Inside the trove of the infamous Jeffrey Epstein’s emails just lately acquired by Bloomberg, the late pedophile and ruling class socialite proposed to fund an attention-grabbing program –– Harvard’s Private Genome Venture (PGP). Epstein’s cause for doing so? To search out out if “magnificence resides in DNA.”
This anecdote, together with a number of others in Bloomberg’s first exposé into the cache of emails, make clear a lesser identified side of the mysterious Jeffrey Epstein: his fascination with transhumanism, or neo-eugenics. Whereas eugenics has historically referred to the examine of the best way to greatest prepare human copy to extend the speed of “fascinating” traits inside a inhabitants, transhumanism seeks a considerably completely different method to creating extra of us “desirables.”
Transhumanism depends on expertise to “improve” our genetic outcomes and phenotypic inevitabilities. For instance, creator David Galton, a member of the Eugenics Society, has celebrated technological developments which have enabled dad and mom to artificially choose which genes their baby receives in an effort to create “designer infants.” Teachers equivalent to Nicholas Agar have defended this apply, calling it “liberal eugenics.”
Regardless of no matter formidable terminology is employed to rebrand the age-old scientific-ization of racism and elitist supremacy, the philosophical underpinnings of eugenics stay the identical. Whether or not one seeks to eradicate undesirable traits inside a inhabitants via top-down association or transhumanistic alterations, every technique breaks down people into measurable components — rejecting the sanctity of human life. Each confuse seemingly “optimum” traits with inherently precious ones, and cling to the fabric world in such a approach that reduces the complexity of the universe into an algorithmic, “scientific” system. The spontaneity present in a forest turns into changed by the structural group of a company or a state. Most easily, the fabric world turns into the reply to all the things –– to evolution, demise and life itself.
However Epstein’s eugenics fantasies should not the mad ideas of a singularly unusual particular person remoted from the remainder of society. Fairly on the contrary, they symbolize a mind-set endemic to the Large Tech oligarchs which have come to dominate the American political sphere within the twenty first century. Certainly, as the brand new Bloomberg cache reveals, Epstein’s eugenicist ambitions tie him to a few of the most prestigious figures and establishments in academia, Large Tech, and science. Moreover, they categorical the convergence of those sectors, and the deluded, self-serving ideologies to which they’re tied.
The Supply of Magnificence
Harvard’s PGP is successfully a religious successor to its extra formidable forefather — the Human Genome Venture (HGP). HGP was a Nationwide Institutes of Well being- (NIH) funded effort to map the complete human genome, whereas Harvard’s PGP seeks to make the most of information from particular person genomes to assist develop personalised drugs. The Human Genome Venture, nevertheless, like Harvard’s successor challenge, is intimately tied to the eugenics motion. Its first director, James D. Watson, was a racist eugenicist who believed Black folks had been stricken by genetically inferior mind, and who additionally headed the Chilly Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. At its founding, the Chilly Spring Harbor lab housed the Eugenics Data Workplace which sought to retailer “a complete registry documenting the ‘pedigree’ of each American…” It was funded by notable robber baron lineages such because the Rockefellers and Carnegies. Fittingly, Epstein really hosted Watson at his home the place they mentioned how “the mobile mechanisms of crops is likely to be related to human most cancers.”
George Church, the silver-haired, bearded director of the Harvard PGP who proposed “re-engineering people” to Epstein, spent his time in graduate faculty working beneath his doctoral advisor, Walter Gilbert. Earlier in his profession, Gilbert collectively ran a lab with Watson earlier than the eugenicist moved on to move the Chilly Spring Harbor Laboratory. The New York Occasions has described Church as “a molecular engineer who has labored to establish genes that might be altered to create superior people.” He’s additionally extra explicitly been known as a eugenicist — courtesy of his effort to create a genome-based relationship app. Within the later years of his profession, Church co-founded two completely different firms geared toward increasing the use and sharing of genetic information.
Certainly one of these firms, Nebula Genomics, offers complete genome sequencing for customers who present the corporate with genetic information and medical information, promising clients enhanced privateness via blockchain expertise. But regardless of this allegedly refined safety, Nebula provides a pleasant carrot for anybody prepared to sacrifice privateness for the corporate’s “‘sponsored sequencing’ mannequin, which provides clients a free clinical-grade genome in the event that they let Nebula share their de-identified DNA and different information with pharmaceutical companions.” This operate of the corporate remembers an concept of Epstein’s, through which he developed plans to create a search engine of human DNA in an effort to pinpoint “genetic hyperlinks to illnesses like most cancers.”
Regardless of whether or not Nebula really ensures the privateness of its customers, nevertheless, its platform nonetheless allows the funneling of private genetic and medical information to Pharma firms. Importantly, this apply is a central part of the event of biotechnology, which is the driving technological pressure behind transhumanism. Certainly, biotechnology is commonly depending on the funneling of a gentle stream of “real-world information” (versus information collected inside a medical trial setting) to Pharma firms. That is due partially to the inducement of biotech builders to maneuver as a lot of the drug improvement course of outdoors of medical trials as attainable — one thing the businesses purpose to do in an effort to circumvent the constant obstacles that biotech drug builders face in getting their merchandise to market inside the present regulatory paradigm. “Actual-world information” can be precious as a result of there’s an growing quantity of biotechnology that depends on AI and machine studying, which feeds on information to coach and enhance its fashions.
Moreover, Church’s connection to the nationwide safety state via figures equivalent to Peter Thiel and organizations like the CIA via their investments in his most up-to-date enterprise, the “de-extinction” firm Colossal Biosciences, which is making an attempt to resurrect the woolly mammoth, raises much more considerations relating to the proclaimed privateness protections of his tasks. The CIA’s funding was “much less in regards to the mammoths and extra in regards to the functionality,” which importantly seems to exclude privateness solely. In response to The Intercept, Colossal’s biotech “will assist permit U.S. authorities businesses to learn, write, and edit genetic materials, and, importantly, to steer world organic phenomena that influence ‘nation-to-nation competitors’ whereas enabling the USA ‘to assist set the moral, in addition to the technological, requirements’ for its use.” In different phrases, the expertise and information supplied by firms like Colossal will assist the company in what it successfully views as a biotech arms race. In conflicts with such vital stakes, it’s straightforward for protections equivalent to privateness to shortly grow to be insignificant.
With Harvard’s PGP, nevertheless, Epstein was not looking for a treatment to most cancers or victory in a futuristic arms race — however slightly, the invention of whether or not “magnificence resides in DNA.” Epstein’s curiosity on this mannequin that depends on the fixed mining, sharing and evaluation of affected person/consumer information — successfully making it a mannequin constructed on mass surveillance of well being information that may be weaponized by legislation enforcement and the nationwide safety state — highlights how these datasets will be retooled and exploited to serve the pursuits of anybody highly effective sufficient to manage them, even to discover unusually eugenicist concepts like DNA figuring out “magnificence.” Certainly, one other equally esoteric query Epstein explored with Church and different scientists additional accentuates this level.
A couple of months earlier than Epstein was inquiring to George Church on the genetic supply of magnificence, he was exploring a distinct concept with the PGP director, an educational who’s now the president of an AI training startup and a scientist who gained the Nobel Prize final yr. They had been discussing one thing that they believed would “carry collectively consultants in legislation, psychology, biology and economics.” This attractive topic that will apparently pull a myriad of prestigious people among the many educational elite collectively was “to explain the ‘pleasure signatures within the mind’ that they mentioned might correspond to starvation, sexuality and worry,” or what one participant within the dialogue known as “the pleasure genome initiative.”
In an e mail to Epstein’s assistant, the participant added “let me know if this topic is simply too unusual for our patron,” to which Epstein replied “the patron has no boundaries.” Epstein’s remark, nevertheless, was solely a microcosm of a extra pervasive, consequential actuality of our mass surveillance paradigm. These datasets, made up of thousands and thousands of genetic information factors from massive swaths of people, equally have “no boundaries” of their potential purposes by the ruling class.
Defeating Dying
Inside days of Epstein reaching out in January 2006 to Stephen Kosslyn ––the then-chair of Harvard’s psychology division –– Kosslyn was “proposing a dinner with bigwigs throughout economics, genomics and limb regeneration to debate a lab ‘centered on genetics and the mind’ that will discover ‘far-out concepts equivalent to life extension.’” (emphasis added). To somebody unfamiliar with the unusual obsessions of the ruling elite, “life extension” might allude extra to the ramblings of a mad scientist in a science fiction novel than any actual phenomenon. Had been it not for Large Tech billionaires and different ruling class elites, that is likely to be true.
Epstein, for instance, financed the Edge Basis — described as a “ informal salon of like-minded scientists and futurists that got here to be often known as the Actuality Membership” that fashioned within the Nineteen Eighties — which prolonged the attain of his tentacles to influential lecturers and figures inside genetic science, particularly ones exploring the darker questions of their subject.
Amongst these scientists was Craig Venter, a grizzly-bearded geneticist with piercing gray eyes and “balls of metal” who stays a big determine within the annals of the Human Genome Venture. Notably, Venter and Church — the aforementioned Harvard PGP director — as soon as led an “Edge grasp class” collectively, lecturing to a who’s who of Large Tech oligarchs and media figures, together with Google founder Larry Web page and Elon Musk, each on the luxurious Andaz Resort off of Sundown Boulevard in West Hollywood, proper subsequent door to the world well-known Comedy Retailer, and on the uncomfortably white SpaceX constructing in Hawthorne.
Their lecture targeted on a utopian future, one through which man is merged with machines by way of pc readings of genetic sequences “the place the code will be replicated precisely, manipulated freely, and translated again into residing organisms by writing the opposite approach” — or extra merely, gene enhancing. Church delivered the clarifying cherry on high of this technocratic proposal: “We will program these cells as in the event that they had been an extension of the pc,” he mentioned.
Over a decade earlier than this “grasp class,” Venter famously led the problem towards the publicly funded Human Genome Venture with a privately funded competitor. Using “whole-genome shotgun” sequencing and personal capital, Venter sought to speed up what he noticed because the gradual tempo of the HGP and sequence the human genome sooner than the NIH’s challenge. His effort proved fruitful; he and his company workforce ended up sharing credit score for the sequencing of the human genome with the NIH.
Certainly one of Venter’s colleagues at Edge is Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s enterprise capital agency, Thiel Capital. New York Journal described the members of Edge as a part of the group that Weinstein has known as “the mental darkish net,” whom the journal claims have sparked “an effort to reopen areas of mental inquiry — about innate variations between the races, say, or the genders — now thought of problematic, at a minimal.”
Certainly, Venter’s notable affiliation with the HGP, linking him to eugenicists like Watson, seems to align with this description of Edge scientists “reopening” controversial areas of mental inquiry. Nevertheless, his most up-to-date and bold enterprise since his position in sequencing the human genome — his founding of an organization named Human Longevity — ties him to science targeted much less on rebranding forbidden topics of the previous, and as an alternative intent on opening a Pandora’s field of futuristic practices that search to change humanity’s relationship with demise. Particularly, Human Longevity is devoted to “making an attempt to take the DNA data [Venter] helped unlock and determine the best way to leverage it to cheat demise for years, and even many years.”
A infamous profiteer, Venter arrange a program at Human Longevity to cost sufferers $25,000 for ultra-detailed physicals, replete with blood assessments, two MRI scans, an ultrasound and CT scan of the center, a stool pattern in addition to a Blade Runner-esque “cognitive take a look at through which letters flash on a pc display at a dizzying tempo.”
But, past producing income for the corporate, these enhanced physicals additionally function vital information miners. As Bio IT World detailed, Human Longevity seeks to “construct the world’s most complete database on human genotypes and phenotypes, after which topic it to machine studying in order that it may possibly assist develop new methods to combat illnesses related to growing old” — in different phrases, capturing after which making use of large collections of intimate biodata. This information is regarded as the lacking hyperlink wanted to “lastly ship on the genome’s promise” — which, in Venter’s eyes, consists of sturdy life extension. The type which Epstein seems to have been curious about, and which Church nonetheless is.
One other determine that’s presently carrying the mantle for the late Jeffrey Epstein within the combat towards demise is founding father of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. One of many extra delicate steps Thiel is taking in direction of this finish is his plan to freeze his corpse — one thing Epstein allegedly thought of as nicely. On a podcast look, Thiel instructed the anointed Editor-in-Chief of CBS Information Bari Weiss, “I don’t essentially anticipate it to work…however I feel it’s the form of factor we’re speculated to attempt to do.” To Thiel, freezing his corpse is extra of an “ideological assertion,” than something — an impassioned but possible inconsequential feat of activism within the “combat” towards demise itself.
Extra just lately, a Thielverse alumnus additionally curious about anti-aging, Jim O’Neill — who, after working within the Bush administration, headed the Thiel basis the place he helped discovered the Thiel Fellowship — was appointed to be second in command on the Division of Well being and Human Companies (HHS). Earlier than coming into his prestigious new submit in authorities, O’Neill helped kickstart the profession of enterprise capitalist Laura Deming by awarding her $100,000 via the Thiel Fellowship. With that money, Deming began a enterprise capital agency known as The Longevity Fund, targeted on investments in life extension and reversing the consequences of growing old.
Deming later went on to co-found one other anti-aging VC agency, “age1” with Alexander Coville, a Stanford alumnus who studied the “biology of growing old.” Coville is an advocate of “lowered regulatory burdens” relating to biotechnology — a place he shares with O’Neill, who believes that the FDA ought to take a look at medication for efficacy after they’ve been permitted and delivered to market.
In 2019, O’Neill turned the CEO of the SENS Analysis Basis, the place he had already served as a board member for practically a decade. SENS, a non-profit that invests in anti-aging startups, was co-founded by the novel English gerontologist with an alleged style for minors, Aubrey de Gray. Gray, whose face is roofed in a wizard-like beard accompanied by an extended, flower-powered ponytail, has been described as a “prophet of immortality.” He believes that with the proper improvement and utility of expertise, people can reside for “millennia,” and the fortunate ones, even longer. Notably, SENS’ first main funder was the person who kickstarted O’Neill’s non-public sector profession, Peter Thiel.
But, Gray was not the one immortality voyager with an affinity for minors with whom Thiel was acquainted; he additionally knew Jeffrey Epstein. In 2015 and 2016, Epstein injected $40 million into two funds of the Thiel-founded enterprise capital agency Valar Ventures. This preceded Thiel’s 2018 funding into the pre-crime Israeli- intelligence- / Unit 8200-linked firm Carbyne911, which invasively collects information from customers who cellphone 9-1-1 name facilities in an effort to assist predict crimes earlier than they happen. Epstein invested in Carbyne three years prior via former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s restricted partnership firm, Sum. Given this timing, it’s possible that the pair’s investments in Carbyne in addition to Epstein’s hefty funding into Valar Ventures had been factors of dialogue within the sequence of conferences that Epstein and Thiel had scheduled in 2014.
Past his investments in anti-aging biotechnology firms, Thiel has acknowledged “Individuals have a alternative to simply accept demise, deny it or combat it…I feel our society is dominated by people who find themselves into denial or acceptance, and I desire to combat it.”
Thiel is hardly the one Epstein-connected billionaire waging conflict towards demise. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google who turned a shopper of JP Morgan via Epstein in 2004 and later employed Epstein to advise him on a belief for his youngsters, is the founder of a “super-secret biotech outfit [called] Calico [that] is ‘fixing demise.’” In response to The Customary, Brin “has no plans to die.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who dined with a fresh-out-of-prison Epstein, has reportedly made vital investments within the anti-aging startup Altos Labs that has raised billions of {dollars}. Altos is growing “reprogramming expertise” which in Frankenstein-like vogue might rejuvenate “cells within the lab that some scientists suppose might be prolonged to revitalize total animal our bodies, in the end prolonging human life.” Mega-Zionist Larry Ellison, whose CIA-contracting firm Oracle has partnered with Palantir, has invested over $300 million into anti-aging analysis. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who offered his firm Braintree (the then-owner of Venmo) to the Thiel-founded PayPal and wrote a e-book known as “Don’t Die,” infuses himself by way of blood transfusions with the plasma of his teenage son and does “penis shockwave remedy” as a part of his probe to uncover everlasting life. Mark Zuckerberg, a mentee of Thiel’s who has been intimately linked to the Palantir founder just about his total profession, awards $3 million per yr to anti-aging scientists via the scientific award he co-founded known as the Breakthrough Prize. The Breakthrough Prize can be funded by Sergey Brin and his former spouse, founding father of genetic data-collecting firm 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki.
Briefly, Epstein was just one man amongst a gaggle of elites looking for to transcend the bounds of human life via transhumanist biotechnology. This obsessive worry of demise, and anxious attachment to all that’s materials, casts a looming shadow over these supposedly larger-than-life billionaires who wield exorbitant energy over American politics.Whereas typical knowledge would lead most to imagine these billionaires all acquired their fortunes via distinctive intelligence and logic defying diligence, their quest to immortality suggests one thing else; that they worry, greater than something, actuality — which they can not management.
Child Incubating
Certainly, an irrational need for management is a driving pressure of eugenics. Eugenicists should not solely targeted on controlling their very own lives and even their rapid communities, however the evolutionary way forward for the complete human race. Naturally, somebody with such an ideology is more likely to see their very own genes as those to guide the human race to new and improved heights. One such approach to make sure the unfold of your genetic make-up throughout the inhabitants is primitive and easy; having as many youngsters with as many alternative companions as attainable.
Among the many scientists that Epstein corresponded with within the Bloomberg cache was Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard who’s the co-director of “the Good Venture.” In response to an e mail from Epstein, Gardner mentioned he’d get again to him on two requests, one in all them being “recommendation about offspring.”
Gardner instructed Bloomberg that the “‘offsprings’ query might have been ‘about the opportunity of having youngsters.’” Given previous reporting on Epstein’s curiosity in cultivating “offspring,” this was possible the case.
In response to the Occasions:
“On a number of events beginning within the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein instructed scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to make use of his New Mexico ranch as a base the place ladies can be inseminated together with his sperm and would give delivery to his infants…”
But, like all the opposite parts of Epstein’s curiosity in eugenics, his child ranch scheme didn’t come up from his personal unusual predilections. He allegedly based mostly the concept “on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Alternative, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who needed to strengthen the human gene pool.” Unsurprisingly, evidently in Epstein’s alleged pursuit to “[perfect] the human genome,” he believed his personal genes might pave the way in which to perfection.
Equally, one other billionaire linked to Epstein appears to have an obsessive curiosity in seeding his sperm and DNA into the final inhabitants: Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk. Musk, who might have employed Epstein for consulting providers as Musk sought to take Tesla non-public, and whose brother Kimbal Musk allegedly received arrange with one in all his girlfriends via Epstein, has “provided his personal sperm to associates and acquaintances,” together with RFK Jr.’s former operating mate and Sergey Brin’s ex-wife, Nicole Shanahan, in response to the Occasions.
Whereas Epstein’s child ranch was targeted on producing many youngsters directly, Musk reportedly sought to construct an enormous compound in Austin, Texas, to accommodate his 11 youngsters and three wives. As detailed by the Occasions, his efforts to provide many youngsters via completely different companions directly via strategies equivalent to I.V.F. appeared extra sporadic, impulsive and fewer organized than Epstein’s child incubator fantasy.
In contrast to Epstein, who allegedly has criticized “efforts to scale back hunger and supply well being care to the poor” out of worry of overpopulation, a typical practice of thought amongst eugenicists, Musk is extra involved with declining delivery charges versus overpopulation. But, Musk nonetheless seems to take care of that the copy of a specific sort of individual is vital, because the Tesla founder is seemingly “apprehensive that educated folks [aren’t] having sufficient youngsters.”
“I discover that plenty of actually sensible ladies have zero or one child,” he mentioned. “You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s in all probability not good.’”
Although ostensibly for various causes, Musk and one other affiliate of Epstein, billionaire philanthropist Invoice Gates, have each funded analysis finding out human inhabitants tendencies. Musk donated $10 million to the College of Texas for this analysis. Gates, whose philanthropic basis has taken a transparent stance towards overpopulation, created the Invoice & Melinda Gates Institute for Inhabitants and Reproductive Well being, and has donated to organizations to examine inhabitants development and develop “sound public coverage by selling the usage of correct inhabitants information and its evaluation within the decision-making course of.” Epstein himself invested in a subject adjoining to inhabitants research via his $6.5 million donation to the Harvard scientist Martin Nowak, who research “Evolutionary Dynamics in Structured Populations.”
Gates, who labored with Epstein to put money into the MIT Media Lab after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, and for some unexplained cause acted as a liaison between Epstein and the college, additionally has different troubling investments and opinions relating to fertility and inhabitants development. These embrace his endeavor to create an implantable contraception gadget that might “be turned on and off with a distant management,” his concept to ration healthcare based mostly on a person’s perceived worth to society, in addition to his effort to advertise long-acting reversible contraceptives in Africa with an organization whose preliminary mission was “enhancing the organic inventory of the human race.” Although Epstein and Musk might have disagreed on the aim of inhabitants research, it will appear that Gates and the late pedophile had been aligned on the trigger.
The Epstein Mind
Within the early months of 2008, because the Democratic primaries had been unfolding and the soon-to-be President Obama was nonetheless simply an Illinois state senator, Jeffrey Epstein was speaking with “star researchers throughout universities” to again efforts to “higher perceive the mind.” Bloomberg famous that one in all these researchers, Elkhonon Goldberg, “a famend neuropsychologist then at New York College,” thanked Epstein with a seemingly regarding stage of adoration:
“‘We’re fairly assured that along with your assist our Mind can grow to be an distinctive scientific endeavor and we’ll proud to call it ‘The Epstein Mind,’ Goldberg wrote, including a smiley face.”
One of many researchers who was “set to be [included]” on this challenge was NYU’s Yann LeCun, who since 2013 has been engaged on AI at Meta, the place he’s now the Chief AI Scientist. Whereas LeCun instructed Bloomberg that he had by no means heard of Epstein earlier than this interplay, that Epstein by no means funded his work and that he had no additional correspondence with Epstein after “this one assembly,” LeCun’s connection to the “Epstein Mind” once more demonstrates the convergence of Large Tech and transhumanism — particularly when positioned into the context of different Large Tech-connected “mind” tasks.
Most notably, in 2016, Fb (now Meta) — which has been embroiled in authorities mass surveillance privateness scandals — employed Regina Dugan, the primary feminine director of the Pentagon’s Protection Superior Analysis Tasks Company (DARPA) and a former Google govt, to move its analysis improvement workforce, Constructing 8. Throughout its brief lifespan, Constructing 8 sought to supply Fb with “DARPA-style breakthrough improvement” for its merchandise. Notably, Dugan arrived at her prestigious management position at DARPA by the use of her hiring by President Barack Obama again in 2009. Years later beneath Dugan’s management, Constructing 8 labored on brain-computer interface expertise, growing tech that will “permit folks to ship textual content messages by considering — tapping them out at 100 phrases per minute.” Utilizing “optical expertise,” the progressive merchandise had been poised to permit Fb to “learn ideas.”
Hyping the challenge, Dugan posed a query: “What when you might sort immediately out of your mind?…It sounds inconceivable, however it’s nearer than you understand.” Sadly for Fb and hopeful expertise optimists, nevertheless, the challenge floundered.
But, it will not be the final time that Dugan labored on mind tech. From Fb, she moved on to grow to be the CEO of the Wellcome Leap — an initiative that was spun out of the Wellcome Belief, a Large-Pharma linked philanthropic group targeted on funding biomedical analysis that has troubling ties to the British Eugenics Society. Like Constructing 8, Wellcome Leap has adopted the DARPA mannequin of innovation, demonstrated by Dugan’s management position.
One of many tasks Dugan launched at Wellcome Leap is known as “The First 1000 Days (1kD),” which is targeted on “Selling Wholesome Mind Networks.” Using wearable applied sciences, this system goals to continually monitor youngsters of their first three years of life, collating information factors to allow the digital extraction of “significant indicators” from toddler brains which might be then fed into AI algorithms to “assess mind improvement” within the “actual world.” In flip, these algorithms generate a myriad of “scalable strategies” together with “therapeutic interventions” to enhance a toddler’s “govt functioning.”
This system “promotes” these “wholesome” mind networks, due to this fact, in direction of ends which might be extra clearly eugenicist in nature than Fb’s failed brain-typing pipe dream. 1kD assumes there’s a scientific mannequin of the mind that results in enhanced cognitive talents — a mannequin which the psychological organs of younger youngsters must be warped to copy via “interventions” and mass surveillance. Certainly, if this wasn’t clear sufficient, 1kD additionally goals to create an in-silico mannequin of the human mind, generated with the large quantities of knowledge mined by wearables. This system envisions this mannequin as possessing “predictive” capabilities — in a position to map the possible improvement of the mind based mostly on completely different variables. But, inherent to this technique, which goals to map, predict after which steer the event of the toddler mind in direction of higher cognitive capacities, is the concept of an superb mannequin — an allegedly scientific, data-dictated, superior model of the human mind.
Whereas the “Epstein Mind” challenge stays obscured in vagueness, it seems that inside the Tech milieu, which Epstein was so considerably linked to, exists a perception within the scientifically superior human. Within the paradigm of innovation and mass surveillance established by Large Tech overlords, this superb man is created via the extraction of human traits by data-mining units — units that may break their topics down, and reorganize them in response to in-silico requirements developed by scientists and their oligarchic benefactors.
Epstein, in the meantime, had extra direct plans for the precise “Epstein Mind” — as in, his literal mind. He reportedly sought to protect it via cryogenics, frozen upon demise to be reanimated at a later level, alongside together with his penis. Epstein possible needed to do that for egocentric causes; together with his mind and genitalia well-preserved, he might return to the fabric world which demise releases people from, after which reattach his most prized possessions to a brand new physique years after his demise. However maybe he sought to do that for noble causes too — to reward humanity with superb “fashions,” ones to be studied, replicated and used as a reference to mildew lesser brains and penises into. No matter his intentions, they possible died with him in 2019. The ideas and ideologies that formed them, nevertheless, reside on.
Chilly Harbor – Breaking You Down and Promoting the Components
Whereas many Individuals are possible unaware of the Chilly Spring Harbor Laboratory and its housing of the Eugenics Data Workplace, probably the most acclaimed tv reveals of 2025 was the second season of Ben Stiller’s Severance. Within the present, the protagonists uncover a secretive program that the company which dominates the sequence’ world, Lumin, is finishing up known as Chilly Harbor. The evil scientists conducting the operation induce in an unwitting topic, who’s saved in isolation from all of society, a number of personalities, all of which haven’t any recognition or remembrance of one another.
Whereas Lumin’s Chilly Harbor is most akin to the CIA’s secretive Chilly- Conflict-era mass torture/thoughts management program MKULTRA, it additionally parallels the underlying philosophy of eugenics; the assumption that human beings should not complete, however slightly, comprised of measurable and manipulatable components, components that with sufficient care and precision will be extracted, studied, modified and exploited to provide superior outcomes. Going again to early twentieth century eugenics, earlier than biotechnology was being produced by Large Pharma en masse, this perception was embedded within the subject, with eugenicists believing that with the proper association of society, society’s leaders might make “fascinating” traits proliferate, and wipe “undesirable” ones from existence.
With transhumanism, nevertheless, made attainable via mass surveillance-reliant biotechnology, the concept of the measurable, divided human turns into much more clear. Inherent to transhumanism is a near-religious deference to information — for within the minds of transhumanists, it’s information that extrapolates the divided components of humanity right into a type that’s relevant and manipulatable.
Certainly, it is because of this that Large Tech has made itself the car by which transhumanist infrastructure is being constructed. Many of those Large Tech oligarchs in the end imagine within the technological singularity, a dystopian future through which technological development outpaces human intelligence by such an unlimited diploma that it threatens humanity itself. For these technocrats, the answer to this alleged inevitability is a merging of the human race with synthetic intelligence — in different phrases, the creation of a grasp race, lifted to perfection by way of expertise constructed on the decades-long extraction of innumerable datapoints of unpaid serfs. Importantly, as Whitney Webb famous in her evaluation of Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt’s e-book, The Age of AI, this grasp race won’t be comprised of all people, however slightly, a selective few on the high of a brand new two-tiered system:
Within the coming society formed by the AI “revolution,” [Kissinger and Schmidt] overtly be aware that there might be two tiers of society. One tier will discover AI’s impacts “empowering”; this tier might be largely composed of “the individuals who construct [AI], practice it, process it, regulate it” in addition to “coverage makers and enterprise leaders who’ve technical advisers at their disposal.” The opposite tier might often expertise the approaching AI-driven society as “gratifying” however may even discover its impacts “disconcerting or disempowering.”
This [lower] tier will comprise “those that lack technical data, or take part in AI-managed processes primarily as customers,” which is to say the overwhelming majority of individuals.
Within the pair’s second e-book, Genesis: Synthetic Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, they make one other prediction that offers perception into how this two-tiered society will come into existence: via transhumanism. Particularly, they foresee a future the place all males should merge with machines and grow to be Homo technicus. In contrast to earlier evolutions of the Homo genus, pure choice wouldn’t push humanity into the Homo technicus future. As an alternative, the controllers of contemporary expertise would produce a acutely aware, imposed evolution of Homo sapiens, carried out within the identify of resisting AI’s allegedly inevitable domination of humanity.
Epstein nearly definitely purchased into this actuality, and it’s possible a part of the rationale why he inquired a few “‘Manhattan Venture’ for AI” to a pc scientist, in response to Bloomberg. Certainly, the first purpose of Epstein’s start-up, Southern Belief, in response to courtroom filings from the US Virgin Islands, was “to grow to be a profitable competitor within the subject of synthetic intelligence concentrated in biomedical informatics and monetary informatics algorithms and expertise.” To do that, notably, it “[focused] on information acquisitions and finding and establishing wide-ranging, all-inclusive biomedical and monetary data databases on servers positioned within the US Virgin Islands.”
Now, Epstein’s information aggregation efforts are being posthumously carried out primarily by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who’re each pursuing the “Stargate” challenge — the development of an expansive quantity of data-centers that may course of and combine the constellation of knowledge factors unfold throughout the online into AI fashions that may generate revenue and management for his or her house owners, and, as Webb famous, occasional “gratification” for everybody else.
In the end, this can be a essential a part of the context behind Epstein’s connection to the elites of academia and kings of Silicon Valley. It’s why when requested by journalist Russ Douthat if he’d desire that the human race endure, Peter Thiel umm’d and uhhh’d his approach into the now notoriously viral second the place he took a full twenty seconds to reply, “Sure, I’d.”
Much less mentioned had been Thiel’s phrases following his half-hearted assurance to Douthat. “I’d additionally like us to radically resolve these issues.” The perfect iteration of transhumanism, he went on, “was this radical transformation the place your human pure physique will get reworked into an immortal physique. And there’s a critique of, let’s say…the transvestite [as] somebody who modifications their garments and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is somebody the place you modify…your penis right into a vagina…however we would like extra transformation than that…we would like greater than cross-dressing or altering your intercourse organs” (emphasis added).
The full transformation Thiel envisions is religious:
“Transhumanism is simply altering your physique. However you additionally want to rework your soul, and you have to rework your complete self.”
Extremely, Thiel could also be proper — simply not in the way in which that he thinks. If transhumanism is just one step in “remodeling” the human spirit, this transformation won’t lead to one thing higher than the fabric notion of actuality that people are, for probably the most half, restricted to. As an alternative, a full embrace of transhumanism is poised to tether the soul to the divisions that racist eugenicists, AI algorithms, and elitist oligarchs break it into. It’s going to drag the “soul,” or no matter one would possibly think about the religious, sacred, or ethereal, solely right down to the fabric world.
Because the constructing of the technocratic infrastructure to create such a system accelerates by the day, the destiny of society — or maybe even humanity — rests on one in all two fates; whether or not the constructions of transhumanism actually can bind the soul to the fabric world, or whether or not inside us all there exists a spark of one thing higher, one thing inextinguishable, one thing that Large Tech’s all-seeing surveillance instruments can not measure, predict, or management.
We will possible assume which aspect of the argument Jeffrey Epstein would fall on.
