06.17.14
‘Disruptive innovation’ gets some blowback
I point you to a long piece in the New Yorker entitled “The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.”
It’s a point-by-point dissection of the narratives by Clayton M. Christensen. You could call him one of the biggest pushers of “disruptive innovation” in the American economy. And the New Yorker writer, Jill Lepore, informs his material, all based on stories of allegedly successful startups that engage in disruption against bigger, allegedly inferior competitors, has crept into all facets of business life.
In the hands of the Silicon Valley, it’s now trying to take over the public work of education and medicine, every service, even places where it’s profoundly unsuitable, or its immoral philosophy of blowing everything up for the sake of some small new business getting its pile, has grown toxic.
You face it virtually everywhere in American life. Disruption is the key to everything. If you can’t disrupt or deal with being disrupted, you’re just more splatter on the highway to the future. You can rule the world through your smartphone and twiddling fingers or die.
Upworthy comes in for a mention, as does another clickbait “news site,” Buzzfeed, for the way they are viewed, with fear, by the giants of real news.
It’s readily apparent that, in a democracy, the important business interests of institutions like the press might at times conflict with what became known as the “public interest.??? That’s why, a very long time ago, newspapers like the Times and magazines like this one established a wall of separation between the editorial side of affairs and the business side. (The metaphor is to the Jeffersonian wall between church and state.) “The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for decades,??? according to the Times’ Innovation Report, “allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers,??? as if this had been, all along, simply a matter of office efficiency. But the notion of a wall should be abandoned, according to the report, because it has “hidden costs??? that thwart innovation. Earlier this year, the Times tried to recruit, as its new head of audience development, Michael Wertheim, the former head of promotion at the disruptive media outfit Upworthy. Wertheim turned the Times job down, citing its wall as too big an obstacle to disruptive innovation. The recommendation of the Innovation Report is to understand that both sides, editorial and business, share, as their top priority, “Reader Experience,??? which can be measured, following Upworthy, in “Attention Minutes.??? Vox Media, a digital-media disrupter that is mentioned ten times in the Times report and is included, along with BuzzFeed, in a list of the Times’ strongest competitors (few of which are profitable), called the report “brilliant,??? “shockingly good,??? and an “insanely clear??? explanation of disruption, but expressed the view that there’s no way the Times will implement its recommendations, because “what the report doesn’t mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen’s research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully.???
That some of the corporate leadership at the Times would even be interested in hiring a former head of promotion from Upworthy is discouraging. It shows only that some leadership at newspapers is easily frightened by garbage, pure internet eyeball suckerbait, stuff that has no beneficial role at a publication like the NYT.
And make no mistake, as referenced last week, Upworthy is unreservedly daily dogshite, nicely wrapped and sugar-frosted for instantaneous eating, a business where its “contributors” or “curators” post viral swill. The only requirement is that it test well and come as hand-wringing 1-to-5 minute doses of mechanized sincerity delivered by smiling faces who profess to be able to change with world through their cheer, tireless effort, and the magic of Internet.
Two more numbing examples from today’s menu:
Trying To Follow What Is Going On In Syria And Why? This Comic Will Get You There In 5 Minutes.
Here’s the “contributor’s” lead: “Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, people you never heard of are killing each other on the evening news.”
The author, of course: “I love living in a purple city in a purple state (Virginia is for lovers!) because my neighbors represent a wide range of viewpoints, from libertarians to socialists, all striving to live with compassion. I want to bring that respectful tussling to the wild world of the Internet.”
When He Meets His First Child, I Cheer. When He Gets To His Second, I Almost Lose It.
The lead-in:It takes Andrew 13 minutes to tell you how many kids he has. Kudos to you if you can keep your eyes dry that whole time. And along the way, he meets a buxom necrophiliac (1:50), a doughnut dad (3:00), the love of his life, and the mother of his future childre [sic]…”
Naturally, roll the author’s changing-the-world-through-the-pitiless-optimism-of-the-web: “I’m working on big ideas and a small garden. I believe there’s plenty of planet, plenty of money, and plenty of love to go around. People are my passion, and while talk is cheap, conversation is priceless.”
Understanding Syria after five minutes and a cartoon. Crying your eyes out for the want of a copy editor to fix the word “childre” on a website that employs few, pays little, but gets millions of hits for “big ideas” and an endless click-stream of people who share, are pursuing their passion and changing the world through the wonder of social media technology and sunbeams.
On a fundamental level one understands why the lowest-common-denominator delivery of happiness and life lessons works. It impresses people who put no thought into anything but who intensely dislike complicated and often painfully depressing news.
But to think that harvesting an audience of that measure, of believing that you can carry out a valid news function catering to it, that it is disruptive and innovative and to adopt its way, is insane.
It is custom-made groupthink perfect only for the Culture of Lickspittle.
A link to the New Yorker, again, is here.
Frank said,
June 18, 2014 at 8:39 am
Bravo!
George Smith said,
June 18, 2014 at 2:48 pm
Today’s example, from Vox, cited at the New Yorker as being mentioned at the NYT report on disrupters “10 times.”
Headline: “The world is on the brink of a mass extinction. Here’s how to avoid that.”
One of the answers, use smartphones to take pictures of animals in your travels and upload them to iNaturalist where people will identify them and it will help us understand the scope of biodiversity.
It’s an interview turned into clicktainment by Vox and writer Brad Plumer who is “On the apocalypse beat, more or less.”
It was done on the 11th, a short expose on a paper published in Science magazine, one with the much less baiting title: “The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection”
It is here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/1246752.abstract
Read the abstract. It doesn’t really come down to at all what the Vox writer and “editors” made it out to be with the title. It is a careful multi-scientist global paper on species extinction and the as much as they can say about biodiversity.