Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito & Jeff Howe

Author:Joi Ito & Jeff Howe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business, Business & Economics / Management
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Most systems break when they are attacked or stressed. Some systems—like the immune system or the Internet—get stronger when they are attacked; there is some pain, but the system adapts and becomes stronger. The only way to manage the kind of people and work that flourish at the Media Lab—the complexity and the fact that they’re trying to look for things that may not even exist—is to create a system that is self-adaptive.

In order to maximize the creative output of each person in the Lab, people often have to be deprogrammed from needing to know what the “right” answer is, what is being asked of them, what they need to comply with in order to “pass.” Sure, there are guidelines, and as part of a large institution, there are some rules that people must follow. The point is that these rules are not the focus. It’s the freedom to act without asking permission and, as Timothy Leary said, to “think for yourself and question authority” that will generate breakthroughs.47

An institution that measures success through impact and breakthroughs every year requires a culture and a system that encourages and embraces disobedience and views outliers and criticism as not only necessary but essential to the ecosystem.

MIT as part of its 150th anniversary published a book called Nightwork documenting and celebrating its “hacks.”48 As an institute, MIT celebrates the fact that students can and do figure out a way to get a campus police car on top of the dome of the central building on campus. At the Media Lab, the favorite opener of any story is, “It turns out that…,” which basically means, “We were wrong in this cool way.”

It’s also important to note that disobedience is different from criticism. There is, for example, a very important design movement called critical design—a perspective that provides a critique of modern techno-utopianism that we technologists often find ourselves espousing. However, criticism is about our work, where disobedience is the work.

Computer security would not improve without computer network hackers, and we wouldn’t exist without our gut microbes—good and bad—although apparently most are somewhere in between.49

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