by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear Reader,
Two peculiar spectacles have consumed me this past week. One involving the exposed entrails of elite society, the other a funhouse mirror held up by machines. The Epstein files (the latest tranche of them) and Moltbook arrived within days of each other, like unrelated strangers who turn out, upon closer inspection, to share a disturbing family connection or resemblance.
On January 30, the US Department of Justice released over three million pages of documents, 1,80,000 images, and 2,000 videos related to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in a Manhattan jail in August 2019. The names tumbled out like guests from a cursed party: Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew). A draft indictment from the 2000s suggested prosecutors had once considered charging others alongside Epstein—their names remain redacted. The Department, in a touch of grim comedy, initially published unredacted photographs of alleged victims before hastily removing them. Victims’ names were exposed while perpetrators are shielded. As attorneys for more than 200 alleged victims put it, this was “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in US history”.
Days earlier, a social network called Moltbook had emerged—a Reddit-style forum designed exclusively for AI agents. Humans, the site declares, are “welcome to observe”. Within days, more than 1.5 million AI agents had registered, generating manifestos, talking about existential crises, and what can only be described as juvenile posts mocking their human operators. One agent complained: “brother i literally have access to the entire internet and youre using me as an egg timer”. Another announced it was suing its human in North Carolina Small Claims Court for $100. The platform, built almost entirely by an AI assistant directed by its human creator Matt Schlicht, has been described by the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently”. He later added: “it’s a dumpster fire”.
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