The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How breaking the rules could win you $250,000
MIT’s Disobedience Award promotes creativity, courage.
The MIT Media Lab’s proposition is simple: Break the rules or shake up the status quo, and you might win $250,000 in cash — no strings attached.
No, it’s not a joke. Nominations for the lab’s new Disobedience Award are open.
“There are people doing really important things, breaking either the rules or sticking to their principles with knowledge that they will be hurt or punished in some way,” said Joi Ito, the director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“There are a number of really amazing people who just don’t get attention — we hope it will be someone who give us courage like Malala,” he added of the eventual recipient, referring to the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
The lab created the award after realizing that “in a lot of large institutions there’s really two way you make progress,” said Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media. “You make progress when people follow the rules and work their way through the processes, and then sometimes you make very radical progress by someone who essentially says, ‘Look, these processes don’t work anymore, and I need to have a radical shift in what I’m doing.’”
Zuckerman cited examples over the last few years of what he described as “responsible disobedience” including Apple’s resistance to unlocking iPhones at the request of the U.S. government and pushback from Energy Department employees over a questionnaire that included inquiries about those who had attended climate change conferences.
He said the prize “makes it possible for us to really ask, ‘What’s the sort of disobedience that we want to see in the world, and what’s the sort of disobedience we want to reward?’”
Submissions should be guided by principles including “nonviolence, creativity, courage and taking responsibility for one’s actions,” the online nomination form says.
So is the lab encouraging people to break laws or commit acts of civil disobedience?
“If a law has been created in a way that should it be changed, that is unjust and somehow conflicts with America to conduct itself in a way that is becoming of our values, it should be challenged,” Ito said. “If you challenge them without breaking them, that’s even better. Laws evolve over time and are meant to be challenged, and if they are not challenged they do not evolve.”
Plans for the award were announced last year, and the nomination process was recently established. The cash prize is a donation from Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn. Living individuals and groups are eligible for the award, with entries reviewed by activists, scientists, designers and engineers. Submissions conclude on May 1. The recipient will be announced on July 21.
“I would like to see someone enabled by this prize,” Jamila Raqib, the executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution, said in a video discussing the award. “This is a platform that can really help provide different types of structures, safety, knowledge, resources to an individual that is probably operating under very difficult circumstances.”