Only Disrupt
Isn’t it time to retire that idiotic, strutting, smug, self-satisfied word “disrupt” and its derivatives like “disruptive”?
Nowadays, they’re typically only used either as empty marketing terms (“New cloud backups — now with disruption!”) or by the sort of teenage-minded techie for whom disruption-for-the-sake-of-disruption is the whole point of technology (or for whom disruption is just another tech-hipster lifestyle accessory or attitude). And self-proclaimed disruptiveness has the same sort of stale and desperate LOOK-AT-ME!! air as self-proclaimed subversiveness (you know it’s well past its use-by date when it’s a TED staple).
In the dystopia that follows the Big Disruption, I suspect we’ll all learn what that word really means, techies included. Sadly, it won’t be the glamourous paradise of techie dreams.
Let’s face it: patent trolls are disruptive; food poisoning is disruptive, identity theft is disruptive; unemployment is disruptive; social cleansing through gentrification is disruptive; secretly-negotiated international trade agreements are disruptive; power outages are disruptive; military coups are disruptive; DMCA-based YouTube takedowns are disruptive. Even Donald Trump is disruptive. Where’s the glamour in all that?
A lot of creativity is non-disruptive; and a lot of disruption is stupidly destructive. Disruption’s typically just an empty term signifying nothing at all beyond the attitude or (wannabe) lifestyle of the speaker.
