quartztz · 01/10/2023
PALO ALTO, CA — In a breakthrough that has sent ripples through the tech community, computer scientists at the prestigious Stanford Institute for Digital Communication have discovered what they’re calling “a revolutionary new technique for not speaking” — and they can’t stop talking about it.
The technique, dubbed “Voluntary Oral Cessation” or VOC, was accidentally discovered during a 72-hour hackathon when Dr. Emma Chen noticed that her team had gone almost three minutes without interrupting each other.
console.log(“Hello world!”)“It was remarkable,” said Dr. Chen at yesterday’s two-hour press conference. “We found that by consciously closing our mouths and not articulating our thoughts out loud, we could achieve this state we’re calling ‘silence.’ The applications are potentially limitless.”
Since the discovery, the research team has published a 147-page white paper, organized four international conferences, created a Slack channel with 27 sub-channels, and developed a VOC certification program.
“What makes VOC so revolutionary is its simplicity,” explained Dr. Rajiv Patel, who has given seventeen TED Talks on the subject in the past week. “Unlike previous silence-adjacent technologies, VOC requires no specialized equipment — just the conscious decision to stop explaining things to people who didn’t ask.”
The team has already secured $42 million in venture capital funding to develop an app that will notify users when they’ve been talking too much. The app includes features such as “Mansplain Detection” and “Actually-Meter,” which counts how many times a user begins a sentence with “actually” during technical discussions. Critics point out that the computer scientists’ inability to stop discussing their silence technique somewhat undermines its effectiveness.
“I’ve been trying to tell them about the irony of this situation,” said Dr. Lisa Wong, a linguist at Berkeley, “but they keep interrupting me to explain how interrupting works.” At press time, the research team was planning a 12-city speaking tour titled “The Power of Not Speaking: A Comprehensive Oral Guide.”
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