Description
What is the meaning of disruption? Who or what is being disrupted? And why has disruption, despite negative connotations in everyday discourse, become a desirable ingredient for economic growth and progress? At the heart of these questions lies a paradox: while the disruption ethic is driven by the desire to dethrone established actors standing in the way of innovation and progress, for venture capital-backed firms the goal of disruption is not simply to bring down the establishment, but to re-recreate it—bigger, more dominant, and entirely self-aware of the threat of future disruption.
I argue that VC-backed disruption—for all the talk of dynamism, growth, and progress—constitutes an atavism; a dictatorial redux reminiscent of historical class-based power struggles.
The paper has four parts.
First, I examine the disruption paradigm and its relationship to venture capital. Using the work of Benoît Godin, I argue that disruption obtains legitimacy through ideologies of innovation.
Second, I explore the role of libertarian ideology amongst many VCs along with its relationship to the “exit” paradigm dominating VC investment practices.
Third, building on the ideology argument, I demonstrate the various ways in which VC-backed disruption extends beyond the sphere of economic activity to produce social, cultural, and political disruptions conceptualized in terms of ‘exit.’
