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https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/#republicans-want-to-defund-the-police>
'Before "disruption" turned into a punchline, it was a genuinely exciting idea.
Using technology, we could connect people to one another and allow them to
collaborate, share, and cooperate to make great things happen.
It's easy (and valid) to dismiss the "disruption" of Uber, which "disrupted"
taxis and transit by losing $31b worth of Saudi royal money in a bid to
collapse the world's rival transportation system, while quietly promising its
investors that it would someday have pricing power as a monopoly, and would
attain profit through price-gouging and wage-theft.
Uber's disruption story was wreathed in bullshit: lies about the "independence"
of its drivers, about the imminence of self-driving taxis, about the impact
that replacing buses and subways with millions of circling, empty cars would
have on traffic congestion. There were and are plenty of problems with
traditional taxis and transit, but Uber magnified these problems, under cover
of "disrupting" them away.
But there are other feats of high-tech disruption that were and are genuinely
transformative – Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, RSS, and more. These disruptive
technologies altered the balance of power between powerful institutions and the
businesses, communities and individuals they dominated, in ways that have
proven both beneficial and durable.
When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company
disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts
Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.
But the history of "disruption" features far more examples of tech companies
disrupting other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft.
Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts
Nokia. It's only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital
disruption are other digital businesses.
And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector
itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade.
A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born
in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one
Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the
continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this
be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
