By Sheldon Greaves

I ran across an invigorating little piece in Salon recently titled, “Silicon Valley makes everything worse: Four industries that Big Tech has ruined.” by Kieth A. Spencer. It expands on the matter of “disruption”, which is one of Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzwords. After reading the article and comparing its observations with my own from my years in the Bay Area, I have come to the conclusion that the whole “disruption” thing is the opposite of what it claims to be.

The four industries Spencer examines are taxis, home appliances, fitness, and convenience stores.

Disruption is about undermining a current industry or way of doing business in order to make it “more efficient”, which is another way of saying “more lucrative for the people at the top.” The examples Spencer examines demonstrate how something that was working just fine, really, got improved to the point that driving a taxi is no longer a middle-class job, home appliances require more time and attention while spying on us, fitness apps ditto, and convenience stores are being reduced to very large vending machines without all that pesky human contact and interaction with clerks or acting as public spaces.

Uber drivers went on strike recently to protest absurdly low wages, which is pretty typical of what happens when “disruption” strikes. Where labor is involved, it is usually the workers who end up getting the raw deal.

Disruption is Not Creative

“Creative disruption” is a term one hears from proponents of the tear-it-all-down school of business. There was a popular book years ago with the catchy title If It Ain’t Broke, Break It. Iconoclasm has become an almost sacred dogma. But like a lot of other cherished beliefs, it does not withstand close scrutiny.

The problem with disruption is that after you disrupt, you have to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, and that takes work. I’ve also noticed that disrupters know very little about the history of the industries they despoil. They don’t understand why things are the way they are, and that some “inefficiencies” are there for a very good reason. Somehow the task of rebuilding a disrupted industry–when it happens at all–fails to allow for the positive aspects of what was.

Another problem: from what I can see, tearing it all down is where most of the money is. The parallel is not exact, but it reminds me of the merger mania in the 80’s and 90’s when companies were acquired merely to chop them up and sell off the assets. It’s not quite the same, but many of the same classes of people who got hurt then are getting hurt now. And many of the same kinds of business “geniuses” are driving the disruption fashion today.

Digital Everything

The home appliance, fitness, and convenience store disruptions in Spencer’s article all fall under that stomach-churning phenomenon known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The longer I study this emerging trend, the more I feel that it is a menace. Spencer points out that IoT capable appliances actually require more, not less of our attention. I am reminded of this passage from Ray Bradbury’s wonderful short story, “The Murderer” in which he describes his modern house:

It’s one of those talking, singing, humming, weather-reporting, poetry-reading, novel-reciting, jingle-jangling, rockaby-crooning- when-you-go-to-bed houses. A house that screams opera to you in the shower and teaches you Spanish in your sleep. One of those blathering caves where all kinds of electronic Oracles make you feel a trifle larger than a thimble, with stoves that say, ‘I’m apricot pie, and I’m done,’ or ‘I’m prime roast beef, so baste me!’ and other nursery gibberish like that. With beds that rock you to sleep and shake you awake. A house that barely tolerates humans, I tell you. A front door that barks: ‘You’ve mud on your feet, sir!’ And an electronic vacuum hound that snuffles around after you from room to room, inhaling every fingernail or ash you drop. . . .”

Sound familiar? Not bad for a story that was written in 1953.

But there is something more about the IoT that needs to be stated, clearly and forcefully, at every turn: the IoT does not exist to make your life easier. It exists to collect as much information about you as possible, and then sell that information to people who want to manipulate you into buying their stuff. That’s basically it. And to make matters worse, the security on most of these devices is poor or non-existent. So even “unauthorized” snoops get to peek into the most intimate details of your life.

Yes, yes, there are some truly decent souls out there who do want to make things better, but they are the minority.

So I now view “disruption” with a very jaundiced eye. Whoever can figure out how to make truly rebuilding things in a way that serves us all better will be the true movers and shakers that take us to a better world.