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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>unlike-us-reader-24</title> <link href="css/unlike-us-reader.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body id="unlike-us-reader" xml:lang="en-GB"> <div> <h1 id="toc_marker-23" class="article-title"><a id="Disruptive-Business--as-Artistic-Intervention" />Disruptive Business as Artistic Intervention</h1> <p class="slash">/</p> <h2 class="author-name"><a href="unlike-us-reader-34.xhtml#bazzichelli">857475134</a></h2> </div> <div> <p>This essay aims to introduce the concept of disruptive business as a form of artistic and hacktivist intervention within the market field of Web 2.0. The main approach is not simply to refute business, since it has often been part of counterculture and cultural development, but to instead reappropriate its philosophy, making it functional for social purposes beyond the realms of capitalistic logic.</p> <p>In the past years, the whole idea of creating networks has become strictly connected with developing new business models for sharing knowledge and user-generated content. On the one hand, with the emergence of Web 2.0, we are facing a process of continuity: networking, which was previously a narrow artistic practice among the avant-garde, or in the underground creative scene during the 1980s and 1990s, has found a much wider audience today and is becoming a common mode of interaction. On the other hand, we are facing a deep change, or as many hacktivists and critical theoreticians argue, an involution in the modalities of creating networks, which are becoming ever more centralized and informed by the logic of business. Both what has been called Web 2.0 since 2004, as well as the whole idea of folksonomy, which props up social networking, blogging, and tagging, might be considered a mirror to the economic co-optation of the values of sharing, openness, participation and networking which inspired the early formation of hacker culture and peer2peer technology.<sup><a id="footnote-308067-1-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-308067-1">1</a></sup> </p> <p>However, it would be too easy to assume that hackers and technology practitioners – especially in Western countries – have been completely outside of the process of IT business development. Today, it should be of no surprise to find out that Google managers are adopting the strategy of employing hackers – or promoting the bohemian ethos of Burning Man among their employees, as Fred Turner points out in his 2009 essay ‘Burning Man at Google’<sup><a id="footnote-308067-2-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-308067-2">2</a></sup> – since many hackers in California have contributed to the development of the computer business in Silicon Valley.</p> <p>By accepting that the digital utopias of the 1980s and 1990s were never completely extraneous to business practices, the aim is to start analyzing how cyclical business trends work in the present of network culture, and how artistic and hacker practices might emerge from business logics themselves. Is it still effective to adopt a critical position <em>against</em> business, or should we acknowledge that the anti-capitalistic battle has long since been lost, while at the same time being open to the possibility that new territories of intervention and creation <em>within </em>business might be identified and imagined? </p> <p>The question is whether the business appropriation and co-optation of the rhetoric and the values of the first phase of hacker culture (openness, DIY, etc.) might be the only approach for understanding present-day developments of networking and hacktivism. Considering that many social media projects are built up involving and employing hackers and networkers, the question is not so much whether such people are exploited, but rather how hacking, sharing, and openness are still possible inside Web 2.0. If hackers and activists cannot avoid indirectly serving corporate revolutions, they might work on absorbing business ideologies to their own advantage, which, in short, means transforming and hacking its models from within: to reappropriate the appropriators by provoking a conscious understanding of the technology itself, as well as generating disruption within it. </p> <p>Even if it is common to recognize appropriation as a cyclical business strategy among hackers and activists, it takes more effort to accept that business has often been part of counterculture and cultural development. In this phase of ambiguity, it is important to look back and analyze the reasons for the shift of networking paradigms and hacker values, but it is also necessary to break some cultural taboos and avoid dualistic oppositions, as a political and artistic strategy. Possible artistic scenarios might lead to a stretching of the limits of business enterprises, and imagining different strategies of participation, interaction and cultural innovation. Instead of refusing to compromise with commercial platforms, a possible model for artists and activists – but also for common users – might be to develop an understanding of the medium from within, revealing power structures and hidden mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion. </p> <p>Once again adopting the hands-on strategy as practiced by hackers, the objective therefore becomes to reflect on the intersections between art and business, focusing on disruptive art practices as tools for generating aesthetic, technological and socio-political criticism. </p> <p>I propose the concept of <em>The Art of Disruptive Business</em> as a form of artistic and activist intervention within the business field of Web 2.0.<sup><a id="footnote-308067-3-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-308067-3">3</a></sup> This notion describes immanent practices of hackers, artists, networkers and entrepreneurs that interfere with business, whilst at the same time generating new forms of business. Disruptive business is strictly related to the concept of disruptive innovation or disruptive technology, a term coined in 1997 by Clayton M. Christensen, Professor at the Harvard Business School. According to Christensen,</p> <p class="quote">A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect.<sup><a id="footnote-308067-4-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-308067-4">4</a></sup> </p> <p>Adopting this concept as an art practice offers an opportunity to imagine new possible strategies for art as well as creating innovations in the economic framework, which are only possible by getting directly involved in the business process. In this context, artists and hackers, conscious of the pervasive presence of consumer culture in our daily life, react strategically and playfully to create a change that comes from within the flow of business, in all its complexity. While disrupting the machine, and producing innovation, it might be possible to accomplish a new critical perspective.</p> <p>Since the avant-gardes, artists have concentrated on the effect of producing shock and the unpredictable, while generating new forms of visual and artistic experimentation. In the neoliberal era, disruptive business logic deals with the unpredictable as well, as exemplified above by quoting the definition of disruptive technologies. As Stevphen Shukaitis argues in the book <em>Imaginal Machines</em>, it is not possible to discuss subversion as if it was an external entity, or an external enemy, of capital.<sup><a id="footnote-308067-5-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-308067-5">5</a></sup> He points out that ‘resistant aesthetics, anti-art and the avant-garde have greatly shaped the development of capitalism to the degree that it relies on rejuvenation through new images and imagery along with other forms of social energies’.<sup><a id="footnote-308067-6-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-308067-6">6</a></sup></p> <p>If business tends to co-opt its opponents, artists and hackers can respond by appropriating the concept of disruption in the business framework, by generating a mutual interference loop between business and disruption. Performing <em>both</em> disruption <em>and</em> innovation means simulating the logic of the contemporary Web 2.0 business model, which works by adopting sharing values of networking and peer2peer collaboration, and producing new networking strategies. The social and political change comes from the inside, by performing within the system and finding its contradictions and the bugs in the machine, or by using its own logic to transform it. In the era of immaterial economy and increasing flexibility, the act of responding with radical opposition no longer looks like an effective practice, while that of performing within the capitalist framework, keeping the dialectic open through coexisting oppositions, might become a possible path of exploration. Adopting a hacker’s strategy, hacktivists and artists take up the challenge of understanding how capitalism works, transforming it into a context for intervention. </p> <p>Disrupting the scheme of oppositional conflicts, the challenge becomes to create paradoxes and tricks, with the protagonists acting as chameleons to absorb the instances of the system and, by being able to find the system’s weaknesses, turning such weaknesses around to produce innovative perspectives and critical interventions. In a scenario where business is intertwined with the values of hacker ethics and networking, and where the forms of criticism tend to freeze as soon as they emerge, the alternative to social media might be found within business itself. </p> <p class="text-last">Business innovation becomes art intervention.</p> <h6 class="references_title">References<strong></strong></h6> <p class="references">Anderson, Chris. <em>Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit By Giving Something For Nothing</em>, New York: Hyperion, 2009.</p> <p class="references">Bazzichelli, Tatiana. ‘Networked Disruption: Rethinking Opposition in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking’, PhD Diss., Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, 2011. </p> <p class="references">Bazzichelli, Tatiana. ‘If You Can’t Hack ‘em, Absorb ‘em or the Endless Dance of the Corporate Revolution”, <em>Concept Store</em> 3, (2010), <a href="http://www.tatianabazzichelli.com/PDF_files/Bazzichelli_Endless_Dance_Corporate_Revolution.pdf">http://www.tatianabazzichelli.com/PDF_files/Bazzichelli_Endless_Dance_Corporate_Revolution.pdf</a>. </p> <p class="references">Christensen, Clayton M. ‘Disruptive Innovation’, in Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam (eds) <em>Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction</em>, Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2012, <a href="http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/disruptive_innovation.html">http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/disruptive_innovation.html</a>. </p> <p class="references">Raymond, Eric S. ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, <em>First Monday</em> Special Issue #2: Open Source (3 October, 2005), <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1472">http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1472</a>. </p> <p class="references">Shukaitis, Stevphen. <em>Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life</em>, New York: Autonomedia, 2009.<em></em></p> <p class="references-last">Turner, Fred. ‘Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production’, <em>New Media & Society</em> 11.1-2 (April, 2009): 145-66, <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf">http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf</a>.</p> <div class="footnotes"> <h6 class="references_title">Notes</h6> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-308067-1" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-308067-1-backlink">1</a>.	If we want to discover the roots of the process in which business intertwines with the ethics of sharing knowledge and DIY we should go back to a model which inspired both business entrepreneurs and geeks in the course of the 1990s: the Bazaar method. Eric S. Raymond conceptualized this in his paper ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ initially presented at the O’Reilly Perl Conference in September 1997. The paper analyzed the ability to create software and other products of intelligence and creativity through collaboration among a community of individuals acting to open up communication channels (Eric S. Raymond, ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, <em>First Monday</em> Special Issue #2: Open Source (3 October 2005), <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1472">http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1472</a>). Raymond, whose essay led to the formation of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), is clearly in favor of collaborative practices, but also an apologist for greater involvement of free culture in the marketplace. This is hardly surprising considering that Raymond is the co-founder of OSI – together with Bruce Perens – the organization which coined the term ‘Open Source’ in 1998 in Palo Alto, California, and which included various individuals connected with the O’Reilly community.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-308067-2" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-308067-2-backlink">2</a>.	Fred Turner, ‘Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production’, New Media & Society 11.1-2 (April, 2009): pp. 145-66. <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf">http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf</a>. </p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-308067-3" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-308067-3-backlink">3</a>.	The concept of <em>The Art of Disruptive Business</em> is a result of an investigation I have been conducting since 2008 within a research group at Aarhus University in Denmark. This resulted in the completion of my PhD dissertation in 2011, <em>Network Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking</em> (to be published).</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-308067-4" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-308067-4-backlink">4</a>.	Clayton M. Christensen, ‘Disruptive Innovation’, in Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam (eds) <em>Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction</em>, Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2012, <a href="http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/disruptive_innovation.html">http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/disruptive_innovation.html</a>. </p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-308067-5" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-308067-5-backlink">5</a>.	Stevphen Shukaitis, <em>Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life</em>, New York: Autonomedia, 2009.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-308067-6" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-308067-6-backlink">6</a>.	Shukaitis, <em>Imaginal Machines</em>, p. 24.</p> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html>