A History of the MIT Media Lab Shows Why the Recent Epstein Scandal Is No Surprise

“Deploy or Die!” was Joi Ito’s famous slogan for the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.1 Go to war—meaning, in this case, find a practical (and profitable) application for your research—or you die. Even, or perhaps especially, on the techno-frontier.
Ito, a venture capitalist, was director of the famed facility from 2011 until September 2019. On its website, the facility is described as an “interdisciplinary research lab . . . [that]