Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. 
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “disruption” lately. Specifically, about how a term that once carried genuine revolutionary energy has been hollowed out, taxidermied, and mounted on the wall of every venture capital boardroom in San Francisco. It hangs there like a trophy from a hunt that never actually happened.
I should know. I spent years covering this world, writing about the companies that promised to remake everything from healthcare to housing to the fundamental structure of work. I believed, for a time, in the narrative. The founders were compelling. The pitch decks were slick. The returns, for those positioned to capture them, were real. But sitting here in Singapore, watching the latest funding rounds and product launches roll in, I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the technology industry has perfected the aesthetics of revolution while systematically preventing anything revolutionary from taking root.
The Church of Creative Destruction (With a Very Selective Congregation)
Clayton Christensen gave us the framework in 1997 with The Innovator’s Dilemma, and Silicon Valley took it as scripture. Disruption, in Christensen’s formulation, was a specific phenomenon: cheaper, simpler technologies entering markets from below, eventually displacing incumbents who were too focused on high-margin customers to notice the threat. It was an analytical tool. The Valley turned it into an ideology, then a marketing strategy, then something resembling a civic religion.
The liturgy is familiar. Move fast and break things. First principles thinking. Zero to one. Every startup deck opens with a slide about the “broken” industry it intends to fix. Every founder positions themselves as a heretic challenging orthodoxy. The language is deliberately transgressive, borrowing from counterculture, from punk, from protest movements. The implication is always the same: we are the insurgents, and the old guard should be afraid.
But look at what actually gets disrupted. Uber didn’t disrupt transportation; it disrupted the economic security of taxi drivers while creating a new monopoly platform that extracts rent from every ride. Airbnb didn’t disrupt hospitality; it disrupted housing markets in cities around the world while making its founders billionaires. WeWork didn’t disrupt commercial real estate; it disrupted the concept of fiscal responsibility for a few spectacular years before reality intervened. The pattern is consistent: the disruption flows downward. The consolidation flows upward.
When I wrote recently about OpenAI closing its $40 billion funding round, what struck me most was the contradiction at the heart of the enterprise. Here is a company that began as a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It has since converted to a capped-profit structure, then reportedly moved toward removing the cap entirely, all while raising capital at a pace that would make the most aggressive Wall Street firms blink. The disruption narrative says this technology will transform everything. The capital structure says the transformation will be owned by a very small number of people.
The Invisible Architecture of Preservation
The real genius of Silicon Valley’s relationship with disruption is in what remains undisrupted. The tax code. The structure of equity ownership. The legal frameworks that allow platform companies to classify workers as independent contractors. The patent system. The revolving door between tech companies and regulatory agencies. The carried interest loophole that allows venture capitalists to pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.
These are the load-bearing walls of the system, and no amount of AI-powered productivity tools or blockchain-based financial instruments has touched them. They remain intact because the people with the resources to challenge them are the same people who benefit most from their existence.
Consider the housing crisis. San Francisco, the global capital of disruption, has some of the most restrictive zoning laws in America. Tech workers making $300,000 a year compete for a limited supply of housing, driving up prices and pushing out everyone else. The industry that prides itself on solving hard problems with technology has conspicuously failed to apply that problem-solving energy to the regulatory and political structures that make its own headquarters unlivable for most people. The reason is obvious: many of those tech workers and their bosses own property. Disrupting housing scarcity would disrupt their net worth.
The same dynamic plays out globally. In my recent piece on how the global south is being surveilled into compliance under the banner of development, I traced how technology ostensibly designed to empower populations in developing countries often functions as a control mechanism, locking in existing power relationships while generating data flows that benefit companies headquartered thousands of miles away. The disruption is real for the people on the receiving end. But the direction of value extraction, from the many to the few, from the periphery to the center, remains stubbornly unchanged.
The Billionaire Escape Hatch
There’s a revealing tell in how the wealthiest technologists spend their money. If disruption were genuinely the animating principle of their lives, you’d expect them to invest in systemic change: political movements, institutional reform, the kinds of slow, unsexy structural work that actually redistributes power. Instead, the money goes to space companies, life extension research, bunkers in New Zealand, and citizenship in countries with favorable tax regimes.
As The New Yorker detailed in its examination of billionaire survival strategies, the ultrarich in Silicon Valley and beyond have increasingly oriented their personal planning around escape rather than reform. The people who sell us visions of a radically better future are, in their private lives, preparing for that future’s collapse. This is a profound ideological contradiction that rarely gets named for what it is: a confession. They know the system they’ve built is fragile. They know it generates instabilities. And their response is to ensure they personally survive the instabilities rather than to address them.
I’m not writing from a position of purity here. I run a media company. I use the tools these companies build. I benefit from the global flows of capital and information that the tech industry has accelerated. But the honest observer has to reckon with the gap between what is promised and what is delivered, and that gap has become a chasm.
Open Source, Closed Systems
The AI era was supposed to be different. Open-source models, distributed development, the democratization of intelligence itself. And there are genuine currents moving in that direction. DeepSeek’s emergence from China, as The Conversation analyzed, sent genuine shockwaves through the American AI establishment precisely because it demonstrated that open-source approaches could compete with heavily capitalized proprietary ones. The geopolitical earthquake it triggered revealed something important: the incumbents are afraid of actual disruption when it comes from outside their controlled ecosystem.
But watch how the response has unfolded. The major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have moved toward massive capital consolidation. The argument for keeping models proprietary has shifted from “safety” to what is functionally market protection. The infrastructure costs of training frontier models have become a moat in themselves, requiring the kind of capital that only sovereign wealth funds and the largest corporations can provide. Saudi Arabia committing $100 billion to AI infrastructure, as I covered recently, tells you everything about who the intended beneficiaries of this technology will be: states and corporations with the resources to play at that scale.
The open-source community persists, and I respect it enormously. But the structural incentives point toward concentration. Every major technological wave in the last century, from railroads to telecommunications to the internet, followed the same arc: initial openness and experimentation, followed by consolidation, followed by regulatory capture, followed by a stable oligopoly that extracts rent from the infrastructure it now controls. We are watching this happen in real time with AI, and the disruption narrative is the screen behind which it occurs.
What Actual Disruption Would Look Like
Real disruption of the kind Silicon Valley claims to pursue would involve challenging the ownership structures that concentrate wealth. It would mean technology designed to strengthen collective bargaining, not atomize workers into gig-economy fragments. It would look like AI tools that empower local communities to govern their own data rather than feeding it into centralized platforms. It would involve founders who structure their companies as cooperatives rather than vehicles for extracting maximum value for shareholders.
Some of this exists at the margins. Platform cooperatives are real. Open-source communities do meaningful work. There are technologists who genuinely orient their careers around public benefit. But these efforts exist despite the dominant incentive structures, not because of them. The venture capital model, which funds nearly all high-growth technology companies, requires exponential returns. Exponential returns require monopoly or near-monopoly positions. Monopoly positions require the elimination of competition. The disruption rhetoric provides moral cover for what is, at its core, a process of market consolidation.
I keep returning to a simple question: if disruption is the highest value, why does the industry spend so much money on lobbying? According to OpenSecrets, the tech sector spent over $70 million on federal lobbying in the United States in 2023 alone. Lobbying is, by definition, the art of preserving favorable conditions within existing systems. You don’t lobby if you want to tear something down. You lobby when you want to make sure the thing you’ve built stays protected.
The Sermon and the Collection Plate
I think about this in terms of religion because the parallels are instructive. Every religion has its public theology and its institutional reality. The public theology of Silicon Valley is liberation through technology: the individual empowered, the gatekeepers toppled, the future accelerated into being by brilliant minds unshackled from convention. The institutional reality is a small number of enormously wealthy individuals and firms consolidating control over the infrastructure of daily life (communication, commerce, transportation, increasingly cognition itself) while using the language of liberation to preempt scrutiny.
The congregation plays its part. Young engineers move to the Bay Area or Austin or Miami, drawn by the theology. They work long hours for equity that may or may not vest, in companies that may or may not survive, building products that will be described in disruption terms regardless of what they actually do. They attend the conferences. They read the thought leadership. They post the threads. And the collection plate circulates: your labor, your data, your attention, your housing costs, all flowing upward to the people who built the church.
I don’t think most of the people involved are cynical. That’s what makes the system so resilient. The founders genuinely believe they’re changing the world. The engineers genuinely believe their work matters. The investors genuinely believe they’re funding progress. The belief is real. The disruption is selective. And the structures that determine who benefits from technological change remain, as they have for decades, carefully, quietly, thoroughly intact.
The next time someone tells you they’re going to disrupt an industry, ask a simple question: disrupt it for whom?
Feature image by Zetong Li on Pexels
