But something else is blatantly apparent as well, and it becomes tangible through the lens of filmic recording. Imagine a bulldozer doing its work recorded on video. It destroys buildings and tears them to the ground. Now imagine the same recording being played backwards. It will show something very peculiar, namely a bulldozer that actually constructs a building. You will see that dust and debris will violently contract into building materials. The structure will materialize as if sucked from thin air with some kind of Brutalist vacuum cleaner. In fact, the process you see in this imaginary video is very similar to what I described; it is a pristine visualization of a special variety of creative destruction.
Shortly before World War I, the sociologist Werner Sombart coined the term “creative destruction” in his book War and Capitalism.6 During World War II, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter labeled creative destruction “the essential fact about capitalism.”7 Schumpeter drew on Karl Marx’s description of capitalism’s ability to dissolve all sorts of seemingly solid structures and force them to constantly upgrade and renew, both from within and without. Marx emphasized that “creative destruction” was still primarily a process of destruction.8 However, the term became popular within neoliberal ideologies as a sort of necessary internal cleansing process to keep up productivity and efficiency. Its destructivism echoes in both futurism and contemporary accelerationism, both of which celebrate some kind of mandatory catastrophe.
Today, the term “creative disruption” seems to have taken the place of creative destruction.9 Automation of blue- and white-collar labor, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybernetic control systems or “autonomous” appliances are examples of current so-called disruptive technologies, violently shaking up existing societies, markets, and technologies. This is where we circle back to Al-Jazari’s mechanical robots, predecessors of disruptive technologies. Which types of design are associated with these technologies, if any? What are social technologies of disruption? How are Twitter bots, trolls, leaks, and blanket internet shutdowns deployed to accelerate autocratic rule? How do contemporary robots cause unemployment, and what about networked commodities and semi-autonomous weapons systems? How about widespread artificial stupidity, dysfunctional systems, and endless hotlines from hell? How about the oversized Hyundai and Komatsu cranes and bulldozers, ploughing through destroyed cities, performing an absurd ballet mécanique, punching through ruins, clawing through social fabric, erasing lived presents and eagerly building blazing emptiness?
Disruptive innovation is causing social polarization through the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. It facilitates the fragmentation of societies by creating antisocial tech monopolies that spread bubbled resentment, change cities, magnify shade, and maximize poorly paid freelance work. The effects of these social and technological disruptions include nationalist, sometimes nativist, fascist, or ultra-religious mass movements.10 Creative disruption, fueled by automation and cybernetic control, runs in parallel with an age of political fragmentation. The forces of extreme capital, turbocharged with tribal and fundamentalist hatred, reorganize within financials and filter bubbles.
In modernist science fiction, the worst kinds of governments used to be imagined as a single artificial intelligence remote-controlling society. Today’s real existing proto- and para-fascisms, however, rely on decentralized artificial stupidity. Bot armies, like farms and meme magick, form the gut brains of political sentiment, manufacturing shitstorms that pose as popular passion. The idea of technocratic fascist rule—supposedly detached, omniscient, and sophisticated—is realized as a barrage of dumbed-down tweets. Democracy’s demos is replaced by a mob on mobiles11 capturing people’s activities, motion, and vital energies. But in contrast to the modernist dystopias, current autocracies do not rely on the perfection of such systems. They rather thrive on their permanent breakdown, dysfunctions, and so-called “predictive” capacities creating havoc.
Time seems especially affected by disruption. Think back to the reversed bulldozer video: the impression of creative destruction only comes about because time was reversed and is running backwards. After 1989, Jacques Derrida dramatically declared that time was “out of joint” and basically running amok. Writers like Francis Fukuyama thought history had somehow petered out. Jean-François Lyotard described the present as a succession of explosion-like shocks, after which nothing in particular happened.12 Simultaneously, logistics reorganized global production chains, trying to montage disparate shreds of time to maximize efficiency and profit. Echoing cut-and-paste aesthetics, the resulting fragmented time created large-scale havoc for people who had to organize their own lives around increasingly impossible, fractured, and often unpaid work hours and schedules.
Added to this is a dimension of time that is no longer accessible to humans, but only to networked so-called control systems that produce flash crashes and high frequency trading scams. Financialization introduces a host of further complications: the economic viability of the present is sustained by debt, that is, by future income claimed, consumed, or spent in the present. Thus on the one hand futures are depleted, and on the other, presents are destabilized. In short, the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed. Which means that for at least parts of this trajectory, time indeed runs backwards, from an emptied-out future to nurturing a stagnant imaginary past, sustained by disruptive design.
Disruption shows in the jitter in the ill-aligned wipes of the old town’s 3D render. The transition between present and future is abrupt and literally uneven: frames look as if jolted by earthquakes. In replacing a present urban reality characterized by strong social bonds with a sanitized digital projection that renders population replacement, disruptive design shows grief and dispossession thinly plastered over with an opportunist layer of pixels.
Warfare in the old town is far from being irrelevant, marginal or peripheral, since it shows a singular form of disruptive design, a specific design of killing, a special form of wrecked cutting-edge temporality. Futures are hastened, not by spending future incomes, but by making future deaths happen in the present; a sort of application of the mechanism of debt to that of military control, occupation, and expropriation.
While dreaming of the one technological singularity that will once and for all render humanity superfluous, disruption as a social, aesthetic, and militarized process creates countless little singularities, entities trapped within the horizons of what autocrats declare as their own history, identity, culture, ideology, race, or religion; each with their own incompatible rules, or more precisely, their own incompatible lack of rules.13 “Creative disruption” is not just realized by the wrecking of buildings and urban areas. It refers to the wrecking of a horizon of common understanding, replacing it by narrow, parallel, top-down, trimmed and bleached artificial histories.
This is exactly how processes of disruption might affect you, if you live somewhere else that is. Not in the sense that you will necessarily be expropriated, displaced or worse. This might happen or not, depending on where (and who) you are. But you too might get trapped in your own singular hell of a future repeating invented pasts, with one part of the population hell-bent on getting rid of another. People will peer in from afar, conclude they can’t understand what’s going on, and keep watching cat videos.
What to do about this? What is the opposite design, a type of creation that assists pluriform, horizontal forms of life, and that can be comprehended as part of a shared humanity? What is the contrary to a procedure that inflates, accelerates, purges, disrupts, and homogenizes; a process that designs humanity as a uniform, cleansed, and allegedly superior product, a super-humanity comprised of sanitized render ghosts?
The contrary is a process that doesn’t grow via destruction, but very literally de-grows constructively. This type of construction is not creating inflation, but devolution. Not centralized competition but cooperative autonomy. Not fragmenting time and dividing people, but reducing expansion, inflation, consumption, debt, disruption, occupation, and death. Not superhumanity; humanity as such would perfectly do.
A woman had stayed in the old town on her own throughout the curfew to take care of her cow, who lived in the back stable. Her daughters had climbed through a waterfall