The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT

Brand documented the MIT Media Lab in its founding years, when Nicholas Negroponte was assembling a research culture that treated the convergence of broadcasting, publishing, and computing as inevitable. The book captures a specific institutional style — corporate-funded academic research oriented toward demonstration and spectacle — and a specific vision of the digital future that was partly right and partly a projection of 1980s optimism. Brand, who understood institutional design from his Whole Earth Catalog work, was the right observer for this subject: sympathetic but precise about how the Lab's funding model shaped what it could imagine. Many of the technologies described here — personal digital assistants, electronic ink, immersive media — arrived decades later in forms the Lab did not predict. The gap between the prediction and the outcome is itself instructive.