One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!

He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing. 

Regular humans hit on this idea about a century ago; my most generous interpretation of what he was telling me was that he’d hit on a kind of naive, confused version of Structuralism; Saussure via a game of telephone. (There has been recent work on a similar point, which argues that one needs to understand LLMs via literary theory, but it starts with Saussure.) I tried to get out of the conversation as quickly as I could, not least because he seemed frustrated that I didn’t see things exactly as he did — a new behavior and likely a symptom of LLM overuse. 

Not every discovery that’s new to you is actually new. For instance, there’s Elon Musk marvelling at the complexity of hands; I could point to a variety of disciplines for which this is 101-level stuff: artists, who have to figure out how to draw them; surgeons, who have to figure out how to operate on them; musicians and magicians, who rely on extremely fine motor skill to produce their work; neuroscientists and psychologists, who doubtless encountered the cortical homunculus early in their careers. Or Palmer Luckey claiming that “no one has done a postmortem” on the One Laptop Per Child computing project — because he didn’t know there’s a whole book about it called The Charisma Machine.

At its most absurd nadir, one is reminded of Juicero, a company that sold a $400 juicer that did the same work as squeezing its proprietary juice packs with one’s bare hands.

Look, discovering something that’s new to you is exciting — ask anyone who listened to me yell about the joys of European (higher-fat) butter — but you can’t take for granted that something that’s new to you is new to everyone. These things have in common a certain incuriosity that I have found endemic among a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship. Perhaps they have been so siloed that they did not realize their “discovery” was well -known elsewhere, or perhaps their self-conception is that they are the smartest, and if they don’t know something, no one knows it. 

There is a certain amount of hubris required to throw oneself at an unsolved problem — you have to believe you can solve it. But elsewhere, that hubris is a liability. It leads you to do weird things, like announce that Freud invented introspection and that it is a bonus that you simply do not engage in it.

When I think I have observed something important, my first impulse is to go to a library, or Wikipedia, or a person who I think may be knowledgeable, and see what else has been observed. For instance, when I had a concussion, I wanted to see if anyone else had written about what it was like to recover — the dry medical descriptions did very little for me. When I couldn’t easily find an account, I wrote my own. I still receive emails about it, years later, from people who are doing the same search I did, following their own concussions. But doing something like this requires you to take for granted that other people are smart, that smart people have always existed, and that very little in the human experience is new. That requires, you know, intellectual humility — and a willingness to think about other people’s experiences.

While this particular kind of hubris makes people crashing bores, it’s not just an annoying personal trait. It seems to have seeped into the professional side of Silicon Valley as well.

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future. My guess is that they’re aping what they thought Steve Jobs was doing when he, for instance, got rid of the optical drives on the MacBook Air. 

But Steve Jobs, famously, failed at inventing the future in the 1980s and got booted from Apple. We all know how things changed when he came back. But the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone were built with a need in mind. The iMac won because it was easy to use. The iPod was easier to take with you than a CD player and a stack of CDs. (It also was a way to play the MP3s you might have illegally downloaded.) The iPhone had the App Store, which expanded its utility well beyond any other mobile device.

Some of this was luck — introducing the right product at the right time. But each product offered consumers a distinct value proposition. Sure, early adopters jumped on each of these things because they were cool, but the uncool masses don’t care about that. They’ll buy something if it improves their life in a distinct way. 

In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich. NFTs, like crypto, let VCs quickly unload investments with abbreviated lockup periods. The metaverse promised to enrich companies like Facebook by having people move all their socializing online, where it could be surveilled and monetized. In addition, Facebook’s metaverse required the purchase of hardware, which would then need regular upgrades.

At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it. That’s why NFTs, the metaverse, and the Oculus and Vision Pro never really found their customer base. AI is, admittedly, more useful — it’s good for organizing large swaths of data, for instance. LLMs have had widespread consumer adoption, at least as long as they remain free. But there is only really one customer for LLMs that can justify the massive cash incineration process that was required to build them: the US government.

There can only be a few winners on government contracts, though. So we are now treated to the spectacle of watching AI companies scramble. OpenAI is perhaps the funniest, because it is attempting to position itself as a consumer product.

Consider Sam Altman telling the world that he needed ChatGPT to tell him how to raise a baby. You exist. I exist. Our parents did not have LLMs, or even AI, and yet somehow we survived our childhoods, as did almost everyone else we knew growing up because childhood death rates in the US have been extraordinarily low — compared to most of the rest of human history — for decades. The technologies that allowed us all to survive our childhoods were sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. I would put money down that a mandatory measles vaccine will do more for the survival of American children than anything OpenAI has accomplished with all of its billions of dollars to date.

In any event, I presume what Altman actually did was hire a nanny.

Or consider Elon Musk telling us about our future humanoid robot servants. I have a robot servant. Several, actually: a dishwasher, a washer for my clothing, and a dryer. They aren’t very mobile, and yet they have saved me tremendous labor. My fridge is from the ’90s, and my microwave isn’t much younger, and both of those things have been remarkable in what they have done for me: made food storage and cooking easy, without AI involvement. It doesn’t seem like there’s much AI can do to improve things over the baseline that these machines have already established, especially since my “dumb” technology hasn’t required an update in more than 20 years. Saving money is valuable to me, too.

The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher.

Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives. Indeed, there are places in our lives where efficiency isn’t desirable. Vacation planning is sometimes suggested as a place AI can make our lives easier. For me, at least, planning the vacation is a pleasure in and of itself; it allows me to browse information about a place, consider what might be fun, and imagine myself doing it. If I have friends who have been to that place before, it gives me an excuse to talk to them, getting their recommendations. The entire process sharpens the anticipation I feel as the date for the vacation approaches. But if I wish to outsource that, I can do so already — that’s what cruise ships and theme parks are for.

LLMs are, at best, an enterprise technology that may make certain kinds of data organization easier, or coding faster. This has almost nothing to do with most people’s lives. Dinking around with code is a hobby many tech people enjoy and one the rest of us simply don’t care about. Making it easier to write code doesn’t change that I don’t want to write code. I have other hobbies!

The actual use for LLMs in most normal people’s lives is cheating on schoolwork. For adults, it’s looking up information — LLMs are in the process of supplanting Google Search. Google had been degrading its search project for some time, and the results just kept getting worse. This opened the door for an alternative, and the LLMs stepped through. How long that will last, I don’t know — the LLMs themselves will require money at some point and their frequently inaccurate (and sometimes plagiarized) results are killing the websites they rely on to generate information. Sure, it’s more inefficient to click through to a high-quality product, but how else do you plan to continue to have people generate high-quality information? No one has solved this problem.

Sometimes inefficiency is load-bearing. Take, for instance, the stock market. It is only open during certain hours, and only during certain days of the week. That means that during a panic, there is an artificial boundary that gives people time to calm down. This is effective; it’s one of the reasons that individual stocks sometimes undergo a trading halt during periods of hysteria. Now consider crypto, which is open for business 24/7/365: There is no way to pause a panic. One of the reasons the crashes in crypto are so huge and so fast is because there is no breaker to trip and no break in trading to allow traders to regroup. In fact, crypto panics are arguably exacerbated by the fact that many people literally cannot sleep because the market does not close.

There are other ways in which consumer AI is weird. Take the AI music apps, which are predicated on the idea that there are people in the world who want to make music but simply haven’t taken the time to learn how to play an instrument. There are likely very few of those people! Musicians aren’t bogarting creativity — they are people who enjoy making music. The rest of us just enjoy listening, which is an end in itself.

The place where AI music is most useful is for people who want to figure out how to get themselves onto Spotify playlists, accrue streams, and make money — that is to say, scammers. Similarly, the self-publishing market is rampant with AI slop, not because people are desperately trying to express themselves, but because it is easy to trick other people into buying slop on Amazon. And it’s not just the casual readers who get swindled, as demonstrated by the scandal around Shy Girl, the now-withdrawn novel that fooled Hachette. The end result for most people is that these AI tools make it harder for them to access art made by other people. And the end result for artists, of course, is that it’s harder to make a living.

How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.

I suspect this is how we wound up with NFTs, the metaverse, and the clunky VR/AR headsets. These are things that appeal to a very narrow set of people who are overrepresented in the VC and wannabe-tech-entrepreneur spaces. The Silicon Valley hype cycle worked overtime for those things, and I think we all know how this turned out. When was the last time you heard about a Bored Ape, or a Crypto Kitty, or any of the other novelties that briefly swept the nation? Did those novelties translate into a real, durable income stream for artists, musicians, and other creators, as we were promised? When was the last time you saw someone wearing Apple’s headset? Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta utopia ever develop legs?

Look, we all had a bit of fun at Marc Andreessen’s expense about his lack of introspection — but this is precisely the reason Silicon Valley keeps trying to force futures on consumers that they emphatically don’t want. A VC who is incapable of self-reflection will never notice that his bets on the future of consumerism are failing in exactly the same way every time. That VC hasn’t noticed, and indeed can’t notice, that his experience isn’t representative of what the ordinary person wants or needs.

Actually, while I’m picking on Andreessen, I want to point to a bit of that interview that didn’t go viral. It occurs right after the fatal introspection quote, but I think it gets to the real rot at the heart of Silicon Valley’s current culture. In it, Andreessen mentions psychedelics, saying he was discussing them with podcaster Andrew Huberman. “I was describing this phenomenon we see in Silicon Valley, where there are these guys who get under pressure, and they feel anxious or whatever, and someone tells them about psychedelics, and they try it,” Andreessen says. “And they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. They come out much more at peace, but then they tend to quit their companies.”

In Andreessen’s telling, Huberman suggests that these people may be happier, and better off. And Andreessen says, “Yeah, but their company is failing.”

The hubristic entrepreneurs (and the VCs who need them) are a relatively small slice of the population. The majority of us would much rather be happy than try to found a company that takes over the world — sacrificing the majority of our waking hours, our hobbies, and likely many of our relationships in the process. It may be the case that the real way to shape the future isn’t to dictate it to consumers. It is simpler just to give people things they actually want.

He might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won. 

Sure, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors. Sure, he died in jail. (I am not going to wade into the debate about how.) But he subscribed to a racist, misogynist ideology that meant rich white men like him could do whatever they liked. And it seems he took measures to spread it.

The latest tranche of Epstein documents made it obvious. Consider all the “contrarians” and “anti-woke” warriors who show up in the latest dump: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and of course, Donald Trump. With apologies to George Carlin: It’s a big club, and the worst people are in it — because their interests are all aligned. Pushing back on social justice, it turns out, was coordinated.

Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved.

Recall the great many pronouncements about the limits and dangers of #MeToo — hilariously, Bari Weiss wrote an entire article in The New York Times about “iconoclastic” members of the “intellectual dark web” who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Included in this group was a correspondent of Epstein’s: Sam Harris, to whom Epstein suggested he use “more charm and less argument” in debates. Several of the names mentioned in the article would later join Weiss’ abortive attempt at an “independent” school, the non-accredited University of Austin. Much like the group Weiss profiles itself, the University of Austin would become a tool of the far right.

It is more accurate to understand the “anti-woke” “iconoclasts” as a group of loosely affiliated people with the same goals. This isn’t an abstract intellectual movement about free speech — or we’d be hearing more from these people about the recent DHS actions to hunt down critics of Epstein’s old friend, Donald Trump. Besides Trump, there are two key ringleaders: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They both appear extensively in the Epstein files, and have good reason to want to remain untouchable.

How did all these people know each other? Epstein’s influence campaign started in the sciences in the early 2000s, with the help of John Brockman, a powerhouse literary agent, and his Edge Foundation, to which Epstein was the largest donor. “Foundations associated with Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total of almost $857,000 received by Edge” between 2001 and 2017, without which “the nonprofit’s full range of exclusive events would not have been possible,” according to BuzzFeed News. 

Brockman, who got his start with underground movies and Andy Warhol in the 1960s, wanted Edge “to serve as a forum for big, intriguing and/or disturbing ideas advanced by intellectuals who have a track record of major achievements in their fields,” according to The Guardian. The obvious idea was to influence culture by disseminating those ideas.

The group was, of course, mostly men. The demographics are somewhat explained in the current email dump. In 2018, Epstein wrote to Brockman, “john the old conferencess did not care about diversity   I suggest you not either. the women are all weak ,and a distraction sorry, .”

This echoes a long-standing argument — propped up by the likes of Summers and by Steven Pinker, another of Epstein’s close associates, in Edge itself — that the lack of women in the sciences isn’t due to discrimination. They simply aren’t interested and/or aren’t good at it. This assertion is, obviously, wrong. But it is also in line with the “anti-woke” movement, which is fundamentally against equality. I do have to hand it to Epstein: “the women are all weak” is probably the most honest way of characterizing a large part of the “anti-woke” point of view. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, who recently declared his company was in need of more “masculine energy!”

Scientists are perhaps one of the easiest groups to buy influence with. On top of that,  the process of getting a PhD is tightly controlled by the most influential scientists in any given field — so if you argue too much, your career suffers. Summers, whose 2005 speech suggesting women are stupid was defended as being an abstract intellectual inquiry, spent time emailing Epstein about how best to sexually harass a woman he was pretending to mentor.

The boys’ club at the Edge Foundation created a jumping-off point for social contacts for Epstein. Their “Billionaires Dinner” in 2011, which Epstein attended, featured a number of familiar names that appear in the Epstein files: Musk, Sergey Brin, David Brooks, Marissa Mayer, Jeff Bezos, and Nathan Myhrvold (who would later introduce Epstein to Bill Gates). The “Billionaires Dinner” stopped after Epstein made his final donation to Edge.

Brockman also set up a dinner in 2012 with a very exclusive invite list, which included Bezos, Paul Allen, Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Larry Page, Evan Williams, and Myhrvold. “Please show up alone,” Brockman said to Epstein. MIT Media Lab’s Joichi Ito also seems to be willing to broker meetings between Epstein and Bezos or “Bill.” It’s not clear which Bill is referred to here, but Bill Gates was surely close with Epstein, close enough that the tranche of documents shows extensive contact between the two men.

Epstein’s association with this group allowed him to launder his reputation — he had, after all, pleaded guilty to “a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14,” according to the Miami Herald. But here he was, rubbing elbows with “smart” people, some of whom were even considered cool. For instance, there is a long email chain with artist Neri Oxman, trying to coordinate a time to eat together. After a $125,000 donation from Epstein, Oxman gave him a piece of her work. (Oxman’s current husband is billionaire Bill Ackman, a loudmouth hedge fund manager who recently donated $10,000 to the ICE officer who killed Renee Good.) These networking opportunities also did something else: They brought together a lot of influential figures who could suggest that it’s small-minded and prudish to care about sexual harassment and assault.

The Herald revisited Epstein as part of the #MeToo movement, resulting in his rearrest on sex trafficking charges in 2019. The #MeToo movement was premised on the radical notion that no person is too rich or too powerful to escape the law. Rape is illegal. So’s sexual harassment. Some of the most prominent men accused of misconduct — Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby — did, indeed, face consequences. 

There were also social consequences: Powerful men resigned from their jobs in disgrace — or, in some cases, were fired. The men of Silicon Valley did not escape these consequences. Before the Weinstein allegations surfaced, Travis Kalanick of Uber was forced out of the company he founded, after a series of reports on a culture of sexual harassment. The New York Times reported on a payout Google made to Andy Rubin, the father of Android, after he allegedly coerced an employee into sex; two other executives, David Drummond and Richard DeVaul, were also insulated from allegations of misconduct. (Both cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had dated employees. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO who has had multiple public relationships with women who aren’t his wife, hired a mistress as a consultant.) Venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck resigned after multiple female entrepreneurs said he made unwanted sexual advances.

The social consequences, oddly, seem to have freaked these guys out more than anything else. That was where the “cancellation” panic came from — a fear that people might use their right to freedom of association to avoid people who, for instance, palled around with known pedophiles. It’s not illegal to do that, after all; it’s just gross.

Social consequences are the main ones that matter in the Epstein file drop. Anyone with an internet connection and a little free time can find out who was exchanging friendly emails with an evil man. Take Peter Attia, one of Bari Weiss’ newly named contributors to CBS News, who spent a great deal of time sending crass emails to a convicted sex criminal, including, notoriously, one that noted “pussy is, indeed, low-carb.” Like many women, I am not interested in taking health advice from a guy who says a bunch of sexist shit, largely because I do not believe he cares about my well-being — and that’s true even without Epstein’s involvement. Rather than bow to “cancel culture” by firing Attia, Weiss is retaining him, according to Status. But then, Weiss isn’t too worried about Epstein associates — after all, she named lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein and referred to him as a “close friend,” as one of her other new contributors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Free Press, the outlet Weiss founded, has published a series of articles downplaying the importance of the files. The most significant of the three raises the question of whether we, as a society, will regret the release of these files. The suggestion that they may spread salacious (and untrue) gossip has some merits. But that article is missing a larger point: If Epstein had not escaped federal charges in 2008, there would be no push for the file dump at all. (Indeed, the current president was in favor of releasing the files before calling their contents “made up” as more reporting drew attention to the men’s relationship.) Its existence is a response to the public’s distrust in the justice system’s ability to hold powerful men to account. As it happens, holding powerful men to account was also what #MeToo was about.

Epstein appeared to be monitoring #MeToo closely, and even, at times, seemed to be the canceled man whisperer. At one point, in an email to the MIT Media Lab’s Ito, he writes, “with all these guys getting busted for harassment , i have moved slightly up on the repuation ladder and have been asked everday for advice etc.” In a 2018 email, Epstein writes, “instead of the friars club , can we do a pariahs club dinnr. woody me moonves wynn charlie matt. louis ck. etc.”

Epstein kept track of who he might add to the club. For instance, Charlie Rose — who was apparently close enough that Epstein recommended some women to Rose as assistants — was accused of sexual harassment by more than two dozen women. When the story broke, Epstein emailed multiple people — including Summers — links to the story. Later he wrote to the journalist Michael Wolff, “saw charlie rose at haircutters/ s=ell shocked.” The publicist Peggy Siegal emailed Epstein in 2018 about Steve Wynn resigning from the Republican National Committee because of accusations of sexual harassment, “The witch hunt goes on.” She suggests Epstein should have “double security” and “wear a wig and a baseball c=p in public.” In 2018, Steve Bannon emailed Epstein a link to a Business Insider report about Tom Brokaw, who was accused of sexual harassment. “Make sure Woody sees this,” he writes. “Nobody safe.”

Even the relatively minor “Shitty Media Men” list — a spreadsheet anonymously edited with names of men and accusations against them — makes it into Epstein’s emails. Lorin Stein, the disgraced former editor of The Paris Review who resigned after accusations of sexual impropriety, forwarded to Wolff an email from the writer Stephen Elliott, who intended to sue the list’s creator since he didn’t know who’d made the accusations against him. Epstein promises to “help anyway   i can.” Elliott sued Moira Donegan, the list’s creator, six weeks later.

The most extensive emailed advice seems to be to physicist Lawrence Krauss. When Krauss was contacted by journalist Peter Aldhous for comment on a BuzzFeed story about sexual harassment allegations, he forwarded the email to Epstein and repeatedly asked him for advice about how to handle Aldhous. (Krauss strenuously denies the allegations against him, and says he “sought out advice from essentially everyone I knew”.) Krauss sent drafts of his proposed emails about the story to Epstein as well. “Impossible to publish anything about metoo, even if the =uthor was acquitted,” Krauss wrote to Epstein. That was of particular interest to him, because Krauss was planning to write his own #MeToo book, he wrote in another email to Epstein. Later, he wrote to Epstein that a woman on a conciliation committee is “old.. not some young metoo bitch.” This is good news, Krauss notes.

At one point, Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife and the adopted sister of his children, emails Epstein with the subject line “Did you see this in The New York Times today?” “First time a guy wasn’t removed from his job right away due to the MeToo movement,” she wrote. “First time a network decided after an investigation to believe their investigation and the guy as opposed to the woman.” It’s not clear from the email what article she is talking about.

Allen and Previn appear to have been close friends with Epstein, and the #MeToo allegations were of personal interest. Ronan Farrow, whose Harvey Weinstein exposé was one of the major features of the movement, is also Allen’s estranged son — and his sister, Dylan, accused Allen of sexually abusing her when she was seven. In a 2017 Los Angeles Times article, she asked why the #MeToo movement had spared Allen.

Days later, Wolff wrote to Epstein: “I have a bad feeling about this new Woody round. It =ould pull him into the general Harvey pool of the despised and shunned. Cl=arly what Ronan and company are hoping for. I think Bannon may be right. T=is is not going to end until Trump goes down.”

“Strange time,” Epstein replied. “I have two mo=e friends up to bat.” Wolff told Epstein those friends won’t be the last, and added, “Big names on the horizon: Michael Douglas, Larry Gagos=an, and still my favorite, Arthur Sulzberger.” In an earlier email, Epstein suggested that Bannon may have “outted” Sulzberger, but for what isn’t clear. “Pinch sulz your silver bullet,” he wrote.

On December 14th, 2017, Sulzberger announced he was stepping down as the publisher of The New York Times, handing the job off to his son. Epstein emailed Kathy Ruemmler and Landon Thomas that same day, two identical messages: “Sulzberger — told you.” (Thomas was a New York Times reporter Epstein had cultivated; Thomas had not only tipped off Epstein to another journalist’s book, he’d even solicited a $30,000 donation from Epstein to a Harlem charity.) As far as I know, Sulzberger has not been accused of wrongdoing.

And all that, I suppose, illustrates how #MeToo actually went too far: However briefly, it meant money no longer insulated the powerful. In 2008, Epstein, who had escaped federal charges via a non-prosecution agreement thanks to Alexander Acosta (who would later become the Labor Secretary in the first Trump administration), got a private wing in jail, and got to leave 12 hours a day, six days a week, for “work release.” He spent a year under “house arrest,” which somehow included trips on his private jet to Manhattan and the Virgin Islands. But in 2019, the renewed scrutiny from #MeToo landed him in the federal jail where he died awaiting charges of sex trafficking minors.

That seems to have been a wake-up call to his associates, like Thiel, who set about undermining the movement to make even rich men answerable for their crimes. Thiel’s influence campaign, such as it was, was less about cultural power and more about actual power. It was smarter than Epstein’s. But it also seems, in retrospect, modeled on the Edge Foundation. The so-called “vibe shift” — the reemergence of slurs as “edgy,” and feminism as “cringe” — may have been at least partially funded by Thiel, whose “Thielbucks” were rumored to be sprinkled around New York City’s Dimes Square. “Anti-woke” is a convenient label because it obscures what the movement is actually against: accountability.

Thiel’s “vibe shift” required less work than what Epstein was up to, largely because it was something that culture reporters were willing — eager, even — to cover. It also had its own social media apparatus set up, in the assorted podcasts that emerged from the Dimes Square scene. Plus, Thiel already had political power through his superdonor status. The Republican Party had already aligned itself with white nationalism in the 2016 election, when Donald Trump came to power on a platform of blatant racism — backed by Thiel, of course. 

Epstein and Thiel’s shared aims are clearest in a 2016 email about Thiel’s successful effort to bankrupt gossip site Gawker. Gawker was one of the few publications that wrote about Epstein in the early 2000s, and Epstein evidently held a grudge. “would have gladly share your expenses for the gawker suit,” Epstein wrote. Thiel responded with a smiley face.

Epstein was an open eugenicist. For example, in this astounding exchange with AI researcher Joscha Bach, whose MIT work was funded by Epstein, the two chat in detail about population culling, among other social engineering thought experiments. (Bach wrote that women “tend to find abstract systems, conflicts and mechanisms intrinsically boring,” which, according to him, is why there are fewer women in the sciences. It seems Epstein had a type.) Bach also said in the exchange that fascism is “the most efficient and rationally stringent way of governance,” adding that it “makes romantic doo-gooders like me very uncomfortable.” Bach is now the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, and in a Substack post about the emails, wrote “I am not interested in supporting racists and sexists in any way.”

I am not particularly interested in what Bach believes. I bring up his exchange because — even as a thought experiment — it so strikingly demonstrates that there is a short jump between contempt for women and eugenics, and an even shorter one from eugenics to actual fascism.

Epstein’s influence on the science and tech world meant he was able to inject his ideas into places where other AI impresarios hung out. Epstein “hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch,” The New York Times wrote. There’s no evidence this idea was anything more than a fantasy. However, it does bear a significant resemblance to Musk’s army of baby mamas — Musk has 14 known children, and the true number may be much higher, according to The Wall Street Journal. “He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence,” the Journal wrote. Musk uses his social network, X, to recruit potential mothers. He reportedly has a compound for some of those mothers in Austin, Texas.

The most obvious parallel is Musk’s child sexual abuse material machine, Grok. The AI chatbot has been removing clothing from real people, including children, and Musk has been reluctant to stop it. Epstein, in addition to his binders of compact discs of nudes, often emailed people asking for nudes or requesting they take nudes of others. Chillingly, some of the Epstein files simply say “CSAM not scanned.”

Musk has claimed that he hardly knew Epstein, that he was invited to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, and refused. But here he is in the emails, asking Epstein, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” And again, about a year later, asking, “When should we head to your island on the 2nd?” There’s also Epstein asking Musk how many people would be with him for a “heli to island.” And in 2013, Epstein emails Musk, “thanks for the tour , you would have had fun at xmas.” “Elon Musk” occurs hundreds of times in the archive, and there are at least 16 conversations between Musk and Epstein.

Musk has a long-standing interest in breaking rules — from safety violations at Tesla to SEC settlements to publicly smoking weed despite his government contracts to attempting to back out of the Twitter acquisition he’d agreed to. Perhaps the only thing he believes is that he should get to do whatever he wants. And he’s had his own brush with #MeToo. A day before Business Insider reported that he had sexually harassed a flight attendant, Musk announced he was joining the Republican Party. Musk also had a sexual relationship with a SpaceX employee, as well as a former intern at SpaceX, and, in 2013, asked a female employee to have his babies, according to later reporting from The Wall Street Journal. 

Trump’s second presidency combines influences from both Musk and Thiel — Musk spent more than $250 million on Trump’s election, and Thiel’s protege, JD Vance, is the vice president. Trump, of course, has his own ties to Epstein, and is also interested in evading the rule of law. Not only was he never held accountable for his role in the January 6th putsch, he has been using his government position to extract more money for himself — either through what look like bribes, or by suing the IRS directly. He pardoned all of the people who broke into the Capitol at his behest, making it clear that anyone who did what he wanted would suffer no consequences as long as he was in office. Recently, ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents killed two people in Minneapolis. The victims of those shootings are being blamed for their own deaths.

The scale of Trump’s wrongdoing is so vast that the rape and sexual harassment accusations are practically an afterthought. And yet at least 28 women have accused him of sexual misconduct. One woman claimed to have been groped by Trump while Epstein watched. Among his accusers is his first wife, Ivana Trump, who said in a 1993 book that Trump had raped her, and then recanted. (Ivana also said, according to a 1990 Vanity Fair profile, that “he clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,’ possibly as a family joke” and that Trump “reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”) In fact, one of the few times that Trump has faced any repercussions for his actions was when E. Jean Carroll sued Trump for sexually abusing her in 1996 — and she won.

That all seems distant now. In Trump’s second term, Musk rummaged through the federal government, installing his henchmen in critical positions, slashing funding to programs he didn’t like and killing investigations into his companies. Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has reportedly settled sexual misconduct allegations at least twice — as the head of Health and Human Services has ushered in policies that look an awful lot like actual eugenics. Kennedy, it should be noted, was also a friend of Epstein’s, partying with him and flying on his private jet.

Even the release of the files themselves points to the defense of those in power, at the expense of Epstein’s victims. The files were made public well after a congressionally mandated deadline. When they were finally posted, almost 100 victims were identified in the newly released files, resulting in death threats. The government even published unredacted nude photos, some of which may have been of minors. And victims’ advocates claim there are still files that haven’t been released.

Some identities were redacted, though. For instance, we don’t know who Epstein was emailing when he wrote “I loved the torture video.” Or who he was telling in 2009 that that freedom felt “fresh, firm, and creamy.” Or who sent this creepy 2014 email, which reads, “Thank you for a fun night…Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” Or this one, from 2013, which offers to introduce Epstein to a Russian friend and says, “she is fun and gorgeous! Ahh…perfect skin and incredible shape. However, be gentle with her and not a naughty one plz!!!” Or this 2017 email, which reads, “Naughty ? It’s like in lingerie ? Just wanna be correct. Thank you for deserts .” 

This is what elite impunity looks like, and it is coming directly from the so-called Department of Justice. It’s hard not to read these files and come to the conclusion that Epstein helped engineer the ultimate elite impunity — in which our society has been totally destroyed so the richest and most powerful men in the world can do whatever they want.

It also seems like Epstein may have had some role in the unraveling of democracy in the US. Thiel has long cultivated Curtis Yarvin, a neo-monarchist who is close with JD Vance, and obviously has his own ties with Trump, who appears to be trying to turn the US into a dictatorship. Trump is, in the process, weakening the US dollar, freaking out the international community, and otherwise destroying stability.

Of course, that’s an opportunity, as Epstein pointed out to Thiel in 2016. “brexit, just the beginning,” he wrote to Thiel. “return to tribalism . counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

Well, we’re living in the world Epstein wanted. We couldn’t have gotten here without a little help from his friends.