The roots of the disruptive urge

A client of mine sells for a very high-growth, dynamic software company: a new type of service/product aligned with the growth of "edge computing": the fact that so much happens on the web, in the cloud, where consumers expect very fast response time to any query submitted to anyone. He gets paid a lot of money, and also has a non-trivial chunk of shares in the company. I was talking to him the other day and he expressed frustration with an old economy company with whom he was working and expressed a strong desire to support "disruptive" companies.

It's interesting that there is a tendency in the tech world and its boosters (and lately many have become boosters, to the extent that many have been enriched by tech) to celebrate disruption uncritically. On Silicon Valley the team joked that their company's goal was to "change the world," which really resonated, because a lot of tech companies do talk like that: "We're not about making tons of money, really (that's just a byproduct), we want to change the world!"

But of course a generic desire to disrupt and change the world is predicated on the belief that the world as it is is in bad shape, and that the type of change the company offers changes it for the better. In fact the solutions offered more often than not do provide services more quickly and often at lower cost, but at a cost to current employment, and result in displaced lower skills workers who often must take lower paid rolls and become somewhat unmoored in society, with risks to the social fabric and political stability -- as we have seen recently. Generically, better and faster service delivery sounds like a good thing in most individual instances. Destruction of the existing fabric of society is less desirable.

A lot of research has been done, and anecdotal evidence and lived experience support this, that above something like $75k of income, increases to income do not correlate to increases in happiness and life satisfaction for individuals. In aggregate the same should be true. Once a society reaches a level of wealth in that ballpark, it shouldn't get much happier on average when the majority of people get much richer.

None of this is to say that change, dynamism and creative destruction are bad. We all like new products, better cars, smartphones, new foods, etc. But nor should all of that be considered an unalloyed good.