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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

How Silicon Valley’s Disruptors Defend Themselves

June 18, 2014 by Scott Timberg

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I EXPECT the big car companies were as defensive, back when reformers suggested seat belts and the like, as digital-disruptor types are when they receive any bit of criticism. In this case, the Silicon Valley types lash back that anyone who doesn’t buy their cyber-utopian vision is “anti-technology.”

Salon’s Andrew Leonard gets into this quite well in a short piece about the digital boys’ reception to Jill Lepore’s recent storyCV1_TNY_06_23_14Booth.indd. She argues that “disruption theory” is full of holes and bad assumptions, and was immediately tarred as a Luddite. Here’s Leonard:

It’s possible to be critical of the way Silicon Valley is agitating for regulatory reform that is designed to nurture Silicon Valley business models without being “anti-technology.” It’s possible to explore the question of how the current pace of technological innovation is affecting jobs and inequality without being anti-technology. It is possible to be critical of how, in the current moment, technology appears to be serving the interest of the owners of capital at the expense of workers without being anti-technology. It’s even possible to love one’s smartphone and the Internet while at the same time critiquing run-amok “change the world” hype.

The whole fight reminds me of something Paul Krugman has said: The enthusiasts of creative destruction always think it will be someone else getting destroyed. Someday, it will be their turn.

Filed Under: Internet, technology, The New Yorker

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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