Infinite Content: Chapter 1

What Disruption Is and Why it Matters

This is the draft first chapter of my book, Infinite Content: AI, The Next Great Disruption of Media, and How to Navigate What’s Coming, due to be published by The MIT Press in 2026. The introductory chapter is available for free here. Subsequent draft chapters will be serialized for paid subscribers to The Mediator and can be found here.

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I had the pleasure of meeting Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen a few times. “Had the pleasure of” sounds cliched, but in this case it really was. He was as close to a rockstar as any business school professor can be, but he was humble and completely attentive to whatever conversation was at hand. He was obviously brilliant, but also clear and plain-spoken. He talked effusively and vulnerably about his family and his religion—even with complete strangers. When he passed away at only 67, the Harvard Crimson obituary referred to him as “beloved.” Even from my few meetings with him, I understood why.

I was also surprised to realize that he harbored a secret. Christensen was, of course, the father of disruptive innovation theory. He developed a comprehensive framework that explained the process by which poorly-funded upstarts can upend huge, powerful incumbents. He also built a cottage industry around helping incumbents manage disruption. He wrote books about it, launched a consulting firm, and advised many companies directly. But here’s the secret: he could point to very few who had succeeded.

In 2011, he spoke to a small group of us at Time Warner. He spent about 20 minutes thoughtfully describing the disruption process and then asked for questions. I put up my hand.

“Can you provide us some case studies of incumbents that have successfully navigated disruption?”

“I put the question back to you,” he replied, “what examples can you think of?”

I found this response confusing. “I can’t, really. That’s why I asked.”

“Well,” he replied, “at Harvard we use the Socratic method.”

I didn’t mean to be cheeky, although it probably came off that way. “Ok, but we’re not at Harvard, we’re at the Time Warner Center. Who should we emulate?”

His answer: IBM. IBM? In fairness, IBM successfully managed a series of disruptions over several decades: the disruption of mainframes by mini-computers in the 1960s-70s; the disruption of mini-computers by PCs in the 1980s-90s; and the commoditization of PCs (by shifting into IT services and consulting). But recall this was 2011. At that point, IBM’s revenue growth had been flat-to-low single digits for a decade and its stock had not budged over that time. It had missed both the internet and mobile. It was hardly the poster child of corporate success.

It was a memorable lesson for me. Disruption is an overwhelmingly powerful force. Even now, nearly 15 years later and three decades since Christensen first published The Innovator’s Dilemma, incumbent success stories in the face of disruption are few and far between.

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The word disruption gets thrown around so much that its meaning has become muddled. It is now often used to mean “compete with a different business model and/or technology.”

When I refer to disruption, I mean Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory, which is much more precise. It describes a specific process through which new entrants challenge incumbents. It has played out across many industries, over many decades, and has critical economic and social implications.

Importantly for us, it has both explanatory and predictive power. We will use it for both. This book is foremost about the disruption of media, as Christensen defined it: the disruption of content distribution, which is still playing out, and the disruption of content creation that is coming. To explain the consequences of the prior disruption and predict the potential implications of the next one, we must first understand what disruption is, how it happens, why it’s important, and how one disruption may differ from the next.

In this chapter, I lay that foundation. I explain the roots of Christensen’s theory and build on it by exploring several topics that he didn’t, but which will be important as we proceed through the book: why the speed and extent of disruption can vary substantially from case-to-case; the difference between business disruption and ecosystem disruption, which is especially important for media businesses; how one business, industry, or ecosystem can be disrupted more than once; and the characteristics of the most disruptive innovations—General Purpose Technologies, or GPTs.

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