Disruption.

luka

luka

Well-known member
poetix said:
I wonder then about the Ivy League VC fund-grabbing Silicon Valley would-be "disruptor"s. They seem a different kind of beast mostly, Zuckerberg's towering sperghood notwithstanding.
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This is what I had in mind initially, but meandered.
 
C

comelately

Wild Horses
Although I am relying on the Fry/Laurie TV adaptation, I recall Jeeves talking about how the upper class blood needed occasional freshening up or somesuch.

Similarly in Orwell's 1984, iirc the Inner Party is broadly hereditary in its makeup but they will let a small amount of the extra-promising Outer Party children into the fold. And so it goes with Oxbridge entrance and the like.
 
version

version

Well-known member
comelately said:
Although I am relying on the Fry/Laurie TV adaptation, I recall Jeeves talking about how the upper class blood needed occasional freshening up or somesuch.

Similarly in Orwell's 1984, iirc the Inner Party is broadly hereditary in its makeup but they will let a small amount of the extra-promising Outer Party children into the fold. And so it goes with Oxbridge entrance and the like.
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luka

luka

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luka said:
They disrupt by dint of who they are. this is what I notice you said either 'nerds' or autistics (I've forgotten which) do to society at large. Disrupt by their very nature rather than by intent.
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The tweet in question

spoilt pthumerian child
@dynamic_proxy
I do have a pet theory that nerd-suppression is a survival imperative for non-nerd society, which is held together by sentiments and proprieties that nerds find mystifying and pointless. Our way of being is socially disintegrative. But also, bwahahaha.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
The chapter in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy on the "scholarship boy" - "Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and Anxious" - has a lot to say about the type of epistemic dislocation wrought be the grammar school system. Gove for one seems to think that this should be the experience of everybody, which of course it can't be, since it is so signally and centrally an experience of being set apart from others - you can impose a fantasy recreation of a 1950s grammar school curriculum on comprehensive school pupils, as he tried to do, but it's an empty and demeaning exercise for all concerned.

Another character from fiction: Gormenghast's Steerpike, although he is more purely a destroyer.
 
luka

luka

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Can anyone add to this list of saviour/destroyer/disrupters?

Shevek in the dispossessed
Sean Connery in Zardoz
Will In the Fresh Prince of Bel Air
John the Savage in Brave New World.

I was trying to think of them over dinner the other night. They have to represent something their society lacks but simultaneously finds indigestible which is why they destroy and rejuvenate at once.

Edit- just seen Steerpike. a book I've yet to read.
 
version

version

Well-known member
luka said:
Can anyone add to this list of saviour/destroyer/disrupters?

Shevek in the dispossessed
Sean Connery in Zardoz
Will In the Fresh Prince of Bel Air
John the Savage in Brave New World.

I was trying to think of them over dinner the other night. They have to represent something their society lacks but simultaneously finds indigestible which is why they destroy and rejuvenate at once.
Click to expand...

Neo and Smith in The Matrix?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Tthe current social formation has to be broken so it can be rearranged at a higher level of complexity and functioning, with the missing element now integrated. Again this is a fundamental pillar of psychoanalysis too.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
As for the pet theory, it has to do not with "higher" intelligence but with an idiosyncratic use of attention: a nerd is someone who pays more attention to something than the usual metric of social payoff would indicate, who is distracted from the things that make one easy-going and relatable by things that do not seem to outsiders to merit the effort. Trainspotters. Music nerds (many such hereabouts). Shevek is a perfect example of someone who pays attention to things that, from the point of view of his society, are the wrong things. This happens to overlap with the autistic type because one of the ways that autists manage discomfort and confusion is by absorbing themselves in "special interests", which give order to a small part of the world. Sometimes this is a completely sterile absorption, sometimes it results in specialised knowledge and talents that turn out (as in the case of today's techie nerds) to have a market value that can be exploited, sometimes it can become the basis for a position of status and esteem within a subculture devoted to the object of fascination.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Moving in from Chicago, newcomer Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon) is in shock when he discovers the small Midwestern town he now calls home has made dancing and rock music illegal. As he struggles to fit in, Ren faces an uphill battle to change things. With the help of his new friend, Willard Hewitt (Christopher Penn), and defiant teen Ariel Moore (Lori Singer), he might loosen up this conservative town. But Ariel's influential father, Reverend Shaw Moore (John Lithgow), stands in the way.

That sounds spot on lads
 
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