Travis Shrugged: The creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption

[salvorhardin]

Kalanick is a proud adherent to the Cult of Disruption: the faddish Silicon Valley concept which essentially boils down to "let us do whatever we want, otherwise we'll bully you on the Internet until you do." To proponents of Disruption, the free market is king, and regulation is always the enemy.

The pro-Disruption argument goes like this: In a digitally connected age, there's absolutely no need for public carriage laws (or hotel laws, or food safety laws, or… or…) because the market will quickly move to drive out bad actors. If an Uber driver behaves badly, his low star rating will soon push him out of business.

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The truth is, what Silicon Valley still calls "Disruption" has evolved into something very sinister indeed. Or perhaps "evolved" is the wrong word: The underlying ideology — that all government intervention is bad, that the free market is the only protection the public needs, and that if weaker people get trampled underfoot in the process then, well, fuck 'em — increasingly recalls one that has been around for decades. Almost seven decades in fact, since Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" first put her on the radar of every spoiled trust fund brat looking for an excuse to embrace his or her inner asshole.

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And there's the rub. Given their Randian origins, we kid ourselves if we think most Disruptive businesses are fighting government bureaucracy to bring us a better deal. A Disruptive company might very well succeed in exposing government crooks lining their pockets exploiting outdated laws, but that's only so the Disruptor can line his own pockets through the absence of those same laws.

Full post: http://nsfwcorp.co/1sk6cl

For more on Ayn Rand's influence on Silicon Valley and tech culture, see Adam Curtis' excellent short series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.

[div style="text-align:center;"]http://vimeo.com/25966415

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Apple is a key player in the so called "Cult of Disruption"

Disruptive technology is on the whole a good thing. The example of Uber is a false flag. Disruptive ideas and technology are also not inherently Randian.

The author of the cited post is stretching and mislabeling things more than Romney

[cprise]

5. Technology is often said to be neutral, but the disruption flows mainly in one direction

That is because the capitalist class will always prefer to invest in and lobby for technology that will shore up the capacity for proprietary rent seeking. (Bill Gates said he wanted Microsoft to operate the "toll bridge" to the Internet.) They will even push for a generation or more in a field like biotech in pursuit of an ideal like genetically modified agriculture that can take abusive greed to new heights.

The so-called Intellectual Property regime is another area where technology is persistently being bent so that abusive proprietors can, for instance, lock up most of our culture while they rent it out to us. A good question would be, "Is DRM a disruptive technology, or a way to negate the advantages a disruptive tech gives to the consumer and citizen?" The preferred hardware platforms for consuming content are shifting to technology that is extremely closed, and it is due to a long-term push on the part of the media landlords.

Disruptive ideas and technology are also not inherently Randian

The concept doesn't belong to Rand per se, but Rand used it as a cornerstone for her narrative.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

7. The technology is the primary source of the disruption

There is no buggy whip industry anymore...

[cprise]

9. We're talking about dispensing with regulation and other aspects of civil society,

not about replacing old goods/services with new ones. If NYC cabbies were still using horse buggies then many of the same regulations would still apply.

You seem to have little to offer on this subject other that dismissive rhetoric.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

10. That is a false claim in many cases

Recently the former head of the US Copyright office offered his opinion that under current law, any new tech that involves media be required to have explicit Congressional permission prior to sale. That is the kind of thinking we are seeing more of these days, and businesses use their politicians to protect a business model that has been usurped.

The example being flogged by the OP is not a typical case of disruptive technology. It is also a technology that will be in place in other cities, though maybe not by that vendor soon enough.

What new tech does is bring down business models and generally empowers people. Yet there are those who attempt to legislate against that kind of evolution. As long as individuals are not being harmed, I think such behavior is reasonably classified as Luddite.

I am being dismissive since that is all the OP and its citation merit.

[cprise]

11. When looking at computerized voting, DRM, drones, smartphones...

the OP's example seems pretty typical to me. There is a corporatist zeal for control behind the most heavily flogged 'high tech' today. They only require a certain amount of marketing gleam and confident swagger to be accepted by an establishment that is still self-conscious about appearing technologically inept.

As long as individuals are not being harmed, I think such behavior is reasonably classified as Luddite.

I think such opinions are emblematic of the libertarian mindset discussed in the OP: Brandishing "buggy whip" and "Luddite" as if they automatically settle any disagreement over the tech sector's involvement in empowering police states, vulture capitalists and other perfumed miscreants.

And using government involvement as the excuse for an undesirable outcome is classic. If it is the "people" who are being empowered, then is it a case where we were empowered but not quite enough?

Most of what is deemed "high tech" by the for-profit press is conceived explicitly to serve the interests of capitalists, to increase their value at the expense of others. For that reason, they tend to turn their backs on technologies that don't assume increased monetization of society, that don't favor expanding the advantage of the powerful over the vulnerable, that don't increase the disparity of wealth between classes.

IOW, we are a looooong way away from the entrepreneurship of the 1970s, the advent of the personal computer and the first big push into renewable energy. Today, the former is being turned into a bastion of corporate centralization and control, and the latter is still not what most investors would get involved with because they are attuned to wealth and power in their concentrated forms (which is even more remarkable given that much of the technology is already sufficiently developed) -- or am I mistaken?!

Yes!! I see it now!! We gotta wait for Mr. Fusion to be invented in some hallowed hall of commerce... I was so wrong to be fixated on renewables-cum-buggywhips!

I am being dismissive since that is all the OP and its citation merit.

Then you have only shown that it is your POV that lacks relevant material. You seem to be trying to prove the OPs point, if anything.

[Kindly Refrain]

12. actually you are quite wrong

http://westfieldwhip.com/

[kurt_cagle]

2. Agreed

There is, and always has been, a streak of libertarianism in the Valley - what I've referred to more than once as technolibertarianism. It spins off in weird ways, such as the Kurtzweilite post-humanists who look upon 2040 as the the "singularity" when everything converges and we become one with the machine, and a distinct Randian flavor even to open source software, which is ironically probably the purest expression of communism in action. For the most part it's harmless, and while most TLs worship the ground that Ron Paul walks on, I believe the will sit out the election this time around - the GOP burned them big time at the convention, and I suspect the party lost what little loyalty they may have had from this group. That the technolibertarians are pretty much uniformly atheist or pagan doesn't help either - they tend to be socially moderate or even socially progressive so long as it doesn't infringe upon them personally, and have real problems with the Theocracy Party.

[bemildred]

3. They must love Anonymous then.

[Odin2005]

4. Wow, this describes a lot of RW Gen-Xers I know very well.

[Laxman]

6. Social Darwinism Dies Hard...

Our system will always produce "winners" and "losers" and as long as a big enough percentage of the winners believe that their status was 100% earned by virtue of their superiority this thinking will always persist.

Almost seven decades in fact, since Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" first put her on the radar of every spoiled trust fund brat looking for an excuse to embrace his or her inner asshole.

This is a whole other phenomenon. The born on third base and think they hit a triple crowd. Ayn Rand just gives them validation.

[XemaSab]

8. That was a bang-up video