Why has disruption been elevated as a virtue to the point where it’s become orthodox to be heterodox? It’s a symptom of the erosion of trust in institutions.
The notion that successful innovators are remarkable and strong-minded individuals is an old one. Its origins lie in the 19th century, in books such as Samuel Smiles’ “Self-help” or in the improving biographies of men such as Michael Faraday or Thomas Alva Edison. There is more to the idea of disruption, though, than the notion that innovation needs character. It plays instead with the possibility that innovation needs a kind of instability — that disruption isn’t just one of a range of solutions to the problem of progress, but that it’s the only solution.
In fact, the insistence that significant technological change can only take place through disruption upends traditional notions of progress entirely. The 19th-century inventors of the idea of progress imagined that the future would be produced through accumulation. Innovation would build on innovation. Built into the idea of disruption is the sense that successful innovation means abandoning the old entirely for the new.
Instead, what we’re seeing now is the rise of a contemporary form of Tesla Syndrome. Since his death in 1943, the myth that Nikola Tesla wove around himself during his own time has taken on a life of its own, to such a degree that it is now almost impossible to dismantle. (...)
There’s an interesting and revealing contrast in the ways that Tesla and Edison, respectively, presented themselves and their power of invention. Both men were adept at self-promotion and took advantage of every opportunity to put themselves and their inventions in the public eye. The inventive selves that each presented to the public were very different ones, nevertheless, and are revealing of the range of ways in which innovators could be imagined at the beginnings of modernity.
Both were keen to promote themselves as singular men of invention, uniquely gifted and fitted for innovation. But where Tesla and his promoters showed him off as a man apart, living inside his own head and obsessed with invention, Edison’s story was of the self-made man, pursuing — and achieving — his inventions through sheer grit and determination (1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, as he famously suggested). Here was the business inventor, grounded in the world of commerce rather than forever dreaming about the stars.
The ways in which Tesla’s and Edison’s supposed rivalry is re-imagined in contemporary culture shed light on disruption’s appeal for contemporary tech culture, too. Tesla turns up more than once in the popular sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” for example. There he is held up as the epitome of the otherworldly maker of the future, an iconoclastic breaker of rules interested only in innovation for its own sake and doomed to failure because of his single-minded focus on invention.
“You like to think that you’re just like Tesla, but the truth is you’re exactly like Edison,” one protagonist insults another. What they mean is that Tesla stands for uncompromised innovation, while Edison is stuck in the mire of self-interested industrial and corporate innovation. That’s why Tesla makes such a good geek hero. He stands for invention untrammelled by compromise — and in many ways that’s what the allure of disruption is all about, as well. We might sum it up as Tesla replacing Edison as the ideal of innovation.
While Tesla has become the very model of a modern mold-breaker, the myth surrounding him has been here for more than half a century. Why has it — and the notion of disruption it captures — acquired so much resonance now?
by Iwan Rhys Morus, Noema | Read more:
Image: Niki Usagi for Noema Magazine
