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NXNE: Disruption is Dead, Long Live Disruption

Apr 13, 2018

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    @mikerugnetta

    1Thursday, June 19, 14

    First things first, I wanna let everyone know RIGHT OFF THE BAT, if youre keeping track: this talk contains *ATLEAST* TWO ITEMS from the

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    2Thursday, June 19, 14

    BuzzFeed list of things that happen at every conference. I WILL read to you

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    3Thursday, June 19, 14

    like its storytime AND there are enough terrible dad jokes

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    4Thursday, June 19, 14

    in here that I cant imagine there wont be at least some awkward no-laughing pauses so just... like... fair warning, IGUESS? ANYWAY! Now thats out of the way!

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    @mikerugnetta

    5Thursday, June 19, 14

    Ladies and Gentlemen, hello! My name is Mike Rugnetta.

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    6Thursday, June 19, 14

    I am one third of the live, lecture-based multimedia performance art trio

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    7Thursday, June 19, 14

    MemeFactory which makes fast paced shows about the internet and internet culture. I am also the writer and host of

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    youtube.com/pbsideachannel

    8Thursday, June 19, 14

    Idea Channel, a weekly youtube series produced by PBS Digital Studios and made by Kornhaber-Brown which appliesphilosophical and critical concepts to things in the popular culture canon. Every week I get to ask half a millionpeople if they think they

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    9Thursday, June 19, 14

    choose to have their privacy invaded by using the internet, if TV shows like

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    10Thursday, June 19, 14

    orphan black really do signify the existence of some kind of hyperreality and if

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    11Thursday, June 19, 14

    Jurassic Park really IS a warning about the inherent dangers of capitalism. Spoiler alert I think the answer is yes.

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    /watch?v=x2GHXKYKKi412Thursday, June 19, 14

    [WE SPARED NO EXPENSE SUPERCUT].

    [pause]

    In a recent talk he gave at SoundPlus at the University of Maryland, sound, music, communications and culturalstudies scholar

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    http://bit.ly/1lv78zI13Thursday, June 19, 14

    Jonathan Sterne explained to an audience of artists and engineers that while they make media, software and things,he makes questions. Id never suggest I am anywhere close to Sternes league as a thinker and question asker, but Ithink this is a beautiful way to describe the activity of looking deeply into anything.

    http://bit.ly/1lv78zIhttp://bit.ly/1lv78zIhttp://bit.ly/1lv78zI
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    14Thursday, June 19, 14

    Science makes questions. History makes

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    15Thursday, June 19, 14

    questions. Philosophy and critique make

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    questions. Sometimes, when were lucky, there are answers but almost always there are even more questions andwhoa thats really

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    17Thursday, June 19, 14

    frustrating! But also encouraging.

    So that is exactly what Im going to do here today. Im gonna ask one big question, and then lots of small ones. Well

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    http://bit.ly/1lv7Pck18Thursday, June 19, 14

    connect a bunch of things and at some point, there MAY BE SOME

    http://bit.ly/1lv7Pckhttp://bit.ly/1lv7Pckhttp://bit.ly/1lv7Pck
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    ANSWERS. You were, explicitlytold there would be answers

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    20Thursday, June 19, 14

    so Im gonna try really hard to not make a LIAR out of the NXNE organizers but probablyand actually I know this istrue because I went back and added this sentence after I finished writing this presentationthere will really just bemore questions after those answers. SORRY.

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    NOTSORRY

    21Thursday, June 19, 14

    The BIG question I want to ask is admittedly a rather Seinfeldian one: WHATS THE DEAL WITH

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    disruption

    22Thursday, June 19, 14

    "DISRUPTION? When NXNE invited me and asked me to give a talk on the subject, I pulled what my friend Timdescribed as a classic conference move and asked if I could give a talk on why we should stop giving talks on thething I was asked to give a talk on.

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    Which Im pretty surealso files solidly under

    dick move.

    23Thursday, June 19, 14

    Also on the classic conference moves list, I imagine, are ending a presentation after 10 minutes because

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    http://bit.ly/1lv8L0d24Thursday, June 19, 14

    you really wanted to leave enough time for questions and my personal favorite:

    http://bit.ly/1lv8L0dhttp://bit.ly/1lv8L0dhttp://bit.ly/1lv8L0d
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    http://bbc.in/1lv8NoS25Thursday, June 19, 14

    They brought me here to talk about X, but really Im going to talk to you about Y and as it turns out Y is just a reallylong and complicated metaphor for X.

    So! They brought me here to talk about

    http://bbc.in/1lv8NoShttp://bbc.in/1lv8NoShttp://bbc.in/1lv8NoS
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    disruption

    26Thursday, June 19, 14

    disruption, but Im really going to talk about

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    http://bit.ly/1lv8YRk27Thursday, June 19, 14

    CHALLAH BREAD. You see, the single loaf that is Challah bread is woven TOGETHER from up to six strands of dough,but challah itself is a DOUBLE LOAF

    Anyway! The phrase disruptive technology

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    disruptive

    technology

    28Thursday, June 19, 14

    was born some twenty years ago and over the intervening time its twisted and mutated and grown to become thisforce, a guiding principle, a thing of value and something to AIM FOR: there are things out there, and they needDISRUPTING. TechCrunch has referred to every new technology under the sun as disruptive, including an

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    email service that will tell you how best to stretch your dollar at Taco Bell and this

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    gadget that dries your body after youve finished bathing? I guess? Forbes posts about

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    That kind of innovation changes the rules. Were accustomed

    to seeing mature products wiped out by new technologies and

    to ever-shorter product life cycles. But now entire productlineswhole marketsare being created or destroyed

    overnight. Disrupters can come out of nowhere and instantly

    be everywhere. Once launched, such disruption is hard to

    fight.

    We call these game changers big-bang disrupters. Theydont create dilemmas for innovators; they trigger disasters.

    http://bit.ly/1lv9VZP31Thursday, June 19, 14

    BIG BANG DISRUPTORS, which are a sub-category of disruptive technology that is likely to see entire product linesand markets being created or destroyed overnight. Amongst the Big Bang Disruptors this year wereand rememberCREATED AND DESTROYED OVERNIGHTembedded sensors, the first example of which they give is a

    http://bit.ly/1lv9VZPhttp://bit.ly/1lv9VZPhttp://bit.ly/1lv9VZP
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    32Thursday, June 19, 14

    toothbrush,

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    http://bit.ly/1lvaJOo

    33Thursday, June 19, 14

    wearables in general, but specifically things like BEDDIT, a sleep tracker and coach, and

    http://bit.ly/1lvaJOohttp://bit.ly/1lvaJOohttp://bit.ly/1lvaJOo
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    http://bit.ly/1lvaNh734Thursday, June 19, 14

    veristride, a quote-unobtrusive shoe-based technology that will measure and provide active feedback on how well you walk. Theyalso list

    http://bit.ly/1lvaNh7http://bit.ly/1lvaNh7http://bit.ly/1lvaNh7
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    http://bit.ly/1lvaTFu35Thursday, June 19, 14

    driverless vehicles and

    http://bit.ly/1lvaTFuhttp://bit.ly/1lvaTFuhttp://bit.ly/1lvaTFu
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    http://bit.ly/1lvb7MJ36Thursday, June 19, 14

    larger capacity batteries slash e"cient power supplies. Americas most recent

    http://bit.ly/1lvb7MJhttp://bit.ly/1lvb7MJhttp://bit.ly/1lvb7MJ
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    http://cbsloc.al/1lvbg2L

    37Thursday, June 19, 14

    National Climate Assessment, from May, refers to Global Warming as

    http://cbsloc.al/1lvbg2Lhttp://cbsloc.al/1lvbg2Lhttp://cbsloc.al/1lvbg2L
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    climate disruption

    38Thursday, June 19, 14

    climate disruption. If all these things are disruptivewhich maybe they are!then the characteristics that qualifythem as such are necessarily nebulous.

    BUT. OF. COURSE. Language changes. And so thats what were going to

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    HERES WHATS GONNA GO DOWN TALKIN BOUT TALKIN.

    WHAT IS DISRUPTION, ANYWAY?

    COULD IT BE SOMETHING ELSE?*

    *Ithinkmaybe39Thursday, June 19, 14

    talk about, specifically how people use certain words and how the meaning of words change. Then were gonna talkabout what disruption was, and where it came from. Then what it ISlike REALLY isand where it could be going, if wewanted it to go somewhere di#erent than where it is right now. I cant make it go there, but I have no doubts thatsome of you, in this audience, could. Hopefully I can convince you of some things.

    And in the interest of transparency, let me explain, by way of someone else explaining, how I intend to do that:

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    In his introduction to The Machine Question, David J. Gunkel quotes Barbara Johnsons translators notes for JacquesDerridas

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    41Thursday, June 19, 14

    Dissemination...

    Incidentally, how is this for a presentation rabbit hole?

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    A critique is not simple an examination of a particular systemsflaw and imperfections that is designed to make things better.Instead, it is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of thatsystems possibilities. The critique reads backwards from whatseems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order toshow that these things have their history, their reasons forbeing the way they are, their e!ects on what follows from

    them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a(cultural) construct, usually blind to itself.

    43Thursday, June 19, 14

    A critique is not simply an examination of a particular systems flaws and imperfections that is designed to makethings better. Instead, and now heres Barbara, it is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of that systemspossibilities. The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order toshow that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their e#ects on what follows fromthem, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself'.

    Im gonna TRY to do a little bit of that, and see if, in the process, we figure something out about disruption andhow we think, and act, regarding it. But! Before thinking and acting... lets talk about talking:

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    44Thursday, June 19, 14

    We need to admit something: to ourselves, as attendees of a tech conference and citizens of the world and I thinkonce we get this out there everything is going to become much easier. So lets just clear the air, say what everyone isthinking but no one wants to say: Disruption. is.

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    a buzzword. There. I said it. Feels good to get it out in the open. Like a weights been lifted!

    Its up there with

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    tw: buzzwords

    46Thursday, June 19, 14

    social, big data, cloud and the now in its sunset years gamify. It is everywhere. There is a conference named

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    http://bit.ly/1qMtjSX47Thursday, June 19, 14Disrupt,

    http://bit.ly/1qMtjSXhttp://bit.ly/1qMtjSXhttp://bit.ly/1qMtjSX
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    countless books, a sea of blog posts and more than enough marketing material including the word that you couldprobably rearrange it all to construct the entirety of Virgils

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    Aeneid. Its monkeys and typewriters, except for the crowdsourced social graph network e#ect, and

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    what happens next will blow your mind.

    So there are a bunch of things that happen when a certain word becomes this ... popular. The first and foremost:

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    51Thursday, June 19, 14

    the populous revolts. The flavor of distaste we experience when a word is foisted repeatedly front and center is amultifarious, variegated dislike perhaps closer to what we all might have experienced with

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    Happy or

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    Let It Go: each has benefits and its purpose. There are facets easily enjoyed, identified as novel and possessing ofutility, but that utilitous, sharp edge becomes dulled the more it is applied. You may love, in theory, the

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    54Thursday, June 19, 14

    knives in your kitchen but weve all tried to slice a tomato with an edge dull as cantaloupe and know that onlysadness, frustration and

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    http://bit.ly/1qMDO8K55Thursday, June 19, 14tomato goo will ever come of it.

    Accepting for now that the most easily understood annoyance at the overuse of words IS the overuse itselfthat oneis rather just bored of their constant presence, that variety is the spice of life, that endless repetition has its place in

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    bangin techno or

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    http://bit.ly/1qMEefo57Thursday, June 19, 14french gardens but less so in communication, specifically word choicewe are free now to

    http://bit.ly/1qMEefohttp://bit.ly/1qMEefohttp://bit.ly/1qMEefo
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    58Thursday, June 19, 14

    focus on the EFFECTS of that repetition. Its presence given and accounted for, what are the other side-e#ects ofwords constant use?

    An answer, I think, is best illustrated by visiting a passage in William S. Burroughs 1953 novel

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    "Junky". Amidst the various and sundry details surrounding the lives and practices of mid-20th century heroin users,Burroughs at one point describes his picking up some lingo. He writes:

    A group of young hipsters dropped by my place everyd t k d Th C h i i h l d

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    day to smoke weed. There was Cash, a musician who played

    trumpet. There was Pete, a heavy-set blond, who could

    have modeled for a clean-cut American Boy poster. There

    was Johnny White, who had a wife and three children andlooked like any average young American. There was Martin,

    a dark, good-looking kid of Italian stock. No

    zootsuiters. The hipster has gone underground.I learned the new hipster vocabulary: "pot" for

    weed, "twisted" for busted, "cool," an all-purpose word

    indicating anything you like or any situation that is not

    hot with the law. Conversely, anything you don't like is

    "uncool. From listening to these characters, I got a

    picture of the situation in the U.S.A state of complete chaos where you never know who

    is who or where you stand.

    60Thursday, June 19, 14

    A group of young hipsters dropped by my place every day to smoke weed ... No zootsuiters. The hipster has goneunderground.

    I learned the new hipster vocabulary: "pot" for weed, "twisted" for busted, "cool," an all-purpose word indicatinganything you like or any situation that is not hot with the law. Conversely, anything you don't like is "uncool. Fromlistening to these characters, I got a picture of the situation in the U.S.

    A state of complete chaos where you never know who is who or where you stand.

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    Its worth talking about two words here: hipster and cool. Hipsters first written usage is in Jack Smiley's 1941lexicon

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    Hash House Lingo, which purports to "preserve the language of diners and roadside restaurants during their goldenage in the '30s and 40s.

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    hep63Thursday, June 19, 14

    Hep predates and is considered the ancestor of

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    hip64Thursday, June 19, 14

    hip, and was originally used to describe someone

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    in the know

    65Thursday, June 19, 14

    in the know. Hence: Jack Smileys Hash House Lingo definition of hipster to mean

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    hipster(n):

    A know it all.

    66Thursday, June 19, 14

    a know it all. Over time both hep and hip experienced a semantic expansion: their meaning increased fromindicating people who were in the know, who were literally knowledgable about things, to include also people whoknew what was happening. Like yknow HAPPENIN. Maybe with FINGER GUNS. And a

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    LEATHER JACKET.

    Todayhipster means well this.

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    http://bit.ly/1qMGFyv68Thursday, June 19, 14It doesnt so much indicate that a person is hip, hep or knows whats up. Rather, it indicates a most-likely passivemember of a generally disliked, rather fashionable sub-culture built upon practices of cultural appropriation, whichvalues authenticity through the complex prism of irony.

    And while todays hipster might be cool, it is not the same cool that Burroughs uses in Junky: to signify someonewho is with it, who is in the clique who is COOL, meaning, as Burroughs writes likable or NOT hot with

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    http://bit.ly/1qMGPWE69Thursday, June 19, 14

    the law. The law, meaning police o"cers or the heat because they carry

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    http://bit.ly/1qMH1Fi70Thursday, June 19, 14guns or heat or heaters so called because they get

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    http://bit.ly/1qMHaIQ71Thursday, June 19, 14

    HOT when fired. So! Where cool, at one point, had a highly structured and logical meaning it would, eventually, cometo signify a

    http://bit.ly/1qMHaIQhttp://bit.ly/1qMHaIQhttp://bit.ly/1qMHaIQ
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    http://bit.ly/1qMHPtE72Thursday, June 19, 14

    cool guy. Someone who is COOL. A spot or deal that is COOL. Before eventually expanding to its meaning today: aremarkably non-specific

    http://bit.ly/1qMHPtEhttp://bit.ly/1qMHPtEhttp://bit.ly/1qMHPtE
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    stand in for the word ok.

    This, I think, is roughly what has and is and will continue to happen to disruptive. There has been absolutely noshortage of ink spilled on this fact:

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    74Thursday, June 19, 14

    polite requests by all manner of commentators that people please stop using the word. Warnings

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    that its not being used correctly.That weve gotten

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    76Thursday, June 19, 14

    carried away, that we need to reel it in.

    And maybe we do? Continuing on the path its going, disruptive could eventually become a remarkably non-specificstand in for the words new, innovative, clever and slash or cheap. Which, as far as Im concerned at least, isfine... Language is living, it evolves and changes; words shed and take on new meaning constantly. It is not troublingthat hipster and cool and peasant and terrific and awful have all shifted meaningssome drasticallyduring the courseof their use. And probably its not troubling that disruptive has or will do the same BUT!

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    When we air these grievances about the use or sense of some word, were NOT just talking about uses. Or senses.What these words STAND FOR, like... in a grander, more metaphysical sense, is also pushed into the spotlight. Bytalking or arguing about what disruption did, does or should *mean*, were also talking about what we think relatedtechnology did, does or should ... DO.

    Beyond what it literally, literally stands for... were also having this peculiar meta-conversation about what it stands-for-stands-for. To poach a phrase, its what we talk about when we talk about disruption.

    The popular conversation surroundingthe word

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    meme

    78Thursday, June 19, 14

    meme some years ago was one largely about whatqualifies" asa meme: Is something thats viral a meme? Areparticular instances of image-macros memes Isnt... everything... a meme? In some way?

    The e#ect of this conversation is still, to this day, baked into the technology of a website I used to work for:

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    Know Your Meme, where user-submitted Meme entries are confirmed or deadpooled by moderators based uponsome established sense of... meme-worthy-ness.

    Know Your Meme was a symptom, not a cause, of this conversation that was REALLY a conversation about the suddenexistence of newly significant, peculiar pieces of media on the internet...

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    Internet meme gave us a way to refer to those things and so it solidified an understanding and set of possibilitiesfor what we all collectively referred to as internet culture." It became important to know exactly what an internetmeme was, what the phrase meant, because it stood for so much more than JUST. INTERNET MEMES.

    Related things are true of

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    http://bit.ly/1jxpNaa81Thursday, June 19, 14

    hipster and

    http://bit.ly/1jxpNaahttp://bit.ly/1jxpNaahttp://bit.ly/1jxpNaa
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    http://bit.ly/1qMHPtE82Thursday, June 19, 14

    cool and

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    dubstep and returning to

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    disruption

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    Disruption... the conversation about its usage and meaning is important. Because 1)if were all on the

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    http://bit.ly/1jxsSXI85Thursday, June 19, 14

    same page its really nice and helpful but also 2) because by some measure were discussing what we wantDISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY ITSELF to stand for, to accomplish.

    In preparation for this talk I spoke with a bunch of friends, some of whom work on stu#wed readily slap thedisruptive label on. When I asked what, exactly, makes something worthy of that label, they were all over the place:

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    Cheaper than pre-existing options. Easier to use. More widely available. Independently produced. Aimed at cuttingout the middle man. They all want something di#erent from the stripe of technology we call disruptive, and whos tosay they shouldnt?

    Jill Lepore, writing for the New Yorker this week...

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    sees disruption as a gospel, sees its followers as something like zealots. She warns, rightly so I think, againstdisruption for disruptions sake before moving on to what my friend Michelle very aptly described as Get O#MyLawn Cane Waving: the kids and their disruptionthey dont have real jobs, they wear jeans to work!

    For Lepore, disruption is threatens institutions with no need for innovation: medicine, education, journalism. Indisruption, she sees a world gone mad, obsessed with hawking progress in places it doesnt belong, following a ethicof sound and fury, that ultimately means nothing.

    In response to Lepores piece

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    Will Oremus at Slate and

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    Timothy B Lee at Vox fire back, admitting that while

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    many intelligent people have begun writing it o#as a meaningless buzzword,

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    [disruption] remains useful as a descriptive model for understanding how incumbent businesses can sometimesstruggle to fend o#smaller startups peddling seemingly lower-quality products. In disruption, Oremus and Leesee truth. A kind of... objectivity? A name for whats ACTUALLY HAPPENING, not necessarily an agenda or set ofpolitics inspiring those happenings.

    We tend, I think, to see disruption the same way we see what it attempts to describe. Its a word that inspires ...agendas. And this presentation is no di#erent. I have one. And truthfully, its probably closer to Lepores thanOremus and Lees. But more hopeful. And with less cane waving.

    However! For all the recent talk of

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    same-paged-ness, weve yet to even try establishing it. So before I start telling yall how were gonna disrupt thedisruption of disruption, lets do this part:

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    In the February, 1995 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M Christensen had a piecetitled

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    Disruptive Technologies: Catching The Wave. This was the coinage and first big and public use of disruptive withrespect to technologies and predates Christensens much better known book

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    Anyway - In "Disruptive Technologies: Catching The Wave, Bower and Christensen describe a situation which anysuccess oriented tech manufacturing corporation should, and does, fear: the appearance of

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    new technology which, though inferior at first, organizes a new consumer market and quickly overtakes theperformance of existing technologies. ...disruptive technologies, they write

    ...disruptive technologies introduce a very

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    different package of attributes from theone mainstream customers historicallyvalue, and they often perform far worsealong one or two dimensions that arepart icu lar ly important to those

    customers.

    98Thursday, June 19, 14

    introduce a very di#erent package of attributes from the one mainstream customers historically value, and theyoften perform far worse along one or two dimensions that are particularly important to those customers." As theparadigmatic example the authors provide

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    http://bit.ly/1y0MSM799Thursday, June 19, 14

    HARD DRIVES: when five and a quarter inch hard drives were the norm, the small storage capacity of three and a halfinch hard drives meant they were useless:"established computer makers rejected the drives as inadequate, and, inturn, their disk-drive suppliers ignored them as well."

    What computer makers and hard drive suppliers didnt take into account was the reduced price, weight and powerconsumption of smaller drives, their importance to the burgeoning Desktop and Portableas opposed to mainframecomputer markets. Other, smaller firms, realizing these benefits are able to quickly put these smaller drives intoproduction because they dont havea hulking, entrenched manufacturing line or managerial structure that would

    need to be repurposed and replaced or convinced, respectively. As a result a need for them amongst computermakers developed. BOOM. LARGE SIZED DRIVES: DISRUPTED.

    This disruption, the authors explain, is one in the performance and therefore potential market dominance of whatthey refer to as sustaining technologies. Its all encapsulated

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    here in this graph. A sustaining technology has a very slow growth in performance over time, a disruptive technologyhas a very fast one. This right here is the point of disruption. Which Ive marked with little explosion and a crying faceemojis because it only seems appropriate.

    Bower and Christensen warn that large corporations and manufacturers cannot put their rational, analyticalinvestment procedures to work in un-established or un-identified markets and therefore will be under constantthreat from the little guy. Thats how tiny-explosion-crying-face ends up happening: the bigger the company is, theharder it sustains.The aim of

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    DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES:Catching The Wave is to develop something of a brief how-to manual. It provides advicefor corporate entities so they can e#ectively manage and divert resources such that theyre able to seize someunrealized zeitgeist.

    If knowledgeable technologists believe the

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    new technology might progress faster thanthe markets demand for performanceimprovement, then that technology, whichdoes not meet customers' needs today, mayvery well address them tomorrow. The new

    technology, therefore, is strategically critical.

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    "If knowledgeable technologists believe the new technology might progress faster than the markets demand forperformance improvement, then that technology, which does not meet customers' needs today, may very welladdress them tomorrow. The new technology, therefore, is strategically critical. Bower and Christensen emphasizethat

    ...the technological changes that

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    g gdamage established companiesare usually not radically new ordi!cult from a technologicalpoint of view.

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    the technological changes that damage established companies are usually not radically new or di"cult from atechnological point of view. What are they, then? Managerially di"cult. Strategically di"cult. IDEOLOGICALLYDIFFICULT.

    Bower and Christensen emphasize the importance of speed over most thingsparticularly over maintaining the statusquo, sometimes at great, literal, cost

    Now... in order to provide some context for those ideas, of speed and sacrifice and the practices that support their

    prioritization, were gonna take a trip to

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    Italy. In 1909. Where another, wholly distinct, kind of disruption was taking place.

    86 years nearly to the day before Bower and Christensens piece in the Harvard Business Review, the BolongesenewspaperLa gazzetta dellEmilia published a piece of writing by Italian poet

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    http://bit.ly/1y0OKEA105Thursday, June 19, 14

    Filippo Tommaso Marinetti called the Futurist Manifesto. Marinettis

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    http://bit.ly/1y0P4Dd

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    manifesto aimed to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become an art movement know as, unsurprisingly,Futurism. Amongst the most well known Futurist artists would be the sculptor and visual artist

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    Umberto Boccioni and composer Luigi Russolo, who would become well known for his music and his own bit ofFuturist Writing, his own manifesto

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    http://bit.ly/1y0PHfY108Thursday, June 19, 14

    "The Art of Noise."

    Futurists, as a group, would pen many manifestosthey'd end up being a core feature of Futurismbut Marinettis firstwas a mold-maker. It provided a basis for much of the thought and artwork to come from the movement. Forexample, the Futurists, especially Marinetti, were completely preoccupied with the

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    automobile and engines. They were fixated upon the abundance of *machinery* in the early 20th century, and thethen-as-of-yet untold possibilities for a louder, faster world further divorced from nature. They were obsessed bySPEED.

    Marinetti wrote "We a"rm that the worlds magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. Aracing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breatha roaring car that seems toride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the

    >

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    >

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    Victory of Samothrace. [SAH-MOH-THRAH-KEE]

    In a strange combination of characteristics not normally seen in modern times, the Futurists were boundary-pushingartists but also die-hard

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    Sant'Elia, Boccioni, and Marinetti in uniform, 1914

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    patriots. When the first World War began, many enlisted. Marinetti would become one of the first a"liates of theItalian Fascist Party, co-authoring, as you might expect, their original manifesto. Futurists were pro-violence andadmired war. Marinetti wrote it was the worlds only hygiene.

    All in all, Marinettis manifesto set forth 11 total numbered tenets for this FUN LOVING GROUP OF DUDES. Theseventh, I think, is the most powerful. It reads:

    E t i t l th i

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    Except in struggle, there is no morebeauty. No work without an aggressivecharacter can be a masterpiece.

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    "Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Thisstatement is as true of Marinettis manifesto itself as the work it was attempting to inspire. The manifesto's languageis one of e#ort and struggle, of destruction and triumph. The talk is of speed, fighting, aggression and opponentsand the prices they are willing to pay to move art forward. Futurists will battle the old guard, they "will sing of greatcrowds excited by riot. Futurisms is a marriage of success and slaughter, of destruction and construction. Oferuption. Of Disruption, in the most literal sense.

    The speed and force of the Futurist's work aimed to upset the comfortable, sustaining practices of the Creative

    Establishment. The Futurists were admittedly young, reckless, unconcerned with traditional notions of quality orpractice. Bower and Christensens own manifesto,

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    like much business writing, employs similar language. It even has its own numbered tenets! They talk of revolutionsand of attacks. Of entrants into battles and opponents falling. There is talk of winning, struggle and sacrifice.Ultimately, Bower and Christensens lesson is that in order to create success, one must occasionally, if not frequently,do so by way of destruction.

    "No matter the industry, they write,

    ...a corporation consists of business units with finite life spans: thetechnological and market bases of any business will eventuallydisappear. Disruptive technologies are part of that cycle.Companies that understand this process can create new

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    Companies that understand this process can create newbusinesses to replace the ones that must inevitably die. To do so,companies must give managers of disruptive innovation free reinto realize the technology's full potential-even if it meansultimately killing the main stream business. For the corporation tolive, it must be willing to see business units die. If the corporationdoesn't kill them off itself, competitors will.

    114Thursday, June 19, 14

    "a corporation consists of business units with finite life spans: the technological and market basis of any business willeventually disappear. Disruptive technologies are part of that cycle. Companies that understand this process cancreate new businesses to replace the ones that must inevitably die. To do so, companies must give managers ofdisruptive innovation free rein to realize the technology's full potential-even if it means ultimately killing the mainstream business. For the corporation to live, it must be willing to see business units die. If the corporation doesn't killthem o#itself, competitors will.

    Like Futurists, they were unconcerned withif completely laudatory ofthe destruction that would occur in order for

    success to manifest.

    Which is not to say that

    NOTE:NOT ACTUALLYBOWER ORCHRISTENSEN

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    CHRISTENSEN

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    Bower and Christensen are fascists or all about scorning women, inciting riots, or encouraging war. Or maybe theyare? I dont know. Ive never met a Harvard Business School professor, but Id be surprised. They seem like nice guys.It is, though, to provide something of a contextualizing example of what disruption, as a word, WAS beforeDisruptive Technologies started it down the road its on today.

    Like the Futurists, Bower and Christensen recognize the necessity of destruction. But the outcome, the AIM of thatdestruction, could not be more di#erent. The Futurists were DISRUPTIVE in that they were

    Giacomo Balla Abstract Speed + Sound 1913-1914Umberto Boccioni Elasticity, 1912

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    anti-institution and ideology for the sake of some imagined, wholly distinct future. They theorized a BREAK in history.They even saw, in their own manifestos, a road paved: it lead directly to their own demise.

    "When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like uselessmanuscriptswe want it to happen!, Marinetti wrote. The Futurists DISRUPTION realizes that in some eventualmoment, it will itself become the sustaining attitude in need of disruption.

    Bower and Christensen describe disruption so that it can be identified and HARNESSED,

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    put to work achieving traditional notions of success.

    In our Disruption, we recognize the eventuality that is failure or death or drab mundanity, but we seekand herecomes another buzzwordto pivot around it. Disruptive technologies, either purposefully theorized as such ordeemed so after the fact, always DISRUPT in the hopes of sustaining. They dont hope to conjure some powerfulfracture and then find their way to the waste basket.

    TechCrunch's and Forbes and the popular sense of disruption always, ultimately, is

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    subsumed by some existing system. It fuels markets or audiences or profits or capital and it always, eventually, relieson those things. These things disrupt,

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    and seek sustenance. They disrupt hoping to never be disrupted.

    Such disruptors are, in comparison to our Futurist definition of disruption, more like colonizers. The disruption ofpre-exisiting businesses and technologies is something of a side-e#ect to the central aim of organizing a newmarket or re-organizing an existing one under new or di#erent conditions, and then keeping it that way. Holdingon to the territory. The disruptor-colonialists are not, at least not mostly, focused primarily on the demolition ofincumbents; they are focused, as you might expect and as they should be, on themselves, on their own

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    http://bit.ly/1y15go4120Thursday, June 19, 14

    success. On moving into a territory for their own gain, inspired not necessarily or solely by a hostility towardsexisting modes but by a sense of what could be if those existing modes were not exactly that. The destruction of theSustainers, or the threat of their destruction, is notat least as far as Ive ever heardthe initiating aim of disruptionthough it is frequently a result of those initiating aims.

    Netflix did not launch to put

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    Blockbuster out of business; Ubers goal is to threaten

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    medallion taxis as much as emails goal was to threaten the post o"ce.

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    The goal of companies like Uber and Netflix is profit; anything else is a byproduct of their success, signs that theirplan is WORKING. The destruction of the Sustainers is not the direct goal of Disruptors; it is, though, some haveargued, the direct goal of

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    http://bit.ly/1y150FD125Thursday, June 19, 14

    CAPITALISM. And here is where the talk takes an unannounced and rather sharp turn towards Marxism. Sorry.

    ACTUALLYKINDA SORRY

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    KINDA SORRY

    THIS TIME126Thursday, June 19, 14

    In "Marx's "Grundrisse": Vision of Capitalism's Creative Destruction,

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    John E. Elliot wrote that "In Marx's writings

    ...capital is a social relation, not a thing.

    Thus, "capital" includes labor, wages,profits-in short the entire constellation

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    profits in short, the entire constellationof relations between capitalist owners andworkers, not merely tools or instrumentsof production.

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    ...capital is a social relation, not a thing. Thus, "capital" includes labor, wages, profits-in short, the entireconstellation of relations between capitalist owners and workers, not merely tools or instruments of production.Marx pointed out that the

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    http://bit.ly/1y137Zn129Thursday, June 19, 14

    destruction of capital is in some sense the very base operation of Capitalism. First, Marx writes, production foundedon capital

    ...drives beyond national barriersand prejudices, as much as beyondnature worship, as well as alltraditional, confined, complacent,

    t d ti f ti f t

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    encrusted satisfactions of presentneeds and reproductions of oldways of life. It is destructivetowards all of this, and constantly

    revolutionizes it

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    drives beyond national barriers and prejudices, as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional,confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructivetowards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it The state of things is fundamentally changed in lightproduction founded on capital. Nature, tradition, preference, so much, is either made subjugate to orinstrumentalized in the processes of production. But this destruction doesn't stop with what was just hangingaround in antiquity: Marx writes that capital sees its own self-imposed limitsthose on the development of forces ofproduction, of the creation of NEED upon which capitalism is built, on mental and natural resourcesas

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    barriers which need overcoming. Capitalism attempts to find a way through the barriers it erects for itself and in theprocess, must occasionally destroy labor, wages, profits, modes and instruments of production to move forward.Old product is replaced with new product; old means of production with new means of production; new labor takesthe place of old labor. Or, as Bower and Christensen write

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    "For the corporation to live, it must be willing to see business units die.

    Eventually,

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    Joseph Schumpeter extended this idea of Marxs toCapitalism as a movement and a moment in history and wroteabout how capitalism, in the process of its operation, is constantly making a case against itself.

    People celebrate some of Schumpeters ideasespecially the ones about how innovation will power the market. Asfar as I understand it which is to say maybe I dont, Im not a professional Marxist, he was echoing another one ofMarxs ideas here: that if you dont keep throwing new stu#into the system, circulation will stop. Money will settle.So you need to keep making and innovating and releasing and making and innovating and releasing because youhave to keep circulation going because thats how daddy gets new pairs of shoes.

    Inherent to that progress of constant innovation is constant destruction. Over time, a group of peoplesome say thearmy of the unemployed, some say the laborers, some say, ideally, everyoneis organized who will demand it allcease, and be replaced with something better. Marx, and Schumpeter, hoped that replacement would be Socialism.Im hoping for something more metaphysical, like the soul based trading-economy in

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    Dark Souls. Any object that can be used as currency, material for production, means of production, commodity, fueland SOURCE OF MAGIC is pretty rad in my book. Theres also something beautiful about the amount of WORK youhave to do in Dark Souls, most of it involving killing demons of some kind, and upon their death you are awardedwith their ESSENCE, which is also the worlds CURRENCY? Like what? But also YEAH.

    Anyway, this has o"cial been a digression and I don't bring up

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    Marxism to to tell you that capitalism is on the slab and everyone should get ready for the coming revolution, Ireserve that topic for Thanksgiving Dinner and people who sit next to me on long, international flights. I bring it upbecause in addition to seeing these two modes of what came to be called Creative Destruction present in theECONOMIC SYSTEM AS A WHOLE, they seem present in whatever endeavor we might describe as

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    disruptive. Does this make disruptive endeavors metonymic for capitalism as a whole? Im not prepared to say oneway or the other, but man that would be a good headline for a post on a tech blog, huh?

    First, Disruption threatens, or implies a threat, of

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    destruction. It is a feature of capitalism, solving problems it has made for itself, we already talked about that. Second,Disruption implies or suggests what comes

    post-disruption?

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    post disruption?:-(

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    NEXT, after or maybe more correctly as a result of Disruption: not how things change as the result of specificproducts or services, but how our thoughts on INNOVATION or PROGRESS might change after DISRUPTION as amovement, if we can call it that.

    I think some part of us secretly, or not so secretly, hopes that the widespread availability of technology and theabundance of clever people who are willing and able to make that technology do neat and clever things will somehowe#ect some great change in the state of things not the least of those things being some aspect of the economy,maybe a major one, maybe not. Weve been implicitly supported in that not-explicitly-stated-and-so-maybe-Im-

    just-making-it-up-but-really-I-dont-think-I-am hope: in the wake of

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    mp3s, peer to peer sharing and torrenting, the music industry wised up and now we can get ahold of more music,more easily than ever beforea large portion of it cheaply and directly from artists. With

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    Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and VHX so many movies are at your fingertips, usually for less than the physical object.

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    AirBNB is stepping into the hospitality industrys up-until-this-moment very comfy and well manicured turf.

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    Uber, Taxis.

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    Steam, computer games.

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    Kindle and Oyster, Books.

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    Kickstarter, funding.

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    OSCAR, healthcare. All these things make us feel more

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    POWERFUL as consumers, we feel

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    in control.

    This feeling is what informs our SENSE of the word disruption". Things that are literally disruptive, by Bower andChristensens definition, provide lower quality alternatives to existing options that quickly increase in quality over ashort amount of time but REALLY its the ALTERNATIVES PART that weve all seized on. Its eye of the tornado ofconfused meaning. Its what me, Lepore and TechCrunch and Oremus and Forbes and Lee and all those people Iasked have in common: ALTERNATIVES, and the power we feel in having them. Or the sometimes very understablefear

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    we have in seeing their power.

    Its why people on the other end of disruptive services value it and why the people making those services aim for it.Its why we wonder what industry Apple is going to DISRUPT next and why we even think in terms of INDUSTRIESTHAT NEED DISRUPTING. It has become something to reach for, a selling point, its why journalists and, to an evershrinking degree startups themselves, label products as disruptive: it sells. Its exciting. It feels nice; it feels likewere heading somewhere it feels like progress.

    And it is but from another perspective, isnt it also

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    http://bit.ly/1viatp6150Thursday, June 19, 14

    MORE OF THE SAME? Im not saying we shouldnt be excited about the reconfiguration of basically every consumermarket upon the advent and continued expansion of the internet and its related technologiesmake no mistake

    http://bit.ly/1viatp6http://bit.ly/1viatp6http://bit.ly/1viatp6
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    I MAKE MY LIVING ON THAT RECONFIGURATIONbut can we pull back for juuuust a second and ask if theidentification and organization of new markets by entrepreneurs, startups and o#shoots of pre-existingorganizations aiming to create a stable, sustainable business model for themselves is REALLY new? The internet hasdemocratized many things for many people but lots of those things, and arguably the most visible ones, involve thesame markets, audiences, and profits. Which is

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    ...cool. Lots of it is innovative. But for all that, to me, at least, it seems to suggest, for all the obsession overmeaning and utility and purpose the constellation of bloggers, pundits, marketersNO OFFENSE NXNEplace on it, Ifind DISRUPTIVE to only ever remind me what it is not. It reminds me ALWAYS of the progress it promises, but hasntyet executed.

    disruption

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    d s up o

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    Disruption announces it's own contradictions and, especially in its ever-presence, makes me wish for the thing thatcomes AFTER it. I dont know what that is, but I have hopes. And no, its not the SOULS ECONOMY AGAIN. Its adisruption that focuses on PEOPLE as-such, and not on markets and their

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    organization or continuation. Or maybe its some disruption OF the importance of markets or audiences so presentin the current tech ethos. Not because those things are bad or they need to completely go awayagain, not preachingthe coming revolutionbut MAN because we are collectively so. powerful. but were SO. FOCUSED. on such a narrowportion of THOSE THINGS. In my mind, an ideal disruptionthe disruption we should aiming for, steering ourdisruption towardsis one that does not

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    seep into or maintain those things which it has challenged; it challenges and it JUST challenges. Disruption shouldn'tfocus on sustaining business practices but on

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    challenging the status quo, and the maximum e#

    ect it can have with minimum footprint. It should lack pretense andoccur as a byproduct of actual need, struggle or aggression.

    Disruption, has to, in a phrase, get in and get out.

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    http://bit.ly/1vigRg0157Thursday, June 19, 14

    A baseball through the window;

    http://bit.ly/1vigRg0http://bit.ly/1vigRg0http://bit.ly/1vigRg0
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    http://bit.ly/1vihciV158Thursday, June 19, 14

    a stone in the lake;

    http://bit.ly/1vihciVhttp://bit.ly/1vihciVhttp://bit.ly/1vihciV
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    /watch?v=eGoMi7V5tn0159Thursday, June 19, 14

    an Italian sports car through the countryside. A plane is traversed, changedsometimes momentarily, sometimesforeverbut the object that did the changing remains totally external, dispassionate but no less e#ective and possiblyfleeting. Pointing to these things becomes di"cult, then, because

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    http://gph.is/1vij8YK160Thursday, June 19, 14

    they disappear. They are a Higgs boson in the night.

    A fair criticism of this idea is that it might set some impossible goal: to precipitate a meaningful change and thendissolve into the cultural, technological or infrastructural ether. Who pays for these disruptions? Who builds them?And then who just gives them up? How do they just disappear?

    For better or worse, weve come to the part of this talk where the answers have lead to more

    http://gph.is/1vij8YKhttp://gph.is/1vij8YKhttp://gph.is/1vij8YK
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    questions. From here, the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Are there things in the world that perfectly exhibit what thisideal disruption? There might be. In a talk I gave last year at XOXO,

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    which was ALSO on disruptionI promise its not the only thing I ever talk aboutI gave a talk on

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    baby goat videos this one time

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    /watch?v=-D9Xq3Xr8aE164Thursday, June 19, 14

    I suggested that the internet has enabled the most meaningful disruption in that it allows people to better knowthemselves. Today we can identify and solidify things about outselves by inspecting the complex portrait of the worldprovided by the network. Here, the disruption is in the social fabric; the thing doing the disruption is well howmany turtles down do you want to go? Its message boards and search bars and people who maintain wikias andnetwork connections none of which IN PARTICULAR is monumentally important but which altogether create thisFORCE of CHANGE.

    But! There has to be more, right? And there HAVE to be more SPECIFIC examplesthings, products, servicesof whatIm getting at here. Well, truthfully, if there are,

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    I dont know about them, hopefully by design.

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    [TALMBOUT EVAN - I hate becoming a user, So much more computing power, but so much less power over thecomputers., laughter as a sign of empowerment this is a fundamental dissatisfaction with the state of the system.So much more power; but really, the same amount of power or LESS in some cases. The user-ification of the internet.But how to you operationalize these ideas at the product level? IDK. Maybe the work the not impossible guys aredoing but DAMN calling what they do disruptive seems like an INSULT.]

    If something occurs to you, I hope youll tell me about it. Truthfully, what I would ask forthis total rethinking theword disruptive and subsequent reimagining of the possibilities for technology so describedis almost certainlyunlikely or

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    impossible. But you know what they say: if you aim for the moon, youll at least end up disrupting some stars ?Or maybe what Im trying to say, really, is that NOTHING is disruptive, and maybe cant ever be? And we shouldall just let this word be meaningless, let people use it to indicate how they feel about the technology theyredescribing with it and understand that it is a loaded, and complicated feature of the current linguistic landscape.

    That being said, an absent specific prescriptions, Ill conclude with this (and, for anyone who watches Idea Channel,spoiler alert: some of this is in next weeks episode): Our uses of and ideas about technology have rewritten ourunderstanding of the most fundamental features of life. The development of

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    processors caused us to ask what it means to think or know. When machines were able to take on a cognitiveload comparable to and then exceeding that of a room of people, it became important and necessary to figure outwhat that meant for our own humanity, and their relationship to it.

    Alan Turings very famous

    http://bit.ly/1lABi68http://bit.ly/1lABi68
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    http://bit.ly/1lABLWe169Thursday, June 19, 14

    Turing Test was designed to determine if we must, under certain circumstances, admit that machines are intelligent.The way it goes is that if youre having a conversation via a computer terminal, and you say I am chatting with ahuman! but its actually a sophisticated computer program responding to your interlocutions based on a set ofruleswe might have to admit that computer can THINK.

    John Searle disagreed. He said because a computer can follow instructions doesnt mean it KNOWS or UNDERSTANDS.In order to do those things, it would have to posses CONSCIOUSNESS, which it does not.

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    http://bit.ly/1lABN0h170Thursday, June 19, 14

    In his Chinese Room thought experiment he explains: imagine youre in a locked room. Someone is passingmessages to you under the door. The messages are in Chinese but you dont speak any Chinese. LUCKILY! In theroom with you is a set of rules written in your native tongue that explain WHEN YOU SEE THIS SYMBOL, REPLY WITHTHIS SYMBOL. WHEN YOU SEE THIS SYMBOL, REPLY WITH THIS SYMBOL.

    To the person you are responding to, it would appear that you speak Chinese. And maybe you do but that doesntmean you UNDERSTAND Chinese.

    In this thought experiment,

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    You are a computer. A computer is able to correlate one set of formal symbols to another set of formal symbols butit doesnt understand what the rules mean, or how and why they were implemented.

    This is complicated though. First o#: whose to say what counts as consciousness? Why do we get the final word? Weused to say ANIMALS didnt have consciousness. And this, concern about now know how and why the rules wereimplemented: isnt the existence of science and philosophy an outright, explicit ADMISSION that we dont know whatthe rules are, or why theyre implemented? So here it is: our consciousness is under threat from our own ideas ofwhat CONSCIOUSNESS IS after weve tried applying them to MACHINES.

    The situations that arise from the possibilities provided by our technology can help us inquire about our fundamentalunderstandings of the world. Sometimes things so FUNDAMENTAL, before a computer or program or machinepopped into existence, we might have never thought they needed inquiry. The global network has caused us to lookanew at art and community and friendship, learning, citizenship and LABOR.

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    1857-8 1995 1997

    172Thursday, June 19, 14

    Disruption, as it stands, provides very little new context. Bower and Christensens The Revolutionary [IDEA] ThatWill Change the Way You Do Business was... what... 130-some years old in 1995? Its the same business weve beentra"cking in just ... more of it. We should celebrate and seize the power that gives us as consumers and creators butat the same time I think we should also be asking...

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    ...if the world hasnt seen its fair share of DESTABILIZING POWERS becoming the status quo. In the ways weve

    challenged and expanded the ideas of thinking, being part of a community, having friends, being POPULAR...

    http://bit.ly/1lADESOhttp://bit.ly/1lADESOhttp://bit.ly/1lADyughttp://bit.ly/1lADyug
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    http://bit.ly/1lAE2Re174Thursday, June 19, 14

    [MARK MARON - TALMBOUT IRA GLASS, TOP EPISODE, MOST POPULAR POSTCAST PERIOD: 800k. HIS OWN WORK,

    NOT POPULAR BY SO MANY CONVENTIONAL STANDARDS]

    So but anyway, in the way weve managed to challenge and expand all those things... I wonder if we have it in us tochallenge, and expand, to change what it means to CREATE CHANGE?

    Maybe. Probably.

    @mikerugnetta

    http://bit.ly/1lAE2Rehttp://bit.ly/1lAE2Rehttp://bit.ly/1lAE2Re
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    THANKS.