Disruption has become a catchword among movers and shakers in the tech world. And almost everyone else seems to have picked it up, too.

“Every successful social movement in this country’s history has used disruption as a strategy to fight for social change,” said Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. “No change has been won without disruptive action.”

While Garza is probably correct, she doesn’t parse those sentences. So I will.

Two questions arise. Where does manageable change end and disruption begin? How much disruption can we stand, as individuals and as a country, before we get ugly?

We all expect change. When the leaves turn, we get out the jackets. When the wind turns raw, we get out the overcoats. We adjust.

Disruption is more than change. Dictionaries define it with such words as disorder, rupture and upheaval. Though trained in political science, I don’t know how to measure the amount or pace of disruption. My gut tells me disruption is growing and quickening.

Is it possible that all the disruption is causing a sense among us that we have lost agency? Lost control over our daily lives?

A wee example. Credit cards disrupted the retail payment system. My father-in-law, a banker, sent us two Bankamericards (now Visa) in 1969. In Nashville, where we lived then, the cards were useful pretty much only at gas stations. Those gas stations turned out to be the first rumble of retail disruption.

My mother had taught me how to write checks so no one could steal the check and write in a number to raise the amount and then cash the check. I still use checks, mainly to pay entities such as CMP and the IRS that I don’t trust with my bank routing numbers. But when we substituted plastic for checks, we gave up a bit of control over our own security.

I use plastic maybe three or four times a month. Yet, during the pandemic, my card identity was stolen three times, forcing me to cancel cards and automatic payments and resume automatic payments on new cards. Plastic is convenient but costs more because merchants must pay bank fees — small businesses can pay as much as 10% — each time we float plastic. And sometimes we have to go through the hassle of getting new cards.

COVID-19 has certainly been among the two or three biggest disruptors in my lifetime. (Other candidates include Vietnam, the second Iraq war and the 2016 election.)

Before COVID-19, we could expect to encounter a mostly familiar pattern every day. The brand of salad dressing you want is on the shelves when you shop. Your favored restaurant opens on its posted schedule. Movie house schedules change on Friday.

That all went away with the pandemic. It’s coming back slowly. I can eat out once in a while, I’ve seen three movies since Railroad Square in Waterville reopened. But my salad dressings aren’t back, not to mention Dobie pads or brown napkins and paper towels.

Multiplying all those personal disruptions a few billion times may add up to societal disruption. Workers disrupted from a job may easily imagine a cabal intent on replacing them with other workers at lower cost. Men who were taught that they were the rightful heirs to jobs and power see women moving into many of those spots and may easily imagine a cabal intent on taking power from men. White people who see Asian, Hispanic and Black folks move gradually up the social ladder may imagine a cabal to rob whites of social status.

Disruption may not give life to these conspiracy ideas but it may at least intensify them.

All this disruption, and no one was there to remind us that life isn’t a zero-sum game. Your gain isn’t necessarily my loss. When the best candidates, regardless of the condition of their birth (race, gender, religion, social status) move into positions of power and trust, all of society rises just a tad. Multiply that a few billion times for a better society overall.

Perhaps no one is more quoted on disruption than Mark Zuckerberg, the major domo of Facebook, who famously said, “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”

Does “break things” include the political system that has shielded Zuckerberg all these years from accountability? I suspect that it does or that he doesn’t care. Or both.

Zuckerberg is justifiably taking lots of heat lately for steering his corporation toward  monstrous profits at great cost to everyone else, perhaps even the cost of our democracy.

I’m not arguing against disruption or even against breaking things. And certainly not against moving fast. I’m a basketball fan, after all. But I believe the pace of disruption may have risen up so much that we can’t keep up with it. As our heads spin, we may grab for answers that wouldn’t make a lick of sense if things moved slower. And broke up less.

Bob Neal never joined Facebook and hopes one day to be able to say, “I told you so” when Facebook and Zuckerberg collapse. Or get regulated like other public platforms. Neal can be reached at [email protected].