This is all baloney. First of all, the Media Lab isn’t Nicholas. Yes he had a huge impact on it.... except he hasn’t lead it in 20 years. And he was a visionary

This is all baloney. First of all, the Media Lab isn’t Nicholas. Yes he had a huge impact on it.... except he hasn’t lead it in 20 years. And he was a visionary — he could see the tremendous diversities of roles computers would play in ordinary lives back when few were convinced they’d ever need a computer at all. I’m not surprised Nicholas had a hard time defining media, as that was the active question in the 70s that is still driving the lab now in 2020. What is media? What does it touch and encompass? What are the forms of it still unexplored? There are plenty of important books on many aspects of media, so to expect an easy definition from an academic is silly, particularly when it seemingly must fit your film-oriented framework. He’s seemingly forgetting that the lab has several hundred more people at any one time... all of which are doing their own vision to try and invent the future in their own way. The Media Lab just provides a space for like minds to explore. To focus on the fundraising is to miss the point of the lab, which is who is there and what they attempt to do during their tenure. When your goal is to invent the future that’s 10-20 years out, you’ll get a heavy mix of output... some silly, some tedious, and some genius. Mixing in a rant about the definition of interfaces and that you should have replaced Raskin is both disrespectful to Raskin and his genius, and has all the hallmarks of a “get off my lawn” style argument. There’s no teeth to it, not all of computing can or should be like film (what’s film like about satellites, networking, or data mining?), and it just takes away from the rest of the argument. I’d also like to note that in my experience working at Apple, no one has ever advocated to make things more complicated so you’ll need a nearby expert (or for any other reason). This smells of conjecture that’s so far removed from the internal realities that I’m disappointing it’s made it to the front page of HN.