Twilight of the Disrupters
by Dr. Edward Tenner, Distinguished Scholar of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Princeton University Department of Sociology and the Rutgers University Department of History. Originally published as “Twilight of the Disrupters” by Dr. Edward Tenner at The Milken Institute Review: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/twilight-of-the-disrupters. This article is republished here with his permission.
Two years ago, following the implosion of the submersible craft Titan with four paying passengers on board, I wrote an essay in the Milken Institute Review on Stockton Rush (the founder of Titan’s parent company OceanGate and pilot that day), in the context of the tradition of “heroic capitalism.” Heroic capitalists spurn conventional economic rationality to maintain the posture of heroes of industry, like, to take one notable example, the owners of anthracite coal mines in eastern Pennsylvania in the early 19th century who blithely endangered themselves and their workers to change the world and become rich in the process.
Publication of the U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s report on the Titan tragedy begs for an alternative look at the maverick entrepreneur as a social type. In retrospect, they seem close not to the digital platform oligarchs like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, but to the wannabes and fraudsters Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried who resorted to deception when their reality distortion fields ceased to function.
Unlike them, Rush was legitimate; why else would he have piloted the fatal dive? But like them, he relished the David-versus-Goliath role, asserting his ability to prove that deep sea exploration need not be limited to the small circle of wealthy dilettantes who can afford to explore the seas’ deepest places in incredibly expensive two-person titanium spheres. In the end, he defiantly refused to have his designs certified by the classifying organizations that test experimental vessels, probably knowing that he could not afford the additional R&D needed to make carbon fiber containment truly safe under enormous pressure – if indeed it was even possible. His decision to proceed will probably make sense only once the internal messages and finances of OceanGate are revealed in the liability suits filed against the company.
Of course, high-risk entrepreneurship did not die with Stockton Rush. But I believe the romantic cult of the founder did. Rush may have been the last of the breed, a mediocre college student but a successful aircraft test pilot even before graduation. A leaked transcript of his senior year as an engineering major at Princeton reveals his seriously underwhelming grades in physics (C+), civil engineering (D), and computer science (F). Yet “Tock” Rush ’84 impressed his later associates as brilliant, and despite his often ruthless behavior toward employees, retained a loyal circle of friends from his college days. They remember his charisma, humor, and passionate pursuit of exploration.
Rediscovering a Classic
Seeking insight into the history of entrepreneurial disruption, I fortuitously found a dollar paperback of Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy at a library book sale. The book offers a long and complex analysis with many ideas still provocative today — for example, on the role of unemployed university graduates in anti-capitalist agitation. But Schumpeter was most famous for extolling the role of the entrepreneur as innovator who makes established technologies obsolete, as Rush claimed he could do by substituting light and relatively inexpensive carbon fiber for super-strong titanium alloy in submersibles.
There is something to be said for institutions including the Coast Guard, the universities and corporations with whom Rush broke, and the watercraft classification organizations to which he refused to submit his submersible.
Edmund Burke’s celebrated words on the French Revolution (“The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.”) are echoed in Schumpeter’s views on the fate of the entrepreneur after the birth of corporate capitalism. “Warfare in the Middle Ages was a very personal affair,” Schumpeter wrote. “The armored knights practiced an art that required lifelong training and every one of them counted individually by virtue of personal skill and prowess.” But as fighting became mechanized, “success in what is now a mere profession [as opposed to a proud social class] no longer carries that connotation of individual achievement” that could elevate the warrior class into social leadership. Today, even the most elite commandos, like the Seal Team Six band that brought down Osama bin Laden, are known largely collectively.
“Capitalist enterprise,” Schumpeter continued, “by its very achievements, tends to automatize progress” and thus “to make itself superfluous.” The heroic entrepreneurs are reduced to cogs in large industrial bureaucracies. Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers thus became “the true pacemakers of socialism.”
How Schumpeter would have applied his analysis to Gates, Bezos, Musk, and company can never be known. But his analysis puts Stockton Rush in a new perspective as one of the last knights of technology (in carbon-fiber armor), a successor to his entrepreneurial father, R. Stockton Rush, who combined oil and gas exploration with conservation initiatives. (Conspiracy theorists will be delighted to discover that he was also president of one of their favorite shadowy, world-dominating organizations, San Francisco’s legendary Bohemian Club, and that his son was president-elect at the time of his death.)
Revelations of the dark side of disrupters and innovators is not new: think of the once-idolized Charles Lindbergh’s flirtation with Adolph Hitler. But Lindbergh also helped transform American aviation. Rush leaves no such legacy.
Time for Neo-Institutionalism?
I still think one can glean a positive lesson from the last voyage of the Titan -- that despite cries for efficiency and doing more with less, there is something to be said for institutions including the Coast Guard, the universities and corporations with whom Rush broke, and the watercraft classification organizations to which he refused to submit his submersible. Indeed, it may be time to cast a friendlier eye on the Nanny State that Rush loved to hate. For as the British critic Hilaire Belloc wrote in his children’s verse “Jim” about a lad killed by a lion after slipping away from his nanny:
Always keep ahold of nurse For fear of finding something worse.
About the Author
Dr. Edward Tenner is an independent writer and speaker at the intersection of science, design, and culture. A founding advisor of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, he is now affiliated with the National Museum of American History as Distinguished Scholar and is also a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University Department of History. He was previously a community college instructor, a health care studies researcher (and coauthor of a paper on Canadian and American health care policy), foreign language research assistant of William H. McNeill in the composition of Plagues and Peoples, executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press, a visiting lecturer in the Humanities Council at Princeton, an affiliate of four other departments and units at Princeton (Geosciences, English, Center for Information Technology Policy, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies), a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (1991-1992 and 2020-2021), and of the University of Pennsylvania Department of the History and Sociology of Science.
He received the A.B. with Highest Honors from Princeton University and the Ph.D. in European history from the University of Chicago (where he was a Special Humanities Fellow), studied at the University of Heidelberg as a German Academic Exchange Service scholar, and was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. His most recent books are Why Things Bite Back, Our Own Devices, and The Efficiency Paradox (all Knopf/Vintage). He has delivered two TED talks based on themes of these works.
Edward Tenner’s honors include Junior Year Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, honorary Danforth Graduate Fellow, the Wadsworth Prize of Harvard Magazine for the best article of the year on Harvard University, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Distinguished Lectureship at the Indiana University School of Information and Library Science and at Western Washington University, and annual keynote honoree of the leading center for the study of public intellectuals, the Messiah College (now University) Center for Public Humanities. He is a member of the editorial board of Raritan Quarterly Review and of the board of directors of the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
