It’s a term that has been tediously shoved down our throats for the past few years like a mantra — ‘disruption’.
Like “innovator” or “agile”, it often accompanies descriptions of new tech start-ups shaking up the traditional system, but has also become a sort of shorthand for ignoring the rules.
This, we’ve been encouraged to think, is something we should be grateful for — lifting us out of our ignorant ways — rather than what it often is: a cheat.
Disruption is nothing new. It has always been a feature of business growth and of society’s evolution. We just didn’t call it that.
We knew it by other less dramatic terms, like best practice, change or improvement.
The repackaging of the word “disruption” as something new and radical is akin to the recent attempt by a Newcastle cafe to dress up Vegemite on toast as some kind of a la carte offering.
It’s like your coffee being more expensive because it’s served by an uncommunicative, apron-wearing bloke with a waxed moustache.
Hans Christian Andersen nailed it back in 1837: The Emperor’s New Clothes.
It is nothing more than what university professors might describe as a postmodern deconstruction of what occurs in the business world everywhere and always has.
When you can get away with it.
Because the main benefit for the businesses reaping enormous profits on the back of the ideology of “disruption” has been to bypass the usual rules.
The disrupters of the world, from Uber to the firms responsible for all those discarded bicycles in your street and clogging up waterways, have used loopholes to bamboozle authorities into accepting a system of reduced or vanquished standards.
So while the poor Luddites of our taxi industry, constrained by regulations designed to both ensure public safety and keep the taxman happy, are having the values of their business slashed and their livelihoods diminished, Uber merrily undercuts the market to drive out the opposition.
Despite grabbing a lion’s share of the world taxi business by “disrupting” traditional services with lower fares and untrained “citizen” drivers, studies show Uber X drivers earn half the minimum wage.
For a company that has never been in profit (it lost $4.5 billion last year) you can bet fares will rise once it has no one left to compete with.
This week the House of Representatives voted to ban Lottoland, a “synthetic” lottery that, rather than having a cash jackpot at its disposal, bets on the outcome of big lotteries and uses insurers to pay off whatever large wins (effectively losses) it incurs.
It is based in the tax haven of Gibraltar and, unlike existing lotteries that help fund charities, it pays no tax.
While it lists donating to charity on its website, most of those “donations” are actually sponsorships whose primary purpose is to advertise Lottoland.
At the same time newsagents, already under strain from diminished sales, have lost revenue they would get through traditional lotteries.
In less than 25 years Amazon, the e-commerce juggernaut, has made its founder Jeff Bezos $112 billion and the richest person in the world.
It is a new arrival here, but in America, where the company made $5.6 billion last year, it paid no tax at all.
Social networks meanwhile have used “freedom of speech” as a way to dodge responsibility for removing inappropriate content, while at the same time harvesting our data for profit and manipulating the information we receive.
Tuesday night’s Budget foreshadowed a raft of new measures to stop companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple from shifting profits offshore and shirking paying tax here.
With barely a complaint from a public mesmerised by their shiny offerings, these companies have raided the retail landscape like plundering Vikings.
I’m all for progress and not for maintaining institutions that don’t work, but I’m also pretty sure when the smoke clears we are going to find we are paying the same and getting less, and a few shrewd companies will have made a mint at our expense.
(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph)
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