Everyone's a Revolutionary Until Friday

In the build-up to his 1987 fight with Tyrell Biggs, Mike Tyson was asked about strategy.

His answer was blunt: everyone has a plan—until they take the first hit.

I think the same rhythm applies here: "Everyone wants to change the status quo — until it's time to actually do it."

Both lines cut off at the same point. Both reveal the same truth: talking a good game is easy, but when the cost or the punch lands, that's when you find out who's serious.

I have a mate who posts about "disrupting the norm” and “challenging the status quo” every few weeks on LinkedIn.

They’ve got the hoodie. They’ve got the standing desk. They’ve got the "change-maker" energy that gets them invited to panels about innovation.

But after Paul and Vibushan, the co-founders of Oru Space, in Sutton, posted on LinkedIn about the racist abuse they received, the change makers' feed went quiet.

When Samia needed a platform to talk about Palestine, they were nowhere to be found.

When it came time to actually challenge something that mattered, they had completely fucked off.

Because here's what I've learnt: everyone wants to be different until it's time to be different.

The performance vs the practice

I’m still reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, and if we dropped her into a room where "tech bros" were talking about "disrupting everything," she'd tear the varnish off in minutes.

She'd point out that much of this rhetoric is theatre.

The "system" being disrupted is often surface-level stuff—taxis, hotels, office space—whilst the deeper structures of capitalism, inequality, and extractive power remain untouched.

Uber didn't dismantle the exploitative taxi industry. It made a more precarious one.

Amazon didn't challenge retail monopolies. It became one.

I know this because I was part of it.

In 2012, I was involved in a sharing economy startup. I became very excited about the prospect of disrupting everything.

What we were doing was bullshit.

I found a satirical video in 2015 called "Well-Deserved: The Premier Marketplace for Privilege," and it remains true today. It's about a startup that lets privileged people monetise their advantages.

"I work at Google and get free lunch every day," says one founder. "Now I sell that guest lunch and feel better knowing I'm putting my privilege to use."

Another entrepreneur walks with women to spare them harassment—and charges them five bucks for the service.