https://www.garbageday.email/p/here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet
"I spent most of my 20s covering what we now call the global populism wave. I
got my start in newsrooms writing 4chan explainers and trawling through school
shooter manifestos and eventually that work took me around the world.
I followed far-right soccer hooligan Tommy Robinson as he marched through the
streets of London in the weeks leading up to Brexit, monitored 4chan users in
France and Germany as they tried to hijack their respective elections, attended
Facebook’s election party in Rome, interviewed Bolsominion YouTubers in Brazil,
went to Estonia to learn about how the country was protecting itself from
Russian-led disinformation campaigns, and even went back to the source,
interviewing Japanese bloggers in Tokyo about 2chan, or Futaba Channel, the
site that inspired 4chan.
I had a front row seat to the collapse of the global order. And I believed at
the time that I understood what was going on. In the aftermath of the Great
Recession, far-right extremists, aided and amplified by Russia’s Internet
Research Agency and funded by Republican dark money, infiltrated fringe online
spaces. They weaponized disaffected young men, and used sites like Reddit and
4chan to organize a flood of content that influenced the unthinking algorithms
on larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there were always holes in
that explanation that I could never quite account for. A feeling — one that can
be quite dangerous for a journalist trying not fall into the void of conspiracy
theories — that there was something bigger going on. And while I can’t say that
we have the complete story yet, it does increasingly feel like I was actually,
without knowing it, following Jeffrey Epstein around the world the whole time.
Based off the newest tranche of emails and texts released by the Justice
Department this weekend, Epstein, at the very least,
believed that he was
orchestrating the downfall of the global order in the 2010s. In June 2016, he
emailed venture capitalist, early Facebook investor, and Palantir founder Peter
Thiel, writing, “Brexit, just the beginning.” He then laid out the most
succinct mission statement we currently have for what Epstein was trying to
accomplish. “Return to tribalism,” he wrote. “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.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
