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I think people are doing some good thinking about the larger problem that the MIT Media Lab is an example of. 1/
It was possible for Joi Ito to take Epstein's money because of two things. First, that the Media Lab was (and is) almost perfectly emblematic of a contradiction that is ripping academia apart, as well as a host of other civic institutions. 2/
That contradiction is basically this: that everything funded in academic and civic life has to return on investment in increasingly literal terms. It has to be of use, of profit, tangibly and directly. 3/
But academic and civic institutions were in many cases created as institutions of maintenance and stewardship, as homeostatic. Not without or against progress, but neither defined exclusively by profit and efficiency. 4/
The Media Lab lays this contradiction out with special pungency not because the money coming in is corrupt, but because the Media Lab was enticing and exciting due to its rhetoric of improvident, whimsical experimentation. 5/
That sounded ideologically more like that idea of academia as a place to think, to dream, to explore, to do basic work or exotic work, without a tight leash of practicality and profit. 6/
But many already had seen how much of a lie that was: the Media Lab was, if anything, even more tethered to the vanities of people out to make a buck, flattering their gilded age pretentions while also servicing their hunger for more and more product, more and more money. 7/
And here is the second contradiction, bundled into the first. MIT loved the messaging of the Media Lab; it's spread throughout the institution. Hell, we all loved it--we love that idea of improvidence, of chasing ideas without fear or constraint. 8/
Talking that way is a sure enticement to donors, consultants, presidents, boards, and many faculty alike. But we don't do it in the core of our institutions--it is always additive. Why? If we love it so much, why not make it our deepest operational goal? 9/
Well, because in part we are already doing some of that improvident work in everyday ways in our teaching and scholarship, and it goes unnarrated and unnoticed by our institutions and maybe even our peers. 10/
But in part also because we have other business that has to be done--that business of stewardship, of the reproduction of knowledge, of the accumulation of skills in the next generation. Which neoliberalism has wholly despised--and which is at the heart of "public goods".
