I was there during the '00s. I'll admit my hostile attitude is partly sour grapes on my part, since I deservedly flunked out (otherwise known as getting a master's). But nearly all the bad press the lab has been getting lately rings true to me. Thinking back to how little of what I saw there turned into any kind of practical advances or useful products in the years since...what was the point? And of course I'm horrified at the source of so much of the funding.

But then I've also been souring on the value of academia and research in general. "Publish or perish" leads to a lot of garbage getting published, as increasingly large amounts of money are thrown at increasingly small results. There's just not enough scientific truth to go around. The Media Lab, being particularly prominent and press-friendly, has this worse than many other places, but it's a problem everywhere.