Joi Ito Resigns as Director of the M.I.T. Media Lab: raceAhead
An exposé by Ronan Farrow details how Ito greenlit anonymous donations from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ronan Farrow published a devastating story in The New Yorker on Friday which detailed the surprising extent to which the M.I.T. Media Lab, and its director Joi Ito, not only accepted significant donations from convicted sex offender and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but sought his input on the disbursement of the funds. Some of the money had been funneled into investment funds controlled by Ito.
Then, Ito went to great lengths to hide the Lab’s association with him.
The story further asserts that Epstein was working behind the scenes on the Lab’s behalf and was credited with delivering millions of dollars in donations, including those from philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. (A spokesperson for Bill Gates denies this claim.)
By Saturday, Ito had resigned his position, followed shortly by his board positions at the MacArthur Foundation and The New York Times Company.
L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., published a message to the M.I.T. community announcing that he’d asked for outside counsel to be retained. “Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation,” he wrote. “We are actively assessing how best to improve our policies, processes and procedures to fully reflect MIT’s values and prevent such mistakes in the future. Our internal review process continues, and what we learn from it will inform the path ahead.”
In the short term, the path ahead will be filled with new revelations and hot takes, many upsetting.
When the anonymous Epstein donations were first reported, some 200 of Ito’s friends signed an open letter in support for him. It has now been removed, but archived here. In an ill-advised follow
Concerned colleagues scheduled a meeting last week billed as “a process of dialogue and recovery,” and which began with some deep breathing exercises. In front of some 200 people, Ito apologized and asked to make amends, a process that was ultimately derailed by architect and lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, who according to reporting from the New York Times, shrugged the issue off. “I told Joi to take the money,” he said, shocking the crowd. “[A]
On the path will be a necessary review of what the Media Lab is actually doing, and difficult conversations about money, power, and what very rich people and organizations do to funnel cash to their own pet projects and away from others that deserve support.
Slate’s Justin Peters says the Media Lab had been failing to live up to its promise of independent invention and breakthrough thinking for well over a decade. And it had been such a beautiful idea! The vibe he once loved while writing his master’s thesis about the lab’s affective computing research group, now hangs in a fragile balance. “You didn’t have to squint to see that the Media Lab’s whiz-bang vibe was made possible—and was constrained—by the corporate partnerships it worked so hard to cultivate,” he says.
“But at the Media Lab, the gulf between the corporate benefactors and the institution’s lofty rhetoric of scientific exceptionalism felt especially jarring. Founded in 1985, the Media Lab cultivated an image as a haven for misfit geniuses, for academics who, as the lab’s most recent director put it, ‘don’t fit in any existing discipline either because they are between—or simply beyond—disciplines.’ These thinkers were the latest inheritors of MIT’s ‘hacker ethic’: iconoclastic engineers who used applied science to try to make the world a better place. Yet the money came from modern-day robber barons, whose main interest in science was how it could be used to sell more cheese.”
Much of which amplified by a media underprepared to evaluate what innovation actually looks like.
While the vaunted Media Lab continues the process of dialog and recovery, I hope they linger on the path of difficult conversations about the kind of ingrained misogyny it takes to render a moral compass completely useless.
Writer and tech expert Xeni Jardin was among the few who raised the alarm early and often to point out what should have been clear from the beginning: No money is completely pure, but this was not a complicated case.
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