On Joi and MIT
medium.com
medium.com
Secondly, he makes it sound like Joi wanted to keep Epstein's contributions secret to keep Epstein from getting any benefit from them. But almost all the reporting on the issue make it pretty clear that Epstein used the donations, and his relationship with Joi, to publically associate himself with the lab, visit the researchers there, present himself to Gates and others as an unofficial go-between, etc. The relationship went far beyond Epstein cutting a check and no one knowing about it.
Thirdly, Lessig's defense is largely based on the claim that Farrow's reporting is factually incorrect, and that MIT told him to take the $, and thus Joi was making a moral compromise in service of his employer. We'll have to wait and see if he or Farrow is correct here, but Farrow's article was obviously drawing on internal MIT docs, so I'd be pretty surprised if that was the case.
Finally, Lessig skips over the fact that Joi took on the order of a million dollars from Epstein for his personal projects. This makes the claim that Joi was just doing what MIT told him to do pretty weak. It also bypasses what I thought was the most damning implication of the Farrow article, which was that Epstein basically bribed Joi to help him get around MIT's prohibition on taking his money.
This is the deep rot at the heart of the American elite system: once you're in the club, it's effectively impossible for anything you do to get you kicked out of it. You become anointed as the Right Sort of Person, and everybody accepts that when the Right Sort of Person does something terrible, it's not because they're actually not the Right Sort of Person. It's just an oversight, an oopsie, an opportunity for Learning and Growth. You're operating among friends, and standards among friends are more forgiving than they are among the public at large.
(Even worse, not only are you anointed as the Right Sort of Person, but your children automatically are as well. And they have even less justification for being treated that way than you did.)
Which is why a lot of people are misunderstanding the root problem in the Epstein case. It's not that Epstein corrupted everything and everyone he touched, it's that an Epstein could only exist in an environment where everything was corrupt already. Epstein was the symptom, not the disease.
Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein. Has your boss ever put you in a position like that? Ito did, in order to retain favor with Epstein. That this was going to happen was so predictable that Ito worked to keep Ethan Zuckerman out of the building the day Epstein arrived, because Zuckerman had already been on Ito's case about Epstein.
Worse still, Farrow has Epstein brokering donations from billionaires like Bill Gates. Lessig retcons Ito's actions into accepting anonymous donations from a "class 3" donor; at least Ito wasn't accepting public donations from "class 4" donors like the Koch Brothers. But Epstein is, in Farrow's telling, literally functioning as an agent for Ito and the Lab. Anonymous? He's got the highest possible profile the Lab can offer with precisely the set of people whose influence he hopes to buy.
Presumably, that level of influence peddling is what enabled Epstein to obtain a 1-year work-release sentence in Florida years earlier. In this telling, Epstein isn't "laundering" anything. He's purchasing the influence he hopes to bank to shield himself from further scrutiny. He's enlisting the Lab to protect him. And the Lab complies, for a pittance†, for a tellingly low amount of money, so low, in retrospect and context you have to wonder if the directorate of the Lab gave a shit at all.
† apparently, and maybe double check because i could be wrong, less than the amount ito also collected from epstein for his own private venture fund.
Fuck these people, burn down the Media Lab, salt the earth.
AFAIK there was no reason cited for their trafficking suspicion. It is not known whether the women with him at the time appeared to anyone to be underage.
Your rebuttal is even less relevant to this thread, which simply contends that there was no meaningful anonymity about Epstein's donations; in fact, there was infamy over them.
You were absolutely making that point. You literally said:
> Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein.
I don't know how much more clear your intent could be.
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/11707895922635161...
The details and the timeline of the donor disqualification in the New Yorker article sounded odd to me-- in particular, that it juxtaposed conjecture and unsupported claims with emails to make it sound like the request for anonymity was a workaround for MIT policy yet it didn't actually introduce any factual support for that conclusion.
In particular, when was he disqualified (e.g. before or after things being discussed) and how was this communicated in the institution? These were obvious and surprising omissions in the article. For Joi's sake I hope Lessig's belief on this point is based on more than just the writing smelling suspicious. Regardless, the absence of clarity on details like this is why investigations are superior to lynch mobs.
Whether or not what someone does breaks the law often his almost nothing to do with the morality of that action or whether or not that action causes harm.
That section of the article was more about the taint upon money donated from various types of donors than about the donors themselves. The distinction it is drawing is between people who do bad things but do not derive their money from those bad things (such as Epstein) and people that do bad things and those bad things is the source of the money they are donating (Koch). It's not saying that donors of the former type are necessarily less immoral or evil than donors of the latter type--just that taking their money is not benefiting directly from their immorality or evil.
So yes I think they are on a different level especially for a university, a university that accepts money from people that are actively trying to fight science to harm everybody...
also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.
the people really doing good in this world don't make any money at all.
all this epstein stuff and the avalanches caused by his actions and associations is just giving us a peek into how the world really works: a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing who think they do are running things in complete, total self and those like their self interest. nobody really cares about anyone else, and people prop up their decisions in the context of institutions with an inability to step outside and ask "what am i really doing here"?
"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out." -- Honore de Balzac (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/09/fortune-crime/)
He addresses the questions around this directly...
> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
> also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.
They're not doing a whole lot of good, they're just not doing anything particularly bad. He's not holding them up as examples of perfect people, just examples of people with no toxic publicly known behaviors that an institution like MIT might want to avoid.
> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
providing a loose supposition and then immediately dismissing it is not addressing something directly. i am not an expert on the epstein situation, but from what i understand, lessig’s supposition is a rather naive one. it seems it is much more likely that epstein was making money from the services he provided and even more likely that he was bankrolled by some other entity or entities.
the fact that lessig, as a supposed law expert, is just grasping at straws with unrealistic guesses to recover his and his friend’s position is really depressing.
What is vindictive music?
He not only personally offended with minors, but amplified that offense by supplying them to others.
This was certainly done for either direct profit, or for buying or paying off favors.
He fails to note that Ito's apology was incredibly selective and self-serving and was basically a lie of omission in furtherance of the longtime covering up of the conspiracy to take Epstein's money.
He accepts as self-evident that Epstein's money was not morally tainted itself by dismissing the most implausible explanation for it (i.e., blackmail).
He ignores Ito's personally profiting from facilitating Epstein by also taking Epstein's money for his own ventures.
Lessig tells a story of a "sweet soul" taking dirty money at the institution's direction and failing to consider the possible future damage of the revelation of same, and then castigates the rest of us because now when someone commits a comparably innocent error, they'll have no motive to confess, apologize and repair. Everything we've seen so far screams that this is a dark, corrupt, wide-ranging affair full of venal people using each other for mutual benefit, and what we get from Lessig is a puff piece on par with Ito's apology.