5 ms·
The Media Lab’s arguably most widely adopted product, the Scratch programming language... is that leading to the “collapse of dignity?” What about Guitar Hero?
by an_opabinia 6y ago
The Media Lab’s arguably most widely adopted product, the Scratch programming language... is that leading to the “collapse of dignity?”
What about Guitar Hero? Are those guys, Media Lab grad students who spent a decade after graduation until they found hard earned success... did they create a “new serfdom?”
The Berkman Center houses the historic DoJ tech antitrust lawyers. Do you think antitrust won’t play a role in reversing “the movement of capital from the poor to the rich?”
Anyway, there are a lot of people who rail on the academy or whatever. I suppose your opinion, however stylized, is as good as anyone else’s.
- Mizza 6y agoI think the Media Lab's most widely known project was probably the failed One Laptop Per Child initiative, which I think perfectly illustrates my point. Turns out what people in the third world need isn't donated laptops, it's liberation from an economic system which keeps them deliberately impoverished. They need food, vaccines, unions, debt jubilees and nationalization of natural resources. The MML/Berkman ideology is literally that laptops bring wealth. In reality, wealth brings laptops.
- acituan 6y agoYou are strawmanning OPs argument by giving those examples as if that’s what they said. OP seems to criticize the ethos of Media Lab as professed, not any particular products. Not only that, you criticize their form and dismiss them as inaccurate but don’t actually posit any counter-arguments.
- morelisp 6y agoGuitarFreaks did not come out of the Media Lab. No disrespect to Egozy and Rigopulos, but HMX's success (even before GH) seems to have come specifically after they dumped Media Lab-inspired plans and started drawing inspiration from the Japanese arcade scene.