The goal of a startup is no longer just user engagement or viability. A “preference for disruption” is celebrated, without reservation, whether a small or big business. (Only recently were reservations even fussed over – Jill Lepore’s critique of Disruption culture was published the week after this conference talk, June 23.) She states (without critical analysis of causation): “Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book.” As an ethnographer of innovation practices, I have always appreciated Christensen and his contribution to theories of change. I also observe the trend signified by Lepore, the increasing meta-narrative of “disruption is good.” Disruptive innovation is not …
Reproduction of Disruption
How Innovation Regimes Reproduce Culture Media Ecology Association, Toronto, June 20, 2014 “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” John Culkin, SJ (Usually attributed to his friend, Marshall McLuhan) We live in a technogenic culture – a society that generates ever more technology, whether necessary or not. Mainstream culture celebrates the economic value of technological ingenuity, and worships innovation. Our desires become captured and entranced by the tools of tech. In this post-age of ubiquitous smart-things, everyone now “owns technology,” or gadgets – whether a smartphone, stack of computers, soon personal robots. For the first time in history perhaps, there is little differentiation between generational ownership – children, the elderly, very poor people – all have similar gadgets. There may finally be little or no cachet to having the latest hardware or gadget. The desirable commodity has become the capacity to produce technology. The capacity for mass …
To hate on the Internets, Click Here.
In the current Guardian, American novelist Jonathan Franzen writes “What’s wrong with the modern world?” Franzen retrieves cranky German polemicist Karl Kraus from the 1930’s to buttress a literary critique of the cultural evaporation accelerated by Big Capital solutionist appropriation of the Internets. Perhaps because there are so few public techno-critics in literary culture in the 21st Century, Franzen seems to own this space for an epic rant (and new book) that pierce our culture’s enamoration with all things interactive, online, gamified, and ultimately, trivial. In the face of the scale of real-world problems faced by our civilization, Franzen is warning that our distraction with the entertaining and trivial, and our failure to invent beneficial alternatives, is costing us our culture: “… the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction. We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq …
Deflationary economies yield free-product ecologies
As someone who gets paid to do foresight research, I have a brief response to the Fast Company article How To Thrive In The Free-Product Economy. They state as a “law:” If a product on the market can be monetized by any means other than directly selling it, a comparable version of that product will eventually be offered for free. The problem here is the word “monetized.” And the word “eventually,” which is a long time. But let’s piece apart the dynamics and see why this is the case. Prices continuing to drop in the face of new entrants in a market is not a given. Competitive dynamics are different based on positioning, market share, strategy. In the 1980’s prices went up as new entrants competed on features. Televisions did not get cheaper, and consumer commodities such as video rental and CDs raised prices over the decade, even with cheaper …
