On Joi and MIT - Lessig - Medium
▻https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
Par Larry Lessig
Un texte très intéressant. Au fond, c’est tout le système de financement des universités par les « donateurs » et ce que ceux-ci recherche dans leur « philanthropie » qui est en jeu. Il pousse forcément à ne pas se poser la question de l’origine de l’argent...
A couple of weeks ago, I signed a petition (the site has since been taken down, but you can see it at archive.org) expressing my support for Joi Ito. Not unexpectedly, that signing produced anger and outrage among many, and among some of my friends. I had wanted, in the spirit of the Net, to respond and explain then. I was asked by Joi’s friends not to. Yesterday’s events terminate that injunction. What follows is an explanation and an account, with as little emotion as I can muster.
I had known of Joi’s contact with Epstein since about the beginning. He had reached out to me to discuss it. We are friends (Joi and I), and he knew I would be upset by his working with a pedophile. He knew that because he knew that I had been extensively abused as a kid, and that I am ferocious in my anger at people and institutions that protect abusers. (Defenders of the Catholic Church just love me for this.) Indeed, as I have come to understand myself, I see this anger as the whole reason for the work I do. Institutional corruption is just a fancy way to frame the dynamic of the weak enabling evil to do wrong.
Our conversations then were about his diligence to determine whether Epstein remained an abuser. I am constitutionally skeptical about claims that pedophiles reform. Pedophilia is alcoholism; it is never gone (without chemical castration), it is only suppressed. Or so I can’t help but believe — I am not a scientist, and I have studied the facts not so deeply. But it is how I feel the wrong that evil is. It is how Joi knew I felt it. And so we had what would not have been an easy conversation about whether this criminal continued his soul-sucking crimes.
Joi believed that he did not. He believed Epstein was terrified after the prosecution in 2011. He believed he had come to recognize that he would lose everything. He believed that whatever else he was, he was brilliant enough to understand the devastation to him of losing everything. He believed that he was a criminal who had stopped his crime. And nothing in his experience with Epstein contradicted this belief.
It was not my fight. I didn’t have the stomach or the ability then to do my own investigation. I wish now I had just screamed “don’t” to Joi. But I didn’t—and I wouldn’t have. Indeed, though I don’t remember this precisely, I probably told him that if he was convinced, then it was ok. Because the truth is that—as I thought about it then—if Joi believed as he did after real diligence, I didn’t believe he was wrong to take Epstein’s money anonymously.
That belief — of mine—was a mistake, for reasons that I’ll return to below. But we should start with why that belief is even conceivable before I return to why it is wrong.
