Edition 64
The New Disruptors
- Published 7th May, 2019
- ISBN: 9781925773620
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
As the digital revolution continues to unleash radical change on industries, economies, politics and institutions, what future will this disruption shape? Is the brave new world of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google and Uber one of decentralisation, anti-elitism and individual freedom – or surveillance, monopoly and control?
Griffith Review 64: The New Disruptors takes a wide-ranging look at the upheavals that have come with our increasingly technological world – and considers the consequences that will come with the digital metamorphosis.
Edited by Ashley Hay, Griffith Review 64: The New Disruptors features contributions from writers including Julianne Schultz, Mark Pesce, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Eileen Ormsby, Ellen Broad, Richard King and Scott Ludlam.
In this Edition
Move very fast and break many things
WHEN FACEBOOK TURNED ten in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and nerdish face of the social network, announced that its motto would cease to be ‘Move fast and break things’, and become ‘Move fast with stable infra[structure]’. For the company that had debuted on...
Hashtag war
THE CAR JOURNEY from Canberra airport to the parliamentary triangle is a necessary trip for Federal politicians. One route heads south along the Monaro Highway, passing Canturf, suppliers of the lawn that carpets the Parliament House roof. Canturf’s rotating roadside promotional signage features cringe-worthy...
Cypherpunks and surveillance power
ON THE SURFACE, the global digital rights landscape is a depressing and forbidding place. US technology giants have commodified the whole field of human social interactions and are performing large-scale extractive operations on their user bases. The phrase ‘data is the new oil’ captures...
Networked hatred
EVERY ERA IS defined by its sustaining myths. Among ours is surely ‘disruption’. The book that seeded the mythology, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), is only a little more than twenty years old, yet its ‘technological disruption’ thesis has...
Discounted goods
WALK THROUGH THE doors of a suburban op shop and you’ll find the residue of household (de)composition that was once catalogued in rhyming newspaper-speak as hatches, matches and despatches. Along half-a-dozen shelves, tucked behind the racks of second-hand clothes and used cutlery, you’ll even...
Guarding the gatekeepers
WARS OFTEN RAGE behind the estimated ten million Wikipedia pages: edit wars, where editors repeatedly override each other’s contributions to a page and cannot reach consensus about what the final content should be. This can extend to many thousands of edits. While some of...
The hydrogen economy
BEFORE THERE WAS Matt Damon in the film adaptation of The Martian, there was Cyrus Harding in Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island: a hero in the guise of an engineer. Stranded on a rocky outcrop in the ocean off the east coast of...
Reading in the dark
I WAS WITH friends, high up on a range looking west and down through a long and beautiful valley just south of Alice Springs, mountains in the far distance gauzy in the late light. A few cars came and went, windows lit up in...
On becoming posthuman
YOUR 185-MILLIONTH GREAT grandparents were fish. Your descendants will not be human forever. In a world of climate change, rising automation, gene editing and advanced artificial intelligence, modern humans are experiencing unprecedented technological disruption and global transformation. At this juncture, biological evolution is no...
Clean sweep
IT IS SUPPOSED to be test of character. An A+ student sits down to the final exam of his degree, and is surprised to be presented with a piece of paper with a single question: what is the name of the person who cleans...
The network versus the hierarchy
‘IT IS EASIER to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.’ So wrote the critical theorist Fredric Jameson in New Left Review in 2003, attributing the sentiment to an unnamed ‘someone’ whom posterity, with nothing else to go...
Rebooting the sharing economy
IN LATE OCTOBER 2010, I found myself in the city of San Francisco for the first time. I was at Hub SoMa, one of the city’s exploding number of co-working spaces, and I was running an event with author Rachel Botsman for the final...
Sortition
ANY DEMOCRACY WORTHY of the name must be an ongoing experiment in institutional design: there must be a willingness to adapt the ways in which representation is handled in order to maintain legitimacy. It is within this context that the idea of sortition arises,...
Disrupting the master narrative
MY INTEREST IN Indigenous people’s use of social media began while I was completing a PhD on the politics of identity. My participants would talk about how they expressed their Indigenous identities on social media. After I graduated, I was fortunate enough to receive...
Keeping faith with words
FOR MOST OF us who care to think about such things, the teenager was invented by JD Salinger in 1951. Of course, before he was described in literature, the teenager was a naturally occurring phenomenon in postwar America. As that country became the world’s...
First life, second death
IN 2011, AS a researcher interested in death and mourning, I decided to explore the now ‘mature’ virtual social world Second Life. It is a vast, online geography that replicates with astonishing detail extravagant real-world places such as New York, Paris and London while...
The search for ET
OUR WORLD WAS made by a million geniuses. Just switching on a light invokes a chain of historical brilliance going back centuries: from the LEDs developed by semiconductor engineers in 1990s Japan, to the power grid imagined by Nikola Tesla in New York a...
Narcissus triumphant
I LIKE TO look in mirrors, a predilection I suspect I share with many others – all of us too afraid to be caught out in our hidden vanities to admit it. It feels innate, the biology of my eye’s neurons firing in synchrony with...
Lessons from the Valley
THERE’S SOMETHING ENDURINGLY disconcerting about flying into Silicon Valley from Australia, where you arrive before you leave. If Silicon Valley can do time travel as easily as that, what can’t it do? You take off late in the afternoon, the A380 banking left over the...
Computer says no
WHEN PREPARING THE publicity plan for Made by Humans (MUP, 2018), my book about data, artificial intelligence and ethics, I made one request of my publisher: no ‘women in technology’ panels. I have never liked drawing attention to the fact that I’m a woman in...
To the moon
I’D LIKE TO believe that I wasn’t jumping on the bandwagon. But don’t we all tell ourselves little white lies to keep our self-worth intact? It was November 2017. I was jolted awake by the rousing sound of a deliciously obnoxious four-stroke engine. The alarm...
Don’t do it yourself
IT’S FUNNY TO think that a broken gearbox could lead to a physics student folding T-shirts in my lounge room, but that’s the internet for you. My addiction to outsourcing began when my car gave up the ghost in exactly the wrong place and I...
When big tech met books
THE FIRST TIME I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2008, I had an appointment with Google. Its stand in Hall Eight was a shiny white pod with no retractable banners or cheap shelving in sight. The pod made a perfect background for...
Dealer’s chance
‘IT HAS THE capacity to change everything – the way we work, the way we learn and play, even, maybe, the way we sleep or have sex,’ wrote British entrepreneur and author Matt Symonds of his prediction for the internet in The Economist in 1999....
Cyclones, fake news and history
IN THE DARK before dawn on 5 March 1899, half way up the eastern edge of Cape York Peninsula, five men camping on a sand ridge about forty feet above sea level and half a mile behind the beach found themselves waist deep in...
Early adopter
ONE TWO THREE running, jumping hops and I launch into the sky, wings beating down hard, plastic feathers scraping car park gravel. It’s easier with a platform to leap from, but just like the brochure says, you can get Aloft Anywhere TM with the...
Dummy
MAGGIE IMAGINES THE stale Ginger Nuts and Milk Arrowroots that will be in the biscuit jar at break time, and the way her thumb will make little crescent moons around her styrofoam cup of milky tea. ‘Repeat after me: DRSABCD. Danger, Response, Send for help....
Radio
Sometimes late at night I play with my radio, trying to tune in the dead. A nine-band Panasonic, ears on the world, AM, FM and shortwave. I believe this is how those gone will reach me, thin noise disguised in a song. So I listen to language I don’t understand, waiting for words I know. New...
Gum packet poem
My arms flecked with brown stained with sun I masticate a minty white cheek-filler to cushion my teeth on the...
Offshore
The gathering with placards is, give or take, the normal size. The speech is not unlike the last but tweaked for the occasion, a five-year anniversary for which the government – and, yes, its cheerful opposition – show not the least concern. The long, unbearable unfairness continues unredeemed. Car horns on the road nearby chip in...
Salvaged fragment from the recorded small morning hours rage of the vampire
of Silicon Valley 12
[ ]woe to tetravalent metalloids and over eager semiconductors! Beards of purest silicon, skulls of purest silicon! Hunchbacked high-octane flyers, trenchant noise polluters of harshest blue-grey silicon! [ ] [ ] [ ...