Building on the author’s recent survey of Western knowledge institutions since antiquity, this article assesses the impact of current trends in information technology, higher education, science, and the environment on knowledge production. Its focus on institutions diverges from conventional histories of ideas, media, and technologies but also from the understandings of knowledge and information prevalent among economists. It instead identifies patterns by which entirely new institutions of knowledge supersede their predecessors, reconceptualizing today’s changes around the fitful process by which the laboratory, broadly understood, outgrows the tutelage of the academic disciplines.