MIT

About the MIT Media Lab

When you’re getting a tour of the MIT Media Lab, a common reaction is, “Wow, I’m at the high-tech Hogwarts.” It’s easy to feel this way, with something akin to the Marauder’s map following you around the building and the robots and the whimsical, interactive, half-living prototypes scattered around.

But it’s not Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that the director of the Lab aspires to be. Instead, Joi Ito tells graduating classes at the Media Lab that they are more like the X-Men. This framing suggests we’re all a bit weird, we have never quite fit into mainstream society, but we wield great powers that the Media Lab can help us hone, and responsibly channel. That the Lab can be our home for that, the place where we finally belong.

But when Joi welcomed the then-already-convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein to invest in the Lab, its students, and his investment funds, it was as if Professor Xavier had courted the same military contractors who violently infused an adamantium skeleton onto Logan.

How does something like this happen? In all my time at the Lab, Joi was clearly a good person, fighting good fights that others had avoided. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, it comes down to two forces: inertia, and fundraising. Evgeny Morozov has unearthed documents showing that Joi’s acceptance of Epstein’s money in 2013 may be predated by Epstein’s donations to MIT in the 2000s. It’s entirely possible that Nicholas Negroponte (and yes, Marvin Minsky) initiated this relationship before Joi even came to MIT.

And then there’s money. I learned a lot early in my career when I was working on campaign finance reform in Washington, DC. The sheer amount of money people need to raise practically predicts, over a long enough time horizon, an eventual bad decision, even from otherwise good people. Joi raises a lot of money.

One discussion trying to emerge from the messy, painful fall-out of these revelations is the sickening embrace between elite academia and Epstein’s coordinated rebranding as a science philanthropist. Why did this happen? “Money corrupts” is too pat an answer. What about the harder questions? How do MIT, Harvard, and other universities get away with taking a 60% administrative cut of funding (including philanthropic grants)? Why does the MIT Media Lab need an $80 million annual budget, when its researchers are paid roughly $30,000 a year? Why do star researchers have to perform for private philanthropists to begin with?

MIT is a corporation. It is also one of the foremost research universities in the world. It has become only more relevant as information technology itself becomes more central to our lives. The unfortunate relationship between Epstein and MIT begs a conversation about the values driving our research universities. How much annual budget would be enough to meaningfully achieve the mission? Which ideals and values tend to be jettisoned in pursuit of additional fundraising that collects well past that point?

Along with Nathan J. Matias, I was one of Ethan Zuckerman’s first two students at the Media Lab after he came over from the Berkman Center to take over the MIT Center for Civic Media (along with two students in the Comparative Media Studies program). I woke up this morning to news, leaked to the Boston Globe, that Ethan has decided to leave the Lab as soon as responsibly possible. Nate has also decided to disaffiliate his CivilServant project from the Lab as soon as responsibly possible.

Reading about Ethan’s decision, I’m thankful, as I’ve always been, to have the fortune (and it was primarily luck, on my end) that my research adviser was one of the most ethical, and maybe more important, caring, of everyone I met while working at the Lab (and in life).

Ethan’s resignation is a major loss for the Lab. Practically, it will lose his stewardship and active research projects interrogating vital topics like the ethical use of technology, and how power and influence flow on the internet. These areas of research have only become more central to our lives in the years since Ethan took the helm at the Center for Civic Media.

Ethan’s departure also feeds the brewing media story around this scandal, turning up the intensity of the shame spotlight on MIT (while Harvard remains deafeningly silent). Most importantly, Ethan leaving is a loss for the Media Lab internally. The earnest students who get to the Lab and discover their research group has an ugly underbelly may not have someone who will take them under their wing instead. Well-meaning but still-learning undergraduates may not have an esteemed thoughtleader who routinely bends the realities of time itself to take one-on-one meetings and provide meaningful email feedback. Everyone at the Lab will miss one of the key voices willing to irritate the established crust layer of the Institute in asking that we all try to be better.

It’s strange to watch what you thought was a mainstream news story evolve and permeate over the course of days, until it’s at your front step and shaking up your own little world. I believe there’s important strategic value in fighting to create change within imperfect institutions, although everyone has their own ethical line at which that’s no longer an acceptable strategy.

From the outside, I’m committed, as are many of my Lab alum, to pushing the Media Lab to do better, to be better. But in the meantime, I’m mostly focused on doing what I can to support those who have put their own futures aside to ensure their are consequences for this, and those who will suffer the follow-on consequences.

Most importantly, we must help the countless women and girls Epstein abused, and make the changes we need to make in our cultures, be they social, corporate, or academic, to prevent the ascent, continued indemnity, and celebration of abusers, no matter who they fund.

Play into a Broader World View with Terra Incognita

My colleague Catherine D’Ignazio is one of those rare people who manages to create beautiful art and clever software while remaining incredibly down to earth. I’ve been helping out here and there on her Media Lab Master’s thesis, Terra Incognita. Here’s an overview of the project I wrote up for the Internews Center for Innovation & Learning.

We’re building a news game that helps you explore a wider swath of the globe than you may have before. Terra Incognita: 1000 Cities of the World is a game delivered by Chrome browser extension. When you open a new tab, you’ll be prompted to read a news story from one of the top 1,000 global cities. You’ll also get credit for news stories you read on a limited set of news sites. You can get early access to Terra Incognita today.

Terra Incognita screenshot

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Joi’s Guiding Principles for Innovation in the Network Era

I just got to hang out with my friends at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and the insanely relevant and great group of people that Civic and the Knight Foundation bring together for the annual conference. Here’s my liveblog of Joi Ito‘s 9 Principles for the Media Lab, some of which directly informed my thesis on participatory aid and crisis resilience. Check out the Civic blog for more coverage.

Liveblogged at #civicmedia with help from Ed Platt. Any errors are likely ours.

Joi Ito (@joi), Director of the MIT Media Lab, is here to share his nine principles.

Nearly thirty years ago when the Media Lab was founded, the internet was about connecting together supercomputers. The Media Lab was all about empowering the individual and making everything digital. The Lab’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte, wrote Being Digital.

What’s changed in these last thirty years is that we’ve made a lot of progress empowering the individual, and as a result, we now have a network. When you have a network, you need to think about systems rather than objects. ‘Media’ is plural for medium, and a medium is something in which you can express yourself. In the past, that was hardware: displays, robots. Today, a medium can also be society itself. Applied social science and journalism are newly relevant. Continue reading

Questioning the Quantified Self as it Marches Towards Mainstream

I’m back at the Media Lab today and got to attend a talk by cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, of MIT’s Science, Technology, and Society program, who’s speaking at Pattie Maes’s Tools for Well-Being series.

addictionbydesign

Digital technologies can have negative impacts on our well-being. Natasha grew interested in the topic over the course of writing Addiction by Design, on the game elements throughout machine gambling in Las Vegas. Speed, repetition, continuity, and designer chairs lure players into a zen flow and open wallet. The casino industry seeks to produce this bubble state, and closely tracks players’ behavior to further refine its profit engines. Loyalty cards are a key mechanism for these studies, recording the games we prefer, the denominations we default to. As “Dividuals“, we are treated as a collection of habits and preferences that can be marketed upon, often in real-time. Continue reading

Thinking ethically about our relationships with social robots

Liveblog of Kate Darling’s Berkman Center lunch, A discussion of near-term ethical, legal, and societal issues in robotics.

Kate begins with the observation that there aren’t nearly enough experts in robotic law. Those that are interested in the emergent field need to become more expert, and many more need to join them in the pursuit.

Here are some of the emerging issues:

  • Liability: the chain of causality of harm is going to get longer and more complex
  • Code is going to contain ethical decisions as autonomous units interact with their environments
  • People’s sensitivity to invasion of privacy is more strongly manifested when infractions are committed by robots (vs. NSA infrastructure-level scripts). Public aversion to such invasions may actually be an opportunity to push for stronger privacy rights.
  • Our tendency to project lifelike qualities on robotic objects. People bond with their cars, phones, stuffed animals, and virtual objects in video games. But this effect is stronger in robots.
  • Physicality: we react differently to objects in our physical space than things on a screen

duckling

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Comedy Hack Day Demos at MIT Media Lab

Cultivated Wit Comedy Hack DayComedy Hack Day began when Craig realized he had two independent groups of nerdy friends: comedy nerds and computer nerds. Comedy Hack Day brings these two groups together.

The first event was held in NYC September 2012. The second was held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco in April 2013 (watch highlight reel). This weekend, we infested the MIT Media Lab.

group shot

Here are the final demos:

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Characterizing the Life Cycle of Online News Stories Using Social Media Reactions

I’ve graduated, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to see my first academic paper accepted for publication. Thanks to Carlos CastilloMohammed El-Haddad, and Jürgen Pfeffer for driving this paper, and for inviting me to collaborate. Take a look. Al Jazeera English provided us with some great data.

To appear in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Baltimore, USA. February 2014.

[Download PDF]

The shelf-life of hard news vs feature pieces
The shelf-life of hard news vs feature pieces on Al Jazeera English

Abstract:
This paper presents a study of the life cycle of news articles posted online. We describe the interplay between website visitation patterns and social media reactions to the news content. We show that we can use this hybrid observation method to characterize distinct classes of articles. We also find that social media reactions can be used to predict future visitation patterns early and accurately.

We validate our methods using qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis on data from a large international news network, for a set of articles generating more than 3,000,000 visits and 200,000 social media reactions. We show that it is possible to model accurately the overall traffic articles will ultimately receive by observing the first ten to twenty minutes of social media reactions. Achieving the same prediction accuracy with visits alone would require to wait for three hours of data. We also describe significant improvements on the accuracy of the early prediction of shelf-life for news stories.

Make an Internet Time Capsule with Google Chrome

If you use the Chrome browser, you may have noticed that when you begin typing in the address bar, Google’s Autocomplete prediction service guesses where you might be heading to save you keystrokes. If you have Web History enabled, those guesses aren’t just popular websites, but rather the sites you’re historically most likely to visit.

I realized that this list of sites actually end up serving as a sort of internet time capsule of the last ten weeks (the amount of time the browser history spans). So, here are my Internet ABCs of my last three months of grad school at the Media Lab. Click any of the images to go to the site.

A is for Analytics
is for Analytics. I maintain a lot of websites

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27 Media Labs that aren’t the MIT Media Lab

While Googling for the Media Lab logo the other day, I came across several pages of results with the logos of other Media Labs. As everyone appends ‘Labs’ to the title of their organizations, a gold rush for laboratory beaker clip art has emerged. Here are 27 other scientific workshops of “media”, including a bonus logo of the now-defunct Media Lab Europe (think Euro Disney). Behold!

xml-logo social-media-lab-logo-resized PortfolioItemImageLarge-logo-SMlab Continue reading

Holmes Wilson, internet activism, and why we need you

(originally posted on Civic MIT)

Fight For the Future is known for its massive viral organizing campaigns that changed Internet history both nationally and globally. Faced with the passage of Stop Online Piracy Act/SOPA and the Protect-IP Act/PIPA — legislation that would have jeopardized the open Internet as we know it — Fight for the Future organized the largest and most visible online protest in history. Holmes Wilson has also co-founded Miro, OpenCongress, and Amara. He’s been at the forefront of a range of open internet and participatory culture projects and campaigns.

Holmes Wilson (foreground) and Dalek (background)

The internet delivers newfound powers of expression
The key thing about the internet that drives Holmes’s passion for it is that it gives us a new power, which ultimately translates to freedom of expression. But not in the conventional sense. The freedom of expression the internet enables isn’t just about speaking. It’s about making art, starting a business, overthrowing a government, building a new government, realizing dreams, and the ability to give your greatest gift to the world. When we think about expression this way, it’d be unthinkable to fail in preserving this medium. It would stifle human potential.

But that power is inherently fragile
The internet is fragile. The power that is being given to people is not necessarily stable and there are significant threats to it. The most present threat of the recent year is SOPA/PIPA. In some ways, these seemed like very small reasonable changes to the law. There’s a law that says sites aren’t responsible for content that users generate and this would make site owners responsible for users’ content. The consequence would have been that any copyright holder could have taken down any site where their content appeared and any site that is built with user generated content would have to aggressively police user behavior and contribution. Most of the harm would have been invisible. If SOPA was in effect when YouTube was first invented, we wouldn’t have YouTube.

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81 Ways Humanitarian Aid has Become Participatory

Update: I’ve since posted my full thesis and a short summary.

My Media Lab Master’s thesis argues that information and communication technologies, and particularly the web, have expanded the range of ways the public can help in times of crisis, even (or especially) if we’re nowhere near said crisis. Or, to be more formal about it, participatory aid is mutual, peer-to-peer aid mediated or powered by information and communication technology. We’re building a platform to help coordinate participatory aid projects, but first, I wanted to share some examples.

Table of Contents:

Context
A Framework for Considering Participatory Aid
Ways to help:
I. Help Prepare Before Crisis Occurs
II. Build technical platforms to facilitate peer-to-peer aid
III. Use Tech to Identify Crises
IV. Improve Situational Awareness of Aid Decisionmakers and Affected Populations
V. Crowd Cognition and Creativity
VI. Aid with technology expertise itself
VII. Improved Donation-making
VIII. Pro Bono Skills Donation
IX. Donate the Gift of Attention
X. Donate physical goods in new ways
XI. Help meet social and cultural needs

Context

The collective response to a far-away crisis in the 20th century went something like this:

  1. Find out about a crisis happening far away (if it’s in the news)
  2. Want to do something to help (if you’re so motivated by the particular crisis, affected community, or other factors)
  3. Realize that the only things you can do to help are:
    • Travel to the crisis location (which aid groups usually hate, because it means they now have to feed and shelter YOU, too)
    • Send food or supplies to the crisis location (which aid groups usually hate, because then they need to figure out how to distribute this stuff, or worse, warehouse it like the Ark in Indiana Jones)
    • Send money to aid groups (which aid groups are usually OK with, because they can figure out how to appropriately allocate this liquid asset)

As a result, one can imagine that citizens watching an endless parade of crises on the nightly news might eventually develop disaster fatigue, or develop the widespread belief that all of the news is negative (AP – A New Model for News).

But today, our radical connectivity lets us do things in new ways, and often without waiting for permission. The formal aid sector, for so many years the conduit between donors and victims, is facing tech-driven disintermediation not unlike the disruptive trends already experienced by the music, travel, and news industries. Technology increasingly allows us to provide this new form of aid directly to the community in need, or as part of newly emerging digital-volunteer-powered organizations, rather than routing everything through a few major aid groups. There are pros and cons to this development, as with anything. I’ll get into those in greater depth in my actual thesis. But the point of this post is to illustrate the range of ways we can help, and get your feedback on the model I’ve abstracted from the following examples.

When we really care about a community in crisis, there’s a lot more we can do than give money to an aid organization. I’m not arguing that everyone will be so motivated every time. That’s not how most of us work. But when that motivation is there, when it’s our friends’ community at stake, or our heartstrings have been sufficiently tugged by a powerful story, the range of activities we CAN do from far away is much greater and richer than it has ever been before.

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Area Comedian Explains Humor to MIT

(blogged by @mstem and @natematias)

Today at the Media Lab, Baratunde Thurston is taking a moment out of Vacation Mode to have a conversation with the Media Lab community. How can we describe Baratunde? His personal website labels him a “politically-active, technology-loving comedian from the future.” He was director of digital at The Onion until 2012. His most recent book is How to be Black (2012). He has also started a new company, Cultivated Wit.

Joi Ito hops on stage and tells us about the Media Lab Director’s Fellows program, which aims to make the Media Lab less of a silo and more of a platform, and expand the range of the Lab. People have asked Joi what he’s looking for in a fellow; his answer is that each of them should be wildly different from one another. If you can detect a theme, we’re doing it wrong.

Baratunde is back from his three week, three day vacation from the internet. It was more of a staycation, hanging out in Brooklyn. He’s easing his way back into things.

“Unlike an alien, I wasn’t manufactured. I came from other lives” Baratunde tells us. His grandfather was born into slavery, taught himself to read, and moved the family to Washington DC in the late 19th century, helping build roads in the area. His mother’s mother was a clerk in the US Supreme Court, the first black employee they had.

“My mother was a rabblerouser,” Baratunde says. She was out in the streets, fully down with civil rights, and all over the radio.

“I’ve successfully made a living lying to people, and calling it ‘jokes’”
Across the four generations of his family, Baratunde sees an arc of expression, from a man who taught himself to read in the bonds of slavery, to a woman who entered the halls of power, to a woman who banged on those walls, to Baratunde himself, who plays and redefines those walls.

Baratunde grew up in DC in the 1980s, where his mom foresaw the importance of computers. He was big on taking things apart, and sometimes, putting them back together. Baratunde got into journalism through his college newspaper, and also expressed himself with standup comedy.

As an undergrad at Harvard, Baratunde got the chance to build an 8-bit computer from scratch. “Any time I have to do something hard, I remember, I built a computer out of wires”.

“My areas of most fun over the last few years have been at the intersection of humor, general creativity, and digital technology.”

“The Onion is very specific about who they let into the walls of that kingdom.” After several rounds of interviews and producing his own microsite, he was offered the role of web editor (in addition to the writing position he had applied for).

“We got to pull off a lot of stunts”
There’s a cheap way to express yourself in new formats, Baratunde says. You take what you did in old media, and cut and paste it into the new platform. You take your print headline, and cut and paste it into Twitter with a link. This isn’t real adoption of new platforms. At the Onion, they tried to create stories that carried out a conversation with technology. In the case of “Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face” they actually built the videogame. People played and reviewed it as they would a real game. It turned out to be a stress-relieving experience for people riding the subway. They built a mobile version, but “Apple rejected it, because they’re fascists.”

“I take FourSquare very seriously…I like being Mayor of places”

Baratunde’s company, Cultivated Wit, is inspired by a quote from philosopher/poet/soldier Horace:

“A cultivated wit, one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.

Another project, Comedy Hack Day, takes your typical hack day and adds comedians to the mix.

ShoutRoulette, which won the first hack day, lets you find people on the internet you disagree with, and yell at them.

Location-Based Racism is an upcoming app that helps you find stuff you don’t want. It turns out that a lot of physical locations are tagged with the racist experiences people have had at them.

Discussion

“Is comedy a user interface for getting your head around difficult topics?” Joi asks. Baratunde thinks of comedy as a language for translating difficult, awkward, and contentious issues, making them more addressable to people.

“Laughter–that’s magic. It’s emotional and intellectual at the same time.”
Comedy can serve the role of sugar-coated pill, where a community can talk about painful issues like police brutality without feeling so powerless.

Baratunde’s early standup riffed on the news. He literally sat at a desk on stage, where he earnestly tried to inform people. He’s evolved since then.

Joi asks, “It feels like comedy is virality of play. Once you want to learn, there are a lot of tools. Getting kids to play in the first place is sometimes hard. Do you think of comedy as a way to pull people into play?” “I love the idea that there’s more science to art than we’ve detected thus far. But too much science kills the art,” Baratunde says. “I hope robot comedy doesn’t take off too much.” He talks to us about techniques in comedy and the need for the unknowable magic parts of humour. Joi responds, “that’s what chess grandmasters said until they got beaten by computers.”


Baratunde talks about a project, Fox The News, where they took real news stories and made them sound ridiculous. Maybe 30% of what they created was legitimately funny, and 70% of it was nonsense.

Joi asks, are we born funny?
Baratunde offers that it’s 13% genetics and like, 5% diet. But he wasn’t a funny child — he was really earnest and political. He had trouble rooting for the Washington Redskins, knowing that a similar team name about black people would be unconscionable.

Baratunde lists some lazy apps created by developers. Some were a little predictable. Developers created an “annoying girlfriend” app, and a “kick someone in the balls” app. The Sunlight Foundation classed things up when they contributed Lobbyists From Last Night, which tells you what dinners and events people in power enjoyed the night before. Baratunde feels it’s important to bridge the earnest information in the Sunlight Foundation’s APIs with the general voting public, who don’t necessarily seek out that sort of information.

Joi points out that The Onion’s funniest stuff is usually teetering on the edge of social taboo, and asks if we need to be able to poke fun at everything. Baratunde stresses how critical context is: the timing, the speaker, the audience, are all very important factors in the line between ‘funny’ and ‘asshole’. You don’t have to look far to see people who have crossed that line: Rush Limbaugh, stand up comics crassly picking on homeless people. But there are intelligent ways to talk about sensitive topics. In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, we can target our own ignorance of Haiti as the butt of our jokes, rather than the victims themselves. Don’t use comedy as an excuse to be mean.

“White people reading How To Be Black in public is my favorite thing. The people who buy the ebooks are just cowards taking public transit.”

Joi asks Baratunde, what do we do about the caring problem, where people just aren’t interested in learning about other places? Can humor connect people and help us care about new things? Comedians are often more approachable than politicians, Baratunde tells us, especially across cultures. He tells us the story of a comedy show he did in Amsterdam among Surimanese immigrants. Cadence, facial expressions, and tone come across even if you don’t understand the words. We can build an empathetic connection across massive language divides.

Joi asks about the idea of user-generated comedy. If it takes lots of practice to be a great writer “are people funnier now because of the Internet?”
There’s now more comedy in the world, just like there are more photos than there has ever been. But per capita? Open question. Twitter has raised the bar for the comedy that’s out there. Comedy’s been disrupted just like music and film. Some of the funniest material originates from amateurs, and agents and bookers are now looking to YouTube and Twitter for new talent.

Sure, there’s a lot of crap. “If I see another portrait video, I’m going to lose my mind. Just turn your phone.”

People on Twitter make the obvious jokes immediately after an event, eliminating some of the low-hanging fruit for comedians. Comedians have to react immediately or raise the bar on their stuff.

The Awkward Black Girl series is an example of someone making a show about their life without waiting for permission from an executive.

Technology is changing how people find and share comedy, Joi acnkowledges. He also points to Damn You, Autocorrect, which offers comedy caused by machinery. How does Baratunde see technology and comedy coming together?

Baratunde says that we can’t easily imagine the future– it just happens. He talks to us about the idea of data comedy– the ability to find absurd patterns in data.

Much of comedy is repetition and playing with patterns, so aggregation of material like Damn You, Autocorrect and Texts From Last Night work.

We can have fun with interfaces, too. Baratunde enjoys the Google Voice text composition field. The character counter lets the user know how many SMSes their message will send, and when you approach three messages, the numerical counter turns to “Really??”

Questions

Fellow fellow Christopher Bevans asks when Baratunde realized that he could integrate all three of his strengths (comedy, media, and technology).

Swine flu.” It was more of a media virus than an actual influenza virus. Baratunde looked to see if anyone else had produced a parody Twitter account, and found only useful, scientific accounts. So he produced a Swine Flu account, and thought of it as an actual character, an off-putting little piggy. Baratunde went all transmedia, with Facebook Pages and voicemail accounts and a full personality for the swine flu.

The Twitter parody account has become a genre of its own. BPGlobalPR, Invisible Obama, and others now spring to life moments after an event or meme starts to take off.

Does internet sharing force you to constantly produce new material?
Standup is far more complicated than people realize. There’s an entire arch, put together over many experiments with what works and what doesn’t. It takes real time to put together a set. Sarah Silverman has spoken about how realtime sharing has broken the comedic process.

Some react by fighting it. The Oprah show confiscates your phones, NBC tape delays the Olympics. But it takes a special kind of

“No one complains about musicians playing the same song a thousand times. They demand it.” They say, “Play the first song that made you popular! The song that makes you sick at night! I don’t want to hear your innovation!”

To comics, the audience demands the opposite: “Don’t do what you’ve perfected! I want to hear the new, unfunny stuff!”

On multiple identities:
People sometime introduce Baratunde with something like, “Now this black guy is going to talk to you for a bit.” But he’s a lot more than a black guy. Just like the bank executives who destroyed the economy are also fathers, and stuff.

“How does race impact the interpretation of your comedy?” Shaka asks. Sometimes there’s a massive gap between what club audiences expect and what Baratunde does. When people see a black guy, people expect to see a criminal — we’ve been programmed to anticipate that. People might expect a rapper or an athlete — does Yoga count? By talking about race, writing the book, and giving a talk at South By Southwest, Baratunde see himself as part of a trend in which the Internet is broadening what’s possible (including people like Kamau Bell).

Baratunde talks about more recent projects, including cultivated wit and comedy hacks. During the last election, he and his colleagues created worked with Fight For the Future on Your Excuse Sucks, a website that tried to use comedy to shame people and undermine people’s excuses to not vote. It provided videos friends could send you in response to specific excuses.

Someone on the internet asks, “How’d that internet vacation go?”
It was wonderful. Baratunde is usually a promoter of constant connectivity, but realized this brings with it a certain baseline level of stress. He rediscovered word of mouth and eye contact. “We have a 3D, HD, large screen window provided by biology.” It was good to reground himself.