The impact of disruption – Gabe Newell and Bruce Sterling

Bruce Stirling

Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions.
Took note of Doom, because:
“In late 1995, Doom (from a team of 12 people) was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 95, despite million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter.”

Talks about reducing noise between the producer and the customer, is a fan of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams  and says the corporation looks like a “pre-internet way of organising production and allocating capital”…

And another video here where Gabe talks about the future of gaming – content producers blurring into customers etc,

And… when disruption isn’t disrupting: Bruce Sterling at NEXT13.

“In the startup world, you work hard and you move fast to make other people rich. Other people. You’re a small elite of very smart young people who are working hard for an even smaller elite of mostly baby boomer financiers. So they can buy national governments, shut the governments down, destroy the middle class and the nation state… That will be the judgement of history for your startup culture… It was a tacit allegiance between the hacker space favelas of the startups and offshored capital and tax avoidance money laundries. We’re all auto colonialised by the austerity”

John Lester:
“In the closing keynote of NEXT Berlin 2013, acclaimed science-fiction author and journalist Bruce Sterling tackled a variety of topics like design fiction, start-up culture, and the mass adoption of disruptive technology. He sees science fiction as a form of design – design fiction that is part of the start-up world.
“The context was Bruce was asked to speak in front of a bunch of people within the “digital industry” in which many of whom fancy themselves as “digital disrupters”.
Many of these self-proclaimed “disrupters” think they are taking advantage of new technologies to disrupt status-quo markets, undercut the slothy competition, seduce away customers/consumers with closer interaction and are generally wreaking havoc with the usual ways of doing business.
“But Bruce was there to give them all a little spanking.
“He said as they are making rich guys richer, they are not disrupting the austerity and are, in fact, one of their top facilitators.
“These corporatist investors are not their friends and they prove it every time they create and smash a tech bubble (over and over again).
If they want to be truly “disruptive” they should keep the money they make and re-invest it in themselves and others to break way from these destructive corporatists.
The digital industry isn’t truly disrupting anything with their so-called “disruptive technology” when they answer to corporatists and/or use their profits to navel gaze and buy little rockets to play with.”