Mass-media coverage of l’affaire Epstein has focused on two things in particular: the more salacious aspects of the late financier/influence broker’s activities, and some of the famous people who appear to have associated with him in some form. Shining a light on the abuses that Epstein and his associates committed is, of course, a necessary endeavour. I applaud the efforts of all who have been pursuing the truth in this case. Journalists who are making a sincere effort to cover the Epstein case in the entirety of its details and implications run the risk of upsetting their bosses, sources, and experts. This is because the facts of Epstein’s behind-the-scenes work make a lot of important people in media and academia look really, really bad.
The bulk of the published commentary on the Epstein scandal takes the typically credulous position that, sexual abuse and corruption notwithstanding, the real crime here is that a few important people allowed their normally impeccable standards of moral rectitude to sag to an extent that permitted the knowledge and perhaps, in the most extreme cases, even the enabling of some of Epstein’s misdeeds. These complaints are usually accompanied by hollow lamentations about a “lack of accountability” in circles of power. What the reader never sees is what “accountability” would entail, how it would be established and/or enforced, or why we’re supposed to think that it alone would curb ruling-class abuses in the slightest, but that’s neither here nor there.
A few of the third estate’s sharper residents have picked up on Epstein’s pattern of befriending academics. Even then, the inquiry has been mostly content to stop at empty shame-slinging over the mere fact of these ostensibly smart individuals’ past acquaintance with the deceased mega-creep, only occasionally entertaining speculation that some of them might have been in on some of the creepery. Being known to have chummed around with Epstein, been charmed by his flattery, visited his private island, and/or exchanged with him advice on dealing with bad publicity is certainly embarrassing for respected public intellectuals like Lawrence Krauss and Alan Dershowitz. Normally shrewd in his wishy-washiness, Noam Chomsky has had his embarrassment compounded by the revelation that he might also have broken kayfabe by schmoozing not just with Epstein, but with political operative Steve Bannon of all people. While these well-deserved public humiliations are certainly fun to point and laugh at, the focus on this particular aspect of the story has served to obscure another important detail: Epstein is also known to have given considerable sums of money to research institutions, university administrators, and individual academics.
Some of the most important information concerning Epstein’s activities as an influence broker and freelance academic impresario was made public several years ago. MIT published law firm Goodwin Procter’s report on its investigation into Epstein’s involvement there on January 10, 2020. Harvard’s report on Epstein’s activities there, authored by two of its in-house lawyers and one from Foley Hoag, was published in May of 2020, when, I’m told, major media outlets were preoccupied with another story. That these reports have been largely overlooked is unfortunate, as they contain some priceless insights into the state of pay-for-play at elite research institutions. To anyone interested in the nuts and bolts, I recommend reading both of these reports in full. While the more recently released “Epstein files” appear to consist mainly of emails and press clippings that feed the media’s preferred focus on the “who knew who” aspect of the scandal, the MIT and Harvard reports provide specific details on substantial payments made by Epstein to university departments and individual researchers. I’ll go ahead and ask a couple of questions few journalists have seen as being worthy of their time and energy: To whom did Epstein give money and why?
•Joichi Ito
The MIT report emphasizes former MIT Media Lab Director Ito’s obstinate and unseemly pursuit of Epstein’s money. Epstein donated to Ito’s discretionary account at MIT as well as to at least one of Ito’s outside business ventures. Ito ended up being one of the first public figures to take the fall over the Epstein scandal. He resigned not only from his positions at MIT and Harvard, but also from the boards of organizations including The New York Times Company and the ubiquitous John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
In his official bio, Ito has the temerity to claim that he “works to tackle complex problems such as climate change and social inequity and redesign the systems of scholarship and science.” In the real world, Ito has spent the last few decades acting as a mouthpiece for the technology companies that are ravaging the planet and, as his partnership with Epstein shows, a money-grubbing gatekeeper with a vested interest in keeping the “systems of scholarship and science” exactly as they are: precisely aligned with the existing social inequity. He now serves as president of the Chiba Institute of Technology.
•Marvin Minsky
Epstein’s earliest known contribution to MIT, a $100,000 gift given in 2002, was in support of Minsky’s research. The MIT report quotes an email in which Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte calls Minsky “[Epstein’s] closest friend.” Epstein’s support of Minsky would later be used by Ito as a justification for accepting more money from the by-then disgraced financier.
Minsky spent most of his career working backwards from the a priori conclusion that humans are machines and the mind is a computer. What a bizarre thing for a computer scientist to say. That Minsky is one of the academics to have been appointed “father of artificial intelligence” is yet another telling illustration of the AI crowd’s vacuousness.
•Joscha Bach
Bach has the distinction of coming off the worst of any of Epstein’s ivory tower-dwelling email correspondents. The MIT report reveals that it was Epstein who introduced Bach to Ito and that Epstein “subsidized the cost” of Bach’s hiring by the Media Lab. Bach would later espouse scientific racism and sexism in emails with Epstein, deploying argumentation of a standard that even the average Klan member would find lacking. In his scholarly work, which is of similarly execrable quality, Bach exhibits a relentless drive to liken every conceivable aspect of human mental and spiritual life to computer software. He takes pains to make “artificial intelligence” appear possible by confining actually existing intelligence to the stultifying boundaries of prefabricated Silicon Valley terminology.
The attention given to the Epstein files appears to have motivated Bach to offer a couple of public apologies, the specifics of which show that he is still well aware of the side on which his bread is buttered. He superficially disavows racism while reifying its pseudoscientific underpinnings: the calculated misunderstanding of intelligence as a discrete attribute that can be measured and ranked, and the notion of biological “race” itself.
•Martin Nowak
Epstein must have seen something extra-special in Nowak, as he spent far more on the Austrian mathematician/biologist’s career advancement than he did for anyone else in his stable. Epstein helped Nowak move from Princeton to Harvard and financed, to the tune of $6.5 million, the establishment of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, of which Nowak would serve as director. The Harvard report also indicates that Epstein introduced Nowak to shady financier Leon Black, who would go on to kick in a similarly large contribution to Nowak’s cause. Epstein even introduced Nowak to Joscha Bach, who joined the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics roster shortly thereafter.
Nowak’s work on evolutionary theory is weighed down by an inveterate reliance upon the precepts of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson’s thinly veiled rebranding of social Darwinism. His research group accomplished nothing of importance before being shut down by Harvard in 2021 as part of its post-Epstein damage control efforts.
•Stephen Kosslyn
Kosslyn’s scholarly output similarly conceptualizes human thought in technological terms. The Harvard report indicates that Epstein gave the university $200,000 to support Kosslyn’s work. Coincidentally, the Harvard report singles him out as the helping hand responsible for Epstein’s laughable appointment as a visiting fellow there. Around the time of Epstein’s donations in support of his work, Kosslyn was co-director of Harvard’s Mind of the Market Lab, which purported to help corporate clients manipulate consumers with the use of insights gleaned through research in cognition and neuroscience. With some apparent thematic consistency, Kosslyn has more recently hopped enthusiastically aboard the AI grift train.
•Seth Lloyd
A quantum computing expert who argues, strangely enough, that the universe is a kind of quantum computer, Lloyd is shown in the MIT report to have received official donations totaling $225,000 and a “personal gift” of $60,000 from Epstein.
What do all of the academics and university administrators with whom Epstein is known to have associated have in common? One thread that unites all of them is that Epstein perceived that they could do something for him. Ito, for example, was clearly a useful guy to know at the time of Epstein’s association with him, given his extensive portfolio of high-profile directorships. More generally, some of the emails that have recently been made public have shown that Epstein’s academic “philanthropy” was motivated in part by his desire to launder his reputation and bury some of the critical coverage that followed his first criminal conviction. However, this doesn’t explain why he chose to back the specific researchers he did.
One thing that jumps out about the coterie of professors whom Epstein is known to have supported financially is their promotion of bad ideas that coincided with Epstein’s personal and class interests. Epstein demonstrated a clear inclination to support academics who were proffering mechanistic ideas that fallaciously liken biological organisms, the human mind, and/or existence itself to latter-day manmade technologies. This kind of thinking serves to bolster the social-Darwinist conceits of capitalist ideology. After all, if the mind is a computer, well, everyone knows that some computers have more processing power than others, right? And, in the tortured logic that dominant classes have espoused since time immemorial, an individual’s superior position is proof of that individual’s superiority. Social Darwinism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and all of the other self-same threads of modern bourgeois thought exist as feeble attempts to disguise that self-serving fallacy as impartial science. Meanwhile, the systematic efforts of naive mechanists like Minsky to downplay the complexity of the human mind and the ontological context in which it exists also have the effect of lending credence to the kind of simplistic explanations and non-solutions that subsist in the polluted air of the political spectacle.
The kind of wheel-greasing that Epstein and other billionaires have done for their hand-picked academic proteges warrants closer scrutiny. Individuals like Epstein, Bill Gates, and Leon Black aren’t dumb. They know what they’re doing, especially when it comes to extracting capital from all accessible sources. They spend big money promoting specific ideas for specific reasons, and that practice doesn’t benefit the public. Joscha Bach stands out as a stark example of how wealthy backers can easily elevate tired buffoonery to the perceived status of “expertise.” Left-branded commentators like to bemoan the erosion of trust in and respect for science, usually pinning the blame on imaginary yokels motivated by kneejerk anti-intellectualism and/or evangelical Christianity. In reality, people who exercise their ability to think critically and logically will decline to extend unconditional trust or respect to prominent scientists or elite institutions for at least as long as those entities continue to act in a way that shows them to be unworthy of trust and produce work that shows them to be unworthy of respect.
What can we do about this? We can start by being more circumspect about whose advice we take. When you see someone who is being presented as an expert pontificating on a hot topic such as so-called “artificial intelligence,” it never hurts to know who’s paying them to say what they’re saying. Jeffrey Epstein may be dead, but the time-tested practice of cloaking ruling-class ideology in scientific garb lives on.