THE PROPHIT

Local, state, and federal investigators continue to work around the clock collecting evidence from the blast. The early morning explosion severely injured Yale University computer scientist David Glertner. He was apparently opening his mail in his office at about 8:15 when the bomb went off. The FBI is investigating the link between this letter bomb and an explosion earlier this week that named a genetics professor at the University of California at San Francisco. >> I don't think that there is any motive that can possibly establish at this date. There has been none. So far as I understand, there's been no credit taken for either bombing and no motive that's been expressed. >> The connection is something that we just can't address at the moment because we just don't know. >> Professor Gertner has been at Yale for 11 years. He's one of the world's leading experts with parallel computer processing. >> It's the use of a number of computers uh running simultaneously to solve large problems. >> Shortly after the male bomb exploded at Yale, a threatening phone call was made to the VA medical center in West Haven. David Girtner's brother Joel is a genetic scientist at the VA hospital as well as a Yale faculty member. >> About midm morning, we received an anonymous telephone call to our switchboard saying, "You are next." >> VA officials tell us the Connecticut State Police bomb squad was here checking out what appeared to be a suspicious looking padded envelope, but an X-ray of that package revealed it was not threatening. Meanwhile, the homes of both Joe Glnerner and his brother remain under tight security. The FBI says investigators have to presume that David Girtner was an intended target, although they say it's still not determined why he would be singled out. Weeks after he was arrested at the Montana Shack he called home, Ted Kazinski stands formally accused tonight of being the so-called uniomber. By the time Theodore Kazinski was arrested in 1996, the public narrative seemed straightforward. A mathematician had retreated from modern society and spent years attacking people he associated with technological progress. But listen carefully to the targets. David Girtner worked in computation. His brother Joel was a genetic scientist. Charles Epstein also worked in genetics. These were not random professions. They belonged to fields Kazinski increasingly treated as parts of the same technological system. Computers, genetics, psychology, surveillance, behavioral control, capital. To Kazinski, these were not separate developments. They were parts of an emerging technological structure that would eventually become difficult for individuals to refuse. And Glertner represented one of its most visible architects. Glirtner had imagined institutions existing twice. Once in the physical world and once inside software. A city with an informationational double. A corporation reflected in data. A society observing itself through the screen. What we would now call the cloud. The digital twin. The smart city. Glertner saw this as a natural development of computation. Kazinski saw the word natural as the problem. In 1995, he wrote to Gertner, "They are inevitable only because techneins believed that technological systems did not simply disappear. Specialists built them. Scientists extended them. Corporations commercialized them. States adopted them, consumers adapted to them, and eventually the system became the environment. That was the theory. But years later, another man began following the actual relationships behind it. German filmmaker Lutz Damonbeck asked a deceptively simple question, why Glertner? And instead of answering it with a biography, he drew a map of different interconnected nodes. Gertner, John Brockman, Steuart Brand, cybernetics, military research, behavioral science, the computer counterculture, the emerging digital elite. He called his film the net. And the title works in more than one direction. The net was the emerging internet, the electronic network spreading across the planet, the global village, the dream of a global brain. But it was also another kind of net, a network of people, scientists, publishers, artists, technologists, military researchers, financeers, people linked not by one organization but by introductions, institutions, money, ideas, and access. And there's also a third meaning and that is also something you get caught in. The more connections it forms, the harder it becomes to stand outside it. That ambiguity is the organizing idea of this film. The net as infrastructure, the net as an elite network, the net as an enclosure. Danbeck was trying to understand whether Kazinski had attacked an isolated computer scientist or one visible point inside something larger. And when you follow that map forward, something strange happens because one of the most important names in that network was not yet visible. a financeier, a patron of scientists, a man who understood that access to intellectuals could itself become a form of power. And by the time Danbeck was constructing his map, that man was already financing part of the network. Mirror Worlds. crit. The idea of uh Mirror Worlds. The book was that the institutions and the organizations that we deal with every day that are becoming more complicated all the time would be mirrored in software. So that if I wanted to know what was happening at the university, I could look at the software image of the university and find out what was being taught and who was saying what and what was happening today and so forth. If I wanted to, if I needed to deal with a government agency or with uh a company or with a hospital or with any organization, the organization would be reflected in software uh like a building reflected in water. It seemed to me that with the rise of global computer networks and more and more powerful desktop computers that this would inevitably emerge. Nobody can control it. That's true, but it's not necessarily bad. It's an organic system. It's a distributed system. It's a system made of many tens and hundreds of millions of human beings. Uh each one making his own decisions. And um and the uncontrollability is not necessarily bad. It makes things interesting. When you got a letter B that wasn't virtual, it was reality. >> David Girtner was not simply a man who worked with computers. He was attempting to describe what the worked computer would become. His importance was not that every prediction came true exactly as written. It was that he recognized the direction. Institutions would acquire software reflections. People would increasingly encounter the institutions through the reflection. Eventually, the information layer could become more actionable than the physical thing it represented. To Kazinski, that was not liberation. It was the construction of an environment in which human beings would be forced to adapt themselves to the requirements of the system. The distinction matters. Kazinski was not arguing that every computer scientist secretly desired tyranny. His claim was systematic. Specialists pursue advances inside their own domain. The geneticist advances genetics. The psychologist advances behavioral techniques. The computer scientist advances computation. The corporation commercializes the result. The state regulates and deploys it. The consumer adopts it as a convenience. No single participant needs to intend the final structure. The structure emerges from the interaction between them. That was Kazinsk's real enemy. Not one machine, not one inventor, a selfexpanding system. Nothing about that analysis excuses what he did. Kazinski murdered three people and injured 23 others. The dead had names. Hugh Scrutton, a computer store owner, killed in 1985. Thomas Moser and an advertising executive and father killed in his home in 1994. Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, killed in 1995. They were human beings, not symbols. And no philosophical argument transforms a bomb into legitimate criticism. But refusing to romanticize the violence does not require us to misunderstand the target selection. The bomb sent to Glertner was not random. Kllinski later attacked the premise that technological development was inevitable if there was no specialist advancing the field. He argued the field could not advance itself. Glirtner described an organic distributed system that no one could control. Dazinski looked at the same description and saw the problem. The pattern did not begin in 1993. To understand why psychology and behavioral control belonged beside computation and genetics in Kazinsk's worldview, we have to move backward. Eight years before the Glertner bombing, another package arrived at the University of Michigan. Its target was psychologist James McConnell. McConnell had become famous through experiments involving learning and memory in flatworms. But he was also publicly associated with a much more controversial idea, behavior modification. the possibility that scientific techniques could be used not merely to understand behavior but to shape it. The package was opened by McConnell's assistant Nicholas Suno. Both men were injured. So now another field enters the map. Not computation, not genetics, psychology, behavioral science. And there is a strange biographical reason this particular domain matters. Because decades before Kazinski attacked a psychologist associated with behavior modification, Kazinski himself had been the subject of a psychological experiment. Ted Kazinski entered Harvard in 1958 at 16 years old. Beginning the following year, he volunteered for a study directed by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Inside the experiment, Kazinski was assigned a code name lawful. From the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Mari's team studied 22 Harvard undergraduates. The subjects were asked to write intensely personal statements explaining their philosophies, values, and beliefs. Then those beliefs were turned against them. Each student was placed across from an adversary who had been given his philosophy written beforehand. The adversar's job was not simply to disagree. It was to attack. Mari described the confrontations as involving venom, sweeping, and personally abusive assault upon the subject's beliefs. The encounters were filmed. Sociological responses were recorded and afterward the subjects were required to watch themselves undergoing the confrontation. But Murray's interest in human behavior under pressure had another history. During the Second World War, he had worked with the Office of Strategic Service, the OSS, the American Intelligence Organization that preceded the CIA. Murray helped develop methods for evaluating intelligence recruits under psychological stress. One technique placed the candidate before interrogators under a bright light. Questions became increasingly aggressive. contradictions were exploited. The candidate would be mocked, challenged, and accused of being dishonest. The objective was to observe the personality under pressure. Years later, Theodore Kazinski found himself inside another experimental apparatus built around confrontation and psychological stress. That coincidence has generated decades of speculation. Some accounts have connected the Harvard experiment directly to MK Ultra. Others have claimed that Kazinski was secretly administered LSD. The surviving evidence establishes neither claim and there is no responsible basis for saying that Henry Murray's experiment created the uni bomber. Kazinsk's ideology developed through many influences over many years, but the historical reversal remained striking before Kazinski became one of America's most extreme critics of psychological manipulation. He had personally experienced an institutional experiment designed to place the individual under controlled psychological pressure. That does not explain his later violence, but it does place behavioral science somewhere more intimate than abstract theory. It had already entered his life. And decades later, when Kazinski wrote about psychology, propaganda, and behavior modification as technologies capable of adapting human beings to industrial society. He was writing as someone who had once sat on the other side of the experiment. Now the pattern becomes clearer. James McConnell, behavioral science. Charles Epstein, genetics. David Glertner, computation. Gertner's brother, Joel, a genetic scientist, received an additional threat. You're next. And in 1995, Kazinski sent warning letters to molecular biologists Richard Roberts and Philip Sharp. They were the domains Kazinski would later place beside one another in industrial society and its future. Computers expanded the capacity to process information. Surveillance supplied information. Psychology made behavior increasingly measurable and modifiable. Biotechnology brought the organism itself within technical intervention. His argument was that the significance lay not in any one technology but in what happened when they reinforced one another. Capital rewards technologies that produce efficiency, prediction and control and institutions integrate those technologies into everyday life. No single component possesses the power of the combined system. The power exists in the connections. This is the point Kazinski believed technological criticism repeatedly missed. Each innovation arrives with its own narrow justification. Efficiency, security, health, convenience, scientific progress, economic growth. Considered independently, each can appear reasonable. But once introduced, technologies change the environment surrounding them. The voluntary becomes expected. The expected becomes necessary. And eventually the person who refuses the technology is no longer living inside the environment that existed before it. That was why Kazinski insisted that the technological system could not be understood one invention at a time. The machine was not the computer. The machine was not genetics. The machine was not psychology. the machine was the relationship between them. And in 1995, he forced that argument into public view. After threatening additional violence, Kazinski demanded publication of his approximately 35,000word manuscript, Industrial Society and its future. The Washington Post and the New York Times jointly arranged for its publication with the complete text appearing as a special section in the post. The decision was controversial, but publication created the opening that ultimately ended the bombing campaign. Ted's younger brother, David Kazinski, read the manifesto. He recognized ideas, vocabulary, turns of phrase, patterns of argument. David and his wife, Linda Patrick, brought their suspicions to an attorney who contacted the FBI. Investigators began comparing the anonymous manifesto with Kazinsk's earlier writings. Vocabulary, spelling, phrasing, reoccurring ideas. The linguistic evidence was not the entire case, but it became an important bridge between the text circulating across America and the man living alone in Montana. On April 3rd, 1996, federal agents arrested Theodore Kazinski outside his cabin. Inside, they found bomb making materials, extensive journals, and a completed bomb ready for mailing. In January 1998, Kazinski pleaded guilty. He received life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He died in federal custody in June 2023 at 81 years old. His bombing campaign was over, but the argument that motivated it survived. Kazinski described the system. Danbeck tried to draw it, but the intellectual architecture beneath that map was older than either man, older than Silicon Valley, older than the personal computer. It begins in the aftermath of the Second World War. The intellectual architecture beneath Danbeck's map begins after the Second World War. Norbert Winer's cybernetics offered a language of communication, control, and feedback. But cybernetics did not remain confined to mathematics or engineering. After the second world war, scientists began asking whether the same principles could explain something much larger. machines, brains, organizations, societies, perhaps even human behavior itself. Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation sponsored 10 interdisiplinary meetings in New York, the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. Their intellectual roots reached directly into the Second World War. Winer had worked on the mathematical problem with anti-aircraft prediction. How do you shoot down an aircraft whose pilot reacts to your attempt to shoot it down? The gunner observes the aircraft. The pilot responds. The gunner corrects. The pilot corrects again. Action produces information. Information produces another action. a loop. What began as a military engineering problem suggests that a larger principle, a system, could regulate itself by receiving information about the consequences of its own behavior. Winer called this emerging science cybernetics, control and communication in the animal and the machine. At the Macy conferences, the categories began collapsing into one another. Mathematics, engineering, neurosciology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, information theory. Participants included Winer, John von Newman, Claude Shannon, Warren McGulla, Margaret me, Gregory Bateson, and eventually Hinesvine Forester. They were not studying the same object. That was precisely the point. They were asking whether radically different systems could be understood through the same underlying language. information, feedback, memory, learning, communication, control, circular causality. A thermostat could regulate temperature. An organism could regulate itself. A brain could process information. A group could respond to feedback. A society might be examined as a communicating system. The machine could be described like an organism and the organism could increasingly be described like a machine. Cybernetics gave previously separate disciplines a common vocabulary. This was not a single ideology or secret organization. It was a shared conceptual language. The people around the Macy table disagreed profoundly about what cybernetics meant and how far its principles could legitimately extend. But the conferences established a question that would haunt everything that followed. One participant carried that question further than almost anyone else. Philosoph. I'm brainwash. and meticul. So there are the spir of mathematic foreign. Yeah. machine system. Yeah. foreign. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. >> Von Foster carried cybernetics into what would become known as secondorded cybernetics. The study not merely of systems but of the observer participating inside the system being observed. That idea is essential to the net. The map maker is not outside the map and eventually this language escaped the laboratory moving into art, media and culture. One of the people who recognized this convergence was John Brockman. >> And all these people were experimenting with media. They were dealing with technological stuff, you know. Uh um nobody was talking about cybernetics at the time, but they were all reading McLuhan. U Rosenberg told me about McLuhan, suggested I read it. and Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Nova Weiner and said this is something for you because of I was extremely interested in uh notions of feedback and nonlinearity. I got a call from AK Solomon and he had read about the expanded cinema festival said you know we have all these scientists up here at Harvard MIT and a group of us would like to invite a group of artists to spend a couple of days and in a in a seminar uh you know to talk about mutual interests. So, uh, I was invited to put this together, which I did. And then they took us to see the computer. There was a room and everybody there was wearing white coats and they were cold and we were cold watching the computer and all these cards and f you know file cards and I just stood there like with a like a kid with my nose against the window and it was so exciting and I have no idea why. Jay-Z Young said um we create tools and then we mold oursel through our use of them. And I suddenly realized that reality isn't this thing in front of us on a precenium stage. It's a movable feast. We we are creating technologies. Then we are the technologies. It's not your heart is like a pump. Your heart is a pump. It's not your brain is like a computer. Your brain is a computer until the next thing comes along. now you're a neural net or now you're an information system widened. So there was Heines Foster who was the dean of the world cyberneticists. It was Gregory Bateson uh Stuart Brand um almost all these people were authors as I was. I'd read all their books and um no one in New York had a clue that there was something happening that there was a a consciousness or mindset that had evolved and you could connect all these people like you can connect this and this you know there are ways to put it together and to see a cohesive hole and they were bestselling authors and they were getting screwed by the publishing industry. So, uh, I was, uh, dragooned into becoming an agent because I had a business background and they said, "Why don't you just go back and look after our interests? It'll take you an hour a day." And I thought it would be a nice way to pick up some money while I wrote books. And uh, uh, I found out very quickly that it was uh, it was sitting on an oil well and I couldn't control. And uh, that was 30 years ago. In 1993, someone attacked your network. We we we talked about your network and David Garner, one of your fabulous writers, received a letter bomb from the unit bomber, >> right? >> Why do you think he was a target? >> Well, I I know it was a target. this madman, criminal madman, uh would read the New York Times and uh a lot of the people he picked as targets were people that John Marov had profiled. So uh Gala was the subject of one of the biggest profiles ever in the Times in 1991. And I'm sure that had something to do with it. Una, he studied in Harvard and he was a mathematician. >> Yeah. And he's a sick criminal. I wouldn't have a serious discussion about this guy, you know, he doesn't uh rise to the level uh I think he's a he's a guy that wrote this manifesto that he couldn't possibly get published because it's written so badly and it's so flawed. So in order to get it published, he kill people. End of story. People can have arguments about environment and science and but you don't need to kill people to make your point and I I wouldn't uh dignify him by discussing him any further. Let's change the subject. >> Brockman moved between art, science, media, technology and business as literary agent and later through the edge foundation. He assembled an intellectual network around prominent scientists and technologists. He called this project the third culture. Scientists would no longer remain inside narrow academic specialties while literary intellects interpreted the meaning of their discoveries. The scientists would become the public intellects. They would explain the universe, the brain, evolution, consciousness in the future directly to the culture through his agency, books, and eventually the Edge Foundation. Brockman became the broker connecting them. Danbeck called its inhabitants the Digerati, a cyber elite connecting science, media, and capital. As we saw from his own mouth, David Girtner was one of Brockman's represented authors. This was the connection that caused Danbeck to reconsider the 1993 bombing. Had Kazinski attacked an individual computer scientist, or had he struck one visible element of something larger? Danbeck followed that line into an elite network of scientists, artists, technologists, and media figures. This is where the net becomes more than a film about the uni bomber. Danbeck places Kazinski beside the computer counterculture. The comparison initially appears impossible. One side retreats into the wilderness of Montana and declares technological society unreformable. The other embraces networks, personal computers, and the new possibility of a new electronic commons. But both emerge from the same historical crisis. The centralized institutions of the postwar world appeared rigid, bureaucratic, and dehumanizing. The question was, what came next? For Steuart Brand in the computer counterculture, the network could dissolve centralized authority. Information wanted to move. Computers could become personal tools. Electronic communities could organize themselves from below. The network could liberate the individual from the institution. But this relationship with the computer was not merely philosophical. There was a moment when the counterculture in militaryfunded computing physically occupied the same room. In December 1968, Douglas England demonstrated a radically different vision of computing, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative editing, video conferencing, interaction. The presentation became known as the mother of all demos. Technologies that would help define personal computing were emerging in part from a federally funded research environment connected to national defense. Engelbart's system had been developed at the Stanford Research Institution with funding from ARPA and support from the United States Air Force. And standing inside the demonstration team was Stuart Brand, the countercultural figure who organized the Trips Festival, one of the defining events of the San Francisco psychedelic counterculture. Brand would go on to create the whole earth catalog. Yet Engelbart's surviving production notes list Brand as part of the demonstration team consultation camera assistant stage. The connection could hardly be more literal. The counterculture was helping present militaryfunded computer research to the world. brand looked at Anglebart's system and saw a tool a means of augmenting the individual in decentralizing information rather than merely centralizing control. That philosophy became central to the whole earth catalog access to tools. Eventually the computer itself became one of those tools. This is one of the greatest paradoxes of the digital revolution. Technologies developed inside large institutions could be instruments for escaping large institutions. The infrastructure of control could also become infrastructure for individual autonomy. And this is precisely where Kazinski and Brand separated. brand saw the possibility that technology could distribute power. Kazinski believed that whatever freedom it initially provided would eventually be absorbed by the larger technological system surrounding it. The same machine, two completely different predictions about where it would lead. And Brand had already placed his prediction on the cover of the whole earth catalog, a NASA satellite photograph of the planet Earth seen from outside itself. For the first time, humanity could look down upon the world as one interconnected system. Brand summarized the responsibility created by that new perspective in one extraordinary declaration. We are as gods and might as well get good at it. That was the countercultural wager. Humanity had already acquired godlike technological power. The answer to brand was not to abandon it, but become wise enough to use it. Kazinski saw the opposite. The more godlike the system became, the less power any individual would possess over its direction. One saw technological power as something humanity could learn to control. The other believed it would eventually control humanity. And when Danbeck placed that comparison directly before Stuart Brand, Brand gave an answer Glertner could not accept. Stuart, uh, you offered two lines in the catalog. How to use a computer and, uh, how to build a cabin in the woods like Soro, one of the American icons. Uh, on one side you offered technology and on the other side anti-technology in one book. >> Mhm. I agree. Was there a discussion about that among the users of the catalog or was it a conflict? What was your position in this time? >> We came down on one side of the conflict between technology and anti-technology. We came down on the side of technology basically on the theory of the way to make a technology work for you is just grab it and run with it and go do whatever you want with that technology. And uh if that happens and everybody does that and these technologies basically get democratized then they will work out. Okay. If you fail to do that and just say they're very very evil and I will never touch them then they have complete freedom to be as evil as they want. You know who wound up in Thoro's cabin was the uniomber was Ted Kazinski. >> Yeah. >> Saying this is evil evil. Evil and I'll prove it by killing some of the people who uh do it. Um, and then you know that line then leads to Bill Joy saying, you know, Ted Kazinski is right about a few things. You read his stuff and there's some sensible critique in there that we need to take seriously because, you know, what if we democratize uh weapons of mass destruction? Is that a good thing? It was okay to democratize personal computers and the internet, but what about weapons of mass destruction? It's a fair question and that's one that we're now dealing with in the early 21st century. Um I think it will eventually sort out but it's a it's a real question. Uh well he was saying the culture is going a whole direction here and I think it's a dangerous direction and I will personally prevent it from going there. And uh he got heard by vile means but he got heard. >> As I prepared the film, I had a talk also with Stuart Brand. You know him is also a digital rally. And he said to me, "This is a genuine counterculture phenomenon that the Uni Bomber was doing. He was just saying culture is going in the wrong direction. I will fight it." >> I think that's a contemptable that's a despicable thing to say. It's a despicable thing to say. Uh we're talking about somebody who murdered human beings. Uh if he'd met the the the widow and the children as I have of men this criminal has murdered, he would be less eager to describe him as a mere countercultural phenomenon. That's the sort of thing that makes me angry. It's no exact for a political language or you know in the history it's >> once a man is a murderer I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. Uh what I know about him is that he's a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering and his his opinions are are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being. >> Gertner rejects the comparison sharply, arguing that once someone murders people, their opinions lose intellectual legitimacy. That disagreement matters because Brand and Galertner are not actually saying the same thing. Brand is trying to locate Kazinski historically. Galertner is refusing to separate the ideas from the violence. And then Galertner makes another claim that pushes the argument somewhere else entirely. And we're now seeing uh new it's it's easier to have a new TV station. It's easier to have a new newspaper. And computers have a lot to do with that also because now you don't need a a factory and a line of type machine. And it's much easier to produce a newspaper and make it available at sell it on the internet or the web. So uh technology helps to correct the uh the errors and uh write the wrongs that technology created in the first place and they the pendulum swings. An old theory but nonetheless that language is almost perfectly cybernetic. A system acts, it receives feedback, it adjusts and it continues. The question is whether that self-correction protects human beings from the system or merely makes the system more adaptive. The network could be used for liberation or control. And this is the philosophical center of the film. Stuart Brand was not merely a philosophical influence on the counterculture computer pipeline Dan Beck was mapping. He was an actual node inside the network. He had known John Brockman since the 60s. Brockman represented his literary interests. Both men moved from the experimental counterculture into the institutions that would interpret and help legitimize the digital future. Danbeck corresponded with Kazinski while making the film. He wrote to him about globalization, regulation, control, military research, computer technology, and people constructing network systems. Kazinski repeatedly pulled the discussion away from individual intentions and back towards structural pressure. A society possessing powerful technology, he argued, will eventually use it to manipulate people, not necessarily because every participant is malevolent, but because systems selecting for power and efficiency reward those who use the available tools. Danbeck translated the argument into a handwritten map connecting cybernetics, military research, computing, the counterculture, Silicon Valley, Bran, Brockman, and Glertner. But this map was not assembled at a safe historical distance. Danbeck was walking through the network while it was still forming. Toward the end of 2001, he traveled to the United States and held what he later described as a preliminary conversation with John Brockman. Brockman then helped connect him with Stuart Brand and other figures who would appear in the net. In 2003, Danbeck released the net. He believed he was reconstructing the intellectual history behind the system Kazinski had attacked. But while Danbeck was drawing the network from one direction, another man had already entered it from another. Not through philosophy, not through science, through money. John Brockman's Edge Foundation's 2001 schedule B records a $25,000 contribution from the J. Epstein Foundation. When Dan Beck entered Brockman's world at the end of 2001, Epstein's money was already there. Danbeck was not reconstructing a dead network. He was walking through a living one. Tax records previously showed approximately half a million dollars in Epstein linked contributions to Edge between 1998 and 2008. But expanded records has placed that number at a total of approximately $638,000 through 2015, making Epstein by far EDG's largest funer and in some years apparently its only donor. The money was already flowing before Danbeck finished the net. The years matter. The overlap begins before the film was completed. In late 2001, Danbeck meets Brockman. Epstein funds Edge. Then the relationship becomes socially visible. In 2002, Epstein's aircraft carried Brockman and several prominent members of his intellectual circle, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker to the TED conference in Montter. The plane transformed an abstract donation into network infrastructure. Epstein's wealth was now transporting members of Brockman's intellectual circle through the physical spaces where the technological elite gathered. By 2003, as Danbeck completed his film, placing Brockman and Glertner at the center of a technoscientific network, Epstein had already become financially and socially connected to that world. But the missing node was not completely invisible. Months before Vicky Ward's Vanity Fair article and a year before the net, New York magazine published an early substantial profile piece on Jeffrey Epstein. The article described an investment operation no one on Wall Street seemed able to explain. It described Epstein as an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Council on Foreign Relations records, subsequently examined by the Washington Post, confirmed that Epstein was a member from 1995 until 2009. In an archived 1995 trilateral commission membership roster list Jeffrey E. Epstein, President New Albany Property, Inc. So the network surrounding Epstein was not limited to private dinners, scientific patronage, or the social world around Edge. By the mid 1990s, his name had entered formal institutions connecting finance, foreign power, corporate power, and international elites. But it also recorded a description attributed to Epstein that reads like a statement of method. The article said, "Epstein collects beautiful minds and attributed this statement to him. I invest in people, be it politics or science." The profile showed that Epstein scientific network was already taking shape. It connected him to a mathematician Martin Noak, psychologist Steven Clan, computer scientist Danny Hillis, and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. Epstein had visited Edelman's neuroscience institute while pursuing a foundational cybernetic question. Is the brain a computer? He also funded research in Costland's Harvard Laboratory concerning cognition and sustained mental imagery. Hillis meanwhile had co-founded the Long Now Foundation with Stuart Brand. biology, psychology, computation, neuroscience. The same fields were converging again. The operating principle of the network had been printed in plain sight. But it was presented as the eccentric intellectual life of a mysterious finance here. And Danbeck was not the only person trying to understand part of this world. in 2003. That March, Vanity Fair published Vicky Ward's profile, The Talented Mr. Epstein. The article helped define Epstein's early public mythology, an elusive billionaire with a vast Manhattan mansion, powerful friends, and an investment firm almost no one could explain. Ward had found more than financial mystery. Maria and Annie Farmer went on the record with allegations of sexual abuse by Epstein and Jizlain Maxwell. Those allegations were removed before publication. Vicky Ward later said Epstein pressured and threatened her while she was pregnant. Former editor Graden Carter disputes her account of why the allegations were excluded, saying the material did not satisfy the magazine's legal standard. Whatever happened inside the editorial process, the farmer sisters had spoken and their allegations were absent from the article the public read. That makes three investigations in the same year. Each captured one half of a structure the public would not understand for another 16 years. Epstein's scientific involvement continued. In 2003, he gave Harvard 6.5 million for the program for evolutionary dynamics. Then in 2004, Edg's own archive placed Epstein and Steuart Brand at the same billionaire's dinner, and it keeps going. In 2005, Epstein funded the Edge of Computation Science Prize. Edge described computations spreading across physics, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genetic engineering. The same convergence Kazinski had identified as components of an expanding technological system. And then in 2008, Epstein became a convicted sex offender, but his access to Brockman in the edge world continued. Kazinski attacked specialists he considered agents of the system. Epstein purchased access to specialists defining its future. And John Brockman's role extended beyond introducing Epstein to established scientists. Released correspondents show that in March 2011, 3 years after Epstein's conviction, Brockman introduced him to Cammy Clark and Michelle Kappello. Brockman told Epstein that he should connect for dinner with my girls. Clark immediately responded, "We would love to have dinner with you this evening." The following day, she described their meeting as fantastic. And sent Epstein information concerning her company's funding requirements. Subsequent correspondents identified the venture as what Clark called a free luxury porn company. She attempted to persuade Epstein to invest, although the surviving documents do not establish that he did. At the time, Clark was dating Ghoul's Eric Schmidt. In 2014, she began dating Daario Amadi, a computational neuroscientist who would eventually co-found anthropic. Clark and Amade married in 2022, and the connections continued moving. Clark later helped bring Schmidt into Amadi's orbit. In 2021, Schmidt participated in Anthropic's first major financing round. None of this establishes that Brockman anticipated Clark's proposal, and it does not establish any relationship between Anthropic and Epstein, but that is precisely the point. No participant needed to foresee the final configuration. A broker arranged a dinner. The dinner created a relationship. That relationship generated additional relationships. In those relationships eventually reached institutions that did not exist when the original introduction was made. Money produced proximity. Proximity produced introductions. introductions produced companies, investments, and institutions. The network expanded. The network expanded without any single person designing its final form. So, it's clear Epstein was the missing node in Danbeck's map. Not because he secretly controlled the entire network, but because Danbeck could see the scientists, the publishers, the technologists, but the financeier stayed in the shadows, supporting part of their intellectual world. Edge connected science to media. Brockman connected scientists to publishers and capital. Epstein converted money into access, proximity, and legitimacy. And every new connection created the possibility of another. The introductions were not incidental to the network. The introductions were how the network reproduced itself. A feedback loop converting one form of capital into another. That is cybernetics 101. Then the man bombed in 1993 returns to the story. Documents released in 2026 revealed that David Girtner corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein from approximately 2009 until 2015. The relationship did not emerge independently. John Brockman introduced them. In December 2009, Glertner wrote to Brockman that he knew Epstein only as a mysterious present, but was willing to speak with him. That introduction led to years of contact. They discussed art, they discussed technology, they arranged meetings, and the correspondence also included women. In 2011, after Epstein's conviction, Glertner recommended a Yale undergraduate for a job and described her to Epstein as a small, good-looking blonde. When the message became public in 2026, Glertner defended it by saying he had tailored the recommendation to what he understood Epstein wanted. The emails matter because Glertner was describing a student in sexualized physical terms to a convicted sex offender while trying to place her in his orbit. Yale opened a review and temporarily removed Glertner from classroom teaching. Glirtner again defended the correspondence in a message to his students. Gertner also approached Epstein about live streams, his software venture for organizing digital information as a chronological stream rather than a desktop of files and folders, an early anticipation of information experienced as a feed. Their correspondence discussed expenses, investors, and the company's future. Although the surviving documents do not establish that Epstein invested, but that is not the point. The point is that the historical line had closed. In 1993, Kazinski attacked Glertner as one of the people making the computerized future appear inevitable. In 2003, Danbeck placed Glertner inside Brockman's network. In 2009, Brockman introduced Gertner to the man who had financed Edge. Glirtner then approached Epstein concerning technology and funding. One email between Brockman and Epstein requires clarification. A Brockman email mentioning a dozen one-year-olds was circulated as evidence of something sinister. Brockman's family said it referred to his granddaughter's first birthday party, but you can be the judge. In 2018, Brockman described the network's value with extraordinary directness. In a private email forwarded through his Epstein account, Brockman proposed that a Middle Eastern sovereign fund could acquire Brockman Incorporated. The advantage he wrote would be immediate access to what he called the world's great scientific minds. The proposal makes the architecture explicit. Scientists possessed intellectual capital. Billionaires possessed financial capital. Universities supplied legitimacy. Media supplied amplification. And Brockman connected them. The network itself became the commodity. Epstein purchased access to parts of the technological elite, but access was only one form of power. The next generation would build institutions capable of making the network operational. Peter Taylor belongs as a modern-day extension of this map. Records released in 2026 document sustained contact between Tail and Epstein years after Epstein's 2008 conviction. The material places Epstein within Tail's social and financial orbit during the 2010s while establishing association, not necessarily participation in Epstein's crimes. But what's important is the function tail represented inside the technological network investor institution builder connector founder through venture capital companies fellowships and private gatherings capital becomes a mechanism for selecting which people and technologies receive the resources to expand. I I met Epstein a a few times as well and I think >> how'd you get introduced? >> Um it was uh it was Reed Hoffman in Silicon Valley introduced us in 2014 but um but it was it was basically uh and I I you know didn't didn't uh check didn't ask any enough questions about it. Um, but I yeah, I I I think there were sort of a lot of things where it was was fraudulent. I do think Epstein knew a lot about taxes and um and there were probably, you know, these these complicated ways you could um you could structure a nonprofit organization, especially as a way in in a in a marital >> cont. context that uh that I I think Epstein might have might have known a decent amount about >> how when you were introduced >> I don't I don't I don't think Epstein would have been able to um you know comment on super string theory something like that >> but uh but I think I think this sort of thing he he might have actually been pretty expert on >> when you were introduced to him what how was he described to you? >> Um he was described as uh one of the smartest tax people in the world. >> Interesting. And uh and I I probably probably was my moral weakness that I >> Well, how could you have known back then? He had never been arrested. >> No, this was this was post this was 2014. It was post arrest. >> Oh, so it was arrest was the first arrest, right? Like 200 >> 708. >> Okay. Okay. And so, >> but you know, you you assume um he didn't go to jail for that long, >> right? >> It was probably not not as serious as alleged. Uh there there was certainly was the illusion that there were all these these other people that I trusted. You know, >> Reed who introduced us was, you know, he started LinkedIn. He was, you know, maybe too focused on business networking, but Right. But uh but I thought he always had good judgment in people. >> Joe, you've got real money. Guys with real money use dinner. Dinner is an incredible thing. I watched Peter Teal use dinner. fly people in for dinners. You put people up in a nice hotel for three nights. You serve them amazing food from a private chef. You get a black car to collect them and they'll tell you anything. I don't think mean that Peter was doing this in an evil way. But I watched dinner after dinner after dinner as people disced all they knew because they were so happy they're getting a $200 bottle of wine and being treated like humans, you know, like respected. So in part, you have to understand that dinner in and of itself or a mansion or first class ticket is all it takes to get people to start talking. So remember, >> I didn't know about that. Just a moment. Jeffrey Epstein is a construct. >> Now, this is not a big new secret that Epstein or Tale figured out. Brockman would use the same tactic. John Brockman's billionaire dinners were not merely social occasions. They were matchmaking infrastructure connecting scientists, venture capitalists, and billionaires who might otherwise never have occupied the same room. The guest list included names like Reed Hoffman, Bill and Melinda Gates, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Sergy Brin, Larry Page, and many more. Peter Tails invitationonly network dialogue makes that function explicit. Dialogue brings together figures from technology, finance, government, and academia. and leaked records indicate that the organization even collected romantic preferences and facilitated matchmaking among its members. The relationship being brokered might be intellectual, financial, political or romantic. The underlying technology remains the same. Select the participant control the room and allow proximity to produce new connections. Tail Brockman and Epstein were simply using the same tactics. Tails Palanteer was founded in 2003, the same year Danbeck released the net. Its software approaches information through relationships, the intelligence file, the financial transaction, the border crossing, the battlefield report, the individual record. Separate databases become part of a larger analytical picture. Connections that were once drawn by hand can now be calculated by software. This is the strange historical progression. Danbeck drew a network to understand power. Palunteer built software for discovering networks inside data. The map became a machine. But there was another way of describing what was happening. While Kazinski was attacking technological society, Nick Land was developing a radically different response to a similar structural problem. Kazinski called it the industrial technological system. Land described it as techno capital. Both described a system produced by countless rational decisions but controlled by none of the individuals making them. Tazinski wanted that process stopped. Land was interested in what happened when it accelerated. The similarity was structural. The conclusion was opposite. For Kazinski, technological autonomy threatened human autonomy. For land, the escape from human control was precisely what made the process philosophically interesting. And decades later, explicit arguments for technological acceleration moved much closer to the center of Silicon Valley. In 2023, Mark Andre published the techno optimist manifesto. Its argument is almost a photographic negative of Kazinsk's. Technology is presented not as expanding constraint but as liberation. Growth as progress, competition as productive, markets as engines of abundance, technological strength as essential to economic and national strength. Two manifestos. One sees technological expansion as a threat to autonomy. The other sees technological expansion as the path toward greater human possibility and Andre's own list of intellectual influences makes the genealogy unusually explicit. Among the names he identifies John von Newman, Douglas Engelbart, Steuart Brand and Nick Land. The intellectual lines have now crossed decades. Cybernetics, Inglebart, brand land, Silicon Valley. The network has become conscious of its own ancestry. Then another branch of the technological elite articulated a different relationship between technology and power. In 2025, Alex Karp and Nicholas Zaminskus published the technological republic. In April 2026, Palanteer's official exac account published a 22-point brief summary of its arguments. The first point stated that Silicon Valley's engineering elite had an affirmative obligation to participate in national defense. Other points emphasized hard power, AI weapons, and the role of technological capability in national strength. The historical loop had tightened. The technologies that emerged partly from military-funded research had passed through the counterculture, personal computing, venture capital, and Silicon Valley. And now leading technology companies were explicitly arguing for a renewed integration between engineering and national power. The question was no longer whether the technological elite would interact with the state. The argument was about how deeply it should participate. And that returns us to the question Kazinski was actually asking. Not whether technology was good, not whether technology was evil, but what happens when technological systems become so deeply embedded in society that individuals can no longer meaningfully stand outside them. It's been 31 years since the manifesto was published. That gives us something Kazinski himself never had. Hindsight. His claims can be compared with what actually happened. The question is not whether his violence was justified. It was not. Three people were killed. 23 were injured. The narrower question is whether some of his structural predictions accurately describe the direction technological society would take. Kazinski argued that technologies enter society as choices before infrastructure transforms them into necessities. His example was the automobile. Today the smartphone demonstrates the same mechanism. Communication, banking, navigation, authentication, and access to services progressively reorganize around the device. No central authority needs to mandate adoption. The environment penalizes refusal. His second claim was that technological power emerges through convergence. A camera, facial recognition systems, a database, and machine learning models possess separate capabilities. But if you network them together, they become something none of the components could become alone. The power exists in the connection. This may be the most interesting part of Kazinsk's argument. He did not require a single dictator secretly designing the final system. He argued that technological control could emerge through rational responses to separate problems. Crime, disease, education, efficiency, security, mental health. Each intervention can possess a legitimate purpose. Each can solve a real problem. But each solution also changes the technological environment in which the next decision occurs. Each institution pursues a rational objective, efficiency, security, diagnosis, prediction, discovery or convenience. Nobody needs to design the final structure. Feedback can produce it. This is where Kazinski and land approach the same mechanism from opposite philosophical directions. Competition generates pressure. Pressure produces innovation. Innovation changes the environment. The new environment creates more competition. No mastermind is necessary. Kazinski argued that increasingly sophisticated psychological, biological, and computational technologies could change the relationship between human beings and institutions. Instead of asking how should the system accommodate human limitations, the question could increasingly become how can the human being be modified, measured or managed to function more efficiently inside the system? productivity, attention, behavior, health, risk, credit, engagement, performance. The individual becomes measurable. The measurable becomes optimizable. Behavior becomes data. Data modifies the environment. The modified environment changes behavior. Feedback. Cybernetics again. But there is a problem. If we select only the places where Kazinski appears prophetic, we can turn analysis into prophecy. His theory has a serious weakness. The technological system can become defined so broadly that almost any outcome appears to confirm it. Technology restricts autonomy. The system expands. Technology creates new freedoms. Those freedoms can be described as mechanisms that deepen dependence. Institutions centralize. The system expands. Technology destroys old institutions. The system reorganizes itself. A theory capable of explaining every possible result risks becoming impossible to disprove. And this is where Stuart Brand returns. Kazinski underestimated what individuals would do with these machines. Personal computers became tools of creation. The internet allowed people to publish, broadcast, organize, build businesses, and reach audiences without traditional institutional permission. Stuart Brand was not simply wrong. Kazinski was not simply wrong. The user became the publisher. The user also became the data. The same network increased individual agency while increasing the power of the infrastructure upon which that agency depended a feedback loop. So the strongest version of Kazinsk's argument may not be that technology inevitably destroys freedom. It is that a technology can increase individual power while simultaneously increasing the power of the system upon which the individual depends. Freedom and dependence can arrive through the same machine. Which brings us back to Danbeck. Danbeck spent years drawing lines. Scientist to publisher, publisher to institutions, institutions to capital, capital back into science. Every connection changed the meaning of the node surrounding it. When Danbeck released the net in 2003, Epstein was already financing John Brockman's Edge Foundation. Years later, Brockman introduced Epstein to David Clner, the man Kazinski had bombed. Kazinski had not identified Epstein. He attacked specialists he believed were constructing an emerging technological state. Danbeck followed the relationships surrounding those specialists. And Epstein embedded himself financially and socially within part of that same intellectual world. Kazinski saw a system. Danbeck drew its connections. Epstein understood the value of access. Nick land described acceleration through feedback. Palunteer transformed relationships hidden inside data into operational power. So was Uncle Ted right? Not about everything. He underestimated the freedom these technologies could create. He treated the technological system as though it possessed a single inevitable direction. And nothing he understood about that system could justify murdering the people he placed inside it. But his more narrow arguments are more difficult to dismiss. Technological power would not arrive through one machine, one corporation, or one dictator. It would emerge through connection. Computation connected to surveillance. Surveillance connected to behavioral science. Behavioral science connected to capital. Capital connected to institutions. institutions connected to the state. Each node pursuing its own rational objective together constructing something no individual designed and no individual could meaningfully refuse. That was the system Kazinski believed he was fighting. not a conspiracy, a feedback loop, a network that expands because every participant gains something by extending it. And 30 years later, that mechanism looks considerably less hypothetical. This is why Dan Beck called his film the net. The infrastructure connecting the world, the social network connecting its elites and something from which it becomes increasingly difficult to escape. Kazinski believed the machine was not any individual technology. The machine was the relationship between them. Danbeck gave those relationships a picture. And 30 years later, the lines have multiplied beyond anything either man could have drawn. At sufficient scale, the nodes become impossible to distinguish. Only the connections remain. And once the network becomes the environment, the difference between being connected to the net and being caught inside it are one and the same.