There is nothing about progress that inherently requires disruption – except our inability to work together for stability.
Is progress possible without disruption?
It sometimes feels like our culture has become addicted to doom – needing time to be characterized by anxious anticipation instead of something more proactive or controlled. We have learned to expect that change should be chaotic, that innovation should be destructive, that the future should collide with the now, whether we want it to or not.
But there is nothing about progress that inherently requires disruption, other than our inability to work together for the sake of stability.
Think about the current conversation AI and the future of work. Most people seem to agree that there are three possible scenarios:
Scenario A: AI replaces almost all functions that humans provide so quickly that society can no longer respond as it did to previous industrial revolutions. Mass unemployment destabilizes social structures supported by payroll taxes. Even with a soft landing – universal basic income, higher corporate taxes – this is seen as catastrophic because it goes against the current capitalist paradigm and leaves people with the existential problem of separating meaning and purpose from work.
Scenario B: AI replaces most current features, but not so quickly. Persistent unemployment persists, but the gradual shift creates opportunities for humans to differentiate themselves from machines and derive value accordingly. Painful, but manageable. And afterward, this may even enable a more deliberate and gentler transition to a new kind of society.
Scenario C: We recognize that AIThe current trajectory is destructive to the social fabric. We slow it down, change the way it is used, and possibly reject aspects of it entirely. This would be the Amish approach – where observation and discussion about how a technology benefits the community determines its acceptance, use and integration.
Most people assume that scenario C is impossible. We’ve already gone too far, they say. The technology exists, the investment has been made, the momentum is unstoppable. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Perhaps power and money are now too involved – unwilling and unable to accept regulation – untouchable by those who want something different.
But maybe not. There are cultures that show us the way.
Despite popular belief, the Amish are not technophobes. They do use technology, but not everything that comes with it. They carefully evaluate the instruments together, based on whether they strengthen or weaken their social structure. They observe. They choose. They have freedom of choice. A telephone can help, but only if it is placed in a shared building rather than in individual homes so that family time is not fragmented. The Amish show that discernment does not mean rejection.
It seems we have lost the ability to do the same. But more accurately, I believe we are convinced we have lost it.
We have internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something—or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, and conditionally—feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But ‘inevitable’ does a lot of work in that sense. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?
The convergence of progress and disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who benefit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very useful argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving quickly and breaking things before anyone can judge whether those things need to be broken.
Disruption benefits the information economy. It makes for a good story when it happens, and a tantalizing – if not addictive – constant trickle of doom when it feels like it’s just around the corner. I would like to live in a world where good future stories trump apocalyptic stories, but I don’t. And so the medium creates the message, and the message creates the moment.
Disruption has become such a powerful memetic force that we have simply forgotten that it is optional. We are taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled and socially destructive – that anything less is not true innovation. But this framework is itself a choice, a choice made for us by people with specific incentives.
Consider what we have accepted as inevitable over the past twenty-five years: the fragmentation of attention, the erosion of privacy, the monetization of human connections, the replacement of public spaces with corporate platforms, the optimization of everything for engagement regardless of the human cost. We were told that this was the price of progress, that resistance was futile, that the technology was neutral, and that the outcomes were just the natural evolution of the way humans interact.
But none of that was inevitable. It’s all chosen. Not by us, but for us.
The doom addiction makes sense in this context. When change is inevitable and beyond our control, the best we can do is anticipate its arrival with a mixture of fear and fascination. Doom is exciting. The fate is dramatic. Fate absolves us of our responsibility, because if a catastrophe is coming no matter what we do, why bother to prevent it?
But stability? Cooperation? Careful evaluation of whether a technology actually serves us? These feel boring, impossible and naive. They require something we seem to have lost: the belief that we can collectively decide how technology is integrated into our lives, rather than simply accepting whatever technologists and investors want to build.
I’m not anti-technology. I have always been fascinated, excited and motivated by new things. I’m picky though. This is about regaining the ability to say ‘not like that’ or ‘not yet’ or ‘only under these circumstances’. It’s about recognizing that the speed and mode of technology adoption is itself a choice, and one that should be made collectively rather than imposed by those who want to make a profit.
What is required to choose scenario C? Not to reject AI completely, but to judge it the way the Amish judge technology – with the good of the community as the main criterion rather than efficiency, profit or inevitability.
Collaboration would be required. It would require prioritizing stability over disruption. It would require us to believe that we have a say in how our world changes, that progress does not have to be chaotic, that we can choose to integrate new capabilities slowly and carefully rather than accept the pace that Silicon Valley sets.
This would require rejecting the narrative that technological change is a force of nature and not a series of choices made by people with special interests.
Perhaps we have actually lost the ability to collaborate on that scale. Perhaps the forces pushing for rapid action are too powerful, too entrenched, and too good at framing their interests as inevitable progress. Maybe scenario C really is impossible.
But I suspect it’s not that we’ve lost the ability, but more that we’ve forgotten we ever had it. We have been told for so long that we cannot choose, that resistance is futile, that disruption is the price of progress, that we have internalized it as truth.
The question is not whether we can make progress without disruption. The question is whether we can remember that we get to choose, and whether enough of us can do so at the same time.
05-02-2026
Filed under: Essays
#Progress #Disruption #Christopher #Butler