Author Archives: Matt Stempeck

About the MIT Media Lab

When you’re getting a tour of the MIT Media Lab, a common reaction is, “Wow, I’m at the high-tech Hogwarts.” It’s easy to feel this way, with something akin to the Marauder’s map following you around the building and the robots and the whimsical, interactive, half-living prototypes scattered around.

But it’s not Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that the director of the Lab aspires to be. Instead, Joi Ito tells graduating classes at the Media Lab that they are more like the X-Men. This framing suggests we’re all a bit weird, we have never quite fit into mainstream society, but we wield great powers that the Media Lab can help us hone, and responsibly channel. That the Lab can be our home for that, the place where we finally belong.

But when Joi welcomed the then-already-convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein to invest in the Lab, its students, and his investment funds, it was as if Professor Xavier had courted the same military contractors who violently infused an adamantium skeleton onto Logan.

How does something like this happen? In all my time at the Lab, Joi was clearly a good person, fighting good fights that others had avoided. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, it comes down to two forces: inertia, and fundraising. Evgeny Morozov has unearthed documents showing that Joi’s acceptance of Epstein’s money in 2013 may be predated by Epstein’s donations to MIT in the 2000s. It’s entirely possible that Nicholas Negroponte (and yes, Marvin Minsky) initiated this relationship before Joi even came to MIT.

And then there’s money. I learned a lot early in my career when I was working on campaign finance reform in Washington, DC. The sheer amount of money people need to raise practically predicts, over a long enough time horizon, an eventual bad decision, even from otherwise good people. Joi raises a lot of money.

One discussion trying to emerge from the messy, painful fall-out of these revelations is the sickening embrace between elite academia and Epstein’s coordinated rebranding as a science philanthropist. Why did this happen? “Money corrupts” is too pat an answer. What about the harder questions? How do MIT, Harvard, and other universities get away with taking a 60% administrative cut of funding (including philanthropic grants)? Why does the MIT Media Lab need an $80 million annual budget, when its researchers are paid roughly $30,000 a year? Why do star researchers have to perform for private philanthropists to begin with?

MIT is a corporation. It is also one of the foremost research universities in the world. It has become only more relevant as information technology itself becomes more central to our lives. The unfortunate relationship between Epstein and MIT begs a conversation about the values driving our research universities. How much annual budget would be enough to meaningfully achieve the mission? Which ideals and values tend to be jettisoned in pursuit of additional fundraising that collects well past that point?

Along with Nathan J. Matias, I was one of Ethan Zuckerman’s first two students at the Media Lab after he came over from the Berkman Center to take over the MIT Center for Civic Media (along with two students in the Comparative Media Studies program). I woke up this morning to news, leaked to the Boston Globe, that Ethan has decided to leave the Lab as soon as responsibly possible. Nate has also decided to disaffiliate his CivilServant project from the Lab as soon as responsibly possible.

Reading about Ethan’s decision, I’m thankful, as I’ve always been, to have the fortune (and it was primarily luck, on my end) that my research adviser was one of the most ethical, and maybe more important, caring, of everyone I met while working at the Lab (and in life).

Ethan’s resignation is a major loss for the Lab. Practically, it will lose his stewardship and active research projects interrogating vital topics like the ethical use of technology, and how power and influence flow on the internet. These areas of research have only become more central to our lives in the years since Ethan took the helm at the Center for Civic Media.

Ethan’s departure also feeds the brewing media story around this scandal, turning up the intensity of the shame spotlight on MIT (while Harvard remains deafeningly silent). Most importantly, Ethan leaving is a loss for the Media Lab internally. The earnest students who get to the Lab and discover their research group has an ugly underbelly may not have someone who will take them under their wing instead. Well-meaning but still-learning undergraduates may not have an esteemed thoughtleader who routinely bends the realities of time itself to take one-on-one meetings and provide meaningful email feedback. Everyone at the Lab will miss one of the key voices willing to irritate the established crust layer of the Institute in asking that we all try to be better.

It’s strange to watch what you thought was a mainstream news story evolve and permeate over the course of days, until it’s at your front step and shaking up your own little world. I believe there’s important strategic value in fighting to create change within imperfect institutions, although everyone has their own ethical line at which that’s no longer an acceptable strategy.

From the outside, I’m committed, as are many of my Lab alum, to pushing the Media Lab to do better, to be better. But in the meantime, I’m mostly focused on doing what I can to support those who have put their own futures aside to ensure their are consequences for this, and those who will suffer the follow-on consequences.

Most importantly, we must help the countless women and girls Epstein abused, and make the changes we need to make in our cultures, be they social, corporate, or academic, to prevent the ascent, continued indemnity, and celebration of abusers, no matter who they fund.

Presenting the Civic Tech Timeline

I’m happy to share that both the writeup and video of our civic tech timeline are now online. Leveraging the Civic Tech Field Guide, we compiled the launch date of over 2,000 civic tech projects over the past 25 years and plotted them chronologically by category. The result is the most comprehensive view of the field available to date, presented at The Impacts of Civic Tech Conference 2019 in Paris.

Read more about the timeline on Civicist or explore it on the Civic Tech Field Guide.

Thanks to my project collaborators, Sruti Modekurty, Aliya Bhatia, and Micah Sifry.

Is social media good or bad for democracy?

This past September, I was invited to share remarks at the International Day of Democracy at the European Union Parliament. Specifically, I was present to discuss the pros and cons of social media on democracy. I have not only advocated for social media for democracy, but also specifically trained pro-democracy groups to maximize their use of social media. And yet while serving as Director of Digital Mobilization on the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, I witnessed firsthand as social media was repurposed to damage our democracy, including coordinated digital voter suppression and rampant harassment, and witnessed the tech giants’ startling lack of responsibility for this mis-use of their platforms.

So I felt a responsibility to directly ask Facebook whether they would proactively address these anti-democratic abuses of their own platforms, not only in the United States, but also equip their staff and subcontractors to better understand the political, social, and linguistic differences around the globe. This week’s New York Times piece on Facebook’s hodgepodge of global content moderation standards leads me to believe that these concerns have not yet been adequately addressed. And that the question of whether social media is more good or more bad for democracy is far from settled.

When the going gets weird, the weird go pro (2017 life update, part II)

man on grass hill in Astoria

I haven’t put this out there publicly yet, but should! I left Microsoft (and NYC) last week after 3+ years on the Technology and Civic Engagement team. I was extremely fortunate to get to serve on that team and learn about creating social impact at the scale of a giant tech company. The team, now Microsoft Cities, is in great shape — they’re expanding to more US cities, and will be covering more areas of social and civic impact work. I’m still deeply supportive of their work, if I can be of assistance connecting.

For a while now, I’ve been eager to get back to creating things myself, and I’m now in a great place where I can incubate projects again. Right now, I’m parked up in a beautiful place next to the ocean in Gloucester, MA. I’m going to hit the proverbial road and travel Latin America this winter, as well. Hit me up if you’d like to cross paths somewhere great. Ideally I find somewhere to park up relatively quickly.

Some of my upcoming work will go through the newly formed Bad Idea Factory, a creative collective of people building things to make you thinking face emoji. You can follow along with that crew’s misadventures on the popular microblogging service Twitter.

In terms of what I’m going to work on…here are a handful, in various stages of progress:

  • Revive and radically open up my puzzle states project to bring popular attention to the state legislators gerrymandering away our elections.
  • Build a web app to automatically track all of your giving across nonprofits, crowdfunders, and political campaigns. This one exists in alpha form, thanks to Justin Nowell. Hit me up if you’d be interested in trying it out.
  • Something, anything to detect capture more methane and buy us time to produce less carbon.
  • Make a game app that makes saving money anywhere near as fun as spending it.
  • Build a tool that helps people maintain a large number of healthy relationships, in excess of the Dunbar number, that isn’t a CRM or transactional, sales-based relationship model.
  • Publish more travel and freelance writing and photography.
  • Develop a noise sensor that lets you know midnight audio levels in the house you’re about to buy or rent.
  • See if we can invent washing machine filters that keep synthetic microplastics out of our oceans / oysters.
  • A bunch of random art projects to track your path across maps, an emoji alethiometer, turn street grids into sheet music, etc.

So, I plan to stay busy, while also adopting a healthier work-life balance and learning Spanish? Needless to say, I probably need to narrow that list down, but get in touch if you’re interested in collaborating. Or just want to get beers in a nice place together somewhere.

This is my 2017 blog post

Here’s what I’m up to recently…

I took a leave of absence from my job at the end of 2016 to join the peerless Digital team at Hillary for America for the final four months of the campaign (more on that soon). Now I’m back at work as Director of Civic Technology at Microsoft in NYC.

We held our seasonal demo night where we gave updates on many of our projects:

I’m also working to connect newly engaged Americans to effective ways to create change, including at the recent NYC edition of the Debug Politics hackathon (Fast Company’s writeup), where I gave a talk to connect technologists to existing work in civic tech.

I’ve resumed curating the Machine Eatable lunch series on data science for civic good. Come have sandwiches.

With my collaborators Micah Sifry and Erin Simpson, I’m continuing to maintain and build a massive collection of civic tech resources at http://bit.ly/organizecivictech.

I’m also continuing to track when tech products embed civic engagement as civic features, and when companies mobilize their users to take political action in the companies’ interests. Let me know if you see examples of either!

Here are some of the interesting events I go to each month. Come join?

Lastly, I’m working on some product ideas with friends and will share those here as soon as they’re functional enough.

Introducing the Civic Features Collection

http://civicfeatures.tumblr.com/ (also in the top nav)

I’ve been inspired for some years now at the potential social impact of embedding social good and civic features into otherwise mainstream technology platforms. After years of building technology projects in DC that only reached 20% of our email list, the ability to reach millions of regular people in the apps they already use is alluring.

I’ve collected examples over the years to help make the argument and increase the practice internally. The similar examples I’ve collected for my Companies Mobilizing Customers Tumblr, which tracks the politicization of users in mainstream apps, have recently been featured in the New York Times (“The Uber-ization of Activism“) and at Fusion (“Meet the Apptivists: The volunteer lobbyists helping keep Airbnb, Uber, and other startups alive“). Given the attention being paid to in-app political campaigns, I thought it would make sense to also share the public-good civic features in a more visual format. Unlike the Companies Mobilizing Customers Tumblr, I’ll try to provide more context and commentary on the featured features. Today, for example, Facebook’s state-sponsored cyber-attack feature is in the news, because it’s how the State Department learned that individual employees’ social media accounts had been targeted by Iran. Check it out.

Here’s what our Civic Tech Fellows did this summer

Our incredible cohort of Civic Tech Fellows (and Program Manager Saron Yitbarek) spent their summers building useful tools and programs to support the field of civic tech. Here are some demos of new tools and projects that are early in development, shared with the Civic Hall community on August 27th, 2015.

Including:

  • Blockchain for Social Impact
  • Civic Graph
  • Civic Graph check-in
  • USDA Innovation Challenge and Big Apps
  • Maker Kit
  • Civic Tech Casefinder
  • Microsoft Translator
  • BRCK
  • Tech Jobs Academy website launch template
  • An open website launch template

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Modeling NYC Subway Flow and School Districts’ Effect on Housing Value

Justin Rao and Jake Hofman coordinate the Data Science Summer School program, hosted and sponsored by Microsoft Research. Each year, dedicated students spend their summer learning how to conduct research thanks to a network of researchers, mentors, and advisors. All of the course materials are openly and freely available on Github.

Tonight, we’re celebrating the program’s second class. Last year’s students researched questions about racial profiling in New York City and how to optimize the city’s bikeshare system. This year, it’s all about subways and school districts. Continue reading