Ted versus The Media Lab [video]

I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days. I was attracted not by Negroponte but by the people he managed to attract: at the time, that included Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand, as well as some less famous but truly brilliant people from the arts (Ricky Leacock, Muriel Cooper) and sciences (Steve Benton, inventor of white-light holography). It was an exciting place, but there was a hollowness at the core and not just architecturally (the shiny new IM Pei building was mostly empty space, since filled in).

Negroponte himself has always been a politician, a hypester, and a sleaze. His one true innovation was in fundraising – he was able to get industries that weren՚t used to funding research (eg the newspapers) to pony up for industry consortia. This was, maybe, better than the usual DoD funding that kept the AI lab alive, but it came with constraints of its own, including trying to impose IP agreements on the graduate students that made it difficult to open-source software. And of course in later days (I was mercifully gone by then) the creative approach to fundraising ran into even more serious issues with Jeffrey Epstein.

I՚d say evaluations of the Media Lab as an institution should be done separately from evaluations of any particular program or researcher who may have passed through there, because while the institution has some fundamentally broken aspects, there has been a lot of good work done there.

CSAIL and the Media Lab are very different places, with different funding sources and ways of interacting with the broader community. There’s also some friction between the two. So to rope it all together is your incorrect outsider impression.

My guess is most high schoolers probably do want to see fancy buildings and robots. There’s no beakers with smoke or explosions (hopefully) happening in a computer science department, so it sounds like they’re doing what they think is their best to appeal to a younger audience. I’m sorry it wasn’t the right marketing message for you, but if you wanted to understand at a deeper level what they were doing there’s no lack of information on the department webpage if you go explore the actual research groups and papers.

From my perspective, MIT truly is an amazing and special place filled with fabulous minds and ample resources. But it’s not for everyone.

I don't think many people would argue that Nelson isn't a visionary, but when push comes to shove, there is an uncomfortable amount of truth in Steve Jobs's oft-cited quip, "Real artists ship." After 50 years, Project Xanadu not only isn't in a production-ready state, the "best demo" available is described on the xanadu.com web site as "beyond fixing." The sample EDL documents on the site do a good job of demonstrating what Nelson had in mind with "transclusion" and two-way links, but it is much harder to tell at a glance what the relationship of the source is to the output than it is with HTML, and at least as implemented, EDLs look awfully brittle.

Maybe Xanadu as envisioned would have been better than the web we have now, but what we have as ostensible working proof of that isn't incredibly convincing. Okay, I could link to any text on another web page, not just text with "anchor" links, and the text I linked to would be highlighted. That's nice, but is it essential? And I can transclude text from any other page, which is coo, but man, Nelson seems to stubbornly ignore the ramifications -- or perhaps think commerce and law will rearrange itself suitably to accommodate his vision. "Publishers of original content are free to require payment, or not"; what's the mechanism? What if I just don't want you to transclude text from my document, or only want to allow transcluding certain parts? How are EDLs updated when transcluded documents change? How come, after fifty years, these fundamental questions are still answered with lines like "[Page and document logic] is defined by the data structure, which we will publish when ready"? Has anyone associated with Xanadu considered even basic HTML 2.0-level presentation aspects like tables, images and fonts?

I can't help but think Ted Nelson is the archetypal poster child for "the perfect is the enemy of the good." He's not the Jef Raskin of Apple because, at the end of the day, Raskin was willing to work with other people and make compromises to get some of his vision out the door. Xanadu's failure -- and by all practical measures, it is indeed a failure -- isn't due to the MIT Media Lab, or Tim Berners-Lee, or Apple, or Microsoft, or its variously brilliant-slash-flaky development teams. It's because they never. Ever. Shipped.

~25 years ago, when the web was pretty new, I saw Ted Nelson give a talk about it. He was angry that it took so long for the world to wake up and hear the gospel of hypertext. And he was outraged and disappointed that the web didn't implement his vision of hypertext. Links should be two-way! The platform should treat intellectual property as a first-class concept! There should be attributions or royalties (or something, forgot the details)! And it did none of that!

I was tempted to laugh it off and dismiss him as just an envious nutcase, but then I realized something: his vision actually did have a lot of neat ideas in it. I came to the conclusion that Ted Nelson is a creative thinker, who had been way ahead of his time in certain ways. To me, it would be a mistake to not listen to him at all. It would also be a mistake to listen without a huge amount of skepticism.