On Interference

Designing strange life forms that don’t always listen

Abstract

In unearthing the roots of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and its multifarious connections with the MIT Media Lab, historian of science Orit Halpern brilliantly exhumes Joi Ito’s (former director of the MIT Media Lab) famous slogan: “Deploy or Die!” Halpern argues, as has Molly Wright Steenson also recently argued, that Ito’s callous call to innovate or perish was well-founded in the history of the global innovation hub. Ito’s motto echoed the one of its founder Nicholas Negroponte, “Demo or Die!”—a spin on the academic aphorism “publish or perish.

Evidently, this comes as no news in the world of neoliberal governmentality and ethics. To innovate, one must overcome all barriers and initial obstacles against all odds; a vision must be maintained unbroken and it is one’s commitment to a cause unaltered that grants valor and eventually yields results.