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Thanks to Brian Holmes, I found a quote that more or less sums up my work at MIT. After a few years people started to refer to Computing Culture as "the political group" at the Media Lab. I always had to stifle a laugh, because so much of the work there -- and at MIT as a whole -- was absolutely political. It just tended to support the status quo. Here, then, is the patron saint of my alma mater UCSD (Frankfurt am Pacific):

I emphasize, it is not a question of making the schools and universities, of making the educational system political. The educational system is political already. I need only remind you of the incredible degree to which (I am speaking of the United States) universities are involved in huge research grants (the nature of which you know in many cases) by the government and the various quasi-governmental agencies.
The educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the established policy. And in this sense we must meet this society on its own ground of total mobilization. We must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom. We must each of us generate in ourselves, and try to generate in others, the instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality, and without stupidity. And we must see that we can generate the instinctual and intellectual revulsion against the values of an affluence which spreads aggressiveness and suppression throughout the world.
Herbert Marcuse, Liberation from the Affluent Society

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