{"id":16439,"date":"2014-06-19T03:19:56","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T03:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/every-age-has-a-theory-of-rising-and-falling-of\/"},"modified":"2014-06-19T03:19:56","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T03:19:56","slug":"every-age-has-a-theory-of-rising-and-falling-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/every-age-has-a-theory-of-rising-and-falling-of\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God\u2019s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new\u2014historicism, the idea \u201cthat all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.\u201d Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It\u2019s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Jill Lepore: What the Theory of \u201cDisruptive Innovation\u201d Gets Wrong\u00a0: The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been cloudy for six months. This New Yorker article by Jill Lepore is the first thing I\u2019ve encountered that cut through all that, and maybe it\u2019s not just my own haziness it\u2019s counteracting.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still too dopey to really make it all the way through this essay with a careful eye. And maybe it\u2019s just cause I\u2019ve been so flattened for a while, but I don\u2019t remember anyone else writing about tech, business, or most anything else, with the same beauty and precision.<\/p>\n

I first came across Jill Lepore\u2019s writing when researching luck \u2014 she\u2019d written a lot about the original Game of Life. But this, reading this, after sharing Clayton Christensen\u2019s private plane from Canada a few months ago, made me feel like she\u2019s looking under rocks that other people have mistaken for monuments. And man, wait until you see what\u2019s under those.<\/p>\n

(via slavin<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4h9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}