Disruption, far from being the red signboard of a hazard requiring caution, is now the zeitgeist of our times. Whether we look at technology, business, or politics, disruption is now positively portrayed and even sought. Is your technology disruptive? Cool! Is your business causing market disruption? Smart! Is your politics disrupting the community? Wow!
This technology will disrupt the market, create mass unemployment, or endanger lives. Should we pause and ponder before we launch it? The loudest in our age answer that there is no need for such care and caution—stop adhering to a prudent and precautionary approach! This business will disrupt the environment and cause multiple negative externalities. Should we approve of such business practices without thorough review? Few would dare raise their voices and say—let us deliberate and discuss the pros and cons. This politics will disrupt the community by fueling racial or class polarization. Should we not eschew such messaging that fosters such disruption? The answer in our times usually is—who cares!
In this carnival of chaos, this festival of illusions, voices advocating reflection and restraint are dismissed as killjoys, fossilized relics unfit for the adrenaline rush of the moment. Who needs to pause and ponder when the spirit of the age demands immediate action? These disrupters cast incrementalism and caution aside as quaint indulgences of a bygone century. Any out-of-the-box solution is lionized, and anything remotely in-the-box is derided as a relic that is fit only for the museum of innocence and eventual obsolescence. Those who dare to question the long-term consequences of disruptive technologies or populist politics are treated as fossils from a bygone age—pariahs to be deliberately ignored. After all, who has the time for caution when chasing the seductive high of breaking things?
Those who benefit from such disruption philosophy—in the form of more profits, power, and pelf—market this latest gospel as the modern panacea for all kinds of problems. The beneficiaries of such disruptive philosophies and practices promise salvation through upheaval. They assure the people and the markets that their unknown or untested ideas and methods have miraculous powers that will usher in digital or political nirvana.
Why does the allure of disruption hold such sway? It may be because we live in an era where the tectonic plates of ancient certainties have shifted far away from their firm grounding. Millions now live in urban centers—uprooted, unknown, unmoored, and uncertain. When the familiar anchors of community, faith, and stability crumble, the psyche, in its despair, adopts a peculiar nihilistic logic: if my life is in ruins, why not raze everything else to the ground? Disruption becomes not merely a strategy but a mass catharsis—an illusion of solidarity in shared chaos, a fake beacon of salvation through upheaval, and an endeavor to explore the uncharted and untested realms.
This disruptive mindset, however, does not serve as a source of creativity but morphs into a perspective that seeks replacements for lost certainties, groundings, and assurances. Millions in urban centers search for new roots, identities, anchors, and certainties. This is why, in our age, millions are ready to confer blind allegiance toto messianic digital and political leaders. These new heralds of disruptive businesses and politics—seekers of more monopolistic profits, dictatorial power, and unaccountable pelf—nihilistically preach the virtues of annihilating institutions, ideologies, and norms, offering utopian visions in their place.
This philosophy of disruption, this romantic but rhetorical populism of our times, feeds on this appetite for new certainties and hopes of millions of uprooted, unknown, unmoored, and uncertain people. These disrupters do not solve the problem of the personal dislocation of millions but convert it into a license for collective upheaval. What better way to cope with one’s shattered world than to cheer as the lives of all others are shattered, too? It sounds wild, but this nihilism is the zeitgeist of our times—a zeitgeist that the beneficiaries of this latest gospel sponsor and exploit to sell their disruptive technologies, businesses, and politics, perpetuating the cycle of dislocation and upheaval, which helps them stay in the market. More consumers and followers join their ranks because of their disruptive technologies, business, and politics—why could these disrupters cease and desist?
Future generations will be burdened by more debris generated by such disruptive technologies, businesses, and politics.
This disruption philosophy bears an uncanny resemblance to the infamous Vietnam War rationale: “We must destroy the village to save it.” Beneath this disruption philosophy lies dark truths and sobering realities: excitement sans accountability, illusions sans solutions, adrenaline rush sans wisdom. The beneficiaries and proponents of disruptive technologies and ideologies have no incentive to stay behind to clean up the new chaos they generate—disruption increases their profits, power, and pelf. The collateral damage—hollowed-out communities, destabilized institutions, and environmental degradation—is conveniently externalized and left for others to endure. Thus, disruption becomes less of a strategy for progress and more of a high-octane exercise in consequence evasion, with the generous helping of moral hazard as its pièce de résistance.
This ostensibly modern yet profoundly myopic philosophy of disruption is neither revolutionary nor benign—it is reckless at best and perilous at worst. Far from heralding an enlightened future, it merely echoes the timeless folly of hubris repackaged in the fashionable guise of innovation. Beneath its veneer of progress lies a familiar arrogance: the belief that chaos can serve as a panacea, that upheaval is inherently virtuous, and that foresight is an antiquated luxury.
As with all such delusional ideologies, this disruption philosophy is not merely reshaping the world but profoundly scaring the fabric of our communities, institutions, and ecosystems. The scary consequences of this mindset will endure long after the ephemeral buzz of disruption fades. Future generations will be burdened by more debris generated by such disruptive technologies, businesses, and politics. Our coming generations will question why we enthusiastically embraced upheaval as progress and mistook our collective short-sightedness for wisdom. Perhaps they will see our age not as an age of innovation but an era of avoidable arrogance devoid of prudence, intelligence, and wisdom.
“The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.” (Norbert Wiener: God And Golem, Inc.). Thus, when the cacophony of nihilistic disruption beckons, let us exercise sagacious restraint. Or, to borrow from the vernacular, it’s better not to pick it up when the wrong number rings. Some calls are best left unanswered.
The writer is an author & a lawyer asim_ali@ksg03.harvard.edu
