> We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.

That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing. The prevailing wisdom was that this "internet" thing was going to fundamentally change the structure of human society, and nothing would ever be the same again. We ignored the laws, and society broadly accepted that those laws weren't fit for this new world of abundance and information freedom anyway. Big tech was offered broad protection from any responsibility through laws such as Section 230, which basically says they can't be blamed for anything, as long as they structure their services as a "market".

After 20 years, I think we've found that actually the structure of human society has remained largely the same. The things we all need are still the same. The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.

>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.

Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before the internet arrived on the scene, I can’t think of anything which is harder to produce or distribute since the advent of the internet. Particularly on distribution, I have far more access to goods and services than my parents did.

Agreed that this hasn’t changed the structure of society in any meaningful way. We’re still social animals with all the same strengths and weaknesses as before.

>That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing.

By the people not involved in the things breaking maybe. If you didn't drive a taxi or run a hotel the tech companies "disrupting" things by breaking laws didn't affect you directly. Now with LLMs, they do.