Meet Tracy: an interior designer who can’t find a good house painter. Meet Bob: a wine store proprietor whose retail staff is unreliable. Meet Seth: a valet driver losing tips in an increasingly cashless culture.

Tracy is a founder of EasyPaint, a startup that matches house painters with individuals and companies seeking their services. Bob sells wine to Bjorn and Marissa Ovick, whose startup Staffly supplies retail workers to independent shops. Seth is a client of Bravo, which lets customers tip electronically.

Last week, each of these companies participated in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt San Fransisco, the annual convention hosted by TechCrunch, AOL’s tech journalism site. The September 2015 Disrupt marked the thirteenth iteration of the event, which began in New York in 2012, and which now takes place each year on both coasts as well as in an overseas city. Each event features an exhibition hall, where software and hardware companies display newly launching products, panel discussions and “fireside chats” with executives whose companies lead the technology industry, and a hackathon that asks teams of coders to build something new over the course of twenty-four hours. Yet Disrupt’s main event, the centerpiece of the convention, is the Startup Battlefield. Billed as “the very heart of TechCrunch Disrupt,” the Startup Battlefield is a competition for investment capital and press attention. To win the competition’s $50,000 prize, preselected contestants must deliver a compelling pitch before an assembly hall of industry insiders, including investors and press, followed by a question and answer session with a panel of industry judges.

Disruption, a favorite Silicon Valley buzzword, signals the end of business as usual—yet the modes of engagement employed this week at TechCrunch Disrupt replicate, rather than rupture, industry norms. In their Startup Battlefield presentations, EasyPaint, Staffly, and Bravo took care to emphasize that the protagonists of their product narratives are real-life individuals affiliated with each company. Still other contestants opened their pitches with (presumably) archetypal or composite characters, imagined individuals whose struggles are solvable with the right company’s technology. In other words, each company set up its product’s desirability by introducing a person (“meet so-and-so”) who faces an obstacle (“so-and-so requires X but can’t have it because Y”) which the company’s technologies will remove (“I’m here to tell you about Z.”)

About half of the Startup Battlefield contestants invoked this presentational formula, which fits a range of industrial verticals: Emily wants to get pregnant but doesn’t know her fertility window. Abby needs school lunches but hates bananas. Scott needs medical care but hospital communication confuses him. Sam owns a car dealership but 401ks overwhelm him. Susie wants a divorce but lawyers are expensive. Tom grows peppers but can’t analyze his farming data. Gillian has asthma but can’t keep up with her treatment regimen. Kendall loves art and manicures but can’t customize her fingernails. Alex needs to notarize his will but must bring a full stack of paper to a notary public, and who prints anything anymore?

Having presented these protagonists’ perils on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, the startup founders quickly came to their rescue. Ava makes a smart bracelet that tracks its wearer’s menstrual cycle. Scrumpt lets parents order their children preselected lunches. Stitch streamlines communication between medical providers. Money Intel automates 401k administration. Separate.us helps divorce petitioners manage their own filing. Agrilyst, winner of the Startup Battlefield, analyzes the agricultural data produced by individual indoor farms. Cohero Health tracks asthma patients’ treatment adherence and lung function through a mobile app that syncs with a smart inhaler and spirometer. Preemadonna prints customized images from a smartphone onto users’ fingernails. Stampery provides digital document certification.

If there is a neoliberal logic undergirding the move to locate a would-be revolutionary technology within the life of a particular person, a narrative logic is also at play in these presentations. An irony of the Startup Battlefield is that the broader the implications of a given technology, the more difficult it is to explain in a matter of minutes. The plight of the pepper farmer highlights the revolutionary potential of Agrilyst for an audience likely unfamiliar with indoor farming on a broad scale.

Still, it’s worth considering what it means when, in the name of disruption, one of the tech industry’s most celebrated events for new, innovative technologies proposes the transformation of industrial sectors as diverse as agriculture, healthcare, and business administration using identical presentational paradigms. Sometimes “breaking shit”–to use another of the tech industry’s favored terms for innovation–means remaking it in Silicon Valley’s image.

Post by Li Cornfeld, McGill University

In an early action sequence of Tomorrowland, the new fantasy film from Disney, quirky proprietors of a Texas junk shop called Blast From the Past open fire with technologies of the future. The shopkeepers Ursula Gernsback (Kathryn Hahn) and Hugo Gernsback (Keegan-Michael Key) wield glowing guns whose candy colored sparks rip through the ceiling; defeated, their bodies spontaneously combust. The murderous merchants were “AA units,” or “audio-animatronics,” explains a mysterious young girl called Athena (Raffey Cassidy), moments after rescuing their intended victim (Britt Robertson) from the blast. Then she twists a screwdriver into a blue port on her own shoulder; Athena, too, is a robot. Futuristic technology might destroy the world, warns Tomorrowland, but it can also save it. In a return to Disney’s mid-century technofuturism, the movie implores audiences to choose optimism.

Tomorrowland’s resident optimist, a variant of Dorothy in Oz, is neither a good robot nor a bad robot; she’s Casey Newton, from Florida. With the help of Athena, and Athena’s old pal Frank, a jaded recluse played by George Clooney, Casey (Robertson) journeys to the otherworldly Tomorrowland, an alternate dimension colonized by an elite group of humans during the last century to foster accelerated advances in science and technology. Decades ago, for example, Tomorrowland discovered particles that permit a voyeuristic form of time travel; Hugh Laurie’s villainous Governor Nix sneers that on Earth, “physicists are still arguing over whether or not they exist.” A chance to glimpse technology of an immanent future, of course, was the promise of the original Tomorrowland, Disneyland’s futurist region from which the movie takes its name.

When the first Tomorrowland opened in 1955, its signature attraction, the TWA Moonliner, promoted the future by inviting tourists to participate in an imagined moon landing. (The Tomorrowland movie signals its investment in this midcentury vision of the future when it frames the dismantling of a NASA launching pad as the end of futurity.) A decade later, Tomorrowland acquired The General Electric Carousel of Progress, a 1964 World’s Fair attraction that took audiences on a tour of domestic life throughout the 20th century, culminating in a future of ease and leisure afforded by technological development. The Tomorrowland movie, whose earliest scenes take place at the 1964 World’s Fair, sets the atmosphere with the Carousel of Progress theme song, There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. Songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman, in a lovingly compiled memoir, recall that they wrote the song about Walt Disney himself, whom they describe as “an optimistic futurist,” dedicated to building a future that was “great, big, and beautiful.”

Tomorrowland bemoans the loss of that vision. Director Brad Bird, who co-wrote the script with Damon Lindelof, avoids self-conscious corporate references, and so while the mythologized spirit of Walt Disney pervades the movie, the man himself goes unmentioned. (“Audio-animatronics,” a Disney coinage, is perhaps oblique enough a reference to warrant inclusion.) When Frank speaks wistfully of his 1960’s childhood, before the future became “scary,” and when Nix charges that the people of earth “didn’t fear their demise—they repackaged it,” Bird surely intends to level the critique at what he perceives as a global culture of fear and resignation. Still, bracketing dubious nostalgia for the Cold War as an era without a politics of fear, we might consider how Disney’s own corporate history indexes a departure from space age optimism.

Disney expanded its investment in fantasy futuristic landscapes with the launch of EPCOT, a theme park adjacent to Orlando’s Magic Kingdom, in 1982. Modeled on the industrial futurism of a world’s fair, and centered around a domed “Spaceship Earth” that showcases communications technology “from the stone age to the information age,” EPCOT celebrated the same technofuturism that girded the development of the original Tomorrowland. Yet this second Orlando theme park also crystalized Disney’s abandonment of its earlier, ambitious vision: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was originally conceived as an industrial-residential community that would revolutionize America. (The futurist settlement of the Tomorrowland movie, with its gleaming central tower and elevated transportation systems, takes its design cues from the original EPCOT plans.) Opening EPCOT as a theme park, Disney committed itself to the creation of fantasy futures rather than to their realization. (“It’s hard to have ideas and easy to give up,” laments Tomorrowland.)

By the mid-1990’s, Disney reversed its orientation to the future altogether: it reinvented Tomorrowland as “the future that never was,” a retro-futurist celebration of historical visions of “tomorrow” that failed to emerge. In an editorial that deemed the change “profound for a company whose founder was one of postwar America’s great popularizers of technology,” the New York Times worried that “as technology has entered lives, it has departed from many imaginations.” Curiously, the Tomorrowland movie likewise fails to fully imagine its own technofuturism. For all its exhortations to picture a better future, the movie never reveals much of what’s behind Tomorrowland’s shiny façade. Its most developed conception of Tomorrowland’s technological capabilities – also its most playful – are the audio-animatronic robots who make their way to Earth.

Audio-animatronics, too, have a long Disney history. Disney engineers began experimenting with lifelike robots in the mid-1940s, and by 1955, audio-animatronic animals populated Disneyland. Humanoid audio-animatronics made their debut at the 1964 World’s Fair, where Disney assured fairgoers “a final result so lifelike that you might find it hard to believe.” Even Disney detractor Richard Schickel would remark on the “astonishing fidelity” of the Fair’s audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln. Today, Disney promotional copy touts its remaining World’s Fair audio-animatronics as employing “Disney’s latest animation technology of the time,” an indication that, following the company’s midcentury robotic enthusiasm, audio-animatronics garnered little further attention—at least, until this summer’s release of Tomorrowland. When the movie pins its optimism on the development of fresh units of AA’s who will revitalize Tomorrowland, Disney casts its newest vision of the future in the mold of its own past.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that shortly before its open call at the world’s largest consumer technology show, ABC aired an episode of Shark Tank (Season 6, “Week 4”) that devolved into a debate over what a technology is. The company that prompted the debate, called Reviver, makes a fabric wipe that masks odors when rubbed on clothing. Company founders, brothers Ben and Eric Kusin, of Dallas, Texas, pitched the show dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of jeans and candy colored company t-shirts: in their case, light blue tees with their company name screen-printed across the front in lower case, white, sans serif letters. “I think you’ve got a good product,” entertainment mogul and Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban tells the brothers midway through the segment, “but first, you’re not a technology.” The soundtrack’s stock music swells, then turns ominous. The brothers counter that they’ve spent $150,000 on custom machinery; Cuban insists that machinery does not a technology make. “It’s not a technology!” he repeats as the shot closes in on Ben Kusin’s stunned expression. Dramatic twist achieved, ABC cuts to commercial.

Shark Tank plays by the reality TV rulebook: editors cut hour-long sessions into scenes lasting minutes, splice in reaction shots out of sequence, and post-zoom wide shots into close-up for dramatic effect. Ben Kusin’s slack-jawed stare, broadcast as his response to Cuban’s pronouncement, may well have come from a different moment in the shoot. Yet the tension cultivated by the TV show comes as much from the producers’ editing suite as from the judges’ ability to fast-track products and fund fledgling companies. In tech industry parlance, Shark Tank’s objective is monetization, not innovation; the argument between Cuban and the Kusins stems less from disagreement over the nature of a technology than over its association with market value. After the commercial break, Eric Kusin defends Reviver’s technological status based on its multiple applications. “We just started thinking of ourselves as a technology because the manufacturers are telling us what this can do,” he explains, and begins ticking potential features off on his fingers—but Cuban cuts him off immediately, at “mosquito repellent,” noting that talcum powder also has a lot of uses. To Cuban, it seems, technology means digital, or at least electronic, whereas to the Kusins, technology means machinic and scalable.

Despite their quarrel over the ontological status of odor masking wipes, however, Cuban and the Kusins alike define technology as a means of accruing venture capital. For the Kusins, both the uniqueness of their formula and its potential for further applications, which they see as technological properties, indicate the desirability of their product to prospective investors. Although Cuban rejects the Kusins’ assertion that the wipes are technological, he perceives the brothers’ insistence on calling themselves a tech company as a reuse for acquiring funding—from their father, founder of the video game corporation GameStop, from whom they received a two million dollar investment to start their venture. (“You only call it a technology because that allows you to go to dad and say, dear dad, we have a technology!”) Cuban may or may not be correct that the elder Mr. Kusin restricts his interest in his children to their interest in the tech sector, but entrepreneurial calculation undoubtedly led the brothers to adopt the language and aesthetics of Silicon Valley. Describing their “freshness revolution” while dressed in t-shirts that Reviver (which, like Twitter, Tumblr, and Uber follows a tech industry naming trend), the brothers emulate celebrated CEOs of the digital economy: usually, like the Kusins, young white men in jeans and t-shirts (Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick are exemplars), whose products promise to revolutionize something. Contra Cuban, it seems to me that the Kusins frame their product as a technology in the hopes that doing so will attract investors other than their father; they look like hundreds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs roaming the exhibition halls at CES.

Self-presentation is always part of pitching prospective funders. When the pitch is broadcast on national TV, performance plays an even larger role. Shark Tank contestants frequently dress according to a theme, and it’s easy to imagine introducing a similar product with entirely different stylistics. Another set of contestants, pitching a product that freshens clothing, might put on, say, aprons or athletic wear—especially if those contestants are women. Interestingly, the Kusin brothers avoid feminine associations with cleaning or clothing, distance bolstered by coding their product as a tool of technology rather than domesticity.

Partnership offers the Kusins receive from Shark Tank judges at the end of the segment underscore the domestic and technological duality of their product: one from Robert Herjavec, who made his fortune in the IT industry, and another from Lori Greiner, of the QVC home shopping network. That the brothers opt to partner with QVC, drawn in part to the exposure afforded by the TV network, suggests how the entrepreneurial aesthetics of digital technology transcend industrial sectors.

The Kusins’ dispute with Cuban gets no further attention. Their post-pitch interview, a confessional clip that Shark Tank usually devotes to rehashing contestants’ perceived slights at the hands of judges, focuses on Barbara Corcoran, founder of Corcoran real estate. Upon learning that their father has already given them two million dollars, Corcoran declines Reviver on the grounds that she doesn’t invest in rich kids. “We’re not rich!” Ben Kusin tells the camera after the segment, “That’s an unfair characterization of how they made it out to be, because of our father’s success.” Blindness to privilege isn’t restricted to Silicon Valley either.