Ted Nelson VS The MIT Media Lab
"From that moment i figured he (Nicholas Negroponte, lab founder) was really a con man [...] The whole point of the Media Lab is "we know something that you don't know!" - to have strange projects no one could understand. [...] Negroponte is a politician, exchanging favours. [..] One day i asked Negroponte for his definition of media and he finally said 'Media is like Air!'. Con men and politicians aren't necessarily held to telling the truth at all." - Ted Nelson
"For over thirty years, the MIT Media Lab has done strange and mysterious things, using hype and hokum to impress the unwary and raise ever more money. Whereas the principles of interaction and media, as far as I'm concerned, are and always have been simple and powerful, with human creativity at the centre. The creative mentality of the film director is exactly what is needed in software - anticipating the user's understandings and expectations, and fulfilling them elegantly." - Ted Nelson
#Comment: It's worth adding that besides the (ongoing) onslaught of "strange projects know one could understand" (aka "Bullshit", as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his essay "On Bullshit" (PDF) ), the Media Lab (and the wider MIT) has been a premier "think tank" for the US military industrial complex. And thus, the media lab has proven the marvellous fact that fictitious techno-utopian bullshit pushed by con man politicians, is highly capable of killing a great many people in the real world.