Accountability and the MediaLab

2019-09-07T14:57:08-07:00

A slack colleague asked about accountability at the MediaLab, and what happens now? What does restitution look like when someone transgresses against their community?

I think it’s important to keep all of these questions in context.

First and foremost, we should be asking what is owed to Epstein’s victims, and keep a focus on what restitution will be for their exploitation (even if the focus of this post deviates from the topic).

And I think that what is owed is a good framing for talking about accountability.

Joi is not accused of anything as horrific as Epstein did. The issue with Joi is a pattern of bad judgement which let Epstein, a convicted sex offender running a sex trafficking ring, into a community he was entrusted with as its director.

That repeated bad judgement is an abdication of what is owed to the students, staff and community of the MediaLab.

Perhaps Joi thought he could play with fire and not get burned. But Ethan Zuckerman & Nathaniel Mathias’s resignations and the whistleblower who provided the backbone of Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker story demonstrate that his leadership at the lab was untenable, even before he acknowledged that fact with his resignation.

That bad judgement can be broken down across at least 4 different dimensions.

He had no compunction taking money for the MediaLab or himself from a convicted sex offender running a sex trafficking ring.
He disregarded the recommendations of those around him to whom he should have listened, whether it was Ethan Zuckerman, his development staff, his students or others. (Ethan’s anecdote about Joi saying Epstein was an interesting guy and if he’d like to meet him is particularly haunting)
He flouted university fundraising policy to get past prohibitions that are designed to preclude bullshit like this from happening.
And most damning to me for trust in his judgement is that he then, knowing that his actions were problematic, just decided to obfuscate Epstein’s involvement in the Lab.

So his judgement is bad, and leadership untenable. But what now? What should the MediaLab do? What should Joi do? Did Joi have any moves available to him other than removing himself from the picture? What was the responsible thing to do?

Maybe someone can get me past the first item, if the person in question were able to articulate how bad of an idea their conduct was in retrospect, and how and why they were going to change going forward. Maybe.

But all of the remaining items point to a pattern of knowingly proceeding with problematic decisions irrespective of all of the warnings – personal or professional – and institutional prohibitions, and then seeking to avoid accountability, even in an environment which claimed to prize transparency.

And in that light, it’s challenging to see how could someone chart a course where Joi could be relied upon as a trustworthy partner. Trust is a hard thing to rehabilitate, particularly because the conduit for rehabilitating trust is transparency, and Farrow’s story documents a pattern of circumventing the MediaLab’s transparency.

(p.s. It will be super fucked up if Joi leaves the lab and Nicholas Negroponte remains.)

Google Maps as context on a tragedy

2018-10-07T12:55:43-07:00

Authorities say that all 18 passengers, including driver, in the limo died; one passenger survived only to die later at hospital, per @nyspolice https://t.co/p7PdvJu8hh
— Jesse McKinley (@jessemckinley) October 7, 2018

The circumstances of this story are horrific, and several things reported in them jumped out immediately.

“That limo was coming down that hill probably over 60 miles per hour,” said Jessica Kirby, 36, the manager of the Apple Barrel Country Store, where she said multiple customers were hit in the parking lot. “All fatal.”

Mr. Tavenner said the site of the accident was a notoriously dangerous spot, a “nasty intersection” that transportation officials had tried to fix in the past without success. “I honestly think it was a more dangerous intersection than it was before,” he said.

Route 30 leads steeply downhill to a T-intersection with Route 30A, marked with a stop sign.

Ms. Kirby also said the intersection was dangerous. “We’ve had three tractor-trailer type vehicles — they come down that hill too fast, they go though our parking lot and they end up in a field behind our business,” she said.

So where the heck is this place?

Okay, the T intersection is there, but let’s also check on the elevation.

Well, that’s not terribly helpful. ZOOM OUT

Yeah, looks like that road is a several hundred foot descent to a dead stop. But we can do one better. Google Maps helpfully provides elevation data for cyclists (we’ll have to jump to a desktop display for this one though).

It’s a ~500 foot descent in under 2 miles.

Ted’s Thoughts

Accountability and the MediaLab

Google Maps as context on a tragedy