First Draft #26: a newsletter on public language
Dreaded innovation speak; "Foster"; "Think big"; Amis and McCarthy
Why is the language of innovation districts so devoid of innovation?
Consider the names. Cortex Innovation St Louis. Newcastle Helix. Technoport Luxembourg. Edinburgh Technopole. Quantum Valley Canada. Scientific terms of spurious relevance are casually appended. I’m reminded of Apprentice contestants grasping for a cool team name and plumping for “Alpha” or “Velocity” or “Apex”. But while some names try too hard, others don’t try hard enough. Future Business Centre in Cambridge. El Paso Tech Hub. Health Innovation Campus Lancashire. Digital Innovation Valley China.
No matter the country or continent, the language of innovation districts is remarkably samey and uninspiring. It is a language of chrome-plated cliches and techno-utopian abstractions; a babble of “clusters” and “ecosystems” and “synergies”, words that apply in obscure ways to the grind of actual work, and which gesture grandly at a better, more productive future while doing little to get us there.
Almost all districts espouse “cross-pollination” and “interdisciplinary collaboration”. All are “hubs” that “drive entrepreneurship” and “foster creativity”. Most claim to be “solving” or “addressing” humanity’s “great challenges”. In a sense it’s not surprising. All supermarkets talk about food. But the sheer linguistic homogeneity – the incessant repetition not just of subject matter but specific words and phrases – reveals a deep conformist streak in the places that claim to be the most innovative.
Stale language is a clue to stale thought. Boiler-plate phrases, whether uttered by politicians, institutions or friends in the pub, suggest at best superficial thinking and at worst insincerity. Innovation district cliches matter because these places are supposedly where the next breakthroughs will happen, where diseases will be cured and environmental destruction averted. They attract an enormous amount of investment and public funding on the basis of their vaunted claims. Humanity has a big stake in them doing what they say they are doing.
Cross-pollination really is important. Many future breakthroughs really will happen at the intersection of disciplines, rather than within old subject categories. We saw this during the pandemic when the collision of biology and advanced computing accelerated progress on vaccines. The fear is that innovation districts have learned to signal the existence of such meeting points while failing to make them happen for real.
One way to measure the validity of innovation district rhetoric is to assess the rate of scientific progress in the time they’ve been around. Districts proliferated around a decade ago after the financial crisis when it made sense for enterprise to gather in urban locations. If the breathless talk of “co-locating” and “clusters” and “networking assets” is correct, shouldn’t the last decade have been marked by unparalleled progress? Surely the accumulated technological acceleration of thousands of shiny business ecosystems around the world added up to a dazzling era of discovery?
If anything, recent years are marked by a slow-down in scientific progress. Fewer blockbuster drugs have been discovered. The rate of new patents has tailed off. Output measures such as productivity and GDP per capita also show slower rates of growth. It seems possible that the age of innovation districts — and their giddy jargon — far from ushering in a new era of blinding brilliance, has been a drag on human progress.
Innovation needs a new language. True custodians of the future should forgo sci-fi nonsense and think instead about how disparate endeavours and people, working in close proximity, really can complement each other. A good start would be to abandon the word “innovation”, a term that so often marks the end, rather than the beginning, of productive thought. A quest for a new, truer way to talk about progress would force humans to think more deeply about what it actually entails. “Innovation” is dead, long live innovation.@AlexDymoke
Jargon buster: Foster
On the Mount Rushmore of jargon, which four words are carved into the stone? “Synergy” and “leverage”, surely. “Utilise” is in with a shout. “Strategic”? Possibly. One word that wouldn’t qualify is “foster”. “Foster” is rarely bemoaned. It appears on few “banned” lists. But it is banned at The Draft. Though seldom used in speech, “foster” is ubiquitous in corporate writing. Companies are always “fostering” things, from inclusive communities to innovative mindsets to welcoming cultures. In our experience, firms are usually doing very little to bring about that which they claim to “foster”. And that is the point. Ingratiating and mock-collaborative, “foster” is also underhand. It suggests active effort but entails no real obligations. Don’t fall for it. And don’t use it — unless, of course, you’re taking temporary guardianship of a child. @AlexDymoke
Jargon buster: Think big
Twitter’s new CEO, former ad executive Linda Yaccarino, sent her first all-staff email last week. Titled “Building Twitter 2.0 Together”, it’s a dizzying parade of jargon, random words in bold, block CAPITALS, unlikely metaphors (“wrap your arms around this powerful vision”), and cliches (“reach across aisles”). Yaccarino’s brief is to rebuild Twitter’s ad revenue. But, of course, she can’t say that. No, instead she wants to “drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information”. Employees are implored to “transform”, to “do it all together” and to “think big”. “Thinking big” had its heyday in the 1960s following the 1959 publication of The Magic of Thinking Big, written by another ad guy, David Schwartz. To go on about “thinking big” in 2023, is a telling sign that you are doing the precise opposite. @james_carroll
Amis and McCarthy: always in style
Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy, two sad departures in quick succession, brought forward the claim that a great prose style is deeply connected to substance of material. It’s a strange claim, in a way, but it is one that Christopher Hitchens used to make on behalf of his friend Amis. It’s the positive version of Orwell’s claim that we can derive the bad politics of the writer from the terrible excesses of the style. “You can always rely on a murderer for a fancy prose style” as Humbert Humbert puts it.
There are some forms of writing – French literary criticism after and excluding Roland Barthes, for example – in which the complexity of style is part of the effect, designed to show that nothing can really be said by saying nothing at all, at length. But, in truth, it is quite easy to separate the style from the substance. Stefan Collini’s essay on Orwell in Absent Minds is a reminder that Orwell’s prose isn’t quite the window pane he would have us think it is. Martin Amis’s magnificent virtuosity as a writer was, it has to be said, sometimes deployed in the service of some ordinary notions. There are plenty of poets – Yeats, Auden, Hughes – who, at least some of the time, wrote fluent flapdoodle. They were always stylish but they were sometimes foolish and the one couldn’t entirely disguise the other.
It is possible to say serious things badly and foolish things well. You can’t necessarily infer the brilliance of the thought from the beauty of the effect. Aristophanes’s charge against the rhetoricians applies here. Sometimes a skilled writer can make the weaker argument the stronger one. A prose style is a wonderful thing to have but it always needs watching. @PhilipJCollins1
Language and beyond
Is jargon always bad? The Economist with an interesting argument that some jargon, in some contexts, can be helpful. “In the right circumstances it can help build a culture and act as a useful shorthand. If you think all jargon is worthless, it may be time to circle back.”
Interesting essay from the always-worth-reading Tomiwa Owolade on why, when it comes to race, we have to stop mimicking American debates. His new book just came out too.
The New Statesman’s entertaining polemic on “Waterstones Dad” (with a bonus appearance from Phil). And James O’Malley’s equally good retort “New Statesman Man”: “And he has never seriously reckoned with low-status questions like what the “theory of change” is that will ever finally “defeat” capitalism, or what policy steps can be taken to improve living and working conditions for actual poor people. He doesn’t take seriously what it actually takes for more progressive parties to win elections. He has a completely unearned smugness about his righteousness when confronted with these political questions. “
An alarming story of police using song lyrics to convict young British rappers.
The great James Wood on the great Cormac McCarthy. Published last December, the piece, which reflects on the author’s flawed final novels, towers above much of what has been written since McCarthy’s death.
Engrossing New Yorker story on the race to approve a promising but untested new treatment for one of the world’s cruellest diseases.
James Marriott — “princeling of the cognoscenti” according to the Waterstones Dad piece — with a typically thoughtful and well written article on centrist anger: Rage is swallowing even the middle ground.
Fascinating podcast gives the background to the ill-fated OceanGate submarine. Recent years have seen an explosion in deep sea tourism that has in turn brought about a golden era of research. That could now end.
The Athletic’s Adam Hurrey on the emergence of “transferspeak” and the new subgenre of footballing entertainment that is the transfer window. (£) “Transfers haven’t changed, but the way we consume them — the way we are fed them — has. Just as Sky Sports News now count down to deadline day in milliseconds (not just on the day itself, but all summer) the reporting of transfers has become more… incremental.”
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Phil in Prospect on the decline of political speechmaking.
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Love this! Working at a brand agency means it can be hard to swerve words like 'innovate' and 'foster' but doing so helps us think better and deeper about what problems clients are actually solving. Reminds me of this v old piece from Scott Berkun on why we need to stop using the word 'innovation' https://scottberkun.com/2008/stop-saying-innovation-heres-why/?mc_cid=01de786a0d&mc_eid=2ca4891d2f