I do not believe that there is an external element to be disrupted now. The situation is different from the period of the Dadaists. There is nothing to overthrow now, because everything has been co-opted. To be subversive now in the sense of Dadaism would be reactionary, because now it would be the attitude of model students.
—Anselm Kiefer
“It’s not just long-term thinking that’s needed, but more weird thinking […] How do we actually understand the massive disruptive consequences that will be weirder and more sudden than are really even slightly acceptable to discuss?”
If we believe that, indeed, “software is eating the world,” that we are living in a moment of extraordinary technological change, that we must – according to Gartner or the Horizon Report – be ever-vigilant about emerging technologies, that these technologies are contributing to uncertainty, to disruption, then it seems likely that we will demand a change in turn to our educational institutions (to lots of institutions, but let’s just focus on education). This is why this sort of forecasting is so important for us to scrutinize – to do so quantitatively and qualitatively, to look at methods and at theory, to ask who’s telling the story and who’s spreading the story, to listen for counter-narratives.
As far as style goes, the AirPods resemble the EarPods from the Season 2 episode of Doctor Who in which a megalomaniac billionaire has convinced the populace to purchase the wireless devices as a means to conduct communication and receive all their information, only to turn around and deploy them as a weapon that hacked into their brains and turned them into soulless, emotionless, homicidal metal automatons.
Another artist-in-consultance model that, importantly, did not take place in California, managed to fluctuate between all three outcomes. As Claire Bishop wrote, this project seriously put forth the idea “that art can cause both business and art to re-evaluate their priorities,” or precisely what I mean by dismantling.5 This was the UK’s Artist Placement Group, or APG, founded by the artists Barbara Steveni and John Latham in 1966 and active until 1989. Calling itself an “artist consultancy,” a “network consultancy,” or a “research organization,” APG arranged “placements” for artists within both public and private organizations for limited contract periods.6 Including the British Steel Corporation, the Ocean Fleets shipping company, and the Department of the Environment, selected host organizations allowed the artist to essentially roam free within their confines according to agreed-upon terms of service (rendered in remarkably authentic bureaucratic language in a huge volume of correspondence mostly written by Steveni, which is a body of artwork in itself). The projects ranged from art education, on-site installations, public outreach, and creative uses of technology to, in some cases, direct critical reflection on company management and policy. Many of these collaborations dead-ended or became as superfluous or antagonistic as the above-mentioned projects. But a critical mass of them proved challenging, fruitful, and even tangibly beneficial to humans within and without the company. The success can be chalked up to the role, as carefully defined by APG, of the artist working in nonart contexts. Latham coined the term “Incidental Person” (IP) to account for this role.
via http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-artist-in-consultance-welcome-to-the-new-management/
The attacks have not dimmed disruption’s popularity as a management buzzword. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer, has said that Europe can solve its unemployment problem with disruptive innovation. This year, USAID, a government agency, credited disruptive innovation for helping curb Nepal’s “extreme poverty.” In a speech at New York University this summer, Hillary Clinton said she was looking for “innovative, disruptive ideas that will save capitalism for the 21st century.” Business leaders seem so enamored with the idea that they’re reluctant to seriously consider naysayers who poke holes in it. “Ninety percent of the problem isn’t Clay, it’s what happened afterwards,” King says. “People don’t want to give this up for some reason.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015–10–05/did-clay-christensen-get-disruption-wrong-
“
In an era of breathtaking, earth-changing engineering projects, this has been billed as the biggest of them all. Three times as long and almost twice as deep as its rival in Panama, Nicaragua’s channel will require the removal of more than 4.5bn cubic metres of earth – enough to bury the entire island of Manhattan up to the 21st floor of the Empire State Building. It will also swamp the economy, society and environment of one of Latin America’s poorest and most sparsely populated countries. Senior officials compare the scale of change to that brought by the arrival of the first colonisers. “It’s like when the Spanish came here, they brought a new culture. The same is coming with the canal,” said Manuel Coronel Kautz, the garrulous head of the canal authority. “It is very difficult to see what will happen later – just as it was difficult for the indigenous people to imagine what would happen when they saw the first [European] boats.” For the native Americans, of course, that first glimpse of Spanish caravels was the beginning of an apocalypse. Columbus’s ships were soon followed by waves of conquistadores whose feuding, disease and hunger for gold and slaves led to the annihilation of many indigenous populations.
–http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/20/-sp-nicaragua-canal-land-opportunity-fear-route
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/