As this book was well into production, in August 2019, a series of allegations began to emerge against a number of people and institutions featured in the text. These allegations linked sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to MIT and to Harvard, and also to faculty and donors at those institutions, including MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito and MIT professor Marvin Minsky (now deceased). In early September, The New Yorker reported that Ito had accepted numerous donations to the Media Lab from Epstein after the latter’s conviction in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, as well as more than $1 million for Ito’s own personal investments. It alleged that Ito had concealed the donations. Around the same time, the President of MIT, Rafael Reif, admitted that he had approved a donation from Epstein to a University faculty member in 2012 and had signed a thank-you note to him. Marvin Minsky, meanwhile, was accused of sexually exploiting a 17-year-old female (more than 55 years his junior) allegedly trafficked by Epstein.
LinkedIn cofounder and MIT Media Lab donor Reid Hoffman defended Ito, and Free Software Foundation founder and MIT research scientist Richard Stallman defended Minsky in ways that drew immediate public condemnation and disgust. In September, Ito resigned as Director of the Media Lab, and Richard Stallman resigned from his positions at the Free Software Foundation and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). The allegations against Ito and the Media Lab led to the departures of associate professor Ethan Zuckerman and visiting scholar J. Nathan Matias from the Lab, who stated that they could no longer be associated with the institution. Ito’s failure to respond, and Hoffman’s defensive response when questioned by Anand Giridharadas, led to the resignation of that journalist and author from the board overseeing the Media Lab Disobedience Award.
I first started reading about these stories huddled in a tent at the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp, the freezing black night illuminated only by the light of the news articles displayed on my cell phone. It was a lot to take in over the high-decibel punk music and partying that were shaking the ground outside.
Dismay was my initial emotion. My book reports, among many other things, on these individuals’ contributions to the history of hacking. What was the proper course of action? Even if I could have excised passages about the impugned individuals entirely from the book at that late stage of the production process, I would not have done it. I don’t believe it’s fair or wise to erase people and their accomplishments from history in order to serve one’s own professional interests. We miss the opportunity to process difficult lessons when we self-righteously rush to scrub someone from the face of an institution, a movement, a profession, or the public record. And as a lawyer I believe that each individual’s case must be examined and judged on its own set of facts in the appropriate forums. Everyone is entitled to due process.
Granted, each individual may be judged, too, in the forum of public opinion. But when we make our own judgments we need to think, not just about individual culpability but about the systems in which individuals are embedded, too.
For me, these stories underline the overwhelming gender imbalance in the computing and high-tech worlds. It’s an imbalance that poses real challenges for holistic tech solutions for our societies. The stories show the danger of universities being corrupted by private and corporate money, and losing sight of their public mandates. They show privileged elites making terrible decisions. By their depressing mulitiplicity, the stories suggest a general moral crisis. In my view the takeaway is clear: we need to rebuild our societies and institutions with a new ethos of distributed power. It is our collective responsibility. That is what this book is about.
At this time, too, it is important to mention that Julian Assange is in prison in the United Kingdom, having been turned out of his sanctuary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and forcibly extracted from the building by police. Sweden’s investigation against him for sexual crimes has been dropped, reopened by prosecutors, and recently put on hold by a Swedish court, but he is now serving prison time in the United Kingdom for skipping bail (in 2012) and might be extradited to the United States. There is heavy disapprobation of him in the hacker scene. I experienced this firsthand at the recent Chaos Communication Camp in 2019. However, regardless of what one thinks of each of Assange’s many actions, his personality, his mental state, his motivations, and his treatment of other people, especially women, over the years, it is important to recognize that his case is, above all, a case about press freedom. What the UK and US governments decide to do with him will set the course for press freedom in this century. In that respect we should all be speaking up and getting involved in the matter because as this book describes, we won’t be living in democracies if we don’t have a free press.
I imagine many more developments will unfold before and after the publication of this book to highlight the pressing relevance of its subject matter. My one hope is that you will feel that you understand what’s going on better once you’ve read it. That is the public service I have aimed to provide.
In solidarity,
Maureen Webb
Fall 2019