Demonstrating disruption

Abstracts

Disruptive Kin for Creative Destruction

Cansu Güner, Technical University of Munich

Entrepreneurs are agents of creative destruction (Schumpeter 1942). They are disruptive forces expected to be geographically mobile in order to chase the ‘next big thing’. In fact, entrepreneurs are figured as free-floating subjects who are tied to neither a place nor to a relation.  They should always be ready to trade whatever is necessary for the next opportunity (Latour 1993). Yet, from the literature -if not from our personal experiences, we know that humans need a network of relations to sustain living (Tsing 2015). But how can the free-floating disruptive entrepreneurs sustain a living? 

During a nine-months field work in entrepreneurial housing (known as co-living spaces) in the U.S. and Germany, I found that a particular bond is emerging among co-living entrepreneurs which is not only limited to business interaction but also ubiquitous to all aspects of social life, providing emotional and professional support for the parties involved. To explain such happening, I developed the term ‘entrepreneurial kin’, a type of disruptive bond that supports entrepreneurs to mobilize creative destruction. Entrepreneurial kin brings entrepreneurs together, demonstrating a deep yet concurrently fluid and short-lived social tie. 

Drawing on STS (Latour 1993; Müller et al. 2014; Haraway 2016; Clarke and Haraway 2018), sociology of time (Adams et al. 2009), and entrepreneurship studies (Bröckling 2016; Schumpeter 1943), this talk discusses disruptive ties in everyday life. I argue that contemplating on the entrepreneurial kin can allow us to better understand the current inventive ways of making human connections.

Multiple, Convertible and Hidden Disruption: A case study of extra-ordinary clothing inventions for sporting and active women (1890-1940)

Kat Jungnickel, Goldsmiths, University of London

Official roads and paths criss-cross cities, hug coastlines and frame regional areas. These familiar networks give shape to normative experiences of the world and provide directions, intentions, and orientations. Yet, tell-tale short or long cuts trodden or cycled repetitively into dirt and grass between or around these official markings evidence informal knowledges and alternate experiences of place. Transport planners call these ‘desire lines’. Sara Ahmed (2006) writes about how they ‘show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow’. Others argue they ‘record civil disobedience’ and demonstrate ‘how everyday activities of citizens can transform environments’ (Ballard et al 2012). An accumulation of these unofficial tracks and traces can reveal shared desires to carve out other ways of being in the world. This paper explores historic clothing inventors as makers of alternate worlds. Analysing 200 convertible, multiple, and hidden clothing inventions patented from 1890-1940, by and for active women, reveal how inventors attempted to address ongoing socio-political restrictions to women’s freedom of movement from the ground up and, often secretly, from the inside out. I suggest these data might be read as acts of resistance, enabling ordinary women to disrupt patriarchal pressures, move and inhabit public space in new ways, and make claims to equal civic participation and mobility rights. I also reflect on how little is known of them today. Discussion will take the form of talk, images, and reconstructed costumes.

Net-zero murderers and quitting drinking by 2050: the role of humour in disrupting carbon offsetting

Kamilla Karhunmaa, Université de Liège

“It’s like saying you’re going on a diet, but you keep eating cake while paying someone else to eat lettuce.”  - Jennifer Morgan, Greenpeace International 

Paying someone else to offset your emissions has been a contested practice form the start. Yet, it is also one that is currently facing a revival globally, with more individuals and corporations turning to carbon offsetting.  

In this presentation, I turn to humour as a way of disrupting voluntary carbon offsetting. Humour abounds in current media environments and is demonstrated in several different forms: as metaphors, comics, memes and satire videos. While the aim of humour is primarily to amuse, political humour also aims to shape public opinion, criticize others and bring forth alternatives. In this context, disruption refers to practices aimed at unsettling the role of offsetting in society. I ask: in what ways is humour used to disrupt the practices and moralities of carbon offsetting? 

To look into this, I present a collection of examples ranging from satire shows to memes. These public demonstrations drawing on humour have also spurred (serious) responses from actors involved in carbon offsetting. 

I show how humour has been used by activists to demonstrate the triviality of offsetting at the face of a climate crisis, through drawing parallels to other forms of absurd behaviour. However, I question whether the disruption posed by humorous interventions leverages the absurdity of carbon offsetting sufficiently as a form of critique.

Media as 'Theatre of Failure': Performing Neoliberalism in Representations of Private and Public Sector Space Exploration

Graham Minenor-Matheson, Linköping University

Since the middle of the twentieth century, space exploration has largely been conducted by government agencies like NASA, the ESA and Roscosmos.  However, since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, there has been a growing private sector influence in space exploration activities that are considered as disrupting the space industry (Schilling 2019; Gudmundsson 2018).

But disruption is not restricted to technological or market activities, there is no organic process of disruption without human involvement.  Disruption also occurs through language, particularly through the mediated public sphere. It is my contention that a process of disruption is ongoing within the space sector, one that sees private sector companies as more capable in pursuing the next phase of space exploration and the public sector as unfit for purpose.

Reimagining “media events” as technological performance, this paper discusses how newspaper reporting on public and private industry rocket and shuttle launches can be analysed through the lens of “theatre of failure” (Periiam 2023; Grommé 2015) performing a neoliberal shift in emphasis from the public (NASA) to the private sector (SpaceX) as being successful proponents of space travel.  New private actors in space exploration are demonstrated as successful, taking over the mantel from a crumbling public sector actor, NASA, who is represented as always expected to fail. This paper aims to show the process by which media are contributing to disrupting our collective imaginaries to reevaluate the role of public sector organisations like NASA in delivering space programs in favour of a growing private sector.

Ambivalent Affect in the AI Revolution

Santtu Räisänen, Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki

The cultural production of AI futures at the end of the 2010’s spawned an abundance of socio-technical disruptions which promised everything and were doomed to fail. The promethean storytelling which works as the cultural undertone of this progressivism is affectively charged. Government strategy texts painting AI futures are aspirational, reaching for the sublime (Bareis & Katzenbach 2021). Not least, actors draw from affective facts (Massumi 2010) of excitement and hype as resources for making sense of it all. According to technologists, it is specifically the fact that AI technology /excites/ that enrols allies, especially non-expert ones, into projects of socio-technical disruption. 

Contrary to these emic understandings, I argue that the affective regimes of socio-technical disruption are much more ambivalent. Drawing from Ngai’s concept of ugly feelings (2005) and Virno’s sentiments of disenchantment (1996), I approach the weak, negative and disparate affects which bubble under the building of the Finnish National Artificial Intelligence Programme (2017-2023). The analysis reveals an affective breakage of objectless opportunism and disenchanted cynicism in an ironic play between high-mimetic and profane registers of a /totalising and totally banal AI revolution/. This breakage qualitatively scales with the experienced agency of actors, from the techno-acolytes setting societal agendas, to the executive civil servants for whom the narrative of disruption is imposed upon form above.

Organizers

Jessamy Perriam, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark