Ok kiddos let's do this. Time to talk about my pretty-minimal-but-still-REALLY-WEIRD brushes with the MIT Media Lab.https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1170733320365379584?s=20 …
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That was a time when the ag industry- Bayer & Syngenta et al- were SCREAMING that they absolutely needed more STEM grads STAT. Except they weren't actually hiring, bc recession. And nobody knew what was happening w the Farm Bill & future of the ag industry bc gov't shutdown.
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So they're yelling "please send us more people" but you could barely get an interview, and once you did, you didn't hear back. So I got a postdoc by the skin of my teeth, and started building a consulting business. This is pretty common for crop scientists.
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Just due to who my first couple of clients were, I wound up specializing in food safety and general facility-having-its-shit-together-ness for greenhouses and indoor farms.
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I went from beyond-broke grad w no prospects in a shitty economy, to a national-level consultant w no debt, at the intersection of ag, tech, & manufacturing- 3 extremely male-dominated fields. There's a reason I'm really confident, y'all. I am very, very good at my job.
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Pretty soon I was one of the people with the most real-life logistics & systems analytics experience in the entire indoor ag industry. I worked with my clients on HR, cold chain logistics, hygiene, water chemistry, bugs, site security, equipment & facility design, worker safety.
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If it was in that weird part of indoor ag that nobody understands where you actually make food- I did it. Companies technically hired me for food safety but soon realized there were all these *things* in their facilities that weren't being taken care of. So I filled the gaps.
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So. When the MIT Media Lab said "We don't even care what you do! We just want you to be interdisciplinary & good at words!" I thought, huh. I do hella interdisciplinary real-world stuff every day, & it's mostly about talking w people to bring their different skill sets together.
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So I leaned tf in and got to know the Media Lab's work. They already had a lab that did indoor ag. I figured hey, let's see if I've got anything to add to this lab? Hoo boy.
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The Media Lab's indoor farm lab was basically centered around this fancy 2-cubic-foot lucite box called a "food computer." The idea was you can program temperature, water/fertilizer routine, lighting, etc into it, plant seeds, & make EXACTLY the plants you wanted.
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There's only one problem. I used to work with room-sized versions of these. Back in 2001. They're called growth chambers, they'd been standard plant physiology research tools for decades, & they ain't new at all.
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But that's pretty standard-level bullshit for the tech space. I mean, Lyft "invented" the motherfuckin bus. That's just what happens when rich people think "dropped out of engineering school" means "expert on all the things."
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So in the application, I focused on what I could do for them. I said "Listen. This food computer thing is super cute. But if you want to make something commercializable [which is ostensibly the entire point of the MITML], hire me. I got you."
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I didn't get the post, which isn't too surprising. They probably got hundreds of applications for it. Who's to say they even wanted another indoor ag person- it's a really tiny subniche, and maybe they really just wanted to make more robots.
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I was in fact pretty ok with not getting the job because the more I looked into the lab the more ... weird it was. Working in an office with all-glass walls sounds hellacious for one thing. Of course they have bad architecture, they're rich
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Then I went to the Atlantic Ag Tech summit & readers, it was not good. It's one of the first things I ever really tweeted about, had maybe 20 followers at the time, & I was already SO SALTY. I could not believe the stupid shit that was getting preached off this stage.
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The moment when I kinda gave up on hoping for anything was when a panelist brought up land-grant schools. You know, the one that's done ag R&D for 150 years in the US? The largest university system in the world? That one.
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Someone asked "where are we going to find scientists who can innovate ag?" & this panelist brings up the land-grant system like it's a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that she just found, nobody knows about it yet, but it's SUPER AUTHENTIC and ALL THE LOCALS GO THERE.
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My fool ass even still tried to be polite about it. https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/928827014785781762?s=20 … To be continued.
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I spent the next 2 years sporadically annoyed that someone got an MIT program director gig, seats on big fancy boards, & a TED talk when their big initiative was a toy version of tech that was already antiquated when I'd worked with nearly 20 years ago.
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Every so often I'd run across an article about the Food Computer & there's usually a line in there about how "We can even program the plants to taste stronger or milder by changing environmental conditions!"
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Yeah no shit. Higher temperatures, less watering, and/or higher salt content in the nutrient water makes plants make more flavor compounds. We've known that since the 19-mothafuckin-80s! It's hydroponics 101.
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And then the other day, this news came out.https://gizmodo.com/mit-built-a-theranos-for-plants-1837968240 …
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Y'all might have missed it because it broke at the same time as the Epstein/Joi Ito news but it turns out this toy version of a growth chamber DOESN'T EVEN WORK.
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It couldn't grow plants. When donors & investors came by they had to go to Home Depot, buy 4-packs of basil plants, flick off the dirt, and pop them in the Food Computer to make it look like they grew there. FOR REALS
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Now. I don't know this dude from Adam and I'm not saying he personally took Epstein money, bc who knows. But I *am* saying that a Media Lab complex that feeds off a sugar daddy might not be terribly motivated to. like. make tech that actually works.
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Most labs make their $ commercializing technology. Now there are plenty of problems with that business model, like "who's going to do R&D for rare diseases that only 3 people have?" But the food computer didn't even meet THAT low bar.
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The reporting on Media Lab's relationship with Epstein frames it as reputation laundering. Epstein gives money, gets respectability, MIT-ML gets money. And that's absolutely what appears to have been going on. But I think there's more to it, that nobody's talking about.
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There's a really fine line between science philanthropy & straight-up Sugar Daddy Science*, and MIT-ML and Epstein sure found it. *h/t
@moorehnhttps://twitter.com/moorehn/status/1170373968202780672?s=20 …Show this thread -
"Sugar daddy science" is not a metaphor here. I mean an actual sugar daddy & sugar baby situation. Epstein wasn't just buying respectability with his science funding. He was literally acting out eugenic sex fantasies. That's why he funded science & not, say, the humanities.
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When normal folks got the labcoat kink, they just roleplay it out at the local bordello or w/e. The difference is Epstein could actually afford entire labs, in addition to whatever power trip got him onto sex with young girls & "seeding the human race with his DNA."
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