Reddit reviews The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet

TEXT OF ARTICLE - PART TWO



Ito’s decision to accept Epstein’s money was at best exceptionally stupid, and not just in retrospect; the financier’s 2008 conviction for procuring an underage girl for prostitution was a matter of public record when he and Ito made contact, and it should have been sufficient to end their conversation before it began. (According to Farrow, “Epstein was listed as ‘disqualified’ in M.I.T.’s official donor database.”) But Negroponte’s comments—even in light of his later clarification—indicate the structural rot at the heart of Ito’s choices. The Media Lab has long been academia’s fanciest glue trap for morally elastic rich people. It is a laundromat for capital from some of the world’s least socially conscious entities and individuals, and the lab never cared very much about their moral valence as long as their checks cleared.

In this, the Media Lab has apotheosized the capitalistic philosophy of its parent institution, which in the 20th century pioneered the now-common nexus between academic science and private industry. In 1919, MIT president Richard Maclaurin developed a document called the “Technology Plan” that sought to create clear ties and channels between the school and corporate America in order to forge “an alliance between [MIT] and certain of the industries in the solving of such technical problems as might be presented and as [MIT] might properly undertake.” The Technology Plan ran counter to the old-fashioned notion that scientists ought to pursue research in order to add to the common store of knowledge, not so that they or their patrons could realize financial gain. The academic scientist’s reward for good work, instead, is acclaim and stature within her community. Theoretically, at least, professors are salaried and tenured so that they can conduct research pursuant to this communal scientific ethos free from any profit imperative.

This is not how modern academic science often works in practice, and it is certainly not how things have worked at MIT for the past 100 years. The Technology Plan came to life as the Division of Industrial Cooperation and Research, and it blossomed during and after World War II, as MIT used its experience with external partnerships to secure and fulfill hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government and military grants and contracts. In the 1980s, the Bayh-Dole Act made it possible for universities to patent the results of federally funded research and license those patents to companies. As you might expect, MIT was on the front lines of this lucrative “technology transfer” process. When the end of the Cold War brought reductions in federal science funding, MIT became even more reliant on the private sector, and on rich people who derived some perhaps-intangible benefit from giving money to the school.

I wrote about this history in my 2016 book about the life and death of the programmer Aaron Swartz. Swartz had a complicated relationship with MIT, which liked to portray itself as a safe harbor for unruly intellects. His father worked with the Media Lab, and Swartz himself gravitated to the school, even though he never formally enrolled there. When Swartz was arrested and indicted for using MIT’s computing resources to download 4.7 million documents from JSTOR without explicit authorization, he and his family believed that MIT could be convinced to speak out on his behalf and perhaps help quash the indictment. After all, Swartz’s actions were not all that different from many of the famous “hacks” that MIT affiliates had perpetrated over the years and that the school had come to officially celebrate. Instead, MIT left Swartz to twist in the wind. A subsequent independent inquiry into MIT’s conduct basically absolved the school for its inaction. It wasn’t personal. It was just business.

In January 2013, days after Swartz killed himself, some of his friends hosted a memorial reception in the lobby of the Media Lab. I attended that reception, but later became upset at the discordance of remembering Swartz in a building that embodied the reasons why MIT had done nothing to help him out of his predicament. According to the Abelson Report, MIT had chosen not to aid Swartz in part because doing so could have sent the wrong message to its institutional partners, which might have interpreted the gesture as MIT coming out as soft on content piracy. And then Swartz died, and the Media Lab was the site of an ice-cream social in his honor. The Media Lab and MIT were capable of anything, it seemed, except meaningful self-reflection.

The Media Lab and MIT were capable of anything, it seemed, except meaningful self-reflection.

The Epstein scandal has forced the Media Lab and MIT into that unfamiliar space. In an all-MIT email sent on Saturday afternoon, titled “Fact-finding and action on the Media Lab,” Reif promised “an immediate, thorough and ongoing investigation” into the accusations in the New Yorker story, and claimed that the school was “actively assessing how best to improve our policies, processes and procedures to fully reflect MIT’s values and prevent such mistakes in the future.” I hope that this review examines the structures that not just allowed Ito to accept Epstein’s money and subsequently cover his tracks, but that made the Media Lab into the sort of place where transgression is seen as evidence of genius and social disobedience is underwritten by LinkedIn. “Lab members who defend [Ito] said academia had a long history of accepting funding from dubious characters,” the Times reported on Friday, accurately and depressingly. MIT’s rainmakers have always been tacitly empowered to show bad judgment in pursuit of research funding; to not think too hard about the provenance of the money they raise or the implications of the partnerships they cultivate; or, as seems to have been the case with Joi Ito, to understand why it would be a bad idea to take tainted funding and then to go ahead and cash those checks all the same.

Over the course of the past century, MIT became one of the best brands in the world, a name that confers instant credibility and stature on all who are associated with it. Rather than protect the inherent specialness of this brand, the Media Lab soiled it again and again by selling its prestige to banks, drug companies, petroleum companies, carmakers, multinational retailers, at least one serial sexual predator, and others who hoped to camouflage their avarice with the sheen of innovation. There is a big difference between taking money from someone like Epstein and taking it from Nike or the Department of Defense, but the latter choices pave the way for the former. It is easy to understand why Jeffrey Epstein wanted to get involved with the Media Lab. Unfortunately, it is also easy to understand why Joi Ito got involved with Jeffrey Epstein. The only bad donations were the ones that weren’t received.