04/19/2016: ISP Law & Technology Speaker Series: Molly Sauter | Information Society Project | New Haven, CT

Date: 

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - 12:00pm

Location: 

Yale Law SchoolSee map

127 Wall Street

New Haven, CT 06520

Disruption as Radical Nostalgia

What are the politics of “disruption”? When deployed politically, specifically in the context of social movements, “disruption” or “disruptiveness” may describe a set of tactics, an event, or a particular theory of change. The term has also been drafted into service, perhaps most loudly, in the open-plan offices of Silicon Valley, where “disruption” is deployed as a highly desirable hallmark of creativity, innovation, and success. Though the term may be applied in a host of contexts, the question at hand is, broadly, what are the politics of disruption? Can it be interpreted to have one that holds steady throughout its applied contexts? If it does have some such underlying politics, what are its implications for the use of “disruption,” both as a descriptor and proactive guide of action? In this talk, Molly Sauter posits that disruption’s politics are primarily tied to a politics of radical, ideological nostalgia. Its conceptual opposite is not the apolitical “continuation,” but rather the liberal “progress,” and progress’s special, extreme form, “innovation.” Its closest conceptual synonym is “interruption,” and the main project of disruptive or interruptive politics is to arrest the liberal drive of “progress.” Ms Sauter will unpack the concept of radical nostalgia as it manifests in disruptive politics and will examine the special case of disruptive politics within Network Communication Technology (NCT) spaces.