(2019-09-08) The Moral Rot Of The Mit Media Lab

Justin Peters: The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab. The Lab’s leaders weren’t averse to making the world a better place, just as long as the sponsors got what they wanted in the process.

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.

I wrote about this history in my 2016 book about the life and death of the programmer Aaron Swartz.

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.

There is a big difference between taking money from someone like Jeffrey Epstein and taking it from Nike or the Department of Defense, but the latter choices pave the way for the former.