Silicon Valley is famous for ‘disrupting’ business models and whole industries through innovative technology: this language – of technological disruption – is also a coded way of saying that there is a new middleman in town. And it subtly suggests that new technology is inseparable from the business practices associated with it. This slippery rhetoric is part of how Silicon Valley companies create exceptions to the norms and rules of their industry competitors while subtly rewriting the rules.

Alex Rosenblat

Rosenblat, A. (2018). Uberland. University of California Press.