1. Jennifer Kavanagh, Michael D. Rich. Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. RAND Corporation, 2018. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html

2. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1995. 212.

3. Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 99; Luis A. Vivanco, Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on a New (Old) Thing. New York/London: Routledge, 2013. 49.

4. A. J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War. New York: Mariner Books, 2014. 36

5. Markus Krajewski, “The great lightbulb conspiracy.” IEEE Spectrum 51.10 (2014): 56–61. 57–58.

6. Krajewski, “The Great Lighbulb Conspiracy” 59.

7. Nigel Whiteley, “Toward a Throw-Away Culture. Consumerism, ‘Style Obsolescence’ and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s.” Oxford Art Journal 10.2. The 60s. (1987): 3–27. 3–4.

8. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2003): 225–248, 227.

9. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”, 231.

10. News of the entanglement of the Media Lab in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke while we were in the final stages of manuscript preparation. If anything, it has strengthened our sense of the usefulness of the extended lab model in terms of its ability to explicate aspects of laboratories that might not otherwise be visible: what forms of agencies are promoted and supported by labs, what sort of promotional strategies project a sense of “humanism”, and how alternative discourses and techniques have been employed as part of another legacy of the lab since the 1990s.

11. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 6.

12. Thomas A. Bass, “Being Nicholas.” Wired 11.01.95. https://www.wired.com/1995/11/nicholas/

13. Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (New York: Routledge, 1985), 23.

14. “MIT Charter of 1861.” http://museum.mit.edu/150/74. Accessed 11 September 2019.

15. “Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology.” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. https://wayback.archive-it.org/7963/20190701233921/https:/libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/objects-plan/index.html. Accessed 11 September 2019.

16. “Scope and Plan of the School of Industrial Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. https://wayback.archive-it.org/7963/20190702084041/https://libraries.mit.edu/archives/timeline/scope-plan.html.

17. Quoted in Andre Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 18.

18. Quoted in Millard, 30.

19. Drucker, 137.

20. Michael J. Gall, “Thomas A. Edison: Managing Menlo Park, 1876–1882” (master’s thesis, Monmouth University, 2004), 77.

21. Gall, 79.

22. David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 118.

23. Noble, 118.

24. Henry Etzkowitz, “The Making of an Entrepreneurial University: The Traffic Among MIT, Industry, and the Military, 1860–1960,” Science, Technology and the Military. Sociology of the Sciences (A Yearbook), vol. 12, edited by Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith and Peter Weingart (Dordrecht: Springer, 1988), 29.

25. Etzkowitz, 530.

26. Ibid.

27. Henry E. Guerlac, Radar in World War II. The History of Modern Physics 1800–1950, Vol. 8. (Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1987), 293.

28. Guerlac, 293.

29. Guerlac, 681.

30. Fred Hapgood, “The Media Lab at 10.” Wired Magazine, 1 November 1995. https://www.wired.com/1995/11/media/

31. For more on this longstanding porousness between the public and private sectors, see Clyde Barrow’s contemporary account Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 and also Henry Etkowitz’s The Making of the Entrepreneurial University: The Traffic Among MIT, Industry, and the Military, 1860–1960. For early, critical accounts of the increasing influence of the private sector on higher education, see John Henry Newman’s 1858 The Idea of the University and Thorstein Veblen’s 1918 The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities By Business Men.

32. Stacy Slotnick, “Membership Levels.” MIT Media Lab, 8 November 2018. https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/membership-levels/

33. Chia Evers, “Frequently Asked Questions about Media Lab Membership,” MIT Media Lab, 3 May 2019. https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/member-faq/#faq-why-do-companies-join-the-media-lab.

34. Ethan Zuckerman, interview by Darren Wershler, Jussi Parrikka and Lori Emerson, February 2017.

35. MIT News Office, “Letter Regarding Jeffrey Epstein and MIT,” 22 August 2019. http://news.mit.edu/2019/letter-regarding-jeffrey-epstein-and-mit-0822.

36. Ronan Farrow, “How and Elite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein,” New Yorker , 6 September 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university-research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein.

37. Angela Chen and Karen Hao, “MIT Media Lab founder: Taking Jeffrey Epstein’s money was justified,” MIT Technology Review, 4 September 2019. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614264/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-nicholas-negroponte-funding-sex-abuse/.

38. Ibid.

39. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 4. See Orit Halpern, “The Trauma Machine. Demos, Immersive Technologies and the Politics of Simulation.” In: Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.): Alleys of Your Mind. Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas. Lüneburg: meson press 2015, 53–67.

40. Ito and Howe, 100.

41. Joichi Ito, “What is the organizational structure at the MIT media lab?” Quora, 14 January 2017.

42. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010), 94.

43. Veblen, 96–99.

44. Just a few of the more recent books published on the intersection of neoliberalism and higher education include David F. Labaree, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago P, 2017); Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Higher Education under Late Capitalism (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2017); and Patricia Gumport, Academic Fault Lines: The Rise of Industry Logic in Public Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2019).

45. Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge (New York: Scribner, 1968), 69.

46. Servan-Schreiber, 78 (our emphasis).

47. Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper Business, 1993), 131.

48. Drucker, 131.

49. Drucker, 325.

50. Drucker 333.

51. President Howard W. Johnson, “MIT Commencement Speech,” Cambridge, Massachusetts, 7 June 1968 (collection AC 0118, MIT Libraries: Institute Archives and Special Collections. September 2013), 1.

52. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here. The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013.

53. Renata Avila describes digital colonialism as “the new deployment of a quasi-imperial power over a vast number of people, without their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems by a vastly dominant power . . .” However, Negroponte’s writing from the 1960s through the 2000s along with Kay’s and Servan-Schreiber’s writing from the 1970s demonstrates it’s anything but new.

54. Hapgood, “The Media Lab at 10.”

55. Britt McCandless Farmer, “Where Tomorrow’s Technology is Born,” 60 Minutes, CBS, 4 August 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-mit-media-lab-where-tomorrows-technology-is-born-2019–08–04/.

56. There is significant research on the history of futures and the notion of futurity that goes back to the RAND corporation in the 1940s. See John Beck’s “The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know” in Cold War Legacies.

57. Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1970), 7.

58. Negroponte, 6.

59. Negroponte, 7.

60. Negroponte, 56.

61. Negroponte, 56–57.

62. Negroponte, 7.

63. Halpern, Trauma Machine, 61.

64. Negroponte, 55.

65. Halpern, “Trauma Machine”, 61.

66. Software: An Exhibition Sponsored by American Motors Corporation, The Jewish Museum, September 16 through November 8, 1970; the Smithsonian Institution, December 16 through February 14, 1971. New York.

67. Orit Halpern, “Inhuman Vision,” Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus 10, No. 3, (2014). N. pag.

68. Halpern, “The Trauma Machine”, 63.

69. Nicholas Negroponte, “A 30-Year History of the Future,” TED Talk, March 2014. https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_a_30_year_history_of_the_future?language=en.

70. Halpern, “The Trauma Machine”, 59.

71. Alan Kay, “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” Viewpoints Research Institute (Glendale: 1972). N Pag. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf. Accessed 11 September 2019.

72. Kay, “A Personal Computer.” N Pag.

73. Ibid.

74. Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (Garden City: DoubleDay & Inc., 1964), 2.

75. Negroponte, Architecture Machines, 103.

76. Negroponte, 104.

77. Negroponte, 108.

78. Molly Wright Steenson, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 179.

79. Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber, The World Challenge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, 6.

80. Servan-Schreiber, 13.

81. Ibid.

82. Servan-Schreiber, 268.

83. Nicholas Negroponte, “The $100 Laptop” in Globalization and Education: Proceedings of the Joint Working Group, The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 16–17 November 2005, Casino Pio IV, edited by Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Edmond Malinvaud and Pierre Léna (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 19.

84. Negroponte, 19.

85. Ibid.

86. See Negroponte, 19–20. Charles Kane, Walter Bender, Neal Donahue, and Jody Cornish, Learning to Change the World: The Social Impact of One Laptop Per Child (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 175. Anita Say Chan has astutely described this method of delivering education technology initiatives to those living in countries perceived as “under developed” or “needy” as an air drop deployment that’s part of a larger program of technological fundamentalism.

87. “New Economy; At Davos, the Johnny Appleseed of the digital era shares his ambition to propagate a $100 laptop in developing countries”. nytimes.com. New York Times. Retrieved May 17, 2016.

88. Nicholas Negroponte, “One Laptop Per Child,” TED Talk, February 2006. https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid.

91. “XPRIZE: Making the Impossible Possible,” https://www.diamandis.com/xprize Accessed 11 September 2019.

92. @OddLetters (M.R. Sauter). September 9, 2019, 11:31 AM. https://twitter.com/OddLetters/status/1171083818352164864

93. @OddLetters (M.R. Sauter). September 9, 2019, 11:58 AM. https://twitter.com/OddLetters/status/1171090446178770944

94. @OddLetters (M.R. Sauter). September 9, 2019, 11:32 AM. https://twitter.com/OddLetters/status/1171083986849927168

95. Charlotte Frost, “Media Lab Culture in the UK”. Furtherfield, 28.8.2012 http://www.furtherfield.org/media-lab-culture-in-the-uk/

96. Josephine Bosma,Nettitudes. Let’s Talk Net Art. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures/NAi Publishers, 2011, 136.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson and Jussi Parrikka, “ACTLab or Make Stuff! An Interview with Allucquére Rosanne Stone,” What is a Media Lab? June 2018. https://whatisamedialab.com/2018/08/24/ACTLab-or-make-stuff-an-interview-with-allucquere-rosanne-stone/.

100. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 5.

101. Susan Stryker, Another Dream of Common Language. An Interview with Sandy Stone,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (May 2016): 294–305, 302.

102. Christen Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone,” Transadvocate.com, 16 August 2014. https://www.transadvocate.com/terf-violence-and-sandy-stone_n_14360.htm; Christen Williams, “Radical Inclusion. Recounting the Trans Inclusive History of Radical Feminism,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, No. 1–2 (2016): 254–258.

103. Williams, “TERF Hate.”

104. Allucquére Rosanne Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, pp. 221–235), 230.

105. Stone, 230.

106. “The Historical ACTLab,” New Media Initiative: The ACTLab Program, https://ACTLab.us/ Accessed 11 September 2019.

107. Brian Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations: Towards a new critique of institutions.” in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.) Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: Mayfly Books, 55. Stryker, 302.

108. Wershler et al., “ACTLab.”

109. Allucquére Rosanne Stone, “On Being Trans, and Under the Radar: Tales from the ACTLab.” A talk at ISEA, 2005. Accessed January 4, 2018. https://actlab.us/radar.shtml.

110. Cory Doctorow, “U Texas/Austin’s ACTLab to close,” Boing Boing, 11 May 2010 http://boingboing.net/2010/05/11/u-texasaustins-actla.html.

111. Rosi Braidotti, “The Critical Posthumanities; Is Medianatures to Naturecultures as Zoe is to Bios?” Cultural Politics, vol. 12 (3), 2016, 382.

112. “The Historical ACTLab.” https://ACTLab.us/ Accessed 11 September 2019.

113. Ibid.

114. Stone, “On Being Trans.”

115. Stone, “On Being Trans.”

116. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), 575–599, 587.

117. Patrik Svensson, “The Landscape of Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 4.1. (2010) http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html.

118. Sophie Toupin, “Feminist Hackerspaces: The Synthesis of Feminist and Hacker Cultures,” Journal of Peer Production 5 (October 2014). http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/feminist-hackerspaces-the-synthesis-of-feminist-and-hacker-cultures/.