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.
Conversation
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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Even in a depression though, I think the culture wants hope/vision. If 2020 picks Trump again and the culture wars continue, we may have everyone asking for safety/normalcy more though and then you're right. Is that your bet?
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Hmm I don't think Trump re-election is a good proxy. If he wins, his mandate for term 2 won't be the same as term 1. If someone else does, it will mean different things depending on who does. But note that there are no strong "vision/hope" candidates like Obama in 2008.
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A Trump re-election will be a referendum on the culture wars (and maybe whether change is possible at all).
is clearly a vision candidate and on the rise. Same with . People crave a new way forward right now past our apathy / inaction.
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Yang, yeah. Warren not sure. And I don't know what the election will be a referendum on. I'll wait for the post-mortem
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