The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab

I recently re-watched “The Internet’s Own Boy”, about Aaron Swartz and his tragic end.

Seeing how MIT had no problem ruining the life of one of the most brilliant members of my generation over commercial interest said a whole lot about MIT’s role in the world.

This clearly isn’t a new issue for MIT, they’ve been making ethically questionable decisions for years.

What are the major successes that came out of the lab? On top of my head I can think of: e-Ink, Lego mindstorms, Scratch. I bet there are hundreds more.

> Each year it hosted a sponsor week during which research groups were expected to dance for their big-money benefactors, corporations like ExxonMobil, Citigroup, PepsiCo, GlaxoSmithKline, and Verizon. Many of its scientists were also involved with private companies that had been founded to monetize their discoveries. A year after I turned in my masters’ thesis, the key members of the affective computing group I had studied founded a company that today partners with “1400+ brands,” builds “automotive AI,” and works with market research firms and other companies to “measure consumer emotion responses to digital content, such as ads and TV programming.” This was what the idea factory was incubating?

This article is rather ignorant and seems consistent with the author’s background as someone who has no background in technology or R&D.

MIT has always been this way. It has operated a billion dollar defense contractor, MIT Lincoln Labs, since the 1950s. The current MIT campus was built using a quarter-billion donation (in current dollars) of cash and Kodak stock by George Eastman in the 1910s. MIT, moreover, is the archetype of how America became a technological superpower. Collaborations between the military, universities, and large private corporations is how things like the Internet got built.

Trying to somehow tie Epstein together with all that, trying and taint MIT and American industry with some spurious connection to Epstein, is sophistry. It’s the easy prose of someone who has never tried to build a damn thing.

If you remove corporate and private money from universities, you don't automatically receive more funding from government. A publication like Slate might like and lobby for this to be, but that's not reality. What you get is less students and professors, less research, less innovation, less progress, and less commercialization of new technologies that benefit us all. I'm sure Mr. Peters means well when he advocates for his conception of moral and academic purity, but he's implicitly advocating for gutting a part of our world-class research universities, which is unnecessarily destructive and not a trade we should be willing to make.

The author seems to flip flop on whether the "moral rot" is isolated to the Media Lab. First they write:

> 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. ... In this, the Media Lab has apotheosized the capitalistic philosophy of its parent institution ... 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.

So the Media Lab, like the rest of MIT, is morally rotten because of its extreme reliance on private sector funding. But then:

> 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

So, MIT is credible and the moral rot is isolated to the Media Lab?

Well, overall, the article presents some facts and seems to want to make a larger point, but then fails to really make any point. The whole discussion of the 1919 "Technology Plan" goes nowhere and it's unclear if the author thinks it was a good or bad (or neutral) idea.

Given that the article seems to have been intended to be persuasive, it would have been better if the article clearly stated either that the Media Lab took the Technology Plan too far, or if the Technology Plan was flawed from the beginning. At least then there would be a clear point which readers could agree or disagree with.

Nice hit piece