The Epstein files have shown, once again, that elites from the worlds of politics, finance, technology, and media form an interconnected network. At points, their interests and connections collide into a single vortex—in this case, most probably a deliberately created one. This begs the question: why was it exposed?
I don’t think there is much doubt that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset. He was most probably working for Mossad, but with ties to others—for example, MI6, as his extensive relationship with Lord Mandelson indicates. His life and “career” were a typical example of this. He was virtually unknown, with no significant traceable family connections; yet, after working in a finance firm, he launched his own financial company and did extremely well.
Epstein ran a financial advisory firm that charged “fees” to his clients. Fees are virtually unlimited, unlike the sale of goods, which is much more complicated to justify. If an agency wants to channel money to an individual, it’s a great cover. Some argue that those fees were, in effect, blackmail, but that is a flimsy argument.
When Epstein died in 2019, he was a wealthy man. He was worth $578 million, including two private Caribbean islands, several lavish homes, and about $380 million in cash and investments. But $578 million is a relatively small number for the world’s billionaires, sovereign funds, and politicians with state budgets—and a manageable investment to control them.
The Epstein files have exposed the debauchery of elites. They operate in a separate order, both physical and moral. Through their corporate offices, private villas, jets, and exclusive hotels, they inhabit a different world. In that world, the amorality of the current cultural form is expressed through perversions. However, many of those who so loudly criticize them might fall into the same pattern if only they were assured immunity.
Which is what Epstein seemed to provide: a safe environment in which to let loose all kinds of fantasies. Whether they were legal or illegal was of no consequence. The correspondence of many with him shows a tacit understanding that whatever happened when they were together was not to be spoken about too directly—only by reference, and never in public.
For about 30 years, since he bought Little St. James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, it worked. The man must have been smart, no doubt. He managed to infiltrate elite circles, gain their trust, and make them feel safe enough to engage in illegal activities, all while keeping records and probably reporting to his bosses.
Until it was no longer private. In 2008, when he was first tried and convicted, few in the public suspected the reach of his network and the scale of the operation. It might be more than mere coincidence that it was the year of the big financial crisis. In 2019, he was arrested, and less than a month later, he supposedly killed himself while in jail. But I don’t think many people really accept that.
The question, assuming one does not buy into the mainstream media narrative of Epstein being a perverted, self-made millionaire who happened to have many elite friends, is why he was exposed. Having the wealth, connections, and compromising evidence, why did he not use it? Perhaps he tried after he was arrested, and that’s why he “died.”
But the question remains: if we accept the hypothesis that he was not working alone but for someone, why did they allow him to be caught and exposed? I will attempt a circumstantial answer, not a particular one, as I don’t think many people are in a position to answer it definitively.
We are in the midst of a change in the “central domain”—to use the Carl Schmitt framework—of our current technological paradigm. For Schmitt, a central domain is the subject that gives an age its structure, language, and battles. A central domain is the core of an age in relation to which all other subjects and challenges are defined. Each era has one dominant domain that organizes how people understand reality.
Schmitt offers the example of European technical progress during the nineteenth century. Progress in this field was the central domain of that age’s paradigm. The massive upsurge of “technical progress” affected all “moral, political, social, and economic situations,” he writes in the essay “The Age of Neutralization.” Its overpowering effect gave it the status of a “religion of technical progress, which promised that all other problems would be solved by technological progress.”
After the age of “technical progress,” for Schmitt, came the age of economic technique, which lasted, I would say, until 2007–2008, coinciding with the release of the first iPhone and the financial crisis. In an economic age, “one needs only to solve adequately the problem of the production and distribution of goods in order to make superfluous all moral and social questions.”
“God, freedom, progress, anthropological conceptions of human nature, public domain, rationality and rationalization, and finally the concept of nature and culture itself derive their concrete historical content from the situation of the central domains and can only be grasped therefrom,” Schmitt writes.
Some might argue with the use of Carl Schmitt’s theoretical framework because of his political choices; however, Schmitt was right in foreseeing two big changes well ahead of time. First, that the relationship between power and the subject in the twentieth century could no longer be thought of through the classical concepts of national sovereignty and the nation-state—an idea that many others, from Foucault to Agamben, developed later.
Secondly, as Nathan Gardels writes for Noema: “It appears Schmitt’s second possibility of America as a balancer did in fact take place during the post–Cold War period. That brief era, which built the exoskeleton of a singular planet, is now splintering. Deglobalization, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the mounting hostility between the West and China—which is seeking to become a maritime global power unshackled from its continental constraints—are morphing into the differentiated Grossraum that Schmitt predicted.”
Schmitt anchored these insights in his concept of paradigms with central domains dominated by his notion of the political. He argued that the central domain is where the definition of friend and enemy—his primary category for the birth of the political field—takes place, and that where this happens is where the political truly resides.
I would argue that we are living through a transitional period between central domains, which Schmitt also considered to be a distinctive phase. We are moving from a central domain defined by economic and analog technique to one dominated by the digital. The digital domain is the age of cloud infrastructure, data, and algorithms, where virtually all spheres of life are reflected and stored—and increasingly, what shapes our very subjectivity.
This new central domain is where the struggle for power happens, and nowhere is that more clearly visible than in the control and definition of money. We are in the midst of a struggle among elites for dominance over the central domain, the power nexus. The money that is coming, which will determine this central domain, is digital; the issue is who will control it.
At its core, digital money is not about currency in the traditional sense, because it is not currency as we are used to defining it; it is a control mechanism. Control mechanisms have “rails.” Whoever owns the rails controls visibility, access, enforcement, and ultimately sovereignty. A central bank digital currency (CBDC) places those rails formally in the hands of the state. A stablecoin, by contrast, places them in private hands—regulated and compliant, but governed through contracts, platforms, and market incentives rather than public law.
This distinction matters because it maps directly onto a deeper conflict inside American power. On one side stands what Simon Dixon and others call the Financial-Industrial Complex (FIC): large banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, and financial infrastructure firms whose profits depend on scale, liquidity, and predictable flows. On the other side are the Military-Industrial Complexes (MIC): the security agencies, defense contractors, and intelligence services whose power rests on threat management, surveillance, and enforcement. Somewhere in between, with Trump closer to the MIC than to the FIC, is the Technological Industrial Complex (TIC).
This is where the tension lies. The FIC wants the rails because they monetize them. The MIC wants the rails because they police them. The TIC has understood that, while they may claim strength on their own to impose order in the previous two complexes, for now they are better off close to the MIC. Stablecoin regulation—who may issue, how reserves are held, and what programmability is allowed—becomes the battlefield where this conflict is negotiated.
Epstein was a tool, and that tool has been used—and is being used at this very precise moment—as a weapon in this conflict. If we continue the hypothesis that he was an Israeli intelligence asset, then trying to understand where Israel fits into this conflict could be clarifying.
For decades, the Middle East functioned as a U.S. security theater. Israel was a central node in that system: a military ally, intelligence partner, and testing ground for surveillance, targeting, and population-control technologies that would face legal or political resistance elsewhere. Continuous instability justified defense budgets, arms sales, and a permanent security posture. The Military-Industrial Complex thrived on this arrangement.
But finance has a different calculus. War is volatile. It disrupts energy markets, trade routes, and investment timelines. It creates risk. As the global system moves toward a multipolar order—driven in part by China’s rise and the erosion of sanctions effectiveness—the Financial-Industrial Complex increasingly favors managed stability over “forever wars” in the Middle East.
If Epstein was a Mossad intelligence asset, then it could be argued that he is being used in order for Israel to gain leverage and to favor those who favor it—and perhaps that he was allowed to be exposed because, in this elite conflict, he was losing leverage and had become too expensive an asset to let go to waste.
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https://x.com/mtracey/status/2019281499321683987
Mr. Tracey returns from exile and amidst some pretty damning evidence, continues providing cover for Epstein like he did before. This is starting to appear like it’s not just deeply contrarian nature…
I’m disappointed I ever read anything he wrote before.
Clearly Epstein was a useful tool. Probably too useful not to have a replacement.
Why would anyone need an Epstein today when ubiquitous digital surveillance and archiving offer kompromat on demand, in perpetuity? A non-descript Unit 8200 geek embedded in Google, Microsoft or the NSA has access to far more levers than Epstein ever could at a fraction of the cost.
Because the ruling elite need to be lured into honeypots, which calls for a conduit to bring the bait together with the fish. Tech alone cannot make this happen…and this is one among many other tasks that someone like Epstein provides. If you poke around enough in the Epstein documents, you’ll find at least one more person who communicated often with Epstein that has a similar role in the network.
Beg to differ here chaps.Saw her last night in Bristol and her voice still superb, especially on old classics Drunken Angel etc. and a wonderful cover of Skip James Killing Floor Blues, Unimpressesd by your song – very very repetitive..Much prefer the Clash – Straight to hell.Best of the lot though Phil Ochs – Here’s to the state of Mississippi,Cops of the world,Draft Dodgers Rag etc still knocks Dylan et.al into a cocked hat.
Maxwell is out and doing a new national singing tour? Frabjous!
Whitney Webb has concluded that he was no longer needed as Palantier and digital spying has come so far they no longer need humans to blackmail people.
Its all so gross.
What happened with the Epstein island is all those little girls became adult women. As children they had no agency, but as adults there’s just too many to ignore. The powers that be can’t make them all go away.
The DOJ just doxed them, names addresses and social security numbers.
the ceded bureau of dirty secrets…the new loyalist verve,
commensurate with decree
There is precedent for this. Genocide has also become “normalized” for the elites.
The traditional “cure” for the pleadings of inconvenient persons is “the silence of the grave.”
Stay safe.
thanks for turning me on to simon dixon,Curro.
this was the most cogent rabbithole ive seen, yet, regarding the epstien shit:
https://www.simondixon.com/blog/epstein-bitcoin-truth-simon-dixon
especially the 1st 15 minutes or so of defining terms.
and, to be clear, i am not a bitcoin believer.
i am far too distrusting and wary for things that i cannot hold in my hand, as “stores of wealth”.
but that guy i would welcome around my fire.
i usually dont last long with podcasts/videos(unless theres hot chicks, of course. i watch Krystal Ball a lot,lol)
regardless, i overcame my preference for print, because that dude was compelling, even if he is of a different religion, as it were.
I’m not a Bitcoin believer either, but I do find his geoeconomic analysis useful and accurate in many respects
Don’t you have the feeling that everything is running out of control, that there is no longer a centre of gravity, and events come more or less at random? May be Schmitt’s central domain is missing in action. Leaders around the world running like headless chickens trying to find it. Epstein not there to provide guidance plus some “niceties”. What one day is evident the following day turns unthinkable. What a mess!
Yes, in one sense, I share the impression. And it is not incorrect, I think. However, that impression might emerge from the accurate depiction that those who seem or claim to be in control actually control very little, if anything at all. The way I see it is that the movement towards a new domain, or center of gravity, is systemic—a logical step of the current iteration. Many, if not most, of those who believe they are steering it are actually being steered by that inertia.
Yeah I very much agree with this: “the accurate depiction that those who seem or claim to be in control actually control very little, if anything at all.”
Epstein had his growing network in place for decades and the scope of his activities started to extend to diplomatic relations. It would be ironic if the factions that set him up an maintain him in power were being undermined by new – techfinance – factions and it simply worked out that Epstein fell into the gears and was crushed. Maybe he should have tried to recruit more techbros to his island paradise to bolster his position.
I befriended a CIA/Mossad agent once. Well, he, of course, never admitted it, but I’m almost certain that he was. He was a US postdoctoral student with a really good bursary who appeared, suddenly, in some of the circles I was frequenting. What I realized is that the best covers are those where the actual subject believes the cover to be their actual life—and to a great extent, it is. I think that is what happened to Epstein. He believed he was part of the elite he was supposed to report on. And to a certain extent, he was. But then he, as you said, fell into the gears of something that was bigger than him and was crushed.
” It would be ironic if the factions that set him up an maintain him in power were being undermined by new – techfinance”
In my understanding, Epstein was a tool, a fragment of a larger project to synchronize deal making in a way that is Israel centered. To make money, on a lower level of the “food chain” you need investors, on a higher level, assorted permissions, regulations (with proper holes), it can be summarized as “connections”, and key connections are Israelis, friends of Israel (formalized in UK with that name) etc. Tasteful debauchery was a lubricant/lure in those times. And as world economy is evolving, top of the “food chain’ changes, but Israel connection remains.
Thus the fall of Epstein is not making much difference in this larger picture. Sufficiently delayed, it can discredit some old geezers with minor impact on current affairs.
But this well design system has a major weakness: its center, Israel, is increasingly insane. Note that some tech-bros are on the forefront of efforts to delay the consequences of this insanity, e.g. takeover of Tik-tok.
“But finance has a different calculus. War is volatile. It disrupts energy markets, trade routes, and investment timelines. It creates risk.”
It does, but there are instances of those that make big bucks and trades from volatility.
Could there also be something that could be called “managed volatility”?
Just spitballin’…
I think that is part of the current conflict: stability or managed volatility? The FIC seems to be pushing for the former in the Middle East, while the MIC pushes for the latter. Will there be war with Iran, then? I guess it depends on who pushes more effectively (the fallout of such a war being another issue entirely).
As to why he was exposed – the DOJ and FBI negotiated a particularly sleazy and favorable plea deal for him over the first 14 year-old girl, right? And then the Miami-Herald wouldn’t leave it alone. And now the DOJ/FBI find themselves in a super awkward position of having gone to extraordinary lengths to protect a pedo and sex trafficker for no apparent or obvious reason. And so the unraveling begins.
But yes – any and probably every state intelligence agency would have known he was leaving quite an extensive email trail. Whoever it was he worked for, whatever the cause, he and they didn’t seem to care, and he seemed willing to die for it.
I don’t discount the role of the DOJ/FBI—especially the middle- and lower-level agents relentlessly pursuing the case—as part of the equation. But we also know that there are ways to shut down those investigations or, in case that doesn’t work, to make the suspect disappear, alive or dead.
Fiat currency is not imaginary it is backed by the assets of a nation state. What is the Grand Canyon worth, for instance. Crypto on the other hand is a belief system backed by the same thing as religion, nothing. But then I am of the mind that nothing is a substantial nothing. Stable coin tries to bridge the difference tying nothing to something, but it is a tenuous bridge relying on the same sort of financial engineered smoke and mirrors that crashed in 2008.
Central bank digital currency is going to win this battle quickly. That will be the core of the surveillance state. All your expenditures will be known and processed by the algorithms. I would hypothesize that the result will be a a robust underground lubricated by hard assets not crypto. Of course gold but in smaller transactions even potatoes.
And just for the record, per the argument that the core of the 20th century was economic, after the fall of the USSR, it was the west that invaded Ukraine that created the conditions for the Russian invasion. The west also invaded Russia but Putin.
Maybe we need to consider the basic physical dynamics?
Nodes and networks.
The essence of the node is synchronization. Everything working on the same wavelength, functioning as one.
The essence of the network is harmonization. All the energies traded around, creating overall equilibrium.
As multicellular organisms, it is the nervous system that coordinates all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity. While the circulation system sustains harmony across this ecosystem of cells and organs.
In that states function as social super organisms, government is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
In order for the node to exist, the centripetal forces have to be more effective than the centrifugal ones. Which requires that central organizing locus, center of gravity, religion, totem.
Now obviously there are two current totems, money and ego.
The problem for money is that making it a god, rather than a tool has hollowed out the actual economies giving it value.
The problem with ego is that when one makes oneself the center of the universe, it becomes a very small universe and the feedback loops start spiraling ever tighter. The two obvious examples being Trump and Zionism, as cultural narcissism. That that music festival was called Nova…
The power of the European Diaspora was that as a supranational social organization, across a bunch of geographically and culturally distinct states, it became a very effective networking mechanism. Bankers, merchants, diplomats, lawyers, media, all those middleman occupations for which European Jewry seem to excel at. The problem was they also internalized the larger European zeitgeist, of cultural distinctness, on top of their own particular set of beliefs. Keep in mind Jewish societies in Asia and Africa did not go through programs and the Holocaust and, prior to the creation of Israel, had the usual sorts of relations different ethnicities will have.
So then this European Diaspora, having accumulated a fair amount of power and wealth, poured it into this vanity project, of resurrecting some Israelite golden era, based on the Holy Men playing twenty centuries of Chinese telephone, over what that golden era represented.
The reality of which was a tribal society bounced between three of the primary civilizations of the Ancient world.
While humanity functioned as primarily as tribes up until four or five thousand years ago, civilizations began to develop, as those broader networking mechanisms grew.
So basically the Zionists are trying to re-litigate the conflict the Maccabees had with the Romans. That their tribal god was more powerful than any civilization gods.
Yet Christianity originated as a schism in Judaism, between those looking to grow and those sticking to the old gods. The effect of which is the Jewish tribal concept of god, the social code as god, rather than some figurative device, like a golden calf, became the locus of Western Civilization.
The problem with making the laws, the Commandments, God, is that while they are necessary structural devices and tools, making them gods makes them inherently rigid and difficult to adjust. Remember Jesus was poking holes in the hypocrisies and contradictions that arise. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
To the Ancients, gods were as much metaphors, as spiritual manifestations. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Ancient Israel was a monarchy and when Christianity was adopted as the state religion of Rome, it served to validate the Empire and bury any reminders of the Republic.
So the Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed.
When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
Keep in mind that while law is form, morality is the substance. They are not synonymous. Forms come and go. Substance is what creates and drives them, until they become stagnant and confining. Then, like light through the cracks, substance moves on. Like Jesus.
Lives come and go. Life moves on.
“states function as social super organisms, government is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.”
One could argue other way around, big business plans what to do, and differences between actors are resolves by circulation of money in the political subsystem. Actually we see both “power from money” and “money from power”.
Very true. The question is which nodes in network have the more power and influence and whether it’s a healthy relationship with the larger organism/ecosystem. White blood cells or cancer cells.
The issues go to the basic paradigms on which society functions. Yet in situations like the present, where there is far more heat than light and people have basically reverted back to bands of monkeys shrieking and throw sticks at other bands of monkeys, it’s a waste of time to stand in front of the train and tell it’s headed for a cliff, because it will just run you over and then run off the cliff. Basically just waiting to pick up the pieces. Being an accelerationist.
re: scattered thoughts on the movie business as another case
Cautiously argueing, I wouldn´t overstate the smartness or overall “skill” in what Epstein “accomplished”.
In the movie industry this opaque mode to reach agreements on huge deals (double/triple digit million figures after all) I suspect is standard procedure in contrast to the official way of funding either by private or public funds which are subject to some limited transparency.
But those latter deals are mostly miniscule. Almost always when serious money is at stake the decision-making moves into shady and delicate areas shielded from any scrutiny.
It builds on trust. One way to create “trust” with a person who you do not know yet is to engage in illegal activities jointly, such as doing “hookers” and “coke”.
Doing any of those together creates a perverse bond of trust, comparable to the bond created through war, murder or shared prison time.
It´s beyond legal normative rules.
It fits more the rule of ethos, “manhood” or loyalty tests accepted as a currency of ultimate “trust” for millennia.
To be able to operate in these very human affairs including the dark (forbidden) erotic fantasies to the detriment of women and children – (were there any reports of gay affairs in the files btw? If not that too would be telling…) – Epstein needed to leave behind possible classic petty bourgeois morals.
Abandoning taboos in sexual conduct and conduct with humans in general is something you are taught when trained as a spy. But that is in itself nothing extraordinary.
(The latest installments of James Bond are alluding to these “techniques” as part of real-spook biz even if only very scantly.)
Was it Conor who mentioned “Eyes Wide Shut” a couple of weeks ago…?
Another older example would be Andrzej Zulawski´s “L’important c’est d’aimer” (1975) where Romy Schneider is playing a respectable actress now in softporn movies who falls in love with a photographer who makes a living with compromising pictures from arranged sex parties in the upper class of Paris.
Not by coincidence the illustrous circles of vogue artists or intellectuals/scholars shared similar practices.
There is not much difference between a Michel Foucault, Rainer-Werner Fassbinder or as some rumours say a present-time director like Bryan Singer when they go to North Africa to either meet adult men (when it was forbidden in Germany e.g.) or minor-aged boys.
Also recall the French high politics scandal „ballets roses“ of the 1950s where French senators up to potential presidents were caught on photos with minor-aged women dressed as ballet dancers.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_Ballets_roses_(France)
A trope that was already used in a Classic German play by Frank Wedekind, „Pandora´s Box“ in 1904.
(Adapated by Georg Wilhelm Pabst into a decent silent Classic in 1929.)
p.s. If I recall correctly Mario Vargas Llosa touched on “perversions” in the spheres of the Japanese power/crime families in his 2006 novel “The Bad Girl”.
The era of popular erotic art films such as “Last Tango in Paris” where abuse was shown as genuine passion were publicly celebrated is over. Which marks a fundamental change in how society works today.
The end of the age of classical partriarchy was the end of the scandal film too.
But only because laws and new rules have changed what is regarded as permissible the illegal/illegitimate practices and desires have not vanished. Which is why these realities in films have been moved from “melodramas” and “erotic art movies” to crime and psychological thrillers.
However maybe these changes in society at large never applied to the privileged strata where Epstein operated. They still live and breath beyond space and time along their own set of rules (or lack thereof).
I’m replying a bit late, but really interesting article that opens up a lot of other thoughts. I’d need to look into the cryptocurrency details more.
I did have one thought about your idea of a changing theme to the current world. I agree the old system is clearly passing away, but instead of the digital world representing the new, couldn’t it simply be the culmination of the economic period & synthesis with the technological? Digitization after all represents successfully engineering a universal basis for acting on symbols, including data & money.
I wonder if the real tension in this age will be reconciling nature with technology, including computers. In a weird way, the Ukraine War in particular, with horses & muddy trench warfare amidst swarming killbots & hyperscale fire plans, is that dialed up to 11. IIUC at least in the rightist circles that think about these sort of things, they put it as techne vs physis (as a left Ghibelline, you inevitably come across a lot from the right wing of the party).
Arguably one of the great failures of the computer age is that it has never overcome the fact that “the map is not the territory”. This becomes painfully clear interacting with most databases or domain-models, which may be why some think of specifically LLMs (that have no real model of anything) as dei ex machina. Maybe the new theme will be simultaneously embodying our newest symbolic techniques (e.g. Chinese, ML-augmented assembly lines) while simultaneously disciplining them and revaluing natural substance.
Include too much information from the territory onto the map and the signal is lost back in the noise.
That’s why all our maps, models, theories, theses,disciplines, doctrines, religions, etc. are necessarily finite slices of an infinite reality. That’s where understanding the relationship between these conceptual nodes and the networks in which they function is important.
The generals lead armies. Specialist is one rank above private. The kids who would make good generals are the ones interested in everything, as they come to see how it all fits together. But that goes against the focus on detail, so they are diagnosed as attention deficit and medicated until their minds fit back in the boxes.
Back in the day, we called it boredom and self medicated. Keep various tools in the mental toolbox, not just one big hammer. When you find yourself spiraling too far into some rabbit hole, hit the circuit breaker.
What are you saying, Curro? They decided to flaunt the the way they do control politics like they flaunt genocide-is-ok-when-we-do-it?
As far as I can see the FIC and the MIC are one thing. Jacques Ellul recognized how humans had been made into little machines as the worship of the efficiency of their technology became so central. In his book “The Technological Society” technique was the heart of Schmidt’s TIC? [Ellul was very particular re what he meant by technique] To me digital only means electronic. In the acronym MIC “industrial” includes electronic. If one insisted on making a distinction, one could add “AI” to the end of MICIMATT [making 4 syllables], and possibly all the divisions would be better portrayed as one! In both finance and defense electronics reigns more everyday, so Schmidt was getting close to this with his TIC and especially in recognizing something important in connection with digital.
Me too.
What strikes me as a bit unlikely is that news of the whole thing wasn’t spilled or passed along earlier. Also, I don’t strongly suspect Kubrick meant to imply some kind of thread of meaning in Eyes Wide Shut; but, if there was a connecting thread, wouldn’t someone in the know have told him not to create anything like Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s ball in a place once owned by the Rothchild family?
Not quite sure I understand…but it would be nice if I did grasp the point you are making.
(also: Rothschild?)
The Epstein/Rothchild connection I heard something about or read something about (the substance of which I had forgotten totally) turns out to have involved Epstein’s money matter knowledge; there’s nothing I’ve seen connecting them to Epstein’s other infamous sphere of endeavor. https://www.ft.com/content/0d70b7d3-063d-43a0-812b-8b8b3e7c4c47
What makes me feel guilty about AI is that I know how much time and effort it would take me to get one or another answer, and I assume there’s some kind of electrical equivalent involved. But I asked ChatGPT once what energy the question I just put to it required, and it cited some miniscule amount. On this issue what it says sounds sound: the ball I mentioned above was past the era of the wildest and craziest parties. Here’s a continuum it gave me (what do I know…that Coleridge and George Fox lived in the 17th century):
“We are in the midst of a change in the “central domain”–to use the Carl Schmitt framework…”
My understanding/interpretation of Schmitt would lead me to argue that he would feel that his interpretation of the central domain–the intensity of conflict and enmity between what he labels as friend and enemy, independent of the state, is still central, perhaps more than ever in 2026 (think Minneapolis).
To me, however, Schmitt’s arguments seem vulnerable because he appears to have made a philosophical decision based on a pessimistic political anthropology about human nature. His process of concretely identifying friend and enemy seems like a kind of ordering–each group is assigned a specific place in the field of conflict (labeled as friend or enemy) and thus is expected to behave in a certain way.
This kind of ordering seems based on a decision by the theorist and assumes that there is no already existing pre-political field like, say, plants and animals sitting in an actual field of battle–that implies the real existence of things prior to what Schmitt calls the always “fictitious” unpolitical.
Schmitt seems quite comfortable with a totalization of politics across all realms (economic or digital)–I guess I’m not.
re: scattered thoughts on the movie business as another case example
In the movie industry this opaque mode to reach agreements on huge deals (double/triple digit million figures) I suspect is standard procedure.
Almost always when serious money is at stake the decision-making moves into shady and delicate areas shielded from any scrutiny.
It builds on trust. One way to create “trust” is to engage in illegal activities jointly, such as doing “hookers” and “coke”.
Doing any of those together creates a perverse bond of trust, comparable to the bond created through war, murder or shared prison time.
It´s beyond legal normative rules.
It fits more the rule of ethos, “manhood” or loyalty tests accepted as a currency of ultimate “trust” for millennia.
To be able to operate in these very human affairs including the dark (forbidden) erotic fantasies Epstein needed to leave behind possible classic petty bourgeois morals.
Abandoning taboos in sexual conduct and conduct with humans in general is something you are taught when trained as a spy.
Was it Conor who mentioned “Eyes Wide Shut” a couple of weeks ago…?
Another older example would be Andrzej Zulawski´s “L’important c’est d’aimer” (1975) where Romy Schneider is playing a respectable actress now in softporn movies who falls in love with a photographer who makes a living with compromising pictures from arranged sex parties in the upper class of Paris.
Not by coincidence the illustrious circles of vogue artists or intellectuals shared similar practices.
There is not much difference between a Michel Foucault, Rainer-Werner Fassbinder or as some rumours say a present-time director like Bryan Singer when they go to North Africa to either meet adult men (when it was forbidden in Germany e.g.) or minor-aged boys.
Also recall the French high politics scandal „ballets roses“ of the 1950s where French senators up to potential presidents were caught on photos with minor-aged women dressed as ballet dancers.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_Ballets_roses_(France)
A trope that was already used in a Classic German play by Frank Wedekind, „Pandora´s Box“ in 1904.
Adapated by Georg Wilhelm Pabst into a decent silent Classic in 1929.
Or take Thomas Mann´s “Death in Venice” from 1912.
If I recall correctly Mario Vargas Llosa touched on “perversions” in the spheres of the Japanese power/crime families in his 2006 novel “The Bad Girl”.
p.s. The era of popular erotic art films such as “Last Tango in Paris” where abuse was shown as genuine passion were publicly celebrated is over. Which marks a fundamental change in how society works today.
The end of the age of classical partriarchy was the end of the scandal film too.
But only because laws and new rules have changed what is regarded as permissible, the illegal/illegitimate practices and desires have not vanished. Which is why these realities in films have been moved from “melodramas” and “erotic art movies” to crime and psychological thrillers.
However maybe these changes never applied to the privileged strata where Epstein operated. They still live and breath beyond space and time along their own set of rules (or lack thereof).
edit:
This was a double post. The older one above I deleted because it wasn´t finished. I wasn´t aware it did end up in comments in spite of deletion…sorry