The Epstein files as squid ink

It's shredded into chaff.

In the field of military aviation, a well-known countermeasure consists of “chaff” dispersed to disrupt radar systems, such as strips of aluminium ejected from a fighter jet to divert incoming homing missiles.

There’s a sense in which this Epstein files information bomb has a similar effect.

One should first note how the bits and pieces of data that this supposedly enormous revelation provides are not anything akin to a coherent whole. It’s dumping a puzzle with ten thousand pieces over an unsuspecting and overworked population, replete with misleading hints, false leads and explanations that will come off as so massively implausible to the majority that they will be liable to ignore the whole affair altogether.

WW2 manufacturing of chaff

The tactic of information overload is probably the single most effective way to hide something of this magnitude in plain sight.

As a population of modern mass societies, we’re already primed, through a superabundance of disjointed and meaningless representations, to respond to the spectacle with a certain disbelief, a detached amusement. We approach information as a form of distraction rather than a source of knowledge, and the flak of the Epstein affair is modelled after the same no-context information flow that TikTok, Twitter and Instagram have established as the predominant mode of public discourse.

Even so, the contents of the Epstein affair tickles the hindbrain in a unique way since it predominantly regards the affairs of the rich and powerful, and as social primates, we find such things utterly fascinating. For this reason, all of this information, when cut up into chaff and reproduced by the no-context digital media machinery, is a uniquely entertaining media product with a nearly infinite potential for branching sequels and spinoffs that is sure to command our fragmented attention for a long time. At the same time, the very nature of our reception of the information inhibits meaningful action. On some level, we do not regard it as real, as something which should merit real political action or organization, but rather as engaging but ultimately trivial amusement.

And the remarkable thing is that this reception of distraction and amusement is perfectly compatible with our firm conviction that a Satanic global elite is habitually cooking babies on skewers. As a society, we are trained to passively consume media content, neither with concern for what it actually means in the grand scheme of things, nor with any thought as to how we should act on this information in our daily lives.

For these reasons, we should expect the Epstein media event to have a pacifying effect on the aggregate level. It will command attention, but only towards the shiny bits of chaff that catch the sunlight in any given moment, rather than as any kind of coherent narrative about deep events or the corrupt power structure that could be acted upon politically in any meaningful way.

Of course, there will be astroturfed organizations designed to soak up any and all political energy that could be devoted to meaningful resistance, followed by a handful of cathartic convictions of high-profile personas that then serve to dissipate it.

Another crucial aspect is the traumatizing impact of these revelations of massive elite corruption, another dimension of the “Lovecraftian mode of politics” by which I previously tried to describe the current state of affairs. To a large part of the population, these narratives will have a very disconcerting effect since they are liable to challenge the fundamental moral framework of the majority’s worldview, something which will tend to destabilize one’s identity.

Kubrick and Burgess on the set of A Clockwork Orange

And while this kind of metanoia could in principle galavanize a counter-movement or a resistance, much in the same way that the Protestant reformation was originally sparked, in our situation, it’s rather likely to have a fragmenting effect.

For one, we don’t have a visible, coherent resistance movement that provides a clear alternative to the established order. The political and ideological landscape is fragmented and thoroughly recuperated, and there’s no obvious and potentially meaningful direction towards which a traumatized and newly awakened population can gravitate towards. Instead, they will fragment into a thousand different directions, with the more important ones already thoroughly colonized by the power structure beforehand. The radical right, in its modern form originally generated through the myth of the War on Terror, while previously isolationist and non-capitalist is now appropriately and unambiguously a force for expansionism and imperialism. The left, with few exceptions, is reduced to tacitly neoliberal champions of consumerism and the supremacy of Western cultural institutions.

So what’s our attention being diverted from?

The same old, of course. The struggle over hegemony and resources. In detail, there are many viable options, but as we’re all aware, there’s at the moment a massive buildup towards a serious conflict with Iran.

And while the world mounted history’s largest demonstrations the last time the US was poised to murder millions of people in the Middle East on a pretext of lies, this time, we’re literally out in the streets in pro-monarchy protests, hot on the heels of the internal subversions backed by foreign intelligence, clamoring for imperialist aggression, everything nicely convergent with the Munich security conference. The parliamentarian left, all across the west, is simultaneously pushing for a violent destabilization of the Iranian government, joining forces with the most hawkish of neocons, effectively driving a wedge between the pro-Palestinian movement and the broader left.

LA last week

The only thing that’s really standing erect in this institutional maelstrom is the Church, and more and more people are indeed finding their way back home to her.

“In the end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright.”

And after expenses
And pulling up fences
No more airplanes

And putting your foot down
A nail shot up like a bright red snowflake

Just like a dinosaur act