Don’t disrupt. Evolve
Earlier this year, Corey Doctorow wrote an interesting op-ed on disruption for Locus. This got us thinking about the creation, politicization and eventual demonization of buzzwords in business. The most interesting notion was how Doctorow dismantles the notion that somehow “disruptive” means “better” by looking at Uber and its ilk — specifically that while Uber may be “taxi 2.0”, it isn’t intrinsically better than taxi 1.0. It just has a different set of downsides, and as Uber moves towards its IPO, it’s getting more… taxi 1.0-ish.
Such is the nature of the disruption game. Disruption has become yet another buzzword to wrap around businesses to make them sound new, like innovative, digitized, or .com, but in most cases, it’s still the same old business at the end of the day.
Disruption isn’t necessarily good
This idea that disrupting business is good has become pervasive, and acquired a sort of gloss of “disruption = progress.” This isn’t really accurate, nor objectively good. Disrupting an institution usually has negative consequences for the users — how many people would appreciate having their phone or internet services disrupted?
Furthermore, at the end of the day does the disruption really change anything, other than shaking up the system through loopholes and making a bunch of money for VCs? Not really. According to the duck test, Uber is a form of taxi, just like AirBnB is kind of accommodation rental agency. They just exploit loopholes in legislation that was drafted to answer the concerns of another era of technology. Taxi and hotel regulation originated in customer protection, and both Uber and AirBnB have faced serious legal challenges to their avoidance of these protections (and the costs they incur).
The users may be thrilled with lower prices, until they get bedbugs or spy cams in their AirBnB or face unforeseen expenses because their Uber driver didn’t have a professional license or commercial insurance. That doesn’t even touch on the supply side issues, with problems regarding payment, protection, and what constitutes an employee going on around the world.
Looking for the loopholes
Doctorow’s argument that “disruption” is a euphemism for using new technology to avoid current regulation, followed by the exploitation of poorly drafted laws did bring to mind interesting parallels in the blockchain space, where decentralist crypto-anarchists decry all centralization as evil and worthy of destruction, while at the same time repeatedly being ripped off by the very sorts of frauds that centralized regulation is in place to prevent.
That’s not to say that the system can’t be improved, of course — but just because regulation 1.0 has problems doesn’t mean that the lessons it learned can’t be used to build a better regulation 2.0. Total decentralization, total freedom to self-administer is a great notion — if one assumes all actors are acting honorably, and discounts the lessons of game theory. However, as we’ve seen repeatedly since Mt. Gox, not everyone is acting honorably, and no regulation means no recourse.
So let’s be honest with ourselves, and admit that much as we dearly love these buzzwords and the notion of change they bring, that at best these trends towards disruptive decentralization will become something analogous to what came before. More nuanced, perhaps, and more contemporary — but to deny the lessons of the past is to deny the realities of human society; one where we accept checks and balances for the greater good, and periodically must realign ourselves to keep things in order.
The reverse of the pendulum: de-centralization
Overcentralization has had its day, and decentralization is the next wave — but perhaps decentralization isn’t as correct a term as de-centralization, or the progressive moving away from our current culture of centralization. There is some place for authorities, and society isn’t a binary. Success lies in the grey areas between. This is where blockchain comes into play — not because it destroys centralized authorities, but that it acts as an immutable window into their actions. We can control what we wish, and assume what responsibilities we wish — but more importantly, we can monitor what those agencies we delegate responsibilities to are doing, to better intervene if we must.
Disruption is a symptom of a lack of transparency and engagement. Evolution is not.
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