Donald Trump is a disruptive president, but this has got nothing to do with disruptive technology.
A view did the rounds this weekend that President Trump is the personification of what disruptive technology is all about. Such a view misses the point.
Words can fool us. When we were at school, the word disruptive applied to the naughty boy or girl who sat at the back and made many of us laugh, created hell for the teacher, but held back the collective learning of the class.
There is a view that this is what people are thinking of when they talk about disruptive technology and that since President Trump seems to represent that naughty boy to a tee, what is Silicon Valley complaining about?
This view simply demonstrates that those who advance it have missed the point.
Disruptive technology typically has four core characteristics:
Firstly, it can totally change the make-up of an industry, causing companies that had dominated that industry for years to fail, and creating a new type of dominant player.
Secondly, it usually emerges from somewhere over there: it evolves from a different business.
Thirdly, it is very hard to predict.
And fourthly, creates a new way of doing things.
But it also has a common theme: it involves technology.
The iPhone illustrates these points. Firstly, not only did this product change the mobile phone business, it has changed photography, the map printing business, the way we shop, the way we read and the way we communicate.
Secondly, it grew out of the computer business: it came from a direction that most of the companies it affected did not understand.
Thirdly, few people saw it coming and fourthly, it is new, all new.
And, of course, it makes use of tech: packing more computer power than the whole of NASA had during the moon landings.
President Trump ticks the first three boxes. He has changed politics, he was an outsider with little or no political experience and very few people predicted his rise.
But he does not represent new ideas: instead he advances ultra-conservative views: bring back manufacturing, pull up borders, the antithesis of collaboration which disruptive technologies tend to support.
Finally, he has nothing to do with tech. Trump and his billionaires all made money the old-fashioned way.
In fact, in the Trump regime, tech is becoming the enemy, tech is the new 'Sith', Dath Vadar in San Francancisco, it symbolises the elite.
President Trump is not truly disruptive because he represents the philosophy of turning the clock back to a mythical day when America was great, the American Dream was real, when in fact, tech is the means by which the US has continued to dominate global business and because of the way it is linked with entrepreneurism, maybe the greatest embodiment of the American Dream ever witnessed.
A true disruptive tech politician would try to change America so that it embraces tech and turns it to the advantage of those who live in areas that voted for Trump out of social disenfranchisement.
