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.

The paragon of this model is Leo Laporte’s TWiT network (named for its flagship program This Week in Tech), which takes a basic area (new media) and spins out variations including This Week in Law (tech news from a legal perspective), This Week in Fun (tech-related human interest stories) and MacBreak Weekly (Mac news).  From his cottage in Petaluma, Laporte produces programming for around $800 an hour, compared to minimum $10,000 for cable news networks, enabling profits with just one or two sponsors (paying higher CPMs than most “real” television could ever charge).

As a future for network television, this model has obvious limits.  TWiT, TechCrunch, Revision3 and similar operations won’t be doing scripted or reality television anytime soon:  it’s mostly commentary, interviews, and news (e.g. CNET TV, which leverages the newsgathering resources of CNET News).

Nonetheless, some distinctive features of the cottage network model make it interesting, such as:

• The apotheosis of simulcasting:  Most of TWiT’s or CNET’s shows work equally well in audio as video, allowing them to exploit a range of distribution methods, technologies, and audience preferences.  This isn’t a 1950s network trying to overcome legacy hardware (i.e. radio); it’s a 2010 network practicing hardware agnosticism.  (Thanks in part to Audible.com‘s advertising strategy, audio is also where a lot of the money currently is, just as radio financed the transition to television.)
• The fully-integrated audience:  Because most shows are streamed live, audience discussion isn’t just a post hoc backchannel–the Chat Room is a fully developed character, showing up at important moments to supply information, move discussion forward, or provide comic relief.  “The chat room will know,” say hosts when unsure of a fact, and sure enough, the Chat Room always does.  Hosts read the audience’s wittiest jokes and smartest comments in real time, and use the Chat Room’s questions to monitor their clarity.  Lost fans—heck, Talk of the Nation fans—can only dream of being so important to the moment of production.
• The high-tech videolow: Cottage networks boast of their distance from older media:  techno-mammals running circles around TV dinosaurs.  It’s an old trope, of course, which makes it even curiouser that it is invoked so often.  You won’t listen long to the TWiT network before Laporte tweaks his slow and greedy former bosses at TechTV.  Similarly, The Sound of Young America‘s Jesse Thorn, a talented interviewer who parlayed his college radio show into a cottage mini-network, frequently mocks (and thereby highlights) his lowly position in the mediascape. More is at stake here, obviously, than pride; in a reputation economy, chastising big media firms that “don’t get it” helps establish credibility and independence.  Thus Skype becomes another character on these shows: the frequent technical difficulties are a charming return to the “Please Stand By” days of early television, but also underwrite claims to “videolow” through which technological elites position themselves as outsider-underdogs.
• The tech-personality ecosystem:  Remember those ads for the WB—Dawson dancing with Felicity, Angel flirting with Prue? Cottage networks instantiate that fantasy by promiscuously mixing personalities across a spectrum of old and new media. For example, one of MacBreak Weekly’s most popular guests, Merlin Mann, is also a blogger, podcaster, and Twitter superstar; Xeni Jardin (of über-blog Boing Boing) is an occasional guest on the TWiT network as well as a mainstream radio and television personality; geek goddess Molly Wood, aside from her regular gigs on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud and (the just cancelled) Gadgettes, frequently shows up on TWiT; and so on.  The result is a self-reinforcing star system supported by the multiplier effects of a self-reinforcing media system, one (adjusted for scale, natch) that even the TV-Hollywood nexus should envy.

I don’t know whether this model is currently just a geek phenomenon, but there is little doubt it will spread, demonstrating the power of leveraging social networks, tapping into personality ecosystems, exploiting different revenue streams, and knowing one’s audience well.  It’s Yochai Benkler’s “networked information economy” finally come to television production.

(Photo Credit:  Leo Laporte;  released under a Creative Commons License – CC BY-NC-SA)