Are You Revolutionary? Or Merely Disruptive?

Imagine that you are an emerging technology. What kind of technology are you? Are you a sustaining technology that offers incremental improvements over previous ways of doing the same thing? Are you a disruptive technology that completely overturns the power matrix of a business sector? Or are you a revolutionary technology that creates entire new sectors and causes other sectors to disintegrate? What about nanotechnology? Is nano sustaining, disruptive, or revolutionary?

The Futurist sees signs that nanotechnology is emerging from an early phase as a sustaining technology into a disruptive phase. This would be a good time for a rip-roaring disruptive technology to emerge. Consider it a form of "slash and burn" agriculture within the industrial, economic, and finance sectors. [Update 6April: Brian Wang's Next Big Future website is one of the best places to keep up on disruptive and revolutionary technologies.]

The Obama administration motto is "never let a good crisis go to waste." The same motto could be applied -- in a more constructive sense -- to free markets. Capitalism involves the constant destruction and creation / evolution of succeeding generations of businesses, technologies, and even the evolution of the means of creation / evolution / destruction. An economic downturn can be an important pivot point that allows a new technology to move quickly from "sustaining" to "disruptive" to "revolutionary." When entrenched interests are temporarily weakened by financial bottlenecks and organisational rearrangements, radically new economic, financial, and technological entities can arise as if out of nowhere.

Disruptive technologies emerge from the chaos that surrounds us and the best thing we could do is to create an environment which stimulates these technologies to come to the fore. We, including our leaders in business and society at large, have to be tolerant of chaos and build strategic capability to solve problems of the future rather than concentrating on today. _Source

It is easy to see that an Obama / fasci-leftist approach to governing does not fit well with the environment of creative disruption described above. Despite marching under the "banner of change", the Obama approach is ultra-conservative at heart. Obama's ties to old corruption, old labour, old faux environmentalism, old "limits to growth", old hyper-centralist governmental philosophies, old mega-statism etc. confines his administration inside a "3-ring circus" of deja vu clownishness. We have seen it all before, and it always fails disastrously.

This is a good time for disruptive --> revolutionary technologies. Many westerners are ready for technologies that will allow them to sidestep the arrogant presidents, the snide bureaucrats, the greedy and corrupt gatekeepers of information, goods, and services. Those who have gotten a taste of freedom are not ready to go back to the Obama / Pelosi reich's way of serfdom. We are becoming burned out on the constant over-hyping of faux catastrophe and disaster which fit too conveniently within the long-range mega-statist political goals of the reich.

So when the technologies of cornucopia begin to appear -- whether via legal channels or not -- more and more ordinary, generally law-abiding citizens will choose to adopt these disruptive and revolutionary technologies.

Such widespread adoption of revolutionary technologies by subpopulations within western countries may not save the economies of the larger socieities. In fact, adoption of revolutionary technologies may hasten these monstrous hybrid and hyper-statist economies to their doom. There will be a lot of hardship accompanying such a downfall of economies, but if a "shadow economy" can be constructed using the new technologies, the way out may grow obvious.

The Obama cult of personality revealed the central vacuity of US media, and cued the public to the untrustworthiness of its information gatekeepers. Most Americans do not care to be Obama zombies, and many of them will resist the powerful forces moving the country toward hyper-statism. This would be an excellent time for emerging technologies of either the distruptive or revolutionary sort.