There is a characteristically funny essay by George Saunders which starts by asking us to imagine an average party, and at that party, a Guy with the Megaphone. It would be funny that is, if it were not so painfully to the point about our contemporary political and informational predicament. The Guy with the Megaphone, fairly average to begin with, but in the possession of this technology that amplifies his statements, starts to exert social, aesthetic and eventually political influence upon the (once)merry party-goers. Fairly quickly, and with just a tiny bit of coaxing, the room divides, and gets meaner. Whether those party goers liked it or not—were aware of it or not—the sheer volume and repetition of his voice insinuates his messages into their conversations, their language, their attention, and eventually their reactions. His messages get simpler and louder—simpler because louder—and vice versa; consequently, the thoughts and feelings of those formerly curious and social party-goers follow. Their priorities and reactions are gradually rewired.

It matters that the Critical Broadcasting Lab’s home is in academia. While it addresses a broader public, its role at MIT is pedagogical, providing a space of reflection, collectively shared and shaped, that is carved out of the time dedicated to, and packed with the elements of, a professional education. It teaches tools for producing the distance necessary for critical operations—for the understanding of complexity, nuance, and implication. Because its existence is tolerated in academia, its broadcasting and curatorial products are not indebted to special interest, nor to popularity algorithms built on the mining of visitor data, at least not yet—at least not directly. Its members exercise academic freedom of speech, freedom to be critical; its projects are unsolicited and thus motivated by urgencies that are felt privately by those who participate in their research and explication. The Critical Broadcasting Lab also reserves the space for thinking politically and critically with an open-endedness towards the aesthetic and critical outcomes of that thinking. It aims to cultivate an experimental attitude toward making architecture (and the things that makes it possible) public; to produce robust criticism of the discipline’s contemporary, historical, and future entanglements with forces beyond its safe academic outlines; and to thus recover the role of the public intellectual in architecture.