Happy anniversary to this piece by @RonanFarrow, which brought down Joi Ito at MIT Media Lab. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university-research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein

If you’ll recall, this piece gave rise to two things:

1. Lots of Silicon Valley notables withdrawing their names from the appalling http://wessuportjoi.org  petition built by Ito’s acolytes [and you can see the deletion of the site between 9/6-9/8/19 at http://archive.org ]

2. And a farrago of bullshit from fellow enablers. On 7/11/19, hedge fund managers posited Epstein was a ponzi scheme funded by blackmail. Yet on 9/8/19, Ito enabler Larry Lessig somehow, sans receipts, cracked the case to Epstein’s finances... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/hedge-funders-have-some-thoughts-on-what-epstein-was-doing.html

...telling us with confidence that Epstein’s $ was not “blood money”. How anyone with, to my knowledge, no experience taking down a sex trafficker knows Epstein’s money wasn’t blood money is still beyond me. Is he a forensic accounting expert? Receipts? https://link.medium.com/m8rLnQlMA9 

Then folks chimed in to tell us that regardless of the misery heaped on the backs of hundreds of trafficked children and young women, perhaps we should pay attention to the very Gordon Gekko/Ayn Rand notion that money allows people to forget violence. https://twitter.com/bryancampen/status/1172504035448037376?s=21

At the same time, the very women who had the credibility to bring down Epstein, based on their experience and testimony, were discarded and labeled as “nuts” by luminaries who also, unquestioningly, signed Joi’s petition. https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1164023584999632897

There was a lot of minimizing of horror. For example, Harvard’s George Church, who took Epstein’s blood money for years, minimized Epstein’s trafficking of minors by comparing his blood money to tobacco sales... https://twitter.com/bryancampen/status/1294731913828143107

John Brockman, who grew only closer to Epstein as they celebrated his release from prison, whose “billionaire dinners” were funded almost entirely by Epstein, is still an agent to many notable science and tech writers out there. He’s remained silent...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation

...while friends continue to drop his name...

...and thank him...

...and run crisis PR for him. https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1216701493895544834

How the hell is it that the press has not insisted all these intellectual giants push Brockman for an answer? How did so many men come to praise Epstein for two decades, remain in the room with him at Brockman’s dinners for years (post conviction) yet never speak up against him?

As someone who used to look up to many of the people I mentioned above, and as a former fellow at Long Now (of which many of the people above are part of the board) I had truly expected at least one of these people to display minimal courage and address this. That didn’t happen.