You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published in December of 2016.
I have a thing for the M.I.T. Media Lab. The place just seems to be so cool.
Who wouldn’t want to enjoy the benefits of working at a great university (smart people, established brand, etc.), with the culture of an iconoclastic startup?
Now Joi Ito (the Lab’s director) and Jeff Howe (a tech writer, assistant professor at Northeastern, and visiting scholar at the Lab) have written Whiplash, a book length distillation of the guiding principles of the Media Lab.
What a treat.
Reading Whiplash might be the closest that most of us will get to having our own appointment at the Lab. We might not be able to hang out with Ito and his fellow academic misfit toys (Ito famously never graduated college), but we can try to bring the thinking of the Lab back our institutions.
The book’s chapters are organized the principles of the Media Lab. The chapter titles - and principles - are worth enumerating in full, as each is wonderfully evocative. They are:
- Emergence Over Authority
- Pull over Push
- Compasses over Maps
- Risk over Safety
- Disobedience over Compliance
- Practice over Theory
- Diversity over Ability
- Resilience over Strength
- Systems over Objects
Let’s imagine for a second that these principles were baked into the strategic thinking and mission of your institution. Or your department. How close (or far) is your organization to any of these ideals?
Academic IT organizations can perhaps learn the most from Whiplash and the Media Lab. Higher ed IT organizations tend to be hierarchical, risk adverse, and homogeneous. This academic IT culture is a response to the incentives that IT leaders operate under. They get little credit when things go well, and all the blame when anything (touching on campus technology) goes wrong.
Whiplash gives us a positive vision for a new kind of organizational structure - one routed in the methods and culture of the M.I.T. Media Lab - without ever falling victim to the techno-utopian blather of much of technology journalism. (My personal favorite for techno-utopian blather is Fast Company).
My one quibble with Whiplash is the uncritical way that Ito and Howe treat the Bitcoin. They are best when describing how the lessons of the Media Lab can be applied both to higher education and other industries. If I were a betting blogger, my money would be on a Bitcoin meltdown within the next 3 years. I’d hate to have Ito and Howe’s (apparent) enthusiasm for cryptocurrency weaken the larger lessons they draw about the future of our organizational, economic, and social lives.
What are you reading?
