A good friend of mine recently conducted a fun survey – he asked people why they thought digital was disruptive (I don’t know if he will ever publish the results as this was an internal project at a consulting company). My own answer to that is simple: digital is disruptive because zero marginal cost takes us into a world of abundance when all of our economics, politics and business practices are rooted in scarcity.
Making this flip runs counter to what we have come to treat as ground truths on par with the laws of physics. We say things like “people need jobs” as if they were the same as “objects fall to the ground.” We have been conditioned to accept behaviors such as consumerism and financial indebtedness as rooted in human nature. The full disruption from digital will not be realized until we open ourselves up to a much broader conception of what is possible and why we are here.
