(2019-09-08) Lessig On Joi And Mit

Larry Lessig: On Joi and MIT. A couple of weeks ago, I signed a petition (the site has since been taken down, but you can see it at archive.org) expressing my support for Joi Ito. Not unexpectedly, that signing produced anger and outrage among many, and among some of my friends. I had wanted, in the spirit of the Net, to respond and explain then. I was asked by Joi’s friends not to. Yesterday’s events terminate that injunction.

I had known of Joi’s contact with Jeffrey Epstein since about the beginning. He had reached out to me to discuss it. We are friends (Joi and I), and he knew I would be upset by his working with a pedophile. He knew that because he knew that I had been extensively abused as a kid, and that I am ferocious in my anger at people and institutions that protect abusers. (Defenders of the Catholic Church just love me for this.) Indeed, as I have come to understand myself, I see this anger as the whole reason for the work I do. Institutional corruption is just a fancy way to frame the dynamic of the weak enabling evil to do wrong

conversation about whether this criminal continued his soul-sucking crimes. Joi believed that he did not. He believed Epstein was terrified after the prosecution in 2011. He believed he had come to recognize that he would lose everything. He believed that whatever else he was, he was brilliant enough to understand the devastation to him of losing everything

the truth is that—as I thought about it then—if Joi believed as he did after real diligence, I didn’t believe he was wrong to take Epstein’s money anonymously. That belief — of mine—was a mistake, for reasons that I’ll return to below. But we should start with why that belief is even conceivable before I return to why it is wrong.

I thank god that I’ve never been obligated to raise money for an institution like MIT, because I know that in every moment of that existence, I would be forced to confront a gap between what I believe is right and what every institution does

Divide the entities or people who want to give to an institution like MIT into four types.

Type 1 is people like Tom Hanks

Type 2 is entities like Google or Facebook, or people whose wealth comes from those companies

Type 3 is people who are criminals, but whose wealth does not derive from their crime. This is Epstein, but not just Epstein.

Type 4 is entities and people whose wealth comes from clearly wrongful or harmful or immoral behavior. The RJ Reynolds Foundation, the Sackler family, the Koch brothers.

Universities wish they could fund their work with Type 1 money exclusively. I can’t imagine that there is a single university in America that does. Instead, every university takes all four types of money.

I think that universities should not be the launderers of reputation

Were I king, I would ban non-anonymous gifts of type 3 or type 4.

Obviously, the difficulty with such a rule is distinguishing type 2 from type 4

Thus when Joi was convinced that the crimes had ended, and he took Epstein’s money, anonymously, he was doing, as I saw it, and likely said, then, the most that any university administrator could do, given the unending need to raise money. That view was then confirmed by MIT’s administration directly when they told Joi to take the money, conditioned upon its anonymity.

But the gift was a ticking time bomb. At some point, it was destined to be discovered. And when it was discovered, it would do real and substantial pain to the people within the Media Lab who would come to see that they were supported in part by the gift of a pedophile.

I fear that I have become so good at intellectualizing what happened to me that I am awful at showing the raw soul-wrenching destruction that that evil is.

I know that Ronan Farrow’s article is crafted to draw the following sentence into doubt: Everything Joi did in accepting Epstein’s money he did with MIT’s approval

MIT is less now that Joi is gone. I suspect even his most vocal critics recognize as much. So is what MIT lost worth what “the cause” has gained?