This is an audio version of a longer piece about disruption – taken from more scholarly work I then decided not to use. When I posted it last year in September, the contextual connection was e-scooters, which, for me, show the confluence of post-GFC hope-love-belief in/for Silicon Valley ‘solutions’, as well as surveillance capitalism, our lives in their portfolios, and all the sharp shady and shadowy blurry things we signed on for when we signed on for ‘move quickly and break things’. As Chris has explored in some recent posts, this is a way of indicating how it’s not always/only about neoliberalism and its norms, nor about finance capital. There are important distinctions and specificities to the whole Silicon Valley jam – this is much clearer to us now that Musk has his goth MAGA hat and is in the US Treasury with Milei’s chainsaw ‘living the meme’, in his own gakked words. Uber isn’t just about replacing taxis and doing automated app-mediated urban transport, just as buying X wasn’t just a way to trigger the libs. We need to be very clear about how big, ambitious and consequential the ‘Project’ imagined here is, while noticing its thin and shady social theory, its moral indifference, its annulment of empathy and care. In other words, we need to reckon both with Uber as a paradigm-setting paragon of disruption, while also seeing that disruption sees itself as salvational – while transpiring, in Musk’s case now (but Zuck and Bezos are totally DTF with this) as destructive destruction – for us. Their accumulation strategy is the public’s demise. What we will be left with – will be much worse. For all these reasons, let’s remember Uber’s intentionality, how many of us were also very much on board with it – and how it fit as a new salvational accumulation strategy after the GFC, during the America
n decade of quant easing, VC, blurred lines, and #metoo.
