We don’t want your disruption

I was in my car recently listening to a podcast when an ad for Fifth Third Bank came on. The narrator, in a businesslike female voice, confidently declared that the bank offers its customers “new and disruptive solutions.” 

Did I hear that right? I thought. Can they really be that tone deaf? 

Banks have been the source of so much unwanted disruption in my lifetime, most notably the Great Recession, which resulted from the banking industry trying to disrupt the way home loans were made with mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and adjustable-rate mortgages. The last thing anyone wants from a bank is more disruption.  

But there it is, disruption—a word like a magnet with its poles reversed, having only recently been resignified from a negative to a positive. In 1997, Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, published a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which pushed his theory of “disruptive innovation” out to the public. He argued that small, agile companies could sidestep traditional modes of competition to offer cheaper, less complicated alternatives to the products and services provided by larger, less nimble companies. The idea gained popularity in Silicon Valley, and soon enough, disruption achieved buzzword status. Chamath Palihapitiya, Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis, Steve Case, Tom Tancredo, and many others were either championing disruption by name or proclaiming its inevitability.  

And now, apparently, banks are proudly proclaiming themselves to be disruptors as well.  

Many writers and critics have called bullshit on the resignification of disruption. Natasha Tiku's 2018 Wired article “An Alternate History of Silicon Valley Disruption” reveals how the excitement over efforts to “disrupt” industry is a cover for exploitative labor practices and assaults on job security—a blueprint for profit-making that injects even more precarity into modern life. In "The Disruption Machine," New Yorker’s Jill Lepore attacked disruption theory for not providing evidence of large-scale benefits. Adrian Daub’s Guardian article “The Disruption Con” warns that celebratory disruption is politically destabilizing as it undermines democracy and workers’ rights. Disruption as a positive force is classic suit-speak, a vague, positive-sounding euphemism for something likely to produce shitty outcomes for some people, like "resource reallocation," "employee optimization," or "rightsizing."  

The irony of suit-speak disruption is that no one ever asks for it. Most people don’t want disruption, not really, but somehow it gets foisted upon us anyway, always unexpectedly and out of the blue, riding on the wave of some new technology, predatory business practice, corporate restructuring, or big government policy shift that lays waste to entire communities—the loan market innovations that drove millions into bankruptcy or foreclosure, for example, or the a new super-powered computer phone that completely rewired the rules for social interaction you learned as a child or the artificial intelligence app that has thrown the entire education system into chaos.  

Humans have always contended with disruption. We live on a geologically and meteorologically precarious planet. Also, human-made disruption has always been with us, though the scale of it is commensurate with the scale of human civilization (a war between two hunter-gatherer tribes might produce a dozen casualties while a war between nation-states might leave millions dead). In state-level societies, the effects of human-made disruption were always unevenly distributed. But it is a feature (or bug) of modern civilization that the socio-economic class best prepared to survive disruption now promotes it as a value. This was Naomi Klein’s argument in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, wherein she uses the examples of Chile (1973), Iraq (2003), and Hurricane Katrina (2005) to show how capitalists exploit natural and human-made disasters to profit from them, but also to impose privatization, deregulation, and austerity measures that cut social services. People with wealth and power are shielded from the worst effects of disruption and positioned to profit from it. The poor, on the other hand, must eat it.  

Lately, it’s the technology elites pushing the disruption-as-positive-change party line: Disruption is part of life, they say. Learn to live with it or be left behind. It is easy for wealthy, powerful people to be insensitive to the effects of disruption. Last year at a 4th of July party among upper-middle-class friends and colleagues, I tried to get a conversation going about the increase in people living under overpasses in the Atlanta Metro area. I was shocked (though I shouldn’t have been) at how many otherwise decent, morally upstanding people favored the police forcefully “cleaning up” homeless camps. There was almost zero sympathy for the fact that economic disruption, namely inflationary effects on the real estate market, was pushing people out of their homes. I see this insensitivity manifested repeatedly. Many Americans believe it is the responsibility of individuals to disruption-proof their lives. If you cannot, there is something wrong with you, not with the system in which we live.  

Disruption always affects poor and marginalized people disproportionately. The sexual revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, was more destabilizing for poor and working-class families, black and white, than it was for better-resourced American families. The disruptions caused by the massive outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs in the period between the 1970s and 1990s reverberated through poor and lower-middle-class communities with destructive outcomes not seen in communities where many college-educated professionals lived. The same uneven distribution of pain was evidenced during the Great Recession. After Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, it was the city’s poor, mostly black population that was most catastrophically affected.  

Rapid societal and technological disruption is not natural. It produces trauma, disorientation, anxiety, and depression, and it leaves many people struggling to adapt. "The individual is forced to make decisions at a much more rapid pace," wrote Alvin Toffler in his 1971 book Future Shock, "He must do this while bombarded by strange new facts, new relationships, new technologies, new moral demands, new careers, new family structures, and new lifestyles." Toffler worried that the rapid acceleration of societal change would create psychological and institutional problems. "Man has a limited biological capacity for change," he wrote. "When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock."  

Toffler’s portrayal of the human brain overwhelmed by novelty and accelerating change has been supported by recent research on cognitive overload, technostress, and the mental health consequences of excessive exposure to social media. His depiction of human biology outstripped by technological and societal change is supported by research from biologists and psychologists such as Daniel Lieberman and Peter Gluckman, proponents of the "evolutionary mismatch theory." His prediction that institutions would not withstand technological change seems especially prescient given the now well-documented effects of social media on electoral politics, social relations, and family life.  

A recent article in Wired Magazine explains how the public backlash against AI integration is growing. People are complaining about the steady creep of AI into their lives, from AI-narrated podcasts to fears about the future of entire industries. The backlash does not surprise me. Americans especially have been here before, and our bullshit detectors are on high alert. Under the cover of the salvific proclamations about how AI will solve all our problems, we can detect signs of the bad old disruption peeking out—the coming job loss, the unanticipated crises, and yet another total restructuring of the social order. We know what disruption looks like, in all its forms, and we don't like it much.