I suspect we’re about to see a zeitgeist-level design ethos swing from “ideas worth spreading” (TED, media lab etc) to “jankiness worth fixing”
The specific sordid reasons the trend is reversing now are actually not that important. It would have happened even without scandals.
Conversation
Not to overindex on my own theories, but this feels like a big part of the winds shifting from premium mediocre to domestic cozy
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Even the maker movement which might seem like stealth/grassroots is actually kinda premium mediocre at present. Lots of 3D printing cuteness and crapjects and starter arduino “blinking LEDs” stuff on the margins while mainstream stuff gets more closed and less repairable.
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The last “maker” thing I did was built a kit robot with a Stamp 2 microcontroller back in 2006, before the scene blew up. It was underwhelming and not as much fun as I’d hoped. I dumped the project after writing some hello worked programs like “go in circle, stop at obstacle”
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All the things I’ve done since then has been “jankiness worth fixing” things. Messiest was replacing a broken motor in our litter robot. Extremely yucky/smelly repair job 😬
It’s all been basic repairs, jury-rigged workarounds etc. Stuff that’s 10% harder to do every year.
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I feel kinda bad about drawing a very large circle around the media lab shitshow and tarring about a dozen other key institutions in the literary industrial complex with the same brush. They may not be infected, but they are vulnerable to the same kind of entryist exploitation.
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Glamorous institution syndrome:
— Prioritize intellectual-glamor branding
— Manufacture a vision surplus
— Overpromise/underdeliver
— Overvalue PR as a KPI
— Big on manifestos
— Charisma engineering as core competency
— Fear “boring” perceptions
— Spotlight-driven funding
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These are neither good, nor bad. They are just features that present a particular kind of attack surface to predators/parasites.
Domestic cozy ethos is the opposite and has its own attack surface (often based on silent neglect and decay)
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The media lab events should serve as a warning for institutions cut from the same cloth.
- Pivot the brand now
- Swap out impresario leaders for quiet bureaucratic-heroes
- Reduce funding reliance on PR
- work on problems that are unsexy and hard not stunts
- refactor > vision
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This seems like a plan to kill the Media Lab. It's supposed to be visionary, so you need a visionary leader, or one that's good at picking visionaries to lead labs. They need to double down on vision, but likely a new vision.
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Worth a long-bet. I think we're headed for a decade or two of "vision recession" where the initiative shifts to the opposite of "visionary" types.
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If you don't believe in vision's future, then you should probably just winddown the Media Lab and start a more serious research lab with a fresh culture.
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Possibly. This is is in fact what I suspect a lot of funders will do. In fact, taking it one degree out, the funding culture will change, and a different kind of billionaire/millionaire will step in while the glamor-seeking/BIRGing kind will retreat.
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I'm wondering how to make the "key results" part of such a bet though. Proposals?
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No clue, it's really a comparison of which of two ways of telling the story in 2040 rings more true. This is too soft to be codified in numbers and measures easily.... but that's going to be hard. I disagree with your reading of inter-war years/FDR for example.
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Re: Vision Recession: I can imagine a few years of vision recession but not decades. Even the Great Depression elected FDR on vision even during the nation's collective emotional depression.
What's your take?

