The Problem with 'Disruption'
The word "disruption" has been disrupted. It has been used so extensively, so promiscuously, and with so little regard for its meaning that it has become one of those words that, in Orwell's phrase, "has no meaning except in so far as it is used to express the approval of the speaker." Everything is disruptive now. A new mattress brand is disruptive. A meal-kit delivery service is disruptive. A toothbrush with Bluetooth connectivity is disruptive. The word has been emptied of its content and refilled with pure aspiration: to call something "disruptive" is simply to say it is good, or new, or worthy of attention.
I want to examine how this happened, because the trajectory of "disruption" from technical concept to empty signifier tells us something important about how language works — and fails to work — in the marketing ecosystem.
The Original Concept
The concept of disruptive innovation was developed by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen's argument was specific and well-defined: a disruptive innovation is a product or service that initially targets the low end of a market (or creates a new market entirely), offering worse performance than existing products on the dimensions that mainstream customers value, but at a lower price or with greater convenience. Over time, the disruptive product improves and moves upmarket, eventually displacing the incumbent.
The key features of Christensen's concept were: it applied to a specific kind of market dynamic; it described a process, not a quality; and it was not inherently positive — disruption was as likely to produce worse products as better ones. The steel mini-mill disrupted integrated steel mills not by making better steel but by making cheaper, worse steel that was good enough for certain applications. The disruption was a structural phenomenon, not an evaluative one.
None of this survived the word's migration into the marketing lexicon. What emerged on the other side was not a concept but a mot d'ordre — a rallying cry, a badge of identity, a word that signified not a specific process but a general orientation toward novelty, ambition, and the overthrow of established ways of doing things.
The Semiotic Inflation of 'Disruption'
Barthes described in Mythologies how words undergo a transformation when they are absorbed into mythological speech. The word retains its denotative meaning — its dictionary definition — but acquires a connotative surplus that overwhelms the denotation. The word "disruption" denotes a specific market dynamic. But its connotation — innovation, courage, progress, the David-and-Goliath narrative of the startup against the incumbent — has swallowed the denotation entirely. When a brand calls itself "disruptive," it is not making a claim about market dynamics. It is performing an identity.
This is how semiotic inflation works. A word that once had a specific, bounded meaning is used in increasingly broad contexts until it means everything and therefore nothing. "Disruption" followed the same path as "innovation" before it and "synergy" before that: a word born in a specific disciplinary context, adopted by the business press, popularized by TED talks and conference keynotes, and finally absorbed into the general vocabulary of aspiration where it dissolves into meaninglessness.
The linguist might call this semantic bleaching: the gradual loss of a word's specific meaning through overuse. But the semiotic perspective is more interesting. What happens when a word is bleached is not that it becomes meaningless but that its meaning shifts from the denotative to the connotative plane. "Disruption" no longer means disruption. It means: we are the kind of company that uses the word "disruption." The word has become self-referential — a sign that points not to a concept but to itself.
The Violence of the Metaphor
There is another problem with "disruption" that rarely gets discussed: the violence of the metaphor. To disrupt is to break, to shatter, to tear apart. The word comes from the Latin disrumpere — to break asunder. When Christensen used it, the violence was apt: he was describing a process by which incumbents were destroyed, workers were displaced, and entire industries were reorganized. The disruption was real and its consequences were material.
When a DTC skincare brand calls itself "disruptive," the violence of the metaphor is unearned. Nothing is being broken. No industry is being reorganized. No incumbents are being destroyed. A company is selling face cream online instead of in department stores. This is a different distribution strategy, not a rupture in the fabric of commerce. The word "disruption" dresses a mundane business model in the costume of revolution.
This is not harmless. The rhetoric of disruption normalizes the idea that destruction is inherently creative, that breaking things is inherently productive, that the new is inherently superior to the old. It imports the logic of Schumpeter's "creative destruction" — which was, in its original context, a description of capitalism's brutal tendencies, not a celebration of them — and repackages it as aspiration. To be a disruptor is to be a hero. To be disrupted is to be obsolete.
The Silicon Valley Mythos
The word "disruption" belongs to a broader mythological system — the mythos of Silicon Valley — that includes other keywords like "innovation," "scale," "pivot," "founder," and "mission." Together, these words constitute a vocabulary of heroic entrepreneurship that casts the startup founder as a romantic figure: a visionary who sees what others cannot, who defies convention, who bends reality to their will.
This mythology is extraordinarily effective. It has attracted trillions of dollars in investment, produced some of the most valuable companies in history, and shaped the cultural imagination of an entire generation. But it is a mythology — a set of narrative conventions that structure perception and naturalize specific ideological assumptions. The assumption that disruption is good. The assumption that growth is necessary. The assumption that the founder's vision justifies the means of its realization.
Barthes would note that the power of this mythology lies precisely in its naturalness — the way it presents its assumptions as obvious, as beyond question. Of course disruption is good. Of course innovation is progress. Of course the future belongs to those who build it. These propositions seem self-evident, which is a reliable sign that they are ideological. The truly self-evident does not need to be stated. What needs to be stated, insisted upon, repeated endlessly in keynotes and blog posts and pitch decks, is precisely what is not self-evident — what is, in fact, deeply contestable.
The Alternatives We Don't Name
The dominance of the disruption narrative crowds out alternative vocabularies. What if, instead of disruption, we valued continuité — continuity? What if the most admirable business strategy were not to overthrow the existing order but to sustain and improve it? What if longevity, stability, and incremental refinement were celebrated as virtues rather than dismissed as signs of complacency?
These alternatives exist — there are businesses that have operated for decades or centuries, producing excellent products without disrupting anything — but they are invisible within the disruption mythology. They do not get featured at conferences. They do not attract venture capital. They do not produce TED talks. They are, in the semiotic economy of Silicon Valley, non-existent: they occupy no position in the system of signs because the system has no sign for what they represent.
The Japanese concept of shinise — businesses that have operated for over a hundred years — offers a fascinating counter-narrative. Japan has over 33,000 businesses that are more than a century old, including some that have been operating for over a thousand years. These businesses are not disruptive. They are the opposite of disruptive. They are persistent. They endure. And their endurance is valued, culturally, as a form of excellence.
What would marketing look like if it spoke the language of persistence rather than disruption? If the highest praise for a product were not "it changes everything" but "it lasts"? If the aspiration were not to overthrow the existing order but to make something good enough to become part of it?
I don't know. But I suspect it would require different words. And different words, as any semiotician will tell you, produce different worlds.
What world does "disruption" produce? And is it one we actually want to live in?