An archival re-run from 2012 at The Baffler: Will Boisvert on the MIT Media Lab. Boisvert was clearly well ahead of the hype cycle on this topic; it’s a gloriously withering piece.

But while the Lab often seems like a marketing team posing as an academic institution, the corruption is subtler than the mere capture of the ivory tower by commerce. The Lab is a failure by the standards of storied corporate-sponsored R & D outfits like Menlo Park and Bell Labs. Instead, the Lab focuses on what corporations think is cool. […] No matter how ridiculous the Lab’s mockups, its grand schematic of omnipresent computing, sensors, video representation, and interactivity is a thrilling business prospect, promising enormous revenues from a tech network that redefines the meaning of ubiquity. And more than that, it’s an expression of an ideology of consumerism—the commodification of things that once were free and the shift toward a lifestyle of infantile narcissism—that the Lab takes to unprecedented extremes.

It can take a good long while to realise that the emperor is naked. Hell knows that I pranced along in his wake in similar caparison for quite some time.