[tlb]

Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor.

In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinners to show off to his friends, so there were substantial reputational benefits.

Lessig's utilitarian calculus doesn't convince me it's OK to take money anonymously from villains.

[xiaolingxiao]

Concur with this. According to friends who works in the university's development department, anonymous donations are often used by people whose kids will attend , or are attending the university. So it's the parents' way of being discrete w/o outing their kids as "undeserving".

[partialrecall]

Right, his identity may have been concealed from MIT's accounting department, but when it came to getting personal/social access to MIT professors, it's clear people were aware he was contributing to their program.

[HillaryBriss]

right. the veil of anonymity was torn apart in this case. this doesn't seem like a robust test case for Lessig's theory of anonymity.

[matthewdgreen]

Lessig's theory of anonymous donations seems to have been carefully developed for the sole purpose of exonerating Ito, who is Lessig's friend. It's not like there's some new revelation that's come out since Lessig wrote his piece.

[tlb]

I think no theory of anonymity works. A villain isn't going to keep their pinky-promise to not tell everyone that your prestigious institution took their money.

[amluto]

It’s not particularly difficult to make a donation anonymous in a way that the recipient genuinely doesn’t know who made the donation. Just have a neutral third party handle it. This could be a donor advised fund or a trustee, for example. I suspect this isn’t particularly rare.

[nardi]

But then the donor tells the recipient that they are the ones who donated all of that money. And so they get all of the benefits anyway.

[amluto]

I just gave you $10M. Can I have a private dinner?

Do you believe me? If an anonymous donation is done with some degree of care, you have no way to verify my claim.

[evancox100]

If a $10M anonymous donation had just showed up in my account and I hadn't told anyone, then yes I would be inclined to believe you.

[Alex3917]

> Lessig's utilitarian calculus doesn't convince me it's OK to take money anonymously from villains.

Meh. It's not OK, but it's not that bad either. Even if what Ito did was wrong, which at least with hindsight it clearly was, the guy is still a hero.

Even the allegations about him using his position to raise LP money for his fund is somewhat dubious, given that he's much more famous for being a venture capitalist than he is for running the media lab; it's literally why he was hired for that job in the first place. It was bad judgment, and maybe he deserved to get fired for it, but as scandals go it's fairly benign.

[kyledrake]

I would love to hear your perspective on why Joi Ito is a hero.

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

Ito was the chairman of Creative Commons for the six years (2006-2012) and championed, among other things, Wikipedia adopting the CC license in 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joi_Ito#Career

[ineedasername]

To me that just says he agreed with some good ideas and was influential in their community, which is good. Doesn't read as "hero" though, it just tells me he maybe wanted to do good things. And good intentions are fine and all, but it seems like he got himself pretty dirty trying to further them. Good deeds don't always follow from good intentions.

[fmajid]

He’s someone who was famous for being famous, but then again he fit right in in the Media Lab, and it’s smoke-and-mirrors carnival as opposed to the serious research done at the AI Lab.

[Alex3917]

He was an early investor in Six Apart and Technorati, was one of the top 100 bloggers, and was one of the first to clearly articulate the ability of the Internet to change society. He was also on the board of Creative Commons, ICANN, Mozilla, etc.

Also his sister is one of the top Internet researchers, and iirc she has said that she became interested in the field because of his early entrepreneurial career.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

>and was one of the first to clearly articulate the ability of the Internet to change society.

A few years ago, it would have been considered a given that the Internet’s ability to change society was a good thing. I don’t think people take that position as unequivocally as before.

So in judging Ito, you have “Hypes the Internet” vs “helps normalize the reputation a child rapist”

I am not so sure that the good outweighs the bad

[dirtybird04]

These are nice achievements. Impressive, even. But that's a very low bar for a "hero" imo.

[Alex3917]

If playing a key role in connecting everyone on earth doesn’t make someone a hero, what does? IMHO that seems like just about the greatest possible human accomplishment.

[_jal]

What? He was a VC who made some investments. He had a role in CC, which is actually above and beyond his job description, sure. But he doesn't hold a candle to Jon Postel or Vint Cerf or even John Perry Barlow.

He's another greedhead who got caught doing what he clearly did not want others to see him doing. He didn't even have the honor to get ahead of things; he tried to hang on until after he made the news.

That's an accomplishment he'll be remembered for.

[bbanyc]

Weird that of all the institutions of the 2000s tech scene, only BoingBoing.net comes out looking good.