‘Question the Law’

It’s not often that people are rewarded for breaking rules, but the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is ready to deliver $250,000 to the winner of its inaugural Disobedience Award. Created to promote work that pushes against structures stifling creativity and change, the award celebrates the kind of disobedience that can actually benefit society.

Disruption is certainly part of the Media Lab’s DNA. A place where researchers study and design digital technologies that test scientific boundaries, the lab has been at the forefront of ideas like wearable computers and intelligent machines. Last year it held a conference on “forbidden” research to examine why some subjects, such as genetics or sexual deviance, are restricted.

Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, is in the process of reviewing the thousands of applications that have come in so far. The contest closes on May 1, and the winner will be announced in July.

The Chronicle talked with Mr. Ito to learn more about positive disobedience and how his own unconventional life as a technology activist — he is a former chief executive of Creative Commons — has influenced his ideas on creativity, academe, and social change.

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How did the Disobedience Award come about?

I was working with [the LinkedIn co-founder] Reid Hoffman, who is a supporter of the lab and good friend of mine. We realized whether you’re trying to win a Nobel Prize or trying to engage in civics, questioning authority and thinking for yourself is a pretty important part of a healthy democracy, a healthy academic environment. And often institutions, when left to natural inertia, tend to make it difficult for these sorts of activities.

We thought both the conference and an award like this might be able to shed light on the role of disobedience in academia, in civil society, in democracy.

In the process of doing this, we did a video about nonviolent action. I had students and people on the internet pushing back and saying that Martin Luther King and Gandhi and all these famous nonviolent movements, they don’t work today. Life is more complex. It was interesting because it triggered a discussion about what you need to do in order to get anything to happen.

You say you’re looking for examples of ethical, positive, and responsible disobedience. What do you mean by that? And how to do respond to students who say this doesn’t work anymore?

I had the opportunity to listen to [the Democratic Congressman from Georgia] John Lewis last year, and he talked about the nonviolence training civil-rights leaders had. In the basement of these churches they would kick and spit on each other to get to the point to have strength to stand up without resorting to violence. He talked about how during the Freedom Rides he and his friend were nearly beaten to death by Klansmen and left in a pool of blood.

A few years ago someone called him and wanted to meet, and it was one of the Klansmen who tried to kill him. And he said, “Will you forgive me?” And they hugged and they cried and he forgave this guy.

He made a really important point. He left room for the humanity in the other to come out.

One of the really big problems we have today is we’re not leaving that room for the healing or the humanity to come out. We’re increasing and amplifying the polarization. So here in the Media Lab, we’re trying to equip students with training and skills to conduct this kind of disciplined, responsible disobedience.

For institutions, I want to remind ourselves that a certain amount of disobedience and dissent is really necessary for any kind of evolution, whether you’re talking about evolution of the law or evolution of scientific theories or the evolution of human rights and civics. We need to build systems that are somewhat disobedience-robust. It’s kind of like systems that get stronger the more they’re attacked. Our immune system is like that.

What’s been the response so far?

We’re getting a lot more press for this under the current administration than we did when we announced it under the previous one. On the one hand, disobedience is a more popular idea. The downside is that even things that wouldn’t have been political back then may look political. Like supporting climate research.

We have roughly 2,700 nominations, and they’re still coming in rather furiously. We still haven’t gone through the process of sorting them, but they’re all over the place. I would love to see us be able to present a stellar example in just about every category in the finalist round so people can see the variety, but have a winner as close to perfect as we can find.

Already there’s a lot of discussion about, What if the nominee would be hurt by being called out? What if the nominee needs other support, like legal support? Also, how do we try to do something that is not overtly political? How do we make sure the person is doing it for the right reasons? All of this is factored into how we think about the prize.

Are nominations coming from around the globe?

One of the difficulties about this is that someone fighting for human rights or to protect journalists or to protect gender rights in Bangladesh, for instance — there is an abundance of those kinds of acts of disobedience, and many of them are life-threatening and creative. It’s harder to find disobedience that would fit a lot of these criteria in science. Back during the Inquisition, it was riskier to have an unpopular scientific idea. These days you might lose your funding, but you probably won’t lose your life.

What do you hope will come out of this process?

There’s a meta conversation about, Should we be doing it? How should we do it? What are we encouraging? Is that a good thing? That conversation is tremendously interesting and informative for me about what people believe is the role of academic institutions in society.

One set of critics would say any award you give is political, and academic institutions shouldn’t be political. That’s the conservative side. Then you have a bunch of kids on the internet saying, What are you talking about? Responsible disobedience, nonviolent disobedience? That sounds like an obedience award! So to me, finding the sweet spot in the middle of what is an appropriate stance for the Media Lab and myself, this process is quite interesting.

Does this idea of positive disobedience speak to you personally? You’re a two-time college dropout, and you’ve led a pretty eclectic life. Normally a person like you doesn’t rise to a position like this.

First of all, I don’t think dropping out of college is disobedient. It was me just being somewhat irresponsible and impatient more than anything. So dropping out of college is not something that I’m proud of. Partially my job now is convincing people to finish their degree.

I grew up in Michigan, and my father and mother worked at a company called Energy Conversion Devices. It was run by a scientist named Stanford Ovshinsky, who was a radical and a union organizer. He was a very socially motivated scientist because he was trying to fix the disparities of the day, which were in energy and in information.

It was a very ideologically driven science lab. He taught me that you have a moral responsibility to stand up when you don’t agree that a law or the norms of society are moral. So for me, science and activism have always been very tightly linked.

Timothy Leary was my adopted godfather. He was very interested in virtual reality. I helped him understand the internet. The biggest contribution from Tim was this phrase that he loved, which was “Question authority and think for yourself.” We would do lecture tours together, and all these New Age hippie types would ask, Tim, what should we do? And he would say, think for yourself!

What I realize as an educator now is that you can tell somebody to think for themselves, but that doesn’t actually allow them to do that. You have to model it, you have to give people permission, and you have to create an environment where thinking for yourself is encouraged and is required.

One of the things that’s really key at the Media Lab is to have people be self-motivated and creative and thinking for themselves. Having people question the law is how laws and norms and rules evolve. So it’s always been in the world around me, but this is getting it out front and center since I joined MIT.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.