business
culture in general has led us to disregard the reckless adverse
effects of progress without responsibility. In fact, this
indifference is vital to understanding the meaning of disruption
and our fascination with a notion that is constantly deployed
to exploit our hope that innovation will save us. “Disruption,”
as Bernard Stiegler noted, “radicalizes the reversal
of all values,” whether technological, political or
religious.
Like other concepts
whose meanings are eroded by overuse, such as nihilism, postmodernism,
and populism, disruption requires a philosophical elucidation.
In recent decades, technological disruptions were heralded
as collective life-shaping events, but is necessary to question
this disruption is seen as a value worth pursuing even though
its worship is tearing apart the possibilities for a sustainable
future.
As a variation
of Josep Schumpeter’s “planned obsolescence”
and “creative destruction,” Christensen’s
“innovative disruption” has become a koiné
-- a common language -- transferred from the realm of capitalist
business and now used to predict success in arenas (social,
political, and cultural) with very different values and goals.
Christensen’s theory is based on the idea of indifference
to the present and focus on an always about-to-arrive futurity.
This indifference is manifest in the difference between “sustaining
innovations” and “disruptive innovations”
in business: companies that make only careful, small, gradual
refinements are often overrun by companies that make big changes
that allow them to produce a cheaper, poorer-quality product
for a much larger market. “Disruption,” as a leaked
New York Times management report quoted by historian
Jill Lepore states, “is a predictable pattern across
many industries in which fledgling companies use new technology
to offer cheaper and inferior alternatives to products sold
by established players (think Toyota taking on Detroit decades
ago).” For Christensen, “doing the right thing
is the wrong thing.”
Without the internet,
Christensen’s book and theory would not have become
a business bible for entrepreneurs and innovators. It provided
a theory to justify the methodology used by the profits-above-all
mindset when launching new products in an age of rapid change,
uncertainty, and indifference. The internet provides a global
machine for revealing surprises, which encourages disruption
regardless of its social consequences. Although its designers
did not express it in these terms, the disruptiveness of the
internet, as John Naughton points out, is a feature, not a
bug. During the advent of internet disruption became a watchword
for innovators (“Unless you are breaking stuff, you
aren’t moving fast enough,” Mark Zuckerberg said),
whose model of business and economic citizenship shifted radically
from one that involved dialogue to one driven by tweeting.
This new culture of indifference in the name of profit eliminates
possibilities for solidarity.
Disruptive innovation,
as Lepore illustrates, holds out the hope of salvation from
the very damnation it encourages because the idea of progress
has been stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment.
The West in the eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress;
in the nineteenth, evolution; and in the twentieth, growth
and innovation. And the problem today is that the idea of
disruption dominates the rhetoric of not only Silicon Valley
but also other industries and contemporary societies all over
the world. Disruption has taken over as a common language
in which to project not just success but also a future of
unforeclosed possibilities. This success is premised on technology’s
capacity to continuously offer cheaper alternatives to established
products --and on the promise that innovation is always an
improvement, regardless of its consequences.
Disruptive innovation
in journalism, education, and medicine has emerged as an all-purpose
replacement of traditional methods with new ways that value
novelty and speed. This valuation of progress without quality
has allowed these pillars of democratic nations to be further
subverted by capital, prey to market drives that ignore the
value of the product for the value to shareholders. The belief
that companies and industries that failed were somehow destined
to fail is at the heart not only of Christensen’s concept
of disruptive innovation but also of a neoliberal age that
holds that government should play no role in restraining corporate
behavior. Giving corporate behavior a free pass has facilitated
the application of disruption’s indifference to arenas
that affect society, politics, and culture. Numerous conferences,
centers, summits, and labs established even in just the most
recent decade demonstrate that ‘disruptive’ has
become an admiring adjective, a positive valence, even a brand.
In order to resist
disruption it is not enough to demonstrate that its benefits
are based on shaky evidence. This has been the approach taken
by Lepore (“Christensen’s sources are often dubious
and his logic questionable”), Michael Porter (“disruptive
technologies that are successful in displacing established
leaders are extremely rare”) and Andrew A. King and
Baljir Baatartogtokh (“only seven of the 77 business
case studies covered by Christensen’s fit his own criteria
of what constitutes disruptive innovation”), among other
scholars. While these analyses are useful to debunk the illusion
that innovation is always an improvement, they do not modify
the widespread enthusiasm for it. “Exaggerated claims
for disruption,” as Mark C. Taylor points out, “usually
result from a failure of memory, which is symptomatic of a
preoccupation with the present in a culture addicted to speed.”
This addiction
can be overcome by thinking through longer stretches of time.
It requires practices that reexamine our existential narratives,
such as politics, psychoanalysis and philosophy, though each
of these contemplative fields faces disruptive forces of its
own in, respectively, populist pronouncements delivered through
Twitter, over-prescription of drugs, and scientistic analytic
thought that displaces existential questions. But when these
existential narratives manage to provide citizens with a picture
of world events and a sense, however limited, of political
community, disruption rather than a value to follow becomes
a sign of indifference, displacement, and alienation that
must be prevented.
It should not
come as a surprise, as Stiegler points out, that disruption
was “announced and foreshadowed not just by Adorno and
Horkheimer as the ‘new kind of barbarism,” but
by Martin Heidegger as the ‘end of philosophy,’
by Maurice Blanchot as the advent of ‘impersonal forces,’
by Jacques Derrida as ‘monstrosity,’ and, before
all of these, by Nietzsche as nihilism. If disruption is the
culmination of these events we must pursue these authors’
experimental responses, which called for different conceptual
platforms where existence can continue to strive.
by
Santiago Zabala
Necessity
of Ageing
The
Philosophy of Warnings
Beware
of Digital Populism
Why
Did Pope Phone the Philosopher
The
Withering of Populism
Philosophy
Takes on the Refugee Crisis
Ever Crumbling Walls
End
of Emergencies
Celebrating
Jacques Derrida
Only
Art Can Save Us
I'm
Wired, Therefore I Exist
In
Defense of Philosophy
