MIT Media Lab giving out $250K cash prize for disobedience | Hacker News Reader

MIT Media Lab giving out $250K cash prize for disobedience

media.mit.edu

45 pointsstepny11 comments

Perhaps they could've given it to Aaron Swartz to support the legal issues they threw him in as a result of his responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging our norms, rules, or laws to benefit society.

I'm half-tempted to nominate him as an act of disobedience.

Can't agree more.

The irony is painful.

excellent idea.

i'm surprised this award doesn't bear his name

i'm even more surprised that his name is not mentioned anywhere in the MIT publication article

Really, MIT? https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-stor...

Why doesn't the university just send that money to Schwartz's family instead?

Heck, rather than a prize, IMO a better idea would be to create a "Disobedience Legal Defense Fund", the sort of thing that might have helped Aaron Swartz.

Assuming a posthumous grant to Aaron Swartz is not possible, I would think Alexandra Elbakyan from scihub would be a good choice for this award.

The rules state that the person must be living, but in the theme of disobedience I felt it pertinent to ignore that.

How fucking convenient that their timeline of examples ends in 2012, a year before Aaron Swartz committed suicide.

In a different way, it is rather interesting that Occupy Wall Street (2011) didn't make the cut.

＊＊＊Aaron Swartz＊＊＊

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

(From archive.org)

Some inspiration:

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/racing-extinction-louis-psihoy...

The Cove - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1313104/

The Yes Men - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379593

Hologram/projection protesting - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3038317/The-world-s-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com