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DEMO OR DIE {#8665 .graf .graf—h3 .graf—leading .graf—title name=“8665”}
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.------Marshall McLuhan（马歇尔·麦克卢汉）
In the basement the inventor of the white-light hologram that flickers from America’s credit cards is demonstrating the world’s first projected hologram. It’s an eighteen-inch Camaro parked in midair, and the sponsors from General Motors（通用汽车） are pleased. One of them steps from the front of the car around to the back and then has to reach into it. His hand grasps satisfactory nothing. The information is in his eye, not in the air.
Out in the Wiesner Building’s sunny atrium, seven-foot-long computer-controlled helium blimps are cruising the five-story space learning how to be like fish------feeding, schooling, seeking comfortable temperature habitats.
On the third floor, body tracking is in progress, a figure in ultrapunk black leather and studs twirling in sensitive space. The studs are position indicators (infrared-light-emitting diodes) being sensed and translated by a computer into an animated figure on the room-size screen dancing in perfect echo to the human. The computer is paying attention and remembering: this is how humans move.
On the fourth floor a violinist strokes once more into a difficult piece, trying it with a slower tempo. The piano accompanist adapts perfectly, even when the violinist changes tempo again in the middle of the piece. The uncomplaining piano player is an exceptionally musical computer.
In the Terminal Garden on the third floor a visitor pretends to be a schoolchild and types into a computer, “hedake.” A computer voice says aloud, “Headache” and shows the word spelled correctly. “The hell with kids,” says the visitor, “I need this.”
Between the second and fourth floors two computers are chatting on the phone, scheduling an appointment between their human keepers, neither of whom is around at the moment.
That’s a small sample of the variety of endeavors going on in the Wiesner Building, but it gives a glimpse of major themes in Media Lab research. Everything mentioned involves communication, empowers the individual, employs computers (the Camaro was not photographed from a model but generated out of pure computer bits), and makes a flashy demonstration.
Students and professors at the Media Laboratory write papers and books and publish them, but the byword in this grove of academe is not “Publish or Perish.” In Lab parlance it’s “Demo or Die”------make the case for your idea with an unfaked performance of it working at least once, or let somebody else at the equipment. “We write about what we do,” comments Director Negroponte, “but we don’t write unless we’ve done it.” The focus is engineering and science rather than scholarship, invention rather than studies, surveys, or critiques.
The Lab is a fascinating visit, a techno-feast of goodies from “Movies of the Future,” “Toys of the Future,” “School of the Future,” Et Cetera of the Future, drawing no end of visiror traffic. On one somewhat heavy day, a year after opening its doors, the Lab was toured by forty computer scientists from China, the Chief Scientist from IBM, thirry-five Japanese architects, fifteen members of a Japanese study mission, the Secretary of State from West Germany, and the president of the German Newspaper Federation. Industrial sponsors of the Lab come to see if they’re getting their money’s worth. Potential sponsors come to see if they should buy in (“less than $200,000 it’t not really worth our time,” Negroponte observes). Journalists come looking for The Story and go away confused, but still with plenry to write about. Scientists and researchers come to see who’s ahead or behind on what. Distinguished visitors come because this is the kind of technological excitement that America and MIT want them to see, and it’s one of the few places where so much is so concentrated.
They see the demos and are suitably dazzled or puzzled, but what draws them here is that they’ve heard or sensed the Media Laboratory has a Vision, capital V.
Amphibian {#7179 .graf .graf—h4 .graf-after—p name=“7179”}
Consider the visionary.
“You’ll find that your left cuff link will be communicating with your right cuff link via satellite,” Negroponte teases an audience. “With flatpanel technologies every license plate, wine label, or price tag will be a ‘display’ Asked about computers he replies, “There will he many more MIPS in the nation’s appliances than in its computers.” (MIPS is million- instructions-per-second, a standard measure of computer power.) What about broadcast, the broadcasters ask him. He breaks it to them ungently. “Sports and elections probably will remain synchronous and shown live. The rest won’t. The rule might be: if you can bet on it, you won’t see it out of real time. As for the motion picture industry, it is the smokestack industry of today’s information world.
“The world faces a more profound transition than fiber optics replacing bicycles or electroluminescent panels displacing newsprint,” he summarizes. “Monologues will become conversations; the impersonal will become personal; the traditional ‘mass media’ will essentially disappear.” The audience shivers deliciously. What if he’s right?
Why does that sound familiar? Ah yes, 1966; Tom Wolfe’s celebrated article about Marshall McLuhan, of Understanding Media, was titled “What If He Is Right?”
There were many studs of the business world, breakfast-food-package designers, television-network creative-department vice presidents, advertising “media reps,” lighting-fixture fortune heirs, patent law-yers, industrial spies, we-need-vision board chairmen------all sorts of business studs, as I say, wondering if McLuhan was … right.... IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone, and others had been flying McLuhan from Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, all over the place, to give private talks to their heirarchs about … this unseen world of electronic environment that only he sees fully.
Nat Rochester{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Rochester_(computer_scientist)” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”}, a senior computer scientist for IBM and the central negotiator for IBM’s early and large involvement with the Media Lab, told me, “Nicholas combines very great technical knowledge and creativity with an artist’s eye and skill, and really world-class salesmanship. If he were an IBM salesman, he’d be a member of the Golden Circle------that’s the inner group that’s made ten Hundred Percent Clubs; from then on they’re completely privileged. If you know what good salesmanship is, you can’t miss it when you get to know him”
Indeed this is no rumpled, tweedy, musing scholar. Fortune magazine observed{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1985/08/19/66314/index.htm” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”} that he “looks more like a matinee idol than a walking paradigm of the state-of-the-art technologist.” Negroponte does look a bit like a young Robert Wagner. He’s meticulously groomed and dresses sharp. The child of an old Greek shipping family, he grew up in Switzerland and the stylish circles of New York and London. Magazines like M and W (formerly Women’s Wear Daily) keep an eye on him. W recently described him------“more the style of a sophisticated successful international executive than a research scientist or academic involved in extremely advanced computer work.”
At age forty-three Negroponte is young for his responsibilities at MIT. He rose fast by virtue of the quality of his research on computer interfacing, the single-mindedness of his effort------the Media Lab is essentially his life work------and how he’s built on a peculiarity of his university. MIT is more merrily in bed with industry and government than any other academic institution in the world. Professors are not only permitted but encouraged to devote up to 20 percent of their time------“a day a week,” as they say------to outside consulting and other profitable business interests such as starting companies.
Negroponte found it easy to mix with the chairmen, directors, and chief executive officers of major corporations and government research offices. Months on the road every year, he’s acquired a business sense of the world. At the university he’s an exotic with the moves of a jet-set executive and a businessman’s get-on-with-it rigor. But in corporate boardrooms and on trade organization stages he’s the prestigious professor, representing the lofty intellectual perspective and long view of the university. Negroponte is an amphibian, comfortable in both worlds, giving an amphibian’s value to both worlds, taking an amphibian’s advantage of both worlds. (The tactic could have been disastrous if he had got it backward and combined academic languor with business shortsightedness.) Nevertheless in his origins and fundamental loyalty he’s an academic.
He gets the public attention of a media maven as McLuhan did, but Negroponte is different in major ways. He doesn’t comment in order to comment------his only books are two somewhat specialist tracts from the MIT Press and another one available solely in Japan, in Japanese. He comments in order to get money to invent, to enable the entire apparatus of the Media Lab and its people to invent.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, invention is the sincerest form of criticism. Faced with the cacophony of media drift, the policy of the Lab is to seize the design initiative------“invent the future”------and deliberately turn most broadcast media inside out. Negroponte would use computer technology to personalize and deeply humanize absolutely everything. The effect on mass media would be for the viewer, listener, reader, student to take over what is seen, heard, read, learned------making everyone into editor, and of a vastly enriched communication spectrum.
Populist program. Who’s cheering?
Nobody political has paid the slightest bit of attention to Negroponte or the Media Lab. Who’s lined up at the door is the business studs. General Motors, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Home Box Office, RCA, 3M, Tektronix, NHK (Japan’s public TV network), Ampex, Harris, Mead, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), IBM, Apple Computer, Warner Brothers, 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, LEGO, Dow Jones, Time Inc., Polaroid, Kodak, Schlumberger, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, BBN (Bolt, Beranek &. Newman), The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Asahi Shimbun, NEC, Sony, Hitachi, NTT (Japan’s AT&.T), Sanyo, Fujitsu, Fukutake, Bandai (Japan’s largest toy maker), Mitsubishi, Matsushita------a hundred sponsors, a few of them government, most of them corporate. Their interest is simple: they want to stay in business, and if what is called the business environment shifts, they have got to shift with it, preferably just ahead of it.
Everyone in business has seen one version or another of this graph, which shows the “information” part of the economy outgrowing everything else, even the service sector. Everyone has heard the success stories------LEXIS grossing $150 million a year selling case law to lawyers electronically; Telerate making $150 million a year (thirty-nine-year-old founder Neil Hirsch{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Hirsch” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”} now worth $65 million personally) selling financial information electronically; Apple Computer founded in a garage by phone phreaks; Sony coining money with audio compact disks; and on and on. And the failure stories------Knight-Ridder blowing $50 million on videotex before quitting; electronic gamer Atari losing an empire when “E.T.” failed; Osborne Computer annihilated by a single marketing mistake; and on and on.
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
How does a corporation get to the front of this risky business without spending a hell of a lot of money? How can you peer ten years along a technological trendline that might devour or starve your present cash cows? How can you explore the crossover technologies where entire new businesses are being bom without becoming one of the stillborn? You read in the Wall Street Journal or the Boston Globe how former industrial backwater Massachusetts is booming, with unemployment down to 3.6 percent and a state budget surplus, and it’s all being attributed to MIT. Then Negroponte shows up keynoting somewhere with video demos of MIT researchers test-piloting the information technologies at the edge of the possible, flying in formation around a pattern vague and shifting but emerging, hypnotic … and you buy in.
Teething Rings {#d282 .graf .graf—h4 .graf-after—p name=“d282”}
Negroponte’s office is deskless. There is only a round table surrounded by chairs, bearing the residue of recent meetings------scribbled notes, coffee cups, odd objects, Variety, and two telephones, one with a speaker-phone. A matched pair of Japanese pachinko games (vertical pinball, sort of) is set in a wall nearby, and two personal computers glow expectantly on a comer table------all computers at MIT are left on permanently; I don’t know why. The door at one end opens to Jerome Wiesner{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Wiesner” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”}‘s comer office; the door at the other end remains open to two secretaries that Negroponte keeps busy.
On one end wall is a long whiteboard covered with diagrams and words like “paralinguals,” “kinesthetic knowledge,” “intelligence = bandwidth.” Above the whiteboard are four large clocks showing different times, labled Tokyo, San Francisco, Boston, and Athens (he has a summer home in the Aegean). In response to my request for a private version of his road show he sets up a self-contained slide projector and brings up the first image onto its screen.
“This is our marketing symbol.” Negroponte sits back from the slide he’s been explaining since 1979, which shows three overlapping circles labled Broadcasting, Publishing, and Computers. “Muriel Cooper{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Cooper” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”}, who heads the Visible Language Workshop, calls it my teething rings. In fact this diagram is what launched the Media Laboratory. We foresaw the coming together of these three industries, which previously were completely distinct. I would give lectures about how nobody in the computer community had heard of ‘Simpty,’ the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), or the AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts. The three industries all have separate professional associations, separate journals, and separate heroes. A hero of broadcasting you’ve probably never heard of is Vladimir Zworykin（弗拉基米尔·佐利金{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/弗拉基米尔·佐利金” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”}）. He invented much of TV. But the people in broadcasting or publishing have never heard of Alan Turing, who more or less invented computer programming. They have separate languages. You can talk to somebody for two minutes and if they use the word ‘pixel’ or the word ‘pel,’ you know where they come from. Both words mean the same thing------‘picture element’------but ‘pixel’ is computer talk and ‘pel’ is television talk.
“The point is, while each of these fields will continue to grow?and then I’d show the Year 2000 slide------we saw the richest and most promising areas of research and development at their intersections. One of the goals of the Media Lab was to deal deliberately with the middle intersection, where you couldn’t find much that was successful yet. Video-disks were in that area, but they came from the world of broadcast and motion pictures, and the computer people didn’t get hold of them and make them interactive until too late. I think if the Media Lab had existed in the late 70s that wouldn’t have happened.”
Negroponte’s vision: all communication technologies are suffering a joint metamorphosis, which can only be understood properly if treated as a single subject, and only advanced properly if treated as a single craft. The way to figure out what needs to be done is through exploring the human sensory and cognitive system and the ways that humans most naturally interact. Join this and you grasp the future.
It worked. Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Wiesner” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”} toured and lectured and demoed and bargained for seven years, and raised the requisite millions. High aluminum walls, countless computers, attractive salaries were generated out of tense, soaring proposal words: ..New theories about signals, symbols, and systems will evolve from the merger of engineering, social science, and the arts… , the intellectual mix of two rapidly evolving and very different fields; information technologies and the human sciences… .” ”… a place where people will be expected to be equally familiar with lumens, leading, and lambda calculus. Graduates will be required to pursue studies in epistemology, experimental psychology, filmmaking, holography, and signal processing, as well as in computer science.” Unlike the other forty-five laboratories at MIT, the Media Lab was aspiring to become an academic department as well.
The noblest phrase, and customarily the meanest practice, on any campus is “interdisciplinary.” Yet sponsored research volume for the Media Lab in fiscal 1985—86 was $3.7 million; for 1986—87 it was $6 million. That’s in addition to the academic budget provided by MIT of about $1 million each year.
Buying what? The boundaries keep shifting, but when counted in early 1987 the Lab was divided into eleven groups. Taking them in the order they appear in this book：
1. Electronic Publishing gets $1 million, most of it from IBM. In the Terminal Garden are the electronic books and self-personalizing electronic newspapers, magazines, and TV broadcasts. Walter Bender{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bender” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”} runs the Garden.
2. Speech works with $500,000, mainly from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. Chris Schmandt invents such things as phones that know your friends and can converse with them in your behalf.
3. The Advanced Television Research Program is led by William Schreiber. Some $1 million comes to it from a consortium of television worriers------ABC, NBC, CBS (initially), PBS, Home Box Office, RCA, 3M, Tektronix, Ampex, Harris. Investigation centers on how gorgeous you can make television if you let the TV set have some computer intelligence.
4. Movies of the Future gets about $ 1 million from Warner Brothers, Columbia, and Paramount, who suspect that computer digitalization will change their industry. Andy Lippman presides over the recording of “paperback movies” on compact disks, and other ambitions.
5. The Visible Language Workshop, headed by design prize-winner Muriel Cooper, is trying to cure the chronic ugliness of computer graphics and visual design, working with $250,000 from Polaroid, IBM, and a German print technology firm called Hell.
6. Spatial Imaging, otherwise known as holography, gets about $500,000, mostly from General Motors and DARPA. The leading light is Stephen Benton, who came from a couple decades of working at the right hand of Polaroid founder Edwin Land
7. Computers and Entertainment is a fuzzy set containing a fantasy called the Vivarium sponsored by Apple Computer, featuring Alan Kay, along with Marvin Minsky trying to godfather the next generation of artificial intelligence, and other fecund activities. Just as the Media Lab is considered by some to be MIT’s lunatic fringe, this group is the Lab’s lunatic fringe, and gets about $300,000 accordingly.
8. Animation and Computer Graphics, led by David Zeltzer, operates with $300,000, mostly from NHK and Bandai. The group is seeking the animator’s holy grail: real-time computer animation. “Real-time” means live------the animation is created “on the fly” in the computer. It manages that by imitating some techniques of life itself.
9. Computer Music, running on $150,000 from the System Development Foundation, is in the process of becoming a major music research center exploring “music cognition” as well as new performance modes. Barry Vercoe and Tod Machover are in charge.
10. The School of the Future, also called Hennigan School, led by Seymour Papert, gets a hefty $1 million, most of it originally from IBM, some from LEGO (of LEGO blocks), some from Apple Computer, MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. The idea here is to find out what happens when you really put computers in a grade school.
11. Human-Machine Interface operates on $200,000 from DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and Hughes. Richard Bolt’s machines can read your lips and eyes, which can feel like they’re reading your mind.
The idea is that these disparate activities shall intersect like the teething rings diagram, and their people will collaborate gladly, defying hallowed academic custom. In fact the Lab is full of collaborative alliances which are generating much of the best work. But that’s a little boring. What are the problems in utopia?
The Boggle Factor {#7ace .graf .graf—h4 .graf-after—p name=“7ace”}
It is the dark side of the demos. It begins with sensory overload. Walter Bender{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bender” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”} would be demonstrating electronic publishing in the half-darkened Terminal Garden, the standard starting point for a Lab tour.
The cluster of visitors would be trying to concentrate on his workstation, where something marvelous is about to appear, but the room is seething with activity------other people’s terminals around the room are already displaying mysterious colorful wonders, a computer-voice announces to the oblivious multitude, “Oh no! Oh three six oh!” a cat flashes past with tail straight up, and through the window where the really big computers are throbbing are perched two disembodied familiar-looking plaster heads.
Walter, radiating his customary sweetness, starts talking, and the group focuses on his computer screen, thinking------this is future------squinting defensively------what the hell am I seeing? It’s a gray picture of a motor or something. “It’s an electronic book,” says Walter, “of transmission repair, and you’re having a conversation with the mechanic. You pave your own path through the material. It’s got a lot of booklike attributes. There’s a table of contents.” He runs his finger over rhe picrure on the screen, and parts of the transmission turn into bright color as he touches them. “Each of these is a different chapter.” He touches a pictured box on the screen, and now there’s text with pictures. Words in red turn into definitions when he touches them. The pictures turn into movies at his touch, slower, faster, forward, hack; he touches one again and it fills the screen, the mechanic in the picture is explaining out loud------sound!------what he’s doing wrong with the oil pan, which suddenly falls open and soaks him with oil. Laughter from the group, amazement, uncertainty------That’s terrific. Is that terrific?
“How recent is this work?” someone asks. “It’s five years old,” says Walter in a voice that conveys he would love to srop giving this demo one of these years. “Can we see something more current?” Walter brings up a picture on his screen of a pretty girl with blue lines graffitied across her face. “This is eight-bit Pamela. It’s compressed from cwency-four-bit color. The trick in that picture is, can you anti-alias the lines when the color repertoire is that limited?” One visitor asks, “Are all 256 colors being used?” Walter replies in Martian, ""You build in a KD tree when you quantize the color space …”
Boggle. Too much coming too fast to sort out. Too many named new things. Too much that needs explanation to even understand what it is, much less what it’s for or what’s remarkable about it. Too much that appears too consequential or inconsequential to cake lightly figuring out which is which. And it’s all connected, so any piece of confusion infects everything else. You don’t know what to be impressed by. You start to look for reasons to trust your guides, because the potential for being bamboozled is total.
In fact the Media Laboratory is scrupulously trustworthy, but one would like that to be self-evident, and there’s no way it can be. I stayed boggled most of the three months that I worked at the Lab. I’m not boggled when I go there now, and I don’t think someone who’s read this book would be. It just takes time to build the context to digest the considerable news of the place.
I can recommend some cautionary attitudes that might be as helpful in this book as in the Lab. Be vigilant for “handwaving,” an apt MIT term with much occasion for use. The word refers to what a speaker does animatedly with his hands as he moves past provable material into speculation, anticipating and overwhelming objection with manual dexterity------a deprecating “you-know” featuring a well-turned back of the hand, or a two-handed symmetrical sculpting of something as imaginary as it is wonderful. Sometimes handwaving precedes creation, sometimes it substitutes for it.
Watch out for overinterpretation, especially by me. “There’s a natural instinct to see either a revolution or a conspiracy in every new technology that comes down the pike,” Russell Neuman told me. Neuman is from MIT’s Political Science Department, working with the Audience Research arm of the Lab’s Advanced Television project, a warm fan of the Media Lab and a warm skeptic of media mania. “I think of the breathless rhetoric of people like Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt,” he went on. “To sell lots of copies of books you’ve got to wave your arms and talk about how ‘information bombs are exploding and changing our basic psyche.’ ” He eyed me. “You may be faced with some decisions about how breathless to get in the first chapter of your book about the Media Lab.?
The Media Lab aims to reframe the way the individual addresses the world and the world addresses the individual; is that handwave preceding a creation or substituting for it? Sponsors have put millions into the place expecting long-range but nevertheless commercial inventions or information; are they getting their money’s worth? If there is a clear idea at the heart of the Lab’s research goals, will it emerge crystalline and focusing or blend back into the blur of technological drift? What is that clear idea exactly?
The Media Laboratory is a huge public bet by MIT, by the myriad sponsors, by the researchers who are risking major portions of their careers. The idea that communication technologies are converging in the world, the idea of convening communication disciplines at MIT under one conceptual roof, the specific people that are gathering to work on it … they all have to be right to get a win. Demo or die.
（The Media Lab: inventing the future at MIT，Stewart Brand） ::: ::: :::