Silicon Valley has gifted us a powerful mythology. Innovation—the word itself carries an almost sacred quality, conjuring images of garage startups transforming the world, brilliant minds solving humanity's greatest challenges, the relentless march of progress.

But mythology serves purposes. It shapes what we see and what we don't. When we celebrate disruption, we rarely ask: disruption of what? And for whom? The language of innovation functions as a kind of ideological anesthesia, numbing us to the injuries inflicted in progress's name.

This isn't an argument against technological advancement or creative problem-solving. It's an invitation to look beneath the gleaming surface of innovation discourse and examine the power relations it conceals. Because every celebration of disruption is also a story about who gets disrupted—and who profits from the wreckage.

When Uber arrived in cities worldwide, the narrative was intoxicating: inefficient taxi monopolies finally facing competition. Consumers would benefit from lower prices and better service. The future had arrived.

What this story obscured was striking. Taxi drivers who had invested their life savings in medallions saw their value collapse overnight. Not because they'd failed at their jobs, but because a well-funded corporation had decided the rules shouldn't apply to them. Disruption rhetoric reframes regulatory arbitrage as innovation.

The pattern repeats across industries. When Amazon revolutionizes retail, we celebrate convenience while ignoring the hollowed-out main streets and warehouse workers timing their bathroom breaks. When AI promises to transform knowledge work, we marvel at efficiency gains while millions face obsolescence with inadequate safety nets.

This isn't mere oversight—it's ideological work. The language of disruption positions those harmed as unfortunate casualties of progress, collateral damage in an inevitable march forward. But there's nothing inevitable about who bears these costs. Policy choices and power imbalances determine whether disruption's benefits flow upward while its burdens fall downward. The mythology of innovation makes these choices invisible by naturalizing them as the price of progress.

Takeaway

Disruption always disrupts someone. The question isn't whether innovation creates losers, but whether those losers have any voice in how the game is played—and whether we've simply decided their losses don't count.

The great promise of the platform economy was democratization. Anyone could become an entrepreneur! Drive with Uber, host on Airbnb, sell on Etsy. The middlemen were being eliminated, and ordinary people could finally capture the full value of their labor and assets.

The reality has proven rather different. Platforms don't eliminate middlemen—they become the ultimate middlemen. They insert themselves into transactions, extract fees, and accumulate data that gives them ever-increasing power over those who depend on them. The gig worker isn't an entrepreneur; they're a piece-rate laborer with none of the protections workers spent a century fighting for.

Consider the algorithmic management that governs platform work. Uber drivers don't know how fares are calculated or why they receive certain ride assignments. Amazon's warehouse workers are monitored down to the second. DoorDash dashers compete against invisible metrics that determine their access to lucrative orders. This is control without accountability—all the power of a boss with none of the obligations.

The feudal analogy isn't hyperbole. Medieval peasants worked land they didn't own, paying lords for the privilege of their labor. Today's platform workers operate on digital terrain owned by corporations, paying algorithmic lords for access to customers and income. The relationship has been dressed in the language of flexibility and entrepreneurship, but the underlying power dynamic remains extraction. Users generate the content, drivers provide the service, hosts clean the sheets—and the platform captures the value.

Takeaway

When someone offers you a platform instead of a job, ask who controls the algorithm. Flexibility without power isn't freedom—it's precarity dressed in startup language.

If innovation discourse serves power, what would it look like to reclaim the concept? Not to abandon technological progress, but to insist that those affected by innovation have standing to shape its direction.

Start with a simple reframing. Instead of asking "Is this innovative?" ask "Who benefits and who bears the costs?" Instead of celebrating disruption, demand accountability for the disrupted. This isn't anti-technology—it's anti-mystification.

Concrete alternatives exist. Worker cooperatives like Stocksy and Up & Go offer platform models where users share ownership and governance. Community benefit agreements can ensure that tech development serves local needs. Algorithmic transparency requirements can expose the hidden logics that shape workers' lives. These aren't utopian fantasies; they're functioning alternatives that simply don't attract venture capital because they don't concentrate wealth and power.

The deeper shift is cultural. We need to stop treating innovation as inherently valuable and start treating it as we would any other exercise of power—something requiring justification, oversight, and democratic input. The technologist in a garage isn't a neutral figure pursuing progress. They're a political actor whose choices will shape lives, often in ways those affected never consented to. Recognizing this doesn't stop innovation; it makes innovation answerable to those it claims to serve.

Takeaway

Innovation becomes accountable when those disrupted have power to shape how disruption happens. The question isn't whether change is coming, but whether you'll have any say in what it looks like.

The mythology of innovation isn't going to dismantle itself. Too many fortunes depend on our continued belief that disruption is synonymous with progress, that those harmed are simply on the wrong side of history.

But ideologies can be contested. Every time we refuse the framing—every time we ask who benefits, who pays, who decides—we chip away at innovation's mystique. We begin to see clearly what the mythology obscures: political choices masquerading as technological inevitability.

The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we make. The only question is whether we'll keep letting a small class of innovators make it for us—or whether we'll insist on having a voice in what gets built and who gets to share in its benefits.