Jill Lepore on disruption

Evan Goldstein interviews Jill Lepore about her latest book, These Truths (W.W. Norton), a history of America. Here's some remarks on disruption:

Q. The last chapter of These Truths is titled "America, Disrupted," and it traces the rise of ideas from the tech world, like innovation. You point out that innovation was traditionally seen as something to be wary of.

A. It’s true that the last chapter is about disruptive innovation, but it’s also true that the book starts with the history of writing as a technology. Reading "America, Disrupted" in isolation might seem like I have some beef with Silicon Valley — which may or may not be the case — but reading that chapter after the 15 that come before makes it clear that what I have is a deep and abiding interest in technology and communication.Innovation as an idea in America is historically a negative thing. Innovation in politics is what is to be condemned: To experiment recklessly with a political arrangement is fatal to our domestic tranquillity. So there’s a lot of anti-innovation language around the founding, especially because Republicanism — Jeffersonianism — is considered excessively innovative. Innovation doesn’t assume its modern sense until the 1930s, and then only in a specialized literature.

Disruption has a totally different history. It’s a way to avoid the word "progress," which, even when it’s secularized, still implies some kind of moral progress. Disruption emerges in the 1990s as progress without any obligation to notions of goodness. And so "disruptive innovation," which became the buzzword of change in every realm in the first years of the 21st century, including higher education, is basically destroying things because we can and because there can be money made doing so. Before the 1990s, something that was disruptive was like the kid in the class throwing chalk. And that’s what disruptive innovation turned out to really mean. A little less disruptive innovation is called for.

Q. Your first big volley on this topic came in The New Yorker in 2014. Does the innovation mind-set continue to hold such sway within higher education?

A. I think there’s quite a bit more caution now than when I wrote that essay. That was the high point of heedlessness, when the big thing to be celebrated was blowing up the newspapers. The reason I wrote the essay, after a great deal of unwillingness, was because The New York Times had produced an internal report that was a brief for how the Times needed to become more like BuzzFeed. I thought it was completely bananas. Institutions that mattered to public culture were being dismantled, and institutions in which how we know what we know can be arbitrated — journalism, the academy — were being destroyed.

Q. You mentioned having been unwilling for a long time to write about disruptive innovation. Why?

A. I was super hesitant because it involved writing about the work of a member of the faculty to which I belong [Clayton M. Christensen], even if the business school is quite a distance intellectually from here.

Also, when I first read all the work, I thought: This is bunk. This doesn’t seem serious enough for me to spend time on. So part of my hesitation was, like, people really buy this stuff? Months passed and then that New York Times report came out and I realized that people buy this so much that the New York Times is remaking itself in the image of this theory.