> 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.