Fossil Poetry #2: Disruption
Hello! Happy dog days of August. We’re back with Fossil Poetry, this time on the word “disruption” and breakage of all kinds.
“Highway 1 at Moon Lake” by John Chiara
Sophie: The word “disruption” is used so frequently in Silicon Valley that’s it’s almost a joke. Start-up founders are disrupting transportation, the art world, education, corner stores, religion, outer space. Disruption, in tech-speak, can be as simple as the introduction of a vending machine in the airport that sells Uniqlo vests. It can be as radical as the expansion of Amazon into grocery stores. Disruption means a plethora of scooters on streets, and it also means someone has raised a lot of venture capital money for an idea with no legs.
No facet of life immune to this kind of disruption, which tech-evangelists—and by extension capitalists—are optimistic about. I am a pessimist, in particular a techno-pessimist, but it doesn’t really matter because I can’t stop the rampant disrupting.
Every time I hear the word disruption, though, I think first of protest art. I think of the Guerilla Girls, and the posters they put around New York City in the 1980s: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5 % of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women but 85% of the nudes are female?” They published list of names of male artists—Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, the usual suspects—who allowed their work to be shown in galleries where women weren’t represented. It was a little embarrassing, and ugly, and effective, and it was above all else a disruption.
A disruption, in its purest sense, is a kind of break—a radical rupture from some sort of established order. Good art, and not just protest art, often has disruptive properties. It interrupts expectations, reality, the monotony and routine of daily living. It is this kind of disruption that interests me most: the psychological, social, cultural, disruptive powers of art. About this kind of disruption, I’m an optimist.
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Yi-Ling: At some point between now and when I created my first Facebook profile, it became cool to move fast and break things. The word disruption — from the Latin word disruptionem (to break apart, split, shatter, break to pieces) — became hot.
Once a word that described war, corruption and the schism within the Church of Scotland in 1843, disruption became a word that rolled off the tongues of young tech savants to describe Uber, Netflix and Airbnb. On a stroll in Paris, Travis found a hole in the taxi cab system and disrupted the way we travel from a to b. In his Harvard dormitory, Zuck figured out that we, as humans, are ridiculously social creatures that devour gossip like candy and disrupted the way we present ourselves, read the news, vote, buy stuff, fall in love — all that good, important stuff.
Now, disruption has become a pretty standard way of thinking for the rest of us plebs. Throw out the old institutions and unlearn old ways of thinking. Don’t study diligently through college, climb your way up the rusty corporate ladder, and stew in your own regret as a jaded, grey-haired executive. Instead, drop out of Stanford, befriend an angel investor and overturn the future of cold brew consumption in The Mission. Disrupt. Look for the short-cut. Sprint. Deploy or die. The world is a giant game of Jenga, and you, young millennial, with or without your newly-minted diploma, can come in like a wrecking ball, and break it all apart.
Here’s my main problem with disruption as a guiding principle: after spending so much time preaching the importance of breaking things, we’ve neglected figuring out what to do next. I’ve found, for example, that American liberal arts colleges do a great job teaching its students the first part — how to deconstruct texts, dismantle old institutional structures and challenge existing value systems. It does a less ideal job teaching us the more challenging Part Two. In other words: what the heck do you do with all the broken pieces?
Last May, after graduating from college, I spent two months in the hills of Burgundy, France and the forests of Chiba, Japan, designing two GAKKO summer camps with a group of young professionals and high-schoolers around the world. I returned this summer to direct a camp in the Berkshires.
In many ways, summer camp was about disrupting the education system. It was a blank slate outside of the traditional schooling institutions, an opportunity to challenge old ways of learning. But it demanded more than just disruption. We needed not simply to challenge old values, but also to re-imagine new ones that we could collectively believe in. To build a world and create community where none had existed before. To take lofty, fragmented ideals and weave them into actionable slots on a two-week schedule.
It was one of the most intellectually, personally, physically challenging experiences that I’ve done in my life. On any given moment, questions running through my mind included: 1) how do we devise a schedule that ensures the collective ownership of 14 young adults and 43 high-schoolers? 2) how do we orchestrate a day-long LARP session that involves bartering for tarp, fort-building in the woods dressed in full drag, and a Utopian Peace Conference? 3) Should we kill the chicken? 4) Who was in charge of getting the snacks? 5) Is this insane-looking rash on my left ribcage poison ivy?
It’s easy, I learned, to break things apart. But what does it mean to reassemble, re-imagine and reinvent?
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Written and reading:
YL: I’m moving back to Beijing next week, and am currently working on a feature on the rise of genome testing in China. The article in Chengdu rappers navigating the Great Firewall is finally coming out in Guernica next week. Keep your eyes peeled. On the reading list: this WIRED piece on repeated self-invention by philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis for his account of one of most beautiful and underrated collaborations of the century, Zadie Smith’s characteristically brilliant essay on Jewish philosopher Martin Buber/Justin Bieber, and Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman, because this dude has nailed the nuances of desire like no other. (Also, after months of hunting, I finally purchased a pair of shoes that look like these.)
SH: I’ve been writing about optimism and pessimism around technology! I wrote for The New York Times about a show in London that explores the future through objects, and I reviewed a book about how digital life is changing our reading brains, including mine. I also wrote about some analog things: the background music of New York City for The New York Times, the problems with the daily crime story and the weirdness of police tape for Popula, and the art of tabloid covers for New York Magazine. I read Sam Anderson’s Boom Town, a fascinating new history of Oklahoma City (trust me, it’s AMAZING) and am deep in Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls, about, well, dead girls in American culture.